Additionally, did you actually read the reviews that have inspired such venom? Here is a quote from the LBP review:

"It's a decent introduction to the game's 2-D platforming, though a slightly unreliable jump button, uneven difficulty spikes and an erratic camera when there's more than one player keep the relatively brief story mode from being as engaging as it should be."

They go on to lament that ultimately, the game will depend on the player's own creative abilities and that of the online community to fully realize its potential. With their clearly stated concerns about the gameplay and required level of community interaction, a score of "8" is certainly not impossible to imagine as an appropriate numerical representation thereof.

"For those critics who do not provide a score, we'll assign a score from 0-100 based on the general impression given by the review."
http://www.metacritic.com/about/scoring.shtml

Happens all the time.  I remember a great Wii game got a 75 based on the "impression" of a NYT article.

They really shouldn't put that on.
It's not a review, it's a report.
It describes the game, but gives no opinions.

And metacritic doesn't even consider VGChartz's occasional reviews...

Metacritic is reliable for the most part, but on occasion they do stupid things like this.

I personally don't think they should count publications that don't give scores, but they do. They have been assigning scores to scoreless 'reviews' since the site opened...

I think the insane part is that you guys are calling 8/10 low... :x

Obviously, it deserves a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 12.

This.

Something is telling me this has little to do with Metacritic's practices and more to do with keeping that high Little Big Planet average.

Since quite a few people in this thread can't grasp why Metacritic would assign scores, allow me to explain. Unlike video games, which have a score a good 95% of the time, the other portions of Metacritic, books, movies, television and music only have scores on the reviews 50% of the time, if that. A lot of the most well respected publications that review these other forms of entertainment do not give scores. It's because of this that Metacritic enters a score for a scoreless review. Without them, those people going to MC looking for reviews will be a bit disheartened to not find some of their favorite review sources represented and it could even keep certain reviewed material to not reach the minimum requirements to have a Metacritic average. Games just happen to not get any special treatment, so they get bunched into the same rule. As others have said, either live with it, or stop using the website. There's always Gamerankings.

I don't give a damn about opinions, the best reviews are just reports of what the game has and what the game lacks.

This is about as dumb as their number system for "letter" reviews.

Meh. I don't see the problem really.