I know, but I think that in the same way the would critique games for not adjusting to the times and trends they are fair game for such critique, too.  Using that kind of strict mathematical scale doesn't gel well with how people tend to relate to films, books or videogames In my view as entertainment.  A 5/10 film is not average and doesn't represent an 'okay' genre entry to most people.  5/10 means flaws and fairly series ones.  Below 5/10 means heavy duty issues.  7/10 is clearly, for entertainment phycologically, where okay starts it seems to me for a majority of people.  Of course, proper reviews never used to have scores at all until they became 'quick guides' so I guess it's all a bit moot in some ways.

Given EDGE's stance I think they should actually drop the score and go with text only.  I'd love to see that.  Their written reviews are generally good, but the score assignment is often inconsistent which is also something I would expect proper editorial control and clear internal standards of critique to prevent.  As you can guess I dislike the current trend to 'do all the work' for the masses so they can exert minimal effort - how much easier to look at a statistically flawed metacritic average score, or a few simple scores without context, and make a decision.  Ugh!

I don't have an issue with low scores, though, the opposite if anything as I think too many games score way to good these days.  Mass Effect is a 7.5 RPG lite with poor combat and boring SF characters dialogue if I ever saw one, Bioshock is an 8/10 flawed attempt to channel System Shock for the masses, and so on. 

But what I dislike more is real lack of consistency of standards.

Professional reviews shouldn't be just another opinion, but an informed opinion (something that seems to have dropped of the radar vs facts/opinions) just like a professional film or literature reviewer - i.e. in general the reviewer should have a greater grasp of the subject than the average joe, whether actually understanding the basics of good level design, gameplay mechanics or whatever.

Now, there will always be inconsistencies, but videogames are far and away the worst for this and I feel it's getting worse, and that includes EDGE as they don't seem to be immune from the inconsistency bug either both in relation to the general view of a title or across their own reviews for different titles.

isn't A- a 9? Since A+ is a 10?

I thought it was
A+
A
A-
?

Not according to metacritic... but hey... metacritic isnt lawed at all.

Did we expect anything else from Edge? There are already other critical reviews out there; Edge had to give an extra-low score to stand out and bring attention to itself (otherwise, we certainly wouldn't care about them, either positively or negatively).

keep in mind a 5 from edge is relative to a 7 from other sites

That is disproportionate though. If 7 is supposed to be the standard "medium" or okay score, that leaves 3 designations or degrees of good, and 6 of bad? That's ridiculous, especially since games in general are fairly good these days. It's just silly.

A 5 because it's linear?

Honestly, I'm not seeing how this can be a valid complaint anymore. The dead horse is beaten.

No need to hate on Demon's Souls just because FFXIII is getting bad reviews.

That is silly

Yah, but that's because in a mature medium the ratio of good to bad is actually heavily skewed.  Now of course, this brings up the issue of the relative maturity of videogames.  I mean, in literature few trully bad novels are actually published (in proportion to the good ones) because the basic approaches of the medium somewhat prevent it.  Same for films (Hollywood pap aside).  I guess maybe with videogames it is better to have more graduation as the ration of poor to average to good is arguably not as skewed as with books, films, etc.  Heck, you might be convincing me that for videogames a broader range is better.

I'd still prefer no range though.  Just a witten review and you extrapolate from there.