I would like to see harsher review environment for these AAA games, we need more places holding them to a higher standard. Not just accepting their marketing money and then generating a perfect score.
Eurogamer, Edge, giant bomb are giving out lower scores than most and seem to be reviewing it a little more objectively.
IGN still seems up to their usual tricks though with their 9.8/10 score. Destructoid as well giving it a 10 seems to be circumspect since they admitted to changing their opinion over Marketing dollars last year during the Forbe's articles.
I'm not saying that Halo isn't a good game, I just have trouble believing that they have generated such a perfect and sublime experience that it warrants perfect scores.
People act like this problem only exists with AAA games.
The fact is that Halo may not deserve 10's, and maybe 8's and 9's would be more appropriate. But on the other end of the spectrum, most games that score ~6 actually deserve a 3 or a 4. Part of the reason good games scores are inflated is because bad games scores are inflated, and there has to be a reasonable difference in the scores to show the difference in quality.
Shit, compared to most of the games that score 6/7's or so, a lot of the games that score 9/10's look like 11/12's.
90% of the games in the 60's on metacritic aren't even worth touching....so why are they getting a 6/10? So why should only AAA games get harsher reviews? Isn't that a bit of a double standard? I'm pretty sure none of those devs are 'moneyhatting' reviewers, yet there scores are still way higher than they should be.