Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Are meta-review sites trustworthy? Well, it depends on the site and their weighting policy, according to this great article at Game Revolution. They explain the grading schemes behind Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and GameRankings and elaborate on why each is accurate or not.

Rotten Tomatoes’ scores don’t go over well for a couple of reasons: First, they only use reader-submitted reviews, which may number as few as 5 or 6. Furthermore, there are only 2 scores: Fresh or Rotten. To get a score of Fresh, a game has to score 80% or better – meaning that a game that gets a 79 is Rotten. Wow, a 79 is a C+ in grade school, certainly not a failure.

Metacritic gets a slightly better review, though there are still problems. For one, they use one set of grading criteria for games, and a different set for everything else. Yet, their conversion-to-letter-grade scale is a third set, not matching either of the others. They also don’t show the original scores from other sites. While these problems are “loco,” according to the article, it all “sort of works” and the Metacritic scores come close to the general consensus about a game.

Finally, the article covers GameRankings, who are at least transparent, showing the original scores from the other sites they take their averages from. However, they do post ratings for Japanese games and forget to mention the games are not available anywhere else. And sometimes, their aggregate scores are really only from one site, when only one site reviews the game. GameRankings is rated as more accurate than Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes, but still not perfect.