Meh. Halo 4 is a good game. I'm sure of it. Haven't read any reviews and I'm DEFINITELY not going to bother with the two or three seemingly trollish reviews. I'm just going to play the game and enjoy it. I suggest more people do the same. With postive reviews, there are often things that the reviewer hypes up but don't really impress me. With negative reviews, the reviewer often trashing things that I couldn't care less about (ie: boring menus or something arbitrary like that.). The only person I trust is me......and Jeremy Jahns.

Yeah. Microsoft really dropped the ball when they didnt purchase them. I mean 343 Studios or w/e their names are clearly doesnt know what Halo needs. I havent even played the game yet but I know they fucked up.

Infact, Imma go kill myself now.

I have been enjoying a game this past week, and then (literally just minutes ago) I discovered the meta critic score was....a 67%!?! What on Earth was I doing having fun playing it? It is almost as if others enjoyment or lack there of did not affect me in the slightest way.

I do not get this obsession, but then again I had no idea what ANY of the games I grew up playing in 8 and 16 bit era got for scores so they've never really bothered me like they apparently do younger gamers.

Same here I enjoyed a game that got 64%. I enjoyed it more then other 90+ games.

Happens more often than you think.  I've had Game of the Year contenders that have bored me to death and disappointed me.  I've had games that ranked horribly (Blades of Time, Lollipop Chainsaw) that I couldn't wait to play to completion.  I like it when people like a game that I like....I like to like....sorry.  Got confused, there.

Anyway, when it's all said and done, it doesn't matter if a few people I'll never meet dislike something that I enjoy.  I'll keep recommending and listening to recommendations but the experience is ultimately what the gamer makes of it.

My game is Lollipop Chainsaw funnily enough.  Beat it and immediately worked on beating the top scores getting A+ and unlocking costumes.  I was actually stunned it was 67% on there given how people here are worried over an 87%.   The only part I disliked was the baseball section, but one grumble in a game I have had a blast beating three times with tons of unlockable content gets my recomendation.  I even found Juliette surpringly endearing and Nick a more complex character than expected.

Sorry to go mildly off topic.  I hope the people that like the Halo series (I am not one, no offense ,I tried the first two, but FPS rarely do well with me) buy the game, have some fun and remembering gaming is about the experience, not the score.

Just an aside:

In the Metacritic FAQ section under the question "Can you tell me how each of the different critics are weighted in your formula?" they respond with "absolutely not".

Metacritic is a fairly terrible site who wont even tell you how they get the numbers they get. Gamerankings is a better site imo as they give a straight average. Unfortunately they seem to be much slower than Meta (they only have 39 reviews up now).

your idea in the OP is interesting but i dont think it is fair to lob off outliers in reviews. Like with this game, it chops off all of the bad-mediocre scores and i don't think that is fair. Better than what meta does now but still not good IMO.

uh your stats is BS because you cant have an outlier above 100 as the highest score is 100.

also the data is heavy skewed to the right so there is no normal distribution.

This. It doesn't make sense to use the IQR method with a distribution that (a) is heavily skewed (in this case, negatively skewed), and (b) bumps up against the maximum or minimum possible score (in this case, the maximum of 100), because it will be impossible to find outliers at one end of the distribution (in this case, at the high end). The review-score distributions for almost all decent video games fit these criteria, so using the IQR method with them is generally a bad idea.

If you are really concerned about outliers, you could argue for using the median score rather than the mean score. Or you could trim the distribution by eliminating the highest and lowest 10% of the review scores, and then take the mean of the remaining scores. However, as other have said, if you want to use an alternative method you should apply it to all games. Because game score distributions are almost always negatively skewed, the median and trimmed mean will almost always be a couple of points higher than the raw mean, as in the case of Halo 4 (median of 90 vs. raw mean of 87). So the final ranking of games from "best" to "worst" will look an awful lot like the metacritic list you started with, except that every game's "average" score will be a couple of points higher.

My advice: Don't bother, because it won't make a difference and it doesn't matter anyway.

I would argue hat when theres a HEALTHY amount of samples. Outliers can then be disregarded.