I'm pretty sure that everything reviewed here is on a sliding scale of its genre's potential. Because of this, a LoZ:TP 8/10 !=! Metroid Prime's 10/10 or Super Mario Land 2's 9/10. There's some skewing and bias between different reviewers, but that's hard to avoid with numerical scores.
Alex's recommendation is solid advice, too. If other reviews are available, I tend to compare NL's with Gamespy and Gametrailers.
Actually, the system we use at N-Club would work well here - the ability for a staff member to write a "second opinion" on any reviewed game, a quick, consise mini-review that only touches on his personal opinion of the game and nothing else. That way, if a game was given a low/high score, and another staff member though the game was much better/worse than the reviewer, he could write a short paragraph explaining his personal opinion about the game, which would then be posted together with the overall review. I remember the local video game magazines when I was a kid always had two people write separate "final impression" sections for each game to go with the overall review text, which largely focused on how the game played. This way, you got a more rounded result.
Well, that's what the Comments section is for -- always read the comments! Though we do tend to respect each other and if you don't seem to have made the case for your score the editors will call you on it before publishing...
Every video game site I've ever visited with multiple reviewers is "all over the place" so-to-speak. No two reviewers have exactly the same tastes of the same set of criteria. So it would be impossible to keep things perfectly consistent. I've said it many times, read as many reviews as you can and always check out the reader's comments to get a feel about how a game is. Simple as that.
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Topic: Wait a second - are reviews REALLY out of 10 here (Nintendo Life)
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