I'm not a big reader of game magazines. For the most part they are not my cup of Peppermint Mocha, but there are a few I do read, like Games for Windows and British mag 360.

A confession: I started reading 360 because I write a monthly column for them and they are kind enough to ship them over to me in big brown packages. Though sadly, they are not tied up with string.

While flipping through the latest issue to pull out review scores for this edition of Kotaku Magu I noticed that they do something kind of cool with their reviews. They have this whole Reviewing Experience Graph which is meant to show you what their reviewer thought of the game over the hours they played it.

More magazines need to do this sort of thing, because for a lot of people, I think, straight up reviews just don't cut it.

So here's their latest review scores from issue nineteen:
Blue Dragon: 4/5
Star Trek: Legacy: 2/5
World Snooker Championship 2007: 3/5
Bionicle Heroes: 2/5

I haven't played Blue Dragon or Snooker, but I totally agree with the other two. Brian Crecente

360 Magazine

Who knew this weird little song was implanted in so many of the games Kazumi Totaki has scored for Nintendo? Don't say "Me!" Or, worse yet, "Mii!" I am a man capable of extraordinary acts of physical violence. Florian Eckhardt

I dig Metafuture... an entertaining, witty gaming blog written by one of Kotaku's disgruntled ex-own. I was saddened by the recent announcement of its passing as a blog: who will point out mistakes in our grammar or chide me for having the name of a Harry Potter fan fic character now?

Metafuture is now positioning itself as a new, more accurate Game Rankings. The idea is to inflate or deflate a review's score based upon that site's history of rewarding that score multiple times. In particular, it hopes to give a more accurate value of a game's actual worth according to a particular site by taking into account, for example, whether or not a site realistically only judges games by a 7-9 point scale.

IGN, we're looking square at you. And one of the first fruits of Metafuture's new focus is the above graph, which charts IGN's entire history of game review scores on a 1-10 point scale. Notice that IGN only really likes to give games whole number scores. Their most common score? An 8.0, followed closely by a 7. Not really surprising, but it's nice to have scientific proof.

Gamespot is a bit more balanced. Their most common score is a 7, but they give out scores above and below a hell of a lot more frequently than IGN. Florian Eckhardt

An Analysis of IGN Review Scores [Metafuture]