Some of you guys would really hate being a game developer I suspect.
I remember a few years ago we wrote the game Entrepreneur. It represented TWO YEARS or our lives to create it. It came out and back then there were 4 major US game magazines. One of them was called PC Games. The guy who reviewed it had only played the game for probably 10 minutes tops (based on screenshots and the words he said in the review). He gave it a D. He even rated the multiplayer system a D even though unlike other games of 1997, Entrepreneur came with an integrated match making service ala Battle.net, far superior to anything available at the time (other than battle.net itself). He had never even logged on.
Luckily, the other magazines gave it very high markets, 3.5 stars, 4 stars, etc. But the PC Games review was the first one and you can imagine how we felt. It also hurt sales.
It happens all the time. We also made a game called LightWeight Ninja. Gamespot gave it a TWO (out of 10). Totally reamed it. But it was totally inconsisten with other reviews they'd given. A differnet reviewer had given a 7 out of 10 to a competing game even though every othre site had rated us far higher than the other game and the graphics of the other game were much worse. We just happened to get a bad reviewer in our case.
The bottom line is, inconsistency happens. It happens all the time. I'd say this site is much more consistent than most because the moderators here literally agonize over what they rate things. More thought often goes into the ratings here than you see done by paid game reviewers!
Virtually every site that has a database of content has some sort of rating system.
