Swinging a sword in different directions is very hard. Harder than remembering every button combination too do specific moves. Yup that makes perfect sense…

If you can’t tell that you should swing a sword at the side that the enemy is not blocking then there something seriously wrong with you. If you do not like motion controls then you should not play the game because that part of it won’t make you even want to play it. If you are forced to play it and review it then the score will not be fair because you’re doing it because you have to and this makes it none professional. This guy couldn’t even tell if you use the censor bar or not which is very clear from the beginning of the game but he played the game as a broken one because the censor bar did not do what it was supposed to do. Yeah Nintendo usually gives you those types of game >_> he even removed that part of his review!

A fair reviewer would be someone that is open to all sorts of games/movies and not just specific ones. If I hate horror then all horror movies will get bad scores from me but is that fair?

Why is it so hard for people to accept that there are biased people out there?

I agree that the overabundance of 9+ score from quite a few sites is a problem, but if you look at Metacritic (or GameRankings, which is better because it includes gamrReview) most titles, although they receive 9+ scores from IGN and such, end up in the high 80s exactly because so many reviewers are afraid of handing out 9s to everything, with the result that this becomes extremely overcrowded. I can't think of many games that average above 90 which don't really deserve it, but I can think of an enormous number of 87s, 88s and 89s which definitely don't deserve to score so high.

The 7 range needs to be used a lot more, and the 8 range a lot less.

People are lame, they get so hyped for a game and they want to feel justified in their hype or purchase. So they dont like it when something they may like is trashed. thats life in general. Im sure as gamers everyone here has gotten upset about it one time or another, we just have to be mature and accept other people's opinions
on a side note, i find i am more agitated with review scores that are too damn high. I think this gen is the worse, its like standards have either dropped, people are just to chicken shit to say what they feel, or they really are getting under the table. I love Uncharted series. But a ten??? That would imply significant improvement overall, sure the online is better, but the campaign wasnt, IMHO. That goes for Crysis 2 as well, no game with that much glitching should get a nine. NMHs, WIi owners must have been desperate for core games.

You have a good point there.  It's almost as if some reviewers are afraid of giving a game with a high budget a score below an 8.  This is kind of going back to my point of the scores being inflated.  We might disagree about how inflated that they are, but we can agree that they are inflated.

Because a game that scores less than 95% is OBJECTIVELY SHIT and cannot be enjoyed by anybody.

Personally I hate high review scores more than I do low ones.

If a certain game tends to get some lower scores here and there below the median of review scores, then at least you know it does have certain issues, whether it be with controls, poor AI, lame story or repetitive gameplay, or even the fact that it's not necessarily a game for everyone and appeals more to specific tastes than others, so you can factor these things in when making a purchase.

Conversely, if a big release gets like all 9-9.5's and above simply because it's a high profile title and no game reviewer wants to be "that guy" who gives the game a low score, then you're doing a disservice to gamers who are expecting said game to blow them away, and then they play it and find out that everything isn't cupcakes and rainbows as expected.

I suppose that's why games like Dark Souls and Super Meat Boy flopped right? That kind of attitude is the reason we get so many games every year that essentially hold your hand all the way through.

Because most of these low scores are given to generate traffic on said-website.
Some games journalists feel the need to be "different" so they give a different score than everyone else. Sometimes its higher and sometimes its lower. It's the lower ones that cause the most outrage

I'm assuming this is about your Tekken review, but by the looks of it, it wasn't the score that's the problem; the problem was that your review didn't really say anything useful, particularly about TTT2 and the movie. You didn't talk about what the movie was about or who it followed. You didn't mention what new features were in Tekken Tag 2 Prologue. You didn't mention what four characters were available in that demo. Etc.

GameSpot gave it pretty much the same score you did, but their review was way better since it mentioned a lot of useful information. They mentioned TTT's gameplay still holds well, but it has some graphical issues and the lack of online is disappointing considering that other fighters that got rereleased had online included. They mentioned what four characters are in the TTT2 demo, and that there are new tag tricks.

However, the demo lacks the characters' move list which is a big problem (for me at least) since I only use two of those characters; I need to look at the move list for the other two to learn their combos and moves, but without a move list, I won't know how to properly play with them which will take away a lot of my enjoyment. I also need to constantly look at Xiaoyu's move list since she's more complex than most of the Tekken characters. Lastly, they talk about the movie's plot and what characters is mostly follows, which sounds terrible. Once I finished reading their review, I said that it was not worth it.

But you, instead, complain about the characters and having 'insert coin' on the screen (which has always been like that since the first game). The characters have always been silly and crazy since the beginning of the Tekken series, but that's one of the beauties of the series. It has a great, crazy diverse cast of fighters, and most of them feel entirely unique in terms of fighting style. Also, some of the characters like Kuma, Panda, and Roger (the kangaroo) aren't meant to be taken seriously; they're just for comedic relief. It's evident that they aren't meant to taken seriously once you've seen some of their endings; they're silly but funny. Lastly, you got the price tag wrong; it's $40, not $50.

And oh yeah, everyone knows Eddy and Christie are for the noobs. Many newcomers love them because you can just button smash with them.

I think there are a few issues at play:

1. Metacritic and gameranking have warped review scores and given them a level of importance that is reiterated when developers and publishers use meta scores to help market their games. Many don't read reviews but just look at the scores.

2. Due to (1), average reviews scores have gradually become higher meaning even minor reductions in review scores can spark outrage.

3. Outrage at review scores doesn't happen in other industries because they're fairly estalished. Video games are still fairly new but review outrage is usually on only core titles where a tech savy group of "elites" can vent rage reviewers. Really, some gamers are just very young or immature but have greater knowledge of where to go to vent their rage at an ill-perceived wrong.

4. To a lesser but still significant degree reviewers in the games industry are still enthusiast press. Whilst there are a number of publications that write and convey accurate criticisms, there are still many that are essentially only gamers that have great difficulty hiding their biases and lack consistency. I've read some reviews on sites where the reviewer has later admitted to not playing a game with sound or for no more than 3 hours. The rumours of publishers splashing cash around game journalists before review also don't help.

It's important to remember however that with books and movies there are discrepancies between sales and reviews (more so than videos games). Whilst it isn't perfect, we shouldn't want the games industry to become too snobbish and alienate readers and players so some critique of the reviewing process is a good thing.