I'm aware that the editorials in their entirety are meant to be satirical, but they aren't funny enough to be justified. It seems that Deadly Premonition review was dictated by his desire to write one of those articles in this case, which is what bugged me. I guess the end result is that Metacritic will be a marginally less useful tool than it usually is, but fortunately most critics are competent at their easy jobs, so even with Sterling around, I can still determine if a game is junk before buying it.

Whether or not the lousy reviews of Sterling and Co. will result in copycats and thus render reviews to be random, emotional and completely useless remains to be seen, but for the time being I can at still count on most other reviewers to give me a good idea of what they liked/disliked about the game, and why. I would go so far to say that I'd rather just see inflated but consistent reviews, done almost to form a consensus with what the reviewer would expect most gamers to enjoy.

I agree the Twilight Princess 4/10 was completely unfair, but at least they had multiple people reviewing the game to cancel out non-standard opinions, (if I remembered correctly) which worked well. Nonetheless, it's an insult to an otherwise top-tier franchise entry.

I guess reviewers like Jim Sterling just have idiosyncratic views on the way games should be, but I think more than anything else, he believed that his views were somehow the unsung truth of the gaming industry, when quite possibly they didn't even reflect his enjoyment of the games in question, but rather nostalgia about past installments, or his frustrations that the games weren't something entirely different.