How relevant is a review score to you gamers?

[Kenryoku_Maxis]

MontanaHatchet said:

Kenryoku_Maxis said:

MontanaHatchet said:

Kenryoku_Maxis said:
As I've been trying to tell people for years, you don't need to listen to reviewers at all. There's way too many resources on the internet and way too many ways for you to judge a game yourself, even before playing it, to allow yourself to simply let some guy with their own bias and opinions to tell you whether or not to buy a game. Because at the end of the day, that's what you are going to a review site looking for, the justification for your purchase, and these review sites know it. So why should we give them an ear at all? Why should we care if they gave a game a 8.8 or 9.8?

In the end, you could have looked up hours of videos of the actual gameplay on various sites (gametrailers, youtube, etc) or read up on the game from actual news sites that don't focus on reviews. If you just focus on the review, you're basically just saying 'IGN/Gamespot/kotaku/etc, tell me what I should play'.

So you should get opinions about games from sources that don't have opinions?

I mean...yeah. People read reviews because they want to get different opinions about a game. You're acting like that's a crime. And those sites aren't telling you what to buy, just what they think is good. But then again, it's probably pointless to point out the obvious here.

Back 10 years ago when there was limited resources and few people had access to the internet, things like Magazine reviews and even limited online reviews like IGN were somewhat necessary, because people didn't have access to simply going online and seeing all the news articles and footage of a game before release.  Now adays however, review sites are pretty much just a luxury, even obsolete, in a world where we have nearly all the same access to the resources of the reviewers themselves.  Heck, aside from 'high profile' games, many times we even end up getting the games before major sites and magazines even review them, if they review them at all.  I had Muramasa: The Demon Blade 2 weeks before it was reviewed.  And Dragon Ball: Revenge of King Picollo a month before it was reviewed on IGN.

So what's the point of reading reviews?  They tend to just focus on high profile games, have bias to certain types of games and try to bend their reviews towards the whims of the masses.  As I said before, I can simply go on youtube or gametrailers and get a better sense of what a game is like than waiting near launch and trying to figure out what a reviewer wants me to think through a review.

Okay, you're still missing the point.

Watching footage and reading about the game lets you know what the game consists of; its mechanics, its presentation, etc. Reviews are there to tell you how well those things work, and if they come together to form a great game (or if some aspects are good while others falter). If getting the scope of how good a game is was as easy as just watching footage, I'd already know how good most games are months before they come out (and Lair would be an amazing game). By the way, being able to purchase games before they get reviewed doesn't make reviews obsolete. If I can buy a game a month before reviews come out, how does that makes reviews pointless? It just means I purchased a game before a reviewer could make a write-up of it. Big freakin' deal. 

And your logic isn't that great in the last paragraph either. Reviewers generally score well regardless of whether or not the game is high profile (see the reviews for ICO or Okami). And again, how does going on Youtube and Gametrailers give you an idea of the quality of a game? I'll use Spiderman 3 as an example (even though it's a movie). Because of the massive amount of previews for this movie before it came out, I already knew all the characters and most of the cool action scenes. And from those scenes, I thought it would be a good movie. However, the reality was very, very different. And how are these video sites not biased themselves? The most popular videos are always going to be the ones with the best parts of the game. They're not going to show the unpolished parts, or the ugly parts, or the parts that are just flat-out terrible (unless it's a joke movie).

I didn't miss the point.  I just repeated my point yet again.  That review sites have various bias they put into their reviews that make it so you can't exactly trust their opinions.  Whereas videos and 'pure' news sites tend not to do that, only sticking to showing you the actual game content and information.

And despite your example, yes, you can see both the good and bad of a game from video footage.  I could tell early on the good points and bad points of most of the games I bought in recent years, simply by looking at videos on sites like gametrailers and youtube.  Gametrailers don't handpick videos to show, only the ones that make the game look good.  They show videos wherever they find them.  I've seen videos that show glitches, bugs and etc in games (like the recent footage of Sonic 4).  But I still consider it a better judge of a games content than a reviewer, who only points out things he/she wants to bring up and then gives a 'score' based on how they 'felt' playing the game.