Since the whole review score thing was mentioned in the podcast, I thought I'd go ahead and toss in a new wrinkle. Imagine you are writing a game review and your boss says you must make use of these new achievement things that seem so popular at the moment. How would you go about it? My thoughts follow.

Achievements could be completely made up by the author of the review and used to call out aspects of the game worthy of attention. If I were reviewing Portal for instance, I could give the "Companion Cube achievement for stellar anthropomorphism." The references can be as arcane as I see fit, so I could declare the portal gun takes the "Proton Axe achievement for awesome weapon/item." At the low end, this is probably just a tarted-up form of the "what's good" bullet list from sites like Gamespot. But it could also be a way to allow praise for things that a normal review score wouldn't pick up, such as giving props to Peggle's graphics for being exactly what they should be instead of trying to compare them to Crysis on the same continuum.

A more systematic approach would imply that your whole, hypothetical, editorial staff come up with a unified set of achievements to work from. You could have achievements for "art direction," "voice work," "sound scape," "intuitive interface," etc. Each review has the same set of icons down at the bottom (or wherever), and the ones the game gets are highlighted. If one were so inclined, this could easily be considered a review score by counting the number of available achievements the game got and normalizing against the possible number. (Though I think doing so would sort of defeat the purpose.) Taken to the ultimate extreme, I could see giving achievements for including various genre elements (the "stat building" achievement for RPG's, etc.), perspectives ("first person," "top-down," etc.), and any other classification methods you see fit. These in turn could facilitate a way of looking for games in a sci-fi setting that have RPG elements and FPS elements with great sound that are not MMOs.

A lighter purpose to the thread would be coming up with silly achievement names...
(And icons if you are feeling really industrious.)
The Aeris's Death for surprisingly emotional content.
The Civilization for oh-crap-the-sun-is-rising addictiveness.
The Mouse-look for interface innovation.
The Old Man Murray for minimal crate usage in an FPS.