According to review aggregation site Metacritic, the top twenty games of the past ten years are...well, pretty damn surprising. Games like GTAIV, Halo and Super Mario Galaxy are up there, as you'd expect. But some of the others, including the top-rated game of the decade, are coming straight out of left field.

Here they are, courtesy of MCV, with only the highest-ranking score of a multiplatform game included.

1. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 – 98 (Activision)
2. Grand Theft Auto IV – 98 (Rockstar)
3. Perfect Dark – 97 (Nintendo)
4. NFL 2K1 – 97 (Sega)
5. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 – 97 (Activision)
6. Halo – 97 (Microsoft)
7. Metroid Prime – 97 (Nintendo)
8. Grand Theft Auto III – 97 (Rockstar)
9. Super Mario Galaxy – 97 (Nintendo)
10. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty – 96 (Konami)
11. Half-Life 2 – 96 (Valve)
12. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker – 96 (Nintendo)
13. Resident Evil 4 – 96 (Capcom)
14. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess – 96 (Nintendo)
15. BioShock – 96 (2K Games)
16. The Orange Box – 96 (Valve)
17. Out of the Park Baseball 2007 – 96 (Sports Interactive)
18. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves – 96 (Sony)
19. Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn – 95 (Interplay)
20. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past [GBA] – 95 (Nintendo)

Wow. I mean, I liked the second Tony Hawk game. It was a blast. But better than Half-Life 2? Better than Halo? That's questionable.

Same for NFL2K1. Yeah, it was a pioneering sports title, but an aggregate score of 97? I think some review outlets were being a little generous around the turn of the millennium.

Top 20 Games of the Decade [MCV]

"Have you played (insert game here)?" It's a question most of us have asked when considering a video game purchase, and the answers given are often more influential than marketing campaigns that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. A study released today by study released today by global integrated communications agency Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, and Harris Interactive. Industry trade groups, surveyed 507 adult gamers between June 6th to July 27th of this year, finding that 33% of those who had purchased a game within the six months prior to the study cited word of mouth from family and friends as the biggest influence on their purchase.

More powerful than friends are a subset being called "Influence Multipliers," friends who are more connected to other gamers, therefor having a much larger say in what other players play. Of the 507 surveyed, 21% were identified as "Influence Multipliers"

"Compared to all video gamers, Influence Multipliers are a hyper influential subset of friends who are also far more connected to other gamers," said Dan Gallagher, senior vice president, Insight & Analytics at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide. "As a result, Influence Multipliers have an outsized network influence effect on their gaming colleagues. By targeting the media channels that Influence Multipliers rely on, marketers can optimize their marketing spending."

Gallagher's advice here is something that politicians have been using for ages. You don't have to influence everyone - just the ones who influence everyone else. Words to market by.

The remainder of the chart shows that advertising and promotions accounted for a mere 11% of influenced purchases, beaten by game reviews, demos, and retail presence.

I'd say that actual advertising is most effective for non-gamers, with gamers being so connected these days that we don't need advertisements to know a game is coming out. We don't need to be made aware of a game's existence, just its quality, and for that, we turn to each other. Group hug, everybody!

The Game Platform Power Ranking isn't just about the average review score of games across the various platforms. Metacritic takes into account the number of titles scored a 90 or higher when calculating the winner, which explains how the PlayStation 3 came out on top, despite PC titles having an average score of 72.5 to the PS3's 72.0.

As you can see in the chart, the Xbox 360 takes third place, followed by the Sony PSP. Nintendo's two platforms take up the rear, perhaps as result of having more games released than any other console platform.

So the PlayStation 3 is the top console, what are the top games?
The PlayStation 3 tops the chart again, with the first three positions taken up with PS3 titles. In fact, of the three titles in the list that are platform exclusives, two of those belong to the PlayStation 3 - number one Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and the God of War Collection, with Xbox 360 racer Forza Motorsport 3 being the third.

Not one game in the top 10 best reviewed games for the year is for the Nintendo Wii, with only a lone DS game - Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars - joining the five PS3 and four Xbox 360 titles.

Going over all of the statistics, it looks like a matter of quality over quantity for the PlayStation 3. It's good to see the sun shining on Sony's black box, isn't it?

You can check out the full lists and breakdowns by platform over at Metacritic.

The Best Games of 2009 [Metacritic]

Bloggers, as reported earlier, are specifically mentioned by the recommendation, which has obvious implications for the specialty press covering video games. "The post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service."

The pivot here is what constitutes an in-kind payment. Games do have a value, but is agreeing to review a game an endorsement, regardless of whether the review recommends it or not?

It's also important to note these new guidelines do not themselves have the force of law. They are:

"[...] administrative interpretations of the law intended to help advertisers comply with the Federal Trade Commission Act; they are not binding law themselves. In any law enforcement action challenging the allegedly deceptive use of testimonials or endorsements, the Commission would have the burden of proving that the challenged conduct violates the FTC Act."

So there are two layers here: One, that it's not even law and two, does it even apply to video game reviews? Either way, the singling out of a blogger's endorsement is significant.

FTC: Freebies Must Be Disclosed [Game Politics]

Speaking to Eurogamer - you really should read the entire story - Vertical Slice director Graham McAllister boils down the process to two things: backtracking through 154 Edge magazine reviews of games, and then analyzing what people say and do while playing the games. The latter, called behavioral or sequential analysis, was used by a marriage counselor who predicted, with 97 percent accuracy, whether a couple would stay together or break up based on the first five minutes of observing them.

"People think you can't predict a game based on quantifiable data," McAllister told Eurogamer. "What we can do is get these estimators. Some people will just have a hard job believing it. We have analysed the statistics to death, thorough and rigorous, and what we're saying is, 'You may not like it, but this is the best model that anyone has come up with to date.'"

In this case, McAllister's analysis is based on just a single minute of gameplay. "What's important about that first minute is that it's the time people play a demo for. That's super critical," he said. "After 30 seconds, we can predict if the game is going to be bad or good, to a certain extent."

The reverse-engineering of the Edge reviews involves the usage of certain words or phrases, matched to scores. "All the high-scoring games talk about certain aspects; all the medium-scoring games talk about certain things; and all the low-scoring games talk about certain things. And there's a very clear mapping between them," McAllister said.

Can You Predict Review Scores? [Eurogamer, via Go Nintendo]

First, there would be no alphabetical or numerical review scores. Second, reviews would be focused on delivering the most critical information in the most efficient way possible. Third, they should be fun to read and hopefully foster conversation about a game's positives and negatives.

We decided to exclude a final score to ensure that Kotaku reviews would not contribute to the average rating at sites that collate and aggregate numerical scores, scores that do not follow a universal grading scale. Our hope was that we could avoid discussions that fruitlessly debate whether a "10" was, indeed, perfect and if one exclusive was better than another exclusive simply based on a number. Boiling down pages of analysis to a single grade or score or number of pumpkins doesn't help readers, it hurts them, reducing the process of critiquing what is often a living document into black and white terms, when there is often a world of gray left untouched.

Our hope is that by laying out the analytical process, by exposing what we feel was good and bad about that game without weighting either, we give you the resources to form your own educated opinion.

We hope this explains how and why we designed this system. We encourage you to add your comments, questions and suggestions in the comments after reading through the more detailed explanation on the key aspects of our reviews on the jump.

Our Reviews Are Designed To Be Concise And Easy To Read

We're not fans of long-winded reviews, ones that read more like the author is getting paid by the word and span seven pages. We've tailored our reviews to be as to the point as possible while giving the reader the relevant information about our experience with a title.

Reviews are divided into four parts: An introduction to get the reader up to speed on the game or series, a list of things we liked under "Loved," a list of things we didn't like under "Hated," then two paragraphs summing up whether we think the good outweighs the bad or vice versa. We then wrap up with some basic facts and figures about the game. Aspects of a game that we "Loved" or "Hated" are not weighed equally and a score should not be inferred because of the number of each. Pointing out what we loved and hated about a game we hope will highlight potential deal breakers, because what matters to one gamer may not matter to another.

Reviews will address both technical and artistic aspects of a game, as games can be more (or less) than the sum of their parts. We feel that due to the nature of the medium, it's important to discuss a game's artistic style as well as its technical capabilities.

Our Reviews Don't Use Numerical Scores

We like arguing about to-the-decimal-point scoring discrepancies for games we haven't played then complaining about them on internet message boards as much as the next guy, but concluding that "Basically, Game X is better than Game Y" because of an arbitrary scoring scheme doesn't benefit the reader. We'd prefer you read our review instead of just skipping to the score and forming an opinion based on a number, a number that doesn't represent a reviewer's assessment. There are plenty of resources for one to judge a game worthy of purchase and play by numbers, stars and letter grades, we're just choosing not to be one of them.

We're Transparent About What We Played

When reviewing a game, our goal is to at least complete a game's single-player mode, whether that's a story-driven campaign or a season in Madden or a series of license tests in Gran Turismo. However, in some cases beating a game is simply not possible, as is the case with open ended, massively multiplayer online RPGs. If we don't "finish" the game or access a particular multiplayer mode, we'll tell you. We'll also divulge how much of the game's multiplayer and bonus modes we played, if applicable and we'll tell you which system(s) we played it on. If there are questions about the experience, we urge you to ask your question in the comments or e-mail us directly.

Our Reviews Will Be Timely And Accurate

We do our best to get reviews up by the day the game ships to stores in North America. Occasionally, when a title is released in another region before its North American street date, we'll review the PAL or Japanese version. Our goal is have a review up no later than a week after its release, but we're not always given the courtesy of early review copies and often take extra time to play online portions post-release to get a better handle on how something will play in the real world. We'll take extra time with games that feature a significant online component to get a more accurate perspective of the experience.

Brian Crecente contributed to this article.

Let's find out! Just like they did for Xbox 360 games, market research firm EEDAR have tracked every PS3 game's Metacritic score and found how much of the system's catalogue has been a hit with critics, and how much of it hasn't.

While 13% of 360 games earned review averages of 85 or higher, 17% of PS3 games achieved the same feat. At the other end of the scale, 30% of PS3 games scored 65 or lower, leaving 53% of PS3 games in that fuzzy, "kinda OK" average review score range of 66-84.

So! Just like the 360, then, the odds are good she'll get you something...decent.

Games At-a-Glance: PS3 Quality [Edge]

In other words, their games are consistently good, bad, mediocre, just as long as they are consistent.

While on the one had you might say that's not very worthwhile information for gamers, it does provide you insight into which publishers you can expect to not surprise you when it comes to quality of games.

For instance, Rockstar games is the most consistent, with 23 titles, most in the well-received range. While Ubisoft is the least consistent with 237 games spread across the board. Granted, 75 of their titles received an "F" and only 4 an "A".

The report offers interesting insight into, perhaps, how diligent a company is about their process of killing off and bolstering game ideas.

Before jumping to too many conclusions, you should keep in mind that this report was commissioned by an unnamed entity for public disclosure. It also would help if you took a look at the methodology used.

In a nutshell, Sweezey and crew looked at games for the PC, PS3, Xbox360, PSP, Wii, and the DS that came out from 2000 to 2008 and had a Metacritic score available based on at least four reviews.

Most / Least Consistent Publishers? [David Perry]

On July 31, 1928, the paper announced they would be using a three-star reviewing system from then on out to rate movies. And almost from the same day, movie critics starting hating the system.

It took video game writers a bit longer to adopt the ubiquitous system for rating games, but the hatred was right on it's heels.

Recently game reviews and the use of ratings have become a target of constant navel staring, with critics, writers and box-standers killing obscene amounts of pixels to talk about what should be done. Last year, we just threw ratings out the window, reinventing how we reviewed games.

I don't expect the same sort of reaction from movie critics, but at least they're starting to talk about their hatred of the system.

"We don't seek to reduce our arguments about a particular piece of art to a number, or letter grade, or golden spatulas, or whatever," says Sam Sifton, the New York Times' culture editor told the Wall Street Journal for a recent article on the subject. "These are numbers that aren't based on any rational or countable thing." However, restaurant reviews in the paper have long included rankings from "poor" to four stars. Mr. Sifton, the former dining editor, calls those "the exception that proves the rule here."

The article is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the subject. It talks about the history of reductive criticism, the good and bad, and how sites like Metacritic have helped bring the issue to a head.

One critic's pan of "Pearl Harbor" originally was ranked 40 out of 100, until he contacted the site to say it was more like a 10. Marc Doyle, co-founder and senior product manager of Metacritic, which is now owned by CBS, says the site's employees read reviews carefully, will change scores if they are protested by reviewers, and will reconsider them if readers object. "It's just a tool, like any other tool," he says of the site.

Doyle, for his part, says that Metacritic is exploring improvements.

Let's Rate the Ranking Systems of Film Reviews [Wall Street Journal]

The list was created by looking at average review scores and includes a couple Grand Theft Auto IV mentions, Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Fallout 3, among others.

DS
1. Chrono Trigger
2. The World Ends With You
3. Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
4. Advance Wars: Days of Ruin
5. Professor Layton and the Curious Village

Dud
Homie Rollerz

PC
1. Fallout 3
2. Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor
3. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
4. Grand Theft Auto IV
5. World of Goo

Dud
Beauty Factory

PS2
1. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4
2. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES
3. MLB 08: The Show
4. Pro Evolution Soccer 2008
5. FIFA Soccer 09

Dud
Women's Volleyball Championship

PS3
1. Grand Theft Auto IV
2. LittleBigPlanet
3. Bioshock
4. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
5. Rock Band 2

Dud
Vampire Rain: Altered Species

PSP
1. God of War: Chains of Olympus
2. Patapon
3. LocoRoco 2
4. FIFA Soccer 09
5. Space Invaders Extreme

Dud
King of Clubs

Wii
1. Super Smash Bros. Brawl
2. World of Goo
3. MaBoShi: The Three Shape Arcade
4. Okami
5. Tetris Party

Dud
SPOGS Racing

Xbox 360
1. Grand Theft Auto IV
2. Gears of War 2
3. Fallout 3
4. Braid
5. Rock Band 2

Dud
Jumper

Hit up the site to read why these games were so good... and so bad.

Best of 2008 [Metacritic, thanks Alan]

Hit the jump for a break-down of what we've reviewed so far and tell us what you're putting on your holiday list. We'll make sure to update this list as we move forward:

Gift Guides
The iPhone Gaming Gift Guide
The Playstation 3 Gift Guide
The Wii Holiday Gift Guide
The Xbox 360 Gift Guide
The Portable Holiday Gift Guide
The PC Gift Guide
The Import Gaming Gift Guide

Cross Platform
Rock Band 2 Review: Second Verse Same As The First (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2)
TNA Impact! Review: Squandering Potential (Xbox 360, PS3, PS2)
LEGO Batman The Video Game Review: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii, DS, PSP, PC)
Fracture Review: Breaking New Ground (Xbox 360, PS3)
Midnight Club Los Angeles Review: The Fast And The Infuriating (Xbox 360, PS3)
Dead Space Review: True Stories Of Space Horror (Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
Fallout 3 Review: Wasting Away Again In Radiationville (Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
Spider-Man: Web Of Shadows Review: A Tangled Web (Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii, DS, PSP, PC)
Guitar Hero World Tour Review: This is Guitar Hero (Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii)
Mirror’s Edge Review: Leaps of Faith End in Splat (Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
Call of Duty: World at War Review: The Modern Warfare Effect (Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii, DS, PC)
Far Cry 2 Review: Hurry Boy, It's Waiting There For You (Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
The Force Unleashed Review: As If Millions of Star Wars Fans Suddenly Cried Out (Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii, DS, PSP)
Tom Clancy's EndWar Review: Vocal Annihilation (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, DS, PSP, PC)
Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe Review: Finish Him (Xbox 360, PS3)
Left 4 Dead Review: 2 Good 2 B 4gotten (Xbox 360, PC)
Need for Speed: Undercover Review: You're Not Good, and You're Not Bad (Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii, DS, PSP, PC)
Tomb Raider: Underworld Review: Lara Croft’s Uncharted Adventure (Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii, DS, PC)
Prince Of Persia Review: Like Sands Through The Hourglass (Xbox 360, PS3)

PC
Spore Review: Evolutionary Creationism
Civ IV: Colonization Review: Once More, With(out) Feeling
World Of Goo Review: Fun Bounces Off Me And Sticks To You
Sacred 2: Fallen Angel Review: Ancaria At Its Prime
Wrath Of The Lich King Review: We Come From The Land Of The Ice And Snow

PS3
Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest For Booty Review: Short Of Greatness
LittleBigPlanet Review: Play, Create... Share?
MotorStorm: Pacific Rift Review: A Festival of Mayhem
Resistance 2 Review: Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore
Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm Review: A Pretty Good Start

PSP
Yggdra Union: We'll Never Fight Alone Review: A Battle Hard Won
LocoRoco 2 Review: Arming The Mui Mui

DS
Personal Trainer: Cooking Review: Gotta Eat Them All
Metal Slug 7 Review: Once More Into The Tank

Wii
Wario Land: Shake It! Review: Shakin' To The Core
Wii Music Review: Jam With The Bland
de Blob Review: Painting A Very Pretty Picture
Animal Crossing: City Folk Review: Crossing Over Again
Skate It Review: Suck It
Castlevania Judgment Review: You Don't Belong In This World

Xbox 360
Too Human Review: Dyack's Human Too
Castle Crashers Review: Hack & Slash & Fun
Tales Of Vesperia Review - A New Chapter Unfolds
Viva Piñata: Trouble In Paradise Review: Maximum Candiosity
Warhammer Battle March Review: Marching Backwards
Portal: Still Alive Review: This Is Barely A Triumph
Fable II Review: A Feast Of Burden
Gears of War 2 Review: Bigger, Better and More... Poignant
Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Review: Aw, Nuts
The Last Remnant Review: Strategically Sound, Technically Flawed

How is it that so many people have reviewed LittleBigPlanet? I’m not asking this because the single player levels are so insanely hard (they are), but because a good third of the game still isn’t really playable.

The servers for online sharing just went live two days ago for a total of about eight hours and after running sporadically with glitches, were taken right back offline be Media Molecule. Currently the servers seem back up, but a bit shakey. So how is it that Metacritic was showing yesterday 34 reviews for the game and a metascore of 95?

I’m not saying LittleBigPlanet doesn’t deserve the acclaim, it most assuredly does, but don’t gamers deserve to read reviews based on the final product?

The problem, I think, is all about balancing. Publications need to balance the desire to publish timely reviews with the obligation to fully assess a game. That didn’t use to be that hard to do. A game, once it was gold, was finished. But nowadays that rarely seems to be the case.

Often review code for a game sent to a reviewer comes with warnings about the game not being polished, or missing bits. Both Ninja Gaiden II and Too Human warned that the official review code wasn’t fully polished. Fable II and LittleBigPlanet shipped despite the fact that the games weren’t really finished. Both had major patches hit the week the game hit shelves.

What’s that mean to reviews? Well, if the review is written and runs the day a game comes out it can mean it’s based on something different than what a person who buys the game will experience. That’s not always the case of course, but it seems to be a growing concern.

I emailed GameSpot, IGN and 1Up yesterday morning to ask about their LittleBigPlanet reviews, specifically about the timing of them and how they dealt with the online play, which was temporarily dead in the water.

Here's what they said on the issue:

1Up, which stated early on they were waiting for final code.
Review run date: Oct. 27 (They said they waited until the game was online for several hours)

We actually waited until the game was officially released and live until our reviewer finished writing his text (he was at home working on it for the first part of yesterday). In cases where there's a a significant enough online component we'll typically wait until we can test it in real-world situations before giving the game a final grade.

IGN
Review Run Date: Oct. 13

"The final game code that we received used the same online servers as the beta test, which we were in for a few weeks before LittleBigPlanet was released. We were given full access to the online component in the game for our review, so we were able to do everything that the retail game allows, including four-player sessions with folks in later levels of the game."

Gamespot
Review Run Date: Oct. 16

LittleBigPlanet was reviewed using a retail copy of the game that was able to connect to a server set up by SCEE ahead of the full release. This, on top of time spent checking out user-created content in the beta, afforded us ample opportunity to test all of the game's online features. We weren't able to see how the retail servers will perform under the weight of hundreds of thousands of users, of course, but that's true of any review for an online game that comes out prior to or even right around the day of release. If the online portion of the game doesn't perform properly at launch then that's something we'll report on.

I suspect many of the reviews relied on that beta of the game for their online impressions, which doesn't seem like a very good decision to me. Perhaps a better option would be to forestall a review until the reviewer has the retail, boxed code in their hands. Then they know they’re writing about the same game. But even that has issues. If the game has major online elements those often won’t be up and running until the game is released. Sometimes, like the case of an MMO, even writing a review the week of release is problematic. Sometimes writing it the month of release is a problem.

For now the best solution seems to be that reviewers should be very specific about what they could and couldn’t play in the game they reviewed. And when playing online they should mention if they used the public servers or one set up specifically for reviews.

At Kotaku we fully disclose in our reviews what we played and how. We also often wait to get final, boxed, review code, rather than using debug review code. Though now I’m considering perhaps changing our review policy to include adding a mention of which we used in our explainer graph.

[pic]

This latter conflict is currently raging between the HTML tags of review aggregating site Metacritic. Trouble started when LittleBigPlanet seemed to have an unusually low user rating - currently at 6.4, compared to 95% approval by 'real' critics.

It soon became apparent that Xbox fanboys had been posting deliberately low user ratings to spite the PS3-touting infidels. The PS3 nation was quick to respond with an equally daft Gears of War 2 review bomb that has left the Xbox shooter with an embarrassing score of 2.8 at time of posting.

UN Peacekeepers are on standby.

PS3 Fanboys Strike Back: [Ripten]

I have a favour to ask you — we build this game not only to appeal to gamers like yourself, but to appeal to anybody. So please, please, please, please, please find somebody who doesn't play games, watch them play it and see how their world turns out, because I think it's only when you see those differences that the unique experiences comes through.

While on some level I can understand where he's coming from, it seems to me that the underlying message of that request is that Molyneux thinks game reviewers are too jaded to do their jobs. It's just the latest in an increasingly long list of excuses developers use for low game reviews, including not "getting" casual and not "getting" the Wii. I can't speak for everyone, but personally I get all of those things. I sometimes just don't like them.

Peter Molyneux's Request [Variety]

There's not much yet, but if Ryan can stick to the book-a-week premise, I think there will be a nice and very accessible collection of reviews and thoughts on a wide variety of books. It's one of those things I've added to my feeds and just hope it doesn't peter out.

The Secret Books of Game Design [Words on Play via Grand Text Auto]

Gus Mastrapa posits in his column at GameDaily that writing really well is the game reviewer's highest calling, and he goes on to point out what he feels are the reviewer's seven deadly sins - Measure, Dullness, Doubt, Diplomacy, Forgiveness, Purposelessness and Obsession.

For example, the sin of "Measure" indicates when a reviewer has to apply a score or rating, and factors in the aggregate as he or she does so:

It's tempting to aim for the middle and grant a score that'll best conform to popular opinion, but to do so is tantamount to handing your guns over to a corrupt sheriff. It's better to score like you mean it and use the numbers, letters or stars to make a point.

I often feel like I'd prefer to do away with scores altogether, as we've done here at Kotaku, but I can also see the merit in needing a quick-hit evaluatory number, after we're so habituated to it.

Another one of Gus' points that jumps out at me is the sin of Diplomacy - worrying about the reaction, the reviewer is often tempted to try to please everyone:

In a post about Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots Tycho from Penny Arcade pointed out a bit of game review weaseling that I myself have been guilty of. "Most reviews I have read," he said, "can be simmered down to 'If you like Metal Gear, you'll like it.'" This kind of wishy-washy language is, itself, unforgivable. It's a way of avoiding the fight that should be at the core of your review. If you don't like Metal Gear you should be illustrating the series' weaknesses and the way they materialize Metal Gear Solid 4. Reviews are no place for peacemaking. Make your arguments and back them up.

A fight at the core of a review, huh? Often, it seems reviews cause fights even when you try to be as genteel as possible.

So, Kotaku readers, what do you think are the worst things reviewers do - and how can we do better?

Media Coverage: The Seven Deadly Sins of Video Game Reviewing [GameDaily via GameSetWatch]

It gives developers feedback, real insights into their game, so they can go back and improve their work. There simply isn’t a way for people to properly explain criticism in the current culture of “I’m not having fun” reviews. Nor is there a way to reward innovation or successful elements of games beyond gushing “I’m having fun” praise. It’s one thing to say you like a game, but figuring out a way to go beyond that gives developers a better understanding of their audiences reaction.

In any case, it's an interesting essay that ties in with a lot of other criticism of the gaming press at large; the other eight parts are also a good read, if you're not scared off by the "Zarathustran Analytics" in the title.

Zarathustran Analytics in Video Games, Part 9: Flaws in Criticism Today [PopMatters via The Brainy Gamer]

"I’m at a point where I rarely second guess what I think about a game upon finishing it,” Gerstmann told me. He said he’s long gotten over the doubt that could set in “when you are facing the raging fury of the Internet.” He used to get death threats about some of his scores. “Now that stuff just rolls off. It’s the ranting of insane people, which you could say about a lot of internet stuff.”

I've always thought that some people take personal offenence to reviews. They are just opinions. Everyone's got one.

The Art of Not Second Guessing [Multiplayer]

Easy to say from the outside looking in, but independent game developer Matthew of the Magical Wasteland blog shared his insider experience with an unidentified major publisher to explain that it's not always so simple, even when executives "talk the talk" about quality control.

Matthew cited the institution of bonuses for developers based on Metacritic scores, similar to the practice of hinging developer royalties on good scores that MTV Multiplayer's Stephen Totilo recently investigated.

Said Matthew:

Armed with the knowledge that higher review scores meant more money for them, game producers were thus encouraged to identify the elements that reviewers seemed to most notice and most like – detailed graphics, scripted set piece battles, “robust” online multiplayer, “player choice,” and more, more of everything. Like a food company performing a taste test to find out that people basically like the saltiest, greasiest variation of anything and adjusting its product lineup accordingly, the big publishers struggled to stuff as much of those key elements as possible into every game they funded.

The result, said Matthew, was that development became rushed and disjointed, all in the pursuit of the mighty Metacritic review score.

Multiplayer modes were suddenly tacked on late in development. More missions and weapons were added to bulk up their offering – to be created by outsource partners. Level-based games suddenly turned into open-world games.

Before you cry in despair, keep in mind that all these people wanted in the end was the best game possible – or, more precisely, the best-reviewed game possible.

Matthew's entire story is well worth a read, even with the (logical) absence of his career specifics. I find it ironic that the games press, many of whom are indirectly responsible for those scores, so rarely gets opportunities like these to look inside the developers' experience.

You Can’t Fake Quality, But That Never Stops Them from Trying [Magical Wasteland]

Totilo talks to some pretty big names about the practice, including GameSpot's former employee Jeff Gerstmann, who explains why the practice is so disturbing.

I’ve gotten e-mails from developers over the years who have said, ‘I don’t think you realize what you’re doing to me with this review’ because my review knocked them out of the range of some bonus that they were up for...

It's really a ridiculous practice that almost always works in the publisher's favor. Luckily it isn't as widespread as it once was, but it does give you interesting insight into why some developers will defend their games as if their lives depended on it. Sometimes they might.

Low Metacritic Scores Cause Game Publishers To Withhold Developer Royalties [MTV Multiplayer]