What are your most trusted review sites/publications?

[marc]

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.