Amidst all the talk of NPD’s March year-on-year hardware sales comparisons, chart-topping software battles and third party revenue numbers, Sony and Microsoft both chose to play the PR game on another front – Metacritic review aggregations.

In its post-March response, Sony stated that: “Approximately one in every three PS3 titles achieve Metacritic scores of 80 or higher, which affirms PlayStation’s proven track record in delivering rich and relevant entertainment content.”

Microsoft, on the other hand, approached things form a different angle: “Xbox 360 is also home to the most top-rated games of any current-generation console, with 139 titles earning a score of 80 or above on Metacritic, while no other console has even 100 such titles.”

It’s clear to see why each company took its respective approach to the Metacritic data. If methodology was reversed Microsoft would only be able to boast that 23 per cent of Xbox 360 titles (compared to PS3’s 30 per cent) ranked 80 or above.

Sony, on the other hand, still has fewer than 100 PS3 titles rated 80 or over – 96, in fact (compared to Xbox 360’s 139).

By way of contrast, Nintendo’s Wii has 45 games rated at 80+ on Metacritic – just 12 per cent of the machine’s total software base, and the lowest of any machine on the site. DS has 76 such titles (also 12 per cent), PSP has 65 (15 per cent) and PS2 has 320 (20 per cent).

Looking further back, the original Xbox has 219 titles with such a rating (26 per cent), GameCube has 127 (25 per cent), Game Boy Advance has 98 (17 per cent) and Dreamcast has 50 (35 per cent – the highest here).