That's why I don't trust them

Metacritic is only useful as a one place to link you with reviews, the metascores are broke.

Plus im suprised that Conduit is receiving such polarised scores, 86 from IGN, 75 from ONM or C+ from 1 UP. Im just going to wait for user reviews to get this one.

I'm not sure it's Metacritic's conversion that sucks, maybe it's the other review scores not making any sense (with games very rarely scoring 5 or under that).

Gamerankings has the C+ review as a 70% or something. Just saying.

1up's scale better incorporates the whole range from 0 to 100, which does not convert well on metacritic, where anything under 70 becomes "avoid at all costs, best to burn with fire"

What was the content of the review? And was it by that guy who claimed the Wiimote "just can't do" that kind of game?

Yeah, Metacritic can get some flak for their conversion, but honestly, why are the sites using such a rubbish scoring system? Why not just use numbers? This isn't school, geez.

There are dozens of different ways to evaluate the "performace" of something, and it is generally much more difficult to translate a marking scheme that has less precision to one that has more precision ... For example, a pass-fail system is heavily used in various forms of certification and it would be (nearly) impossible to assign an appropriate percentage grade when you only know that someone passed or failed.

The problem with Metacritic is they assume that every grade on a scale represents an equal distance from any other grade and therefore a pass-fail represents 100% and 0% respectively and the letter grading system is (roughly) as follows:

F-: 6.66%
F: 13.33%
F+: 20%
D- : 26.66%
D: 33.33%
D+: 40%
C-: 46.66%
C: 53.33%
C+: 60%
B-: 66.66
B: 73.33%
B+: 80%
A-: 86.66%
A: 93.33%
A+: 100%

The truth is that most people are used to letter grades in the educational sense, and the breakdown is much more like:

F:  <45%
D: 45% to 60%
C: 60% to 75%
B: 75% to 85%
A: 85% to 100%

Now, the (probably) haven't received too many complaints because at the high end their scale isn't (that) much different from what people would expect and most games/movies that people are opinionated about tend to be close to the higher end of the scale.

That'd be right on the scale at our uni =P

85% A+
80% A
75% A-
70% B+
65% B
60% B-
55% C+
50% C
45% C-
40% D
Everything else F.

Yeah, the guys at metacritic must have never gone to school, because a C at my school was 75-84