If you're gonna put words in somebody's mouth, it helps if they can't actually straighten things out.

Yep, screw Metacritic. Far too many times, it's admitted, at best, questionable reviews. And, more often than not, PS3 exclusives have been the target of said reviews. Deny that if you want, but an in-depth look at the content of the reviews in question will show that either the score doesn't fit the review, or the review is rather poor, though it justifies the score.

I didn't mention Metacritic at all in reference to SC: Conviction. I said simply, "Based on how Conviction was reviewed." No mention of scores in the slightest. No mention of Metacritic.

If you MUST know, and it's assumed that you must, given the fact that you bothered to comment, the reviews I refer to are the ones that state that Conviction was very little like the rest of the series. Though I didn't play a LOT, I did enjoy the old games, or at least their style of play. If you'd like to tell me that Conviction was NOT a departure from that formula, then I may stand (or sit, as the case currently is) corrected.

In the meantime, bigger fans than myself have been of the opinion that it was not very Splinter Cell-like. I guess, then, you could liken it to FFXIII, which I believe to be a good game, despite being a poor FF. However, while I'm a big enough RPG fan to accept Final Fantasy XIII being different from the rest in the series, my tastes in the stealth and action-adventure genres are rather more narrow.

So, as I said, if it's anything like what reviewers- and I suppose I should amend the comment to include longtime series fans- thought of Splinter Cell: Conviction, then I will pass on it.

Though, if it's exclusive to the 360, I won't be getting it, in any case; there are precious few games on that system that I'm interested in, and they are primarily RPGs like Mass Effect and Lost Odyssey.

As I said, if I'm wrong about my perception of Conviction, please feel free to correct me. If I'm right, however, my original statement stands as written, except for the aforementioned amendment.

To close the way I began, don't generalize. I didn't say to screw reviews. At the least, don't make sweeping, inaccurate comments.

Questioning Metacritic bias only shows oneself bias. Metacritic only aggregates reviews and sometimes their methodology is questionable (like their A-F conversion to numbers system), and some of the aggregated sites are less than stellar (although you can't expect every review outlet and internet website to have the high writing quality as more mature magazines like Edge and GamesTM) but it it not just PS3 exclusives that thake the hit: Wii exclusives, Xbox exclusives, PC exclusives and multiplats. Claiming that it's only PS3 exclusives that take the hit without even investigating the entire dataset is just plain wrong and anacdotal at best.
If anything, the PS3 fares pretty well in that department because it simply has more PS centric review sites than any other platform, and these mostly tend to score exclusive games higher. So if anything Metacritic is here to help you and balance the bad reviews with the good ones.

Your next point is that you weren't talking about metacritic but about the reviews themselves? So the question remains which ones? Or did you simply ignore the good reviews and selectively chose the bad reviews? Aren't those reviews published on Metacritic? Metacritic gives a pretty good picture of how Splinter Cell was reviewed and the bottom line was extremely positive.

So my point it that it's easy to cherry pick reviews based on one's bias and then claim it "was very little like the rest of the series". Even if it was, is that such a bad thing? Aren't we expecting games to change and evolve and innovate? Resident Evil 4 was one of the most critically acclaimed last generation and it was praised for that reason exactly. Modern Warfare on the other hand just like the rest of last games the series, so perhaps you prefer that approach of sticking to the same formula again and again?

But that's not reviewers anymore, right? Now your'e talking about amending the comment to include longtime series fans point of view on how the game changed - Which wasn't what you wrote before and wasn't what I was replying to. If this was the case than my response would have been also different.

Even then, you say that you are not a big fan of Splinter Cell yourself, so why do you care if the game changed so much? Did you consider that perhaps it changed in such a way that it will suddenly appeal much more to you?
As a fan of the series myself I can say that it's one of the best in the series. Pandora Tomorrow still remains the high point of the franchise IMO, but the series did need a facelift and a new direction from that trial-and-error formula (which became pretty stale in Double Agent), and Conviction provided just that.