[QUOTE="PBSnipes"]
[QUOTE="skrat_01"]Why not ditch these stupid systems and just have the Five Star system, that actually makes sense.Episode_Eve
This. You don't need to be any more accurate than an out-of-five scale for the purpose of scoring a game (which is to provide a rough idea of the game's quality to those who don't read the review, not sum up the absolute minutae of a game in a single number).I like the 5 star scale, but I also like some diversity in review systems. Eurogamer does well with their 1-10 scale, for example, fully utilizing it. So maybe not every single publication should use it; that's just my take. There are some credible sites that use 5 stars, the most notable being Giant Bomb and G4. It's great how they don't translate their scale into 1-100% themselves, because it doesn't make sense.
What is a problem I believe, is aggregate sites like Metacritic and GameRankings using their scores in averages--it doesn't correlate. I think that's a reason Adam Sessler (since he's the editor-in-chief) doesn't want G4 reviews on those sites. I haven't seen any G4 reviews on MC in a while, and knowing Sessler's views on reviews, I've come up with that educated guess :P.
Metacritic is actually bad for the gaming industry, that's why people who are conscientious about their impact on developers want no dice with it. The aggregation of review score data, and the focus on numerical reviews over actual game content / quality just leads to a hamburger-ization of the gaming world. You wind up with a bunch of big budget games trying to mass-appeal themselves into AAA scores, and a bunch of low-budget games trying to cash-in by copying whatever social game was successful. Metacritic perpetuates that, they only way they would ever get an ounce of respect for me after all of the horrible things that have come about because of them, from firings to entire studios being liquidated, is if they posted a public apology and took down their site.
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