I know, it's all SE's fault. Everybody knows you have to buy reviews from gamespot. 

Hmmm, I wonder if the reviewer had a different score and got browbeat into lowering it. Sort of the reverse GTA effect.

Gamespot Exec: "Im sorry [reviewer], I know you want to give Lost Winds and 8.5 but accounts recievable called and infomred us that Frontiers check has yet to clear. The higest you can give it is 5.5"

I stopped caring about Gamespot reviews after their review of Metroid Prime 3. The 8.5 is decent, but you'd never guess that score from reading the actual write-up which has always seemed to me to be a hit piece.

Really, I think they're pretty biased. Today, their first-page coverage of the April NPD report reads:

NPD: US game revs spike on GTAIV
Rockstar's latest sells 2.85M, pushing total industry growth in April to 47 percent.

While this is fine and true, the reactions on this forum say to me that this might not be the central story from the NPD release...

But in the article, they don't even get to hardware until paragraph 7, Wii's astonishing success until the following paragraph, and even then they write it up casually, and as an almost negative: However, the Wii kept up its momentum, slipping slightly to 714,000 units from 721,000.

Is it slipping slightly if there's one less week of sales in this month's NPD? Gamespot doesn't bother mentioning that. :)

ETA: On topic, I find My Life as a King to be a whole lot of fun. :D

what are they comparing them to?

Games in the next 20 years that are AAA and allegedly 100 million dollar projects and system sellers / opossing system killer?

Either way to each their own, I'm a Simcity fanatic so FFCC is like a piece of nirvana to me, I bought lost winds yesterday - played it a little it's a fun little game I haven't taken the time to understand it though.. too busy with FFCC (made a new games to get even races) Like I think I've put about 24 hours into FFCC by now and it's still hell of fun... haven't played a game that did that for me in about a year actually more I think the last game I played like that was Melee.

In fact I'm playing FFCC right now XD, just turned on my PS3 to see what was up on the interweb for a bit.

I think this is the heart of the problem here. Most reviewers have just gone through games like Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Grand Theft Auto 4. Both offer dozens upon dozens of hours of gameplay with the highest production values on the planet. Then they're given something like LostWinds.  

Now common sense would tell most people to use a different scale for games that are so different, taking into account how it's only 10€, or looking at it from a more "casual" point of view, but not GameSpot. Even with Boom Blox when 1UP said "this is the best casual game possible, totally across the spectrum from GTA4, but every bit as entertaining", GameSpot goes "it's fun and everything, but just a puzzle game so the score caps at 70."  

This generation is offering reviewers a major challenge in how the best selling system has much less powerful hardware than the other two, and how a significant portion of its games is aimed at a segment of the market most reviewers don't understand, let alone belong to. Whatever approach will prove best, I can say with a shadow of the doubt that just giving lower scores isn't going to be it.

After this, the Kane&Lynch fiasco, and raising GTA4's score from 95 to 100 just because that's what everyone else was giving it, Gamespot has lost all credibility in my eyes.

GameSpot wants money for good reviews, all know this.

GameSpot is a site founded on the old model of games. The Wii is a very real threat to their way of being. Seeing them take the stance of "maybe if we slam it hard enough it will go away" is understandable in that context, if rather sad. But it's nothing new, either. Game journalists from 1985 all the way into the mid-90s used to slam console gaming as "a passing fad". Heck, there are still some game journalists who claim this.

Update, even Critter Round-Up got better score.

Star Soldier R

LW is a fun game, albiet a bit short. I would be more than willing to drop cash for a full length version.