were infamous' glitches severe and had a massive negative impact on gameplay? were they frequent? or were they infrequent and minor?

You don't understand. Having any glitches at all should disqualify a game from being anywehre near the top 15% of games in a nicely distributed model. But good thing you are around to prove the second half of OP's post true.

for open world games minor glitches are almost always expected to be present in some form for example : games like elder scrolls 4, fallout, gta 4 etc all have had more severe glitches than any i've seen in infamous and are all rated higher

"But good thing you are around to prove the second half of OP's post true."

i understand that you should be critical of games for having these bugs and everything but games must also be held to the same standard this isn't about favouritism for a game or whatever... all i'm saying is if fallout or oblivion gets a higher score with more severe glitches then similar games that come after them must be held to the same standard

how am I not?  not EVERY review did the same thing, and I know some of the best games ever released have glitches in them.  the issue is: Do the glitches negatively impact the gameplay?  I found in inFamous 2, they really didn't.  yeah there was a very odd time it happened, but I went through the game, my brother went through it twice, and each of my friends that I leant the game to went through it, and put together, all 5 times through the game, there were perhaps three physical glitches, the rest were strictly aesthetic.  that's not game breaking, but it is worth mentioning and it's enough to keep it from that coveted 90%+.  

Also, I have a very clear way to review things: 

95-100 - Absolutely exemplary, unrivalled games, the best ever, flawless in practically every way

90-94 - Truly fantastic, cream of the crop type stuff. Near perfection. 

80-89 - Great games, fantastic in almost every way, some flaws keep it from 9+

70-79 - Good games, these games are really fun to play in spite of their flaws

60-69 - decent games. These are fun to play but have parts that detract from their score

50-59 - Acceptable games. marred with issues but still worth playing if just to say you did

40-49 - Poor games, where the unpleasantness outweighs the good, but they might still be worth playing for that one good gameplay mechanic or the story

30-39 - Bad Games, these games may have their fun parts, but they are mostly bad with few redeeming factors

20-29 - horrible games, these games are fundamentally broken, unenjoyable, and have almost no redeeming factors

10-19 - atrocious games, they are an absolute mess, bad in every way

0-9 - offensively bad games, these get absolutely nothing right and even if they did they'd still be atrocious for other reasons such as story or graphics. 

pretty much exactly what GamrReview has as their criteria. 

Whoa... it's like you JUST now figured out how broken the rating system is. Welcome to 4 years ago.

exactly i actually absolutely agree ~50% is supposed to be an average score yet games seldom get that kind of score... but regardless all games have to be held to the same standard one game can't be penalised for something that others aren't

One game's shit review does not justify another's.

Wow.... I was bored so I did the graph myself, it's a lot owrse than I thought it was. I don't even think I should have said "Practice what you preach" and outright called you a liar, because this is what the graph looks like:

Reviewers get absolutely no sympathy from me, only piss and vinegar when they cause shit like that to happen (btw those spikes are around the even 10s and 5s). Oh pelase tell me you also see the problem with this graph.

Edit: Basically a 80 is actually a 55 or so, an 90 is around a 75, and so on and so forth.

Dude, you're taking this entirely too seriously.  

First of all, this isn't professional mathematics, so your law of averages doesn't really apply.  This is videogame review and values need to in some way coincide with public ideals/opinions.

Secondly, My method works pretty muich perfectly for what needs to be done.  It indicates a game's overall quality based on how perfect it is.  a game that gets a 50 is half good, half bad.  a game that gets 80 is mostly good with some bad.  a game that gets 100 is flawless.  a game that gets 20 has a thing or two that's good but is almost all bad.  This works the same way as test scores, a student who gets 50% of the answers right gets 50% on the test.  this isn't about bellcurves or averages, that's irrelevant.  The 'average' is determined from what the test subjects get.  sometimnes the average is 65, other times it's 80 or more.  If most games are getting 80s, I'm happy!  

Thirdly, you're mixing apples and oranges.  hell, you may even be comparing apples to carrots, and you;re pretty much going out on a limb claiming that since MY methods and values don't match yours, or that they don't have perfect math to back them up, that its somehow inherently wrong.  This is plain false.  

LAstly for now, you're also coming across as remarkably hostile and callous.  It's rather rude to say some of the things you are based on "baww, you don't agree with me, I have no sympathy for you bawww".  You need to calm down. youre taking entirely too much time on this issue, assuming absolutes and judging based on that.  IT won't get you anywhere.