The whole used games argument thing is still very weird to me. I will be opening a Play N Trade Videogames store later this year, competitor to Gamestop. The used games business is basically the same but I honestly don't see why publishers hate on it. There is a cycle to the way the business works right now.
Stores like mine and Gamestop NEED to sell new games to sell used games. That is why they push pre-orders. The reason is that it is more likely that you may trade that title into the store thus allowing them to eventually sell it used. There would be no other retail location that will strive to sell a pre-order like these stores do. While you can pre-order games at some big box stores, typically they are just cards with box art.
The reasoning is that for publishers, if someone is buying a used game they are not buying a new game. Truth is that if you are buying a new game, you are not buying it from the publisher anyway, the store is. In addition, most of the time after a few months you just don't buy any new games because they are out of cycle. It is why if you go to a big box store, while they may have a ton of titles, it is quantity they have, not the number of different titles. They may have 20 copies of Madden but if you count the number of different titles for each system. You may get 15 for each console at Best Buy... at a used game store you have over 50 because of those older games.
The restricting of selling of new product only hurts the publishers and consumers. It is like Sony then telling you that you can't sell your Blu-Ray on ebay... because someone may want to buy it new. It is tough luck. Depending where you go, you can really get better deals with a used title and not only that sometimes a game gets fandom with used game sales. These are titles that don't sell huge new and may not take off till down the road. Its hard to find a new copy of Beyond Good and Evil
I understand Wombat's logic with thinking that they can just sell the titles at non used places, but then again look and see how pre-orders help the industry and if you take that market away, they will sell far less. If they also hated Gamestop so bad, then they wouldn't be partners with select games and offering bonuses.
But for the game review stuff... I don't know if it is possible but what if you had something where you can see where all game scores rate. So you can have your 5 star system but what does someone think is a 5 star game compared to a 4 star game? That context can really help people know the difference. Like what games do you consider for each section to be a awful, bad, fair, good, great game? Another idea would just call the middle score "Wombat" and have his picture there. Everyone would know what that means and would be funny to see a "Wombat" score on metacritic.