| Grampy said: I decided to take a look at X-Play Scores versus the MetaCritic Average. I took their list of Latest Games. Out of the 35 games listed, X-Play reviewed 9. The table lists the MetaCritic Score, the IGN score, the X-Play Score, the difference between X-Play and MetaCritic and whether or not X-Play gave the lowest score of all reviews.
The result wasn't quite what I expected which was a constant bias. Not true, but instead something I consider even worse. X-Play seems to treat Wii games in one of two ways. If they like it they give a very reasonable, even slightly generous score. If they don't like a game they stick it with an absurdly low score, about 30 points off average and with a single exception, the lowest score of all reviewers. In that single exception they were next to the lowest. I think this is a deliberate effort to completely trash the MetaCritic average on any game they dislike. That really sucks. When I was a kid we called this torpedoing and even then we knew it was a lousy unfair thing to do. THIS IS WORSE THAN BIAS BECAUSE YOU CAN'T FACTOR IN A CONSTANT ADJUSTMENT, YOU HAVE TO FIGURE OUT WHETHER THEY ARE ACTUALLY REVIEWING THE GAME OR JUST PLAIN F**KING IT OVER. I wonder if they do this to PS360 games as well. I leave that for someone else. UPDATE: OK, I couldn't stand so I took a quick look at PS3 and XBox 360 for signs of the same pattern. Looking at all low scoring games (yellow or red), X-Play reviews were consistent or slightly higher than MetaCritic. Apparently this SCREW JOB is reserved exclusively for the Wii. Way to go X-Play. |
I understand why X-Play scores games the way they do. The HD games are sometimes good looking and sometimes not, so they get noticed for that, and then you find out other things about them, like gameplay. The Wii games are generally plain looking, so the only thing to note are gameplay issues. Therefore X-play tends to break out the Wii games into two seprate camps, good games (4 and 5stars) and bad games (1 or 2 stars) based on what they think of the gameplay. Whereas with HD games you can potentially have four camps, good looking and good gamplay (5 stars) , good looking and bad gameplay (2 to 4 stars) , bad looking but good gameplay (2 to 4 stars), and bad looking and bad gameplay (1 star). Naturally the HD games fall more on a spectrum, whereas Wii games are either in the love it or hate it categories. X-Play review format being limited to a couple minutes on TV exaggerates the issues they notice and makes the scores vary more wildly than they would in a print or web format.
