Rath said: ckmlb said: Soriku said: I used to use GS but they kinda lost my fondness. Aww... Nintendo games didn't get 10s?  Seriously back off Cklmb, that was completely unnessecary.

Beat me to it so I'll second it.

IGN is my main source with Gametrailers and a little Yahoo coming in second.  I go to 1up/Gamepro/Gamespot for laughs every now and then.

ckmlb said: Soriku said: I used to use GS but they kinda lost my fondness. Aww... Nintendo games didn't get 10s?

VGChartz mod standard at its best.

 

Yes, gamespot has lost some credibility. I now go by forums to see how games are and if one sounds interesting,  I check it out at ign. 

rocketpig said: marc said: User Reviews >>>>...>>>> Pro Reviews Pros are just normal people anyway so there is no reason to give them any more credibility than anyone else (ie user reviewers are just as good until they are proven otherwise). User reviews are better than pro reviews for three other big reasons. 1 - They are not being paid! (no pressure on them so they can tell you exactly what they think) 2 - The sample size is much larger (thousands of reviews vs. 10 pro reviews) 3 - You can track a reviewer that is most similar to yourself by reading his/her past reviews and comparing them to your own quickly and easily. The only problem with user reviews is that about half of them are plain garbage (biased or childish reviews) but you can skim through those quickly so its not a big issue. I couldn't disagree more. User reviews are often fanboyish in nature and you never know how many games that user plays a year. How much would you trust a user's Heavenly Sword review if they had never played God of War before? Pro reviewers are generally unbiased as possible, they play a boatload of games a year (and therefore have a better idea if a game's features are new, innovative, or just another rehash of another game), and they generally have some kind of experience in writing and journalism.

If you try to read user reviews without filtering then yes you would be somewhat correct in that most are useless however if you already know what to avoid then you can easily filter through them and pick out the good ones. You already stated that people who give 9.5's and 10's are usually fanboys/girls. So why dont you simply skip all the reviews with unusually high or low scores? That will filter a good 75% of the reviews in an instant and now you can read the ones that are more level headed. You can be even more selective by skipping the 1st 30 reviews since they are usually biased (but not always) and you can narrow things down even farther by looking at users other reviews. If their other reviews do not match your own opinions then you can skip them and move on quickly until you find the reviewers that will match your own opinions.

Another problem with pro reviews is the fact that you will never be able to tell if they are being geniune or not. Reviews from a publication go through several people and are edited before they are published. As we all know, some reviews are corrupted (through affiliations and other avenues) but because they are pro publications we cant easily tell that from their writing. Conversely user reviews are immune to this issue. Once you filter out all the garbage and find the good stuff they are world and galaxies more useful than pro reviews that have to be politically correct, are edited by several people, and can be corrupted easily either monitarily or through pressure such as hype or affiliations.

ckmlb said: Also, user reviews on Gamespot will likely have a majority of people who love a game, why? Because they will take the time to write a review of a game they loved. So I don't check user reviews too much on any site.

This is not always true. Many people review most of the games they own for their own personal records. I happen to be one of those people. Ive played so many games over the past 24 years that its become impossible for me to remember them all in detail, so I write reviews for myself to help me remember. It just so happens that you can access them on gamespot since they have a friendly user interface and I feel that they will be around a long time (my reviews will probably not get deleted or lost). I do the same with movies and books for the same reasons listed above. So while you are right that some people are indeed biased, they are no more so than anyone else including pros. It all comes down to who you trust based on what you have read. If you have a pro that you trust then by all means read his reviews however I personally dont trust them. I would rather find a regular Joe that writes for the same reasons I do.

There is no way I will answer this, it can then be used against me when I want to complain on a review.

Gamespot and IGN are the two I read regularly. I generally lean toward IGN because I like the other reviews that come with it -- i.e. the international IGN ones. That said, after I check both, I'll check gamerankings.com and see how they fit in with the big picture and look for any large deviations from the average from a reputable mag... If there is one, I'll read it just to see.... It works for me pretty much always. There are few that I completely disagree with...