Gaming scores over saturated?

I feel as though gaming review sites in general have over-saturated review scores across the board. I think it is partly do to critics, like us, who are expecting good games to get 9.0s and higher. If a review site or magazine gives less then a 9 on a good game, they are immediatly shunned and labeled as a 'bad' source for reviews, or biased towards a particular platform - even if their scale has an average review score of 5.0 with a 5.0 variance. In all reality, I think the average score of games across the board probably falls in the 8.0-8.5 range, with a average variance of 1 point. Holy saturation!

The funny thing is, it seems like some review sites were able to counter this saturation by increasing the gradiance of the scores. For example, Gamespot scoers by a .1 scale. However, as we all know, they switched to a .5 scale. Why? I think once again, it was us, the critics at fault - starting fires when one of our games was outscored by another.

So what do you all think? Do you think game scores are over-saturated?

Game scores are basically the gaming equivilant of baseball stats, used by nerds to try and quantify something that is inherently unquantifiable. I wish they would switch to a 5 star rating (like most movies) or even do away with ratings altogether (like book reviews). I am probably the only person on this board who thinks that gamespots switch to a .5 system is a good idea however.

Game scores are basically the gaming equivilant of baseball stats, used by nerds to try and quantify something that is inherently unquantifiable. I wish they would switch to a 5 star rating (like most movies) or even do away with ratings altogether (like book reviews). I am probably the only person on this board who thinks that gamespots switch to a .5 system is a good idea however.

actionquake

I like it too. Its better to have "levels" of quality. Now rather than "This 9.3 CLEARLY owns that 9.2!", its both 9s, great games.

All reviews are just someone elses Opinionated Opinion.

I rent games from now on and see for myself if I want to buy it or not.

But I use the reviews as a supplement.

Game scores are basically the gaming equivilant of baseball stats, used by nerds to try and quantify something that is inherently unquantifiable. I wish they would switch to a 5 star rating (like most movies) or even do away with ratings altogether (like book reviews). I am probably the only person on this board who thinks that gamespots switch to a .5 system is a good idea however.

actionquake

I like the switch too, given the atmosphere surrounding review scores. In a perfect world though, I would rather have sites review games on a 1-10 scale, with a 5.0 average with intervals of .5. In fact, even better if 3 people from that site/magazine displayed their scores, and the final score was the average.