I bought my gamecube late in the game, about 5 months before the 360 was released. The transition between teenager living at home and adult had taken up much time and money, and I had gotten out of the videogame world for a few years. Finally things started to settle down, and I saw an ad for used gamecubes at EBgames for 60 bucks, and a big bin of used games for 10 bucks a pop. I obviously jumped on it.
By this time I knew nothing about what was going on in the videogame world, I had been living under a rock as far as the realm went. I didn't know what was good and what was bad. I didn't have the review scores of every release in the past year memorized from continual debates about what's worth playing and what sucks, and why this system is blah blah ect. So my game choices were completely random, or that is to say based on the same things that appealed to me when I was a kid. I looked at the box art, the screenshots on the back and decided what looked cool. I picked up a game called "lost kingdoms", a Lord Of the Rings hack and slash generic liscensed action game, and "the sims". The kind of choices that I would probably consider choices for a very ill informed casual gamer.
I enjoyed all three immensely. I have no idea what kind of scores those games got, but I'm guessing pretty mediocre ones. Actually looking it up lost kingdoms got a 71% average score on gamerankings. I didn't know or care, it was fun. An average RPG, a liscensed hack and slash, and a poor PC port of an old game. And I loved them, played my gamecube every day after work. Never even thought about whether or not they were good games.
Now I'm back in the saddle, got my current gen system and I'm checking the sites everyday, keeping up with reviews, and the gamerankings. These days I don't even rent a game that gets less than an 80% average ranking. I know ballpark figure what kind of scores a game is going to get months before it's ever released. And I really think I'm missing out. Since I've had my wii I haven't even thought about playing alot of games because they didn't perform up to par with the reviewers. I thoroughly research all of my gamecube games that I think about purchasing, and forget about it if it didn't get good scores when it came out. 7.5? That's not worth my 12 bucks! No sir!
Forget that. When I was younger I didn't need research and reviewers to inform me what I should and should not play. That's what box art and screenshots were for! I didn't need a number to know whether or not a game was fun or not. I didn't need a website to tell me all the reasons a game was flawed and probably alot less fun than this other game with a higher metascore. I'm going back to that. I'm playing soul calibur legends, reviews be damned! Where's my red steel, and ninjabread man? COD4 bored me, give me some generic FPS from 2 years ago I never played! There's a good chance I'll enjoy it more.
Reviews are just ammo for console wars. And I will use them as such :) but I'm playing whatever the hell I want.
You can find me on facebook as Markus Van Rijn, if you friend me just mention you're from VGchartz and who you are here.
