I think in this generation of "super titles" that take nearly the length of a generation to make and gigantic budgets only smaller sites are willing to give honest scores. Bigger sites need to deliver on the expectations of fans.

Maybe those biggers site honestly think MGS4 is an outstanding game.  The only game reviewers that have admitted to give high scores to games to please fans is Famitsu.

In the 1980's? Yeah. Today? No. Video games are creeping ever closer to being a viable medium for artistic expression, political and social commentary and education. No longer am I and many others satisfied with good gameplay simply because gameplay is no longer an essential quality to all types of video game experiences such as ones made for the purpose of education or commentary. In those cases and others gameplay becomes merely a vector to transfer knowledge or the designers political or social views which are the focal point of the experience.

We are a few decades away from that, at least.

No matter how good the plot is, terrible gameplay means a terrible game.  I won't suffer through bad gameplay just to hear a story I could much more easily read about elsewhere.

MGS particularly 2 disagrees.

I think you are a few units short of a pair.

 Its like saying we dont need literature, movies or games because none of those media can hold a candle to this stone I hold in my hand. It has seen billions years of evolution, saw wars, civilezations form and dissolve, species form and dissapear and the rock itself was formed from billions of years of erosion and cataclysmic events. In short all other art forms are redundat because this piece of stone I hold in my hand  has existed trough it all and has a story many times more epic then we mere mortals could ever hope to comprehend.

All hail to the rock.

 ok maybe not all the little ones,but the ones that do it often

There, we agree upon something... I hope the debate isn't over now