the funny part about this is , if it was back in the ps2 get alot of good reviews last gen , but this this gen i see how this people dis the wii all the time and just becuase wii is up top. why can this people give the wii a chance you know and x-play suck ass , all they do is beat on wii dis like them for the shit .

I decided to take a look at X-Play Scores versus the MetaCritic Average. I took their list of Latest Games. Out of the 35 games listed, X-Play reviewed 9. The table lists the MetaCritic Score, the IGN score, the X-Play Score, the difference between X-Play and MetaCritic and whether or not X-Play gave the lowest score of all reviews.

The result wasn't quite what I expected which was a constant bias. Not true, but instead something I  consider even worse. X-Play seems to treat Wii games in one of two ways. If they like it they give a very reasonable, even slightly generous score. If they don't like a game they stick it with an absurdly low score, about 30 points off average and with a single exception, the lowest score of all reviewers. In that single exception they were next to the lowest.

I think this is a deliberate effort to completely trash the MetaCritic average on any game they dislike. That really sucks. When I was a kid we called this torpedoing and even then we knew it was a lousy unfair thing to do.

THIS IS WORSE THAN BIAS BECAUSE YOU CAN'T FACTOR IN A CONSTANT ADJUSTMENT, YOU HAVE TO FIGURE OUT WHETHER THEY ARE ACTUALLY REVIEWING THE GAME OR JUST PLAIN F**KING IT OVER. 

I wonder if they do this to PS360 games as well. I leave that for someone else.

UPDATE: OK, I couldn't stand so I took a quick look at PS3 and XBox 360 for signs of the same pattern. Looking at all low scoring games (yellow or red), X-Play reviews were consistent or slightly higher than MetaCritic. Apparently this SCREW JOB is reserved exclusively for the Wii. Way to go X-Play.

360 is on top if you look at the G4 audience.  This has nothing to do with dissing the Wii.  X-play is just garbage.

But hey, if you like this game you know how PSP fans felt when they gave Crisis Core a 2...out of 5, because they like to pause before they tell you it's out of 5 as if they are suddenly going to change their scale.

They're giving their opinion. It doesn't matter if they're biased, it's impossible for media to be totally unbiased. All you have to do is listen to their reviews and see what you agree with, you don't have to agree with their overall opinion to get something out of the review.

Reviews aren't as influential as they used to be anyway. The typical Wii user buys based on recommendations from friends rather than reviews.

I was actually interested in Tenchu, but the negatives that X-Play highlighted are actually game breaking in my opinion. I hate to say it, but the review seems justified. They didn't even mention some of the negatives that other review sites mentioned (and I was concerned about).

mmmm, they were just terribad at playing that game I think, because those "issues" were part of the gameplay that you have to master, I don't think they understood the core mechanics of it.

Both comparisons were what I was asking about. And that does seem like a suspicious pattern.

I understand why X-Play scores games the way they do.  The HD games are sometimes good looking and sometimes not, so they get noticed for that, and then you find out other things about them, like gameplay.  The Wii games are generally plain looking, so the only thing to note are gameplay issues.  Therefore X-play tends to break out the Wii games into two seprate camps, good games (4 and 5stars) and bad games (1 or 2 stars) based on what they think of the gameplay.  Whereas with HD games you can potentially have four camps, good looking and good gamplay (5 stars) , good looking and bad gameplay (2 to 4 stars) , bad looking but good gameplay (2 to 4 stars), and bad looking and bad gameplay (1 star).  Naturally the HD games fall more on a spectrum, whereas Wii games are either in the love it or hate it categories.  X-Play review format being limited to a couple minutes on TV exaggerates the issues they notice and makes the scores vary more wildly than they would in a print or web format.

Interesting review. The gist of it is that the game is fun if poorly executed.

People are worrying too much over the number.

Why would the same criteria not apply to IGN? Or at least some other reviewer. If you really believe that being the absolute lowest score out of all the reviewers 5 out of 9 games and usually by a grotesque margin constitutes some rational system of judging ... well fine. What can I say, somewhere someone will believe almost anything. There are people that actually believe that George Bush will go down in history as a great president.

WAGER: Because I willing to admit that I can be wrong, unlike X-Play I offer a wager. If you can document a single instance of IGN being 30 points or more lower than the MetaCritic score on any game, on any console, then I will add "rajendra82 is smarter than me" to my signature for one month. Seems like it should be an easy bet for you; after all X-Play managed it in 3 out of 9 reviews.