Yup... they even managed to diss PS3 members during the KZ2 review, in which they said that "PS3 owners finally have something to buy now"

Fuck them, and fuck their 2/5 for Tenchu. It deserves much better, and IGN sees this.

I would love to see a temporal element added to this discussion. Because it seems that the distortion bias has increased disprorotionately in recent months. In other words, the more recent reviews have been lower.

Mike from Morgantown

I stopped watching X play reviews ages ago when I realized I didn't agree with 1 review that they made(could be because of content or number or both).

There is no bias.

A very nice job but you missed my whole point. I never said the X-Play was consistently lower on their Wii scores than MetaCritic. As I mentioned, on the games they like, they tend to actually score higher that the average and they have given a reasonable number of the top games 100.

What I dislike is the odd pattern where a game is Great, Very Good, Good, or we score it so low that it is buried forever. They have way too many, expecially recently, scores that are so far off average that they are unreasonabe. Any individual critique that is 30 points below average on a 100% scale should be subject to scrutiny. They also should be infrequent. A 30% rate, which they have in the latest 35 games is unreasonable especially when they do not tend to EVER do the same thing in other consoles.

 Obviously you could score half the games 30 pts below average and if you scored the other half 30 points above your graph would show no bias but then every review would be highly questionable. My challenge still stands. In gathering your data, how many games did you find for the XBox360 or the PS3 where X-Play was 30 or more points off average? Any? Anything close to 30%?

You know, I find it utterly fascinating how some people see what they want to see and only what they want to see.

I also think most of the problems you have consist of X-Play having a 5 point scale which translates into no 7s or 9s (I don't remember X-Play giving halves back when I used to watch it).  Look closely at that chart above at the metacritic scores and look at the cluster of games in the 60-80 range to see what I mean.

Here is an interesting figure. In the most recent games on MetaCritic (the ones listed in the center).
Wii games scored 25 or more points lower than the average = 5

XBox360 and Ps3 games scored 25 points or more below average = 0
XBox360 and Ps3 games scored 10 points or more below average = 0

Not one single HD game was scored more than 8 points above or below the MetaCritic average where 50% of Wii games were scored 25 pts or more below average.

I don't really need a statistical analysis to see a problem here.

My point was that X-Play scores on a scale of 1 throgh 5 stars with no half scores.  The lowest 7.5% of the Wii games have gotten 1 star which is translated as a score of 20.  If you look at Metacritic average for the lowest 7.5% of the Wii games that are also reviewed by X-Play, the average score is about 42 (they are not the same games, but you get the point).  Therefore if a game is bad, X-Play, because of the way their scoring system is set up, will likely rate it 22 points below Metacritic average.  Conversley, they have rated the highest 7.5% of Wii games 5 stars, which is a score of 100, Metacritic average for the highest 7.5% games is 93, therefore X-Play will likely rate the highest games 7 points above Metacritic average score.  It's because of the wasy the scores are set up.

This is different than what I was initially thinking with Wii games being two camps and HD more of a spectrum.  That was just speculation, this is data.

As to why the Wii games scoring less than Metacritic average lately, there is a simple ans more innocent explation than X-Play trying to sabotage the Wii.  The games on the Wii lately have been below average in general, and those games are precisely where X-Play will below Meacritic average because they will hand out 1 and 2 stars while the averages will be 40% and 55% for the same games.

Why would you restrict yourself to recent games only.  Among the PS3 full list, here are several examples of what you seek:

Don't worry X-Play are so pro-microsoft...