And yet when you look at the Metacritic yearly round-up, we see this:
Metacritic doesn't say particularily much about a game's quality though:
Sonic the Hedgehog (360 version): 46%
Sonic Unleashed (PS3 version): 54%
Sonic Unleashed (Wii version): 66%
Now, you don't neccessarily know these games, so I will explain to you why I chose this sample. Sonic the Hedgehog is one of the worst games of all time. It makes everything wrong it can (with the sole exception of the music, the music is really nice!), it's full of bugs, slow as fuck, has two thirds of absolute bullshit (Shadow and Silver instead of Sonic), half an hour long, dreadful levels, especially when playing Silver, an outrageous physics engine, and loading times right out of hell (loading 30 seconds for one line of written text accompanied by a "Hey"). And did I mention the amount of lag you have to deal with, especially when playing Silver on a mission with a lot of enemies? It's amazing. I'm still on my way to get all S-Ranks (and therefore all achievements) for this game because I just can't stand this horrible piece of garbage despite being a huge Sonic fan. I've also played this game just yesterday, so my memory of it is fresh. And I'm not saying this because I'm a burned fan, Sonic the Hedgehog has next to no redeeming aspects.
Now, why did I compare it to the PS3-version and the Wii-version, not to the 360 version? PS360 and Wii version are totally different games (every single level is completely different!) with the PS360 version being the obviously way better game (it's really the same concept just dreadingly easy and short on Wii, yet fast and virbant on PS360. And this is not bias against the Wii, in fact, if anything, I'm a Nintendo-fan). The PS3 version performs worse than the 360 version though, so I compare this version to the 360 version of Sonic the Hedgehog (which is the better performing one here), because even the better performing 360 version of StH is comparing a hell of a lot worse than the PS3 version of Unleashed. So I did this to lower the influence of two things: The bad word of mouth Sonic the Hedgehog got before it released on PS3 and the impact of the purely technical problems.
So, what do we see? Sonic the Hedgehog is getting a worse Metacritic than Sonic Unleashed PS3, but really only marginally (8 out of 100 points difference). The difference in quality is astounding though. On the other hand, the game that should be somewhere inbetween those two games, Sonic Unleashed on Wii, gets an average of 66, which isn't great in itself, but still, it's 12 points, so more than the difference between Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic Unleashed PS3. Judging the quality of these three games, one should come to three conclusions:
1. Sonic Unleashed Wii is the best of the pack, play this, if you play any of them
2. Sonic Unleashed PS3 is considerably worse than Sonic Unleashed Wii, only bother if you really liked Sonic Unleashed Wii
3. If you still liked Sonic Unleashed PS3, or even preferred it to Sonic Unleashed Wii (which I deem the most likely case), then there doesn't seem to be a lot of harm in playing Sonic the Hedgehog, too, after all, it's nearer in ratings to the PS3 version of Unleashed than the Wii version is to the PS3 version of Unleashed
None of these conclusions is correct. If you don't believe me, just watch some Youtube videos of gameplay of these three games. It's really obvious just from that.