I think the reason all of them are 10's and high 9's, is you sign an agreement that if you are going to release a low score, you have to do it after the game launches.

It's a great tactic to produce hype.

Actually, it's a shit tactic that reduces responsible journalism to fanboy bullshit.

The publications that agree to this sort of thing should be ashamed of themselves. 

I think it only sucks if they change their review for it. If they were going to give it a 95+ anyway, then who cares.

They shouldn't allow themselves to be bribed like that in the first place. Just the fact that it exists undermines the review system. You don't see the movie, book, or television industry getting away with that crap.

Yea, but on the flip side, no one cares about movie, tv, and book reviews. They are jokes to most people who folow that media.

Not a 100? Catch me. I just fainted.

No more than game reviewers. At least I find myself consistently agreeing with aggregate movie scores like Yahoo! Movies.

Whereas, when it comes to games, I almost never agree with the aggregate score. It's almost always too high, unless the industry finds a whipping boy like Haze, then they all pile on it and give it a ridiculously low score. Sure, it's a bad game ,but "4.5 bad"? Nah. 

Didn't OPM give Haze and Lair amazing 10/10 reviews?

i agree.

Games will always get a bad score if...

1. Its not multiplatform - cause there are fanboy reviewers.

2. Lesser know review sites will recieve more traffic if they give the game an increadibly low review. For instance, if you see a 10/10, you know the game is going to get mostly all praise, if you see the same game get a 6/10, you will read it to see what the critisims are.