You can't buy reviews. Seriously, that doesn't happen.

If I wanted to attention whore, I would just change avatars like I used to.

Wait, damn it.

the problem then becomes about how rich the reviewer is.
someone might think a game which lasts 5 hours and has no online is worth $10-15 but someone else might think that same game is easily worth their $60 because the quality in the 5 hours is worth it.

all i wish is that reviewers use the same criteria for all games. for example gran turismo was criticised for having 'premium' and 'standard' models but that applies to all games. the main characters are always 'premium' and the others are 'standard'. GT5 has more premium character models than any other game but it still got picked on for also having standard models.
i dont see FIFA or GTA games get criticised that badly when their premium/standard character model ratio is far worse than GT5....heck i dont think they have any premium character models in the first place. Niko looks worse than bad guy no. 355 in uncharted and fifa's cover players look like their rendered with squares, not polygons.

ok so i went a bit off topic but theres numerous examples of how when one game gets criticised, those same criticisms all of a sudden dont matter for other games, the premium/standard issue being one example.

Yes it does, for magazines it happens whole the time..

And then I am not even speaking about Jeff Gerstman and his Kane en Lynch review..

I actually kind of like your idea.

There is something somewhat similar that happens - certain publishers (very few, and nobody has ever asked us to do this) give a certain minimum score to break an embargo. But buying a review... I'm pretty sure that never happens.

As for Gerstmann, that was probably just GameSpot being weird, because they didn't even change the score.