I'll prefice this by saying I don't really care for The Conduit and I don't really care what Gamepro has to say on the game because it's not going to affect my purchasing habits, but the reality is that it does serve this purpose for some people.
People are quick to jump up and down about Metacritic when trying to argue the strengths of a particular systems library but then turn around and say we shouldn't get worked up about a single review. We can not attach any credibility whatsoever to a Metacritic score unless we are critical of the components that make up a Metacritic score, the individual reviews. Reviews are by their very nature subjective but the purpose of reviewing games/movies etc is to attempt to provide as an impartial assessment as possible.
In science a meta-analysis is a way of looking at the body of evidence regarding a particular topic and then arrive at an overall conclusion regarding the evidence by looking at all studies (reviews) that address a particular question. THE KEY POINT OF A META-ANALYSIS IS THAT A BODY OF EXPERTS SYSTEMATICALLY EVALUATE EACH STUDY FOR CONSIDERATION IN THE META-ANALYSIS FOR QUALITY, IMPARTIALITY ETC AND ANY STUDIES THAT DO NOT MEET CERTAIN PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS ARE NOT INCLUDED. If Metacritic is not willing to take some comparable steps then they should just abandon their scheme of applying an overall score and change their name to reviews.com or reviewsreviewsreviews because at the moment there is nothing Meta or critical about the way they assign overall scores.
I realise this became more of a rant about Metacritic than Gamepro but i think both topics are intimately linked as a good deal of people use Metacritic as a portal to access reviews like Gamepros that they might otherwise not see.
