It's bad enough that Gamespot, which lost a great deal of credibility when the likes of Jeff Gerstmann and Alex Navarro flew the coop (or in Gerstmann's case, made to fly the coop), continually and consistently delays its reviews. There is no question that this tendency has its own nefarious designs, namely to ensure that GS ratings can effectively sandbag the Metacritic average for a given title. Personally, I think Gamespot reviewers have used the practice in order to appoint themselves the "Fox News" of the game industry--delivering allegedly unbiased and unfiltered reviews that purport to give the "real" take on a particular title. It's as if Gamespot relishes the faux prestige that comes with dispensing the last opinion on a game, even if reviews elsewhere are better-written, more comprehensive, and more in touch with the general gaming public's expectations.
What exacerbates this failing, however, is Gamespot's insanely unbalanced scoring system, which was revamped a couple of years ago and has proven time and time again to be an abject disaster. Two recent, ballyhooed releases provide perfect examples of how disingenuous the Gamespot scoring system has become:
Madden NFL 10 received an overall 7.5 rating. This is effectively a C+ for a game that, per the review, had but a handful of minor annoyances. Bland commentary and AI quirks take this game down that many pegs? It should be noted that in a comparable review from another website, these same drawbacks were also cited but the game received a score in the high 8s. Apparently, Gamespot feels that minor, subjective grievances warrant significant point reductions, which is odd when you consider how these quibbles are treated elsewhere. Then again, refer to my point above about the delay factor--every other major reviewer had already published its review by the time Gamespot threw its two cents in, and no score was lower than an 8/10. So naturally Gamespot scores it a 7.5 and gives off the pompous air of being unimpressed.
Shadow Complex got an admirable 8.5 overall in a review published only hours ago. Now, having not played this game yet, I can't fairly debate the merits of whether this comparatively low score--in the context of the critical mass that had accumulated so far--is justifiable. But again, I can read the review and ascertain that while this may be the best $15 digital download to date, Gamespot thinks some occasional aiming quirks should take the game out of the Editor's Choice realm. I never really quarrel with what Gamespot reviewers identify as flaws, but I do question the gravity they assign to these alleged shortcomings. Why did Grand Theft Auto IV get a perfect 10 when it had some pop-in and clipping issues?
The scoring system that was adopted a few years ago was designed, presumably, to make Gamespot's critiques distinctive. The emblems and the good/bad snippets had the potential to be useful, but instead the removal of categorized scoring has made these overall ratings completely flaccid and untrustworthy. I don't necessarily want to know how the sausage is made but I do want to know the ingredients--Gamespot has taken the position that you don't need to know what's even in the sausage, short of assigning cutesy little icons, but that at the end of it all, it's sausage of a particular grade. And, frankly, I think that's doing the readers a disservice.