Gamespot has the best reviews. They don't just throw out 10's if it's Nintendo, and they don't just trow out 10's for having hype. All of these 10's thrown around for every hyped game has been a joke.

Aye. You pretty much described Game Informer right there. 10 for massively hyped games or games based around characters they love, 5s-7s and mocking criticism for almost anything else.

Mario Galaxy certainly hasn't deserved the tens it's been getting.

I wonder if Gamespot has decided that all the 10s and high 9s as of late is out of hand and has decided to return gaming reviews to "reality".

In my worthless opinion, games should be graded with a 10 being essentially perfect with on very minor flaws. That would, of course, mean very, very few 10s. A 9 would still be a stellar game, 8 must buy, 7, a good game, 6 a good game for the genre, 5 being "average" and down from there. That said, no-one is going to adopt a standard system and their will always be reviewers that score it very high or very low relative to others so they can get attention.

I've stopped reading individual reviews until there are enough to get a composite score on Gamerankings and Metacritic. I tend to throw out the high and low and look at the ones in line with average for information about the game...

 Lies. That game deserves every 10 it's been getting and more.

Anyway, as I've said before, one can always trust Gamespot to see through the hype.

Oh for the love of shit!

A perfectly legitimate thread about a review score and then bam! people are already taking pot shots.

Ehhhh....

No, the community is great, but sometimes I think that when a community member feels that have nothing productive to contribute to a thread, they still feel the need to post anyways.

The situation lately with reviews saddens me. Almost only shooters and FPS get high reviews while other genres (RPGs, platformers, puzzles,etc) get low scores.

^^^^ Exactly my point

Reviews are just an opinion. If you trust the reviewer, read the text. I've played plenty of awesome 7/10s that I knew I'd like because the reviews described a game that sounded cool in spite of its flaws.