That settles it. I'm no longer purchasing this game because the vaunted gaming publication Variety magazine only gave it an 8/10. I certainly won't check out other reviews or even take the step of renting the game first to see if I like it. Oh, and disolitude: "high on drugs"....really? Come on. You're better than that.

http://www.metacritic.com/about/scoring.shtml

A: Many reviewers include some sort of grade for the movie, album, or game they are reviewing, whether it is on a 5-star scale, a 100-point scale, a letter grade, or other mark. However, plenty of other reviewers choose not to do this. Hey, that's great... they want you to actually read their review rather than just glance at a number. (Personally, we at Metacritic like to read reviews, which is one of the reasons we include a link to every full review on our site.... we want you to read them too!)

However, this does pose a problem for our METASCORE computations, which are based on numbers, not qualitative concepts like art and emotions. (If only all of life were like that!) Thus, our staff must assign a numeric score, from 0-100, to each review that is not already scored by the critic. Naturally, there is some discretion involved here, and there will be times when you disagree with the score we assigned. However, our staffers have read a lot of reviews--and we mean a lot--and thus through experience are able to maintain consistency both from film to film and from reviewer to reviewer. When you read over 200 reviews from Manohla Dargis, you begin to develop a decent idea about when she's indicating a 90 and when she's indicating an 80.

Note, however, that our staff will not attempt to assign super-exact scores like 87 or 43, as doing so would be impossible. Typically, we will work in increments of 10 (so a good review will get a 60, 70, 80, 90, or 100), although in some instances we may also fall halfway in-between (such as a 75).

M$ paid them :P

I rate this thread a Confirmation Bias/10.

Its been pretty clear from the start that Metacritic is shit, they don't include all the reviews, they just pick and choose which ones to use, the same with GR. The LBP review thread has around 60 reviews, and Metacritic has only a dozen or so listed.

no offense but seriously someone would have to be a bigtime loser to care about such stupid things

They do it all the time. I often feel they get it wrong. They should only use sources with a score IMHO. You can't take a wall of text written by someone else and assign a score on their behalf as far as I'm concerned.

I doubt its some big conspiracy though as no doubt you could find examples for 360 games as well.

Also I wouldn't see Variety as a particularly good game review source either...

And long hair.

So they asign themselves the ratings if theres isnt one .....this kill a lot of the sites validity then.

Diomedes1976 joins the ranks of those who haven't read the thread before posting.