Why do some games get free passes?

[Kenryoku_Maxis]

twesterm said:

Rainbird said:
Because the qualities outshine the downsides? I haven't played ME, so I can't comment on that specifically, but I remember my first playthrough of Assassin's Creed being pretty awesome, but I couldn't finish the second time around (1 year later maybe), because the framerate and screentearing was just horrible!

The frame rate and screen tearing wasn't anything compared to frame rate in Mass Effect.  Also, there are less hyped games that have far less minor issues but they can have that one single issue and it's an automatic bomb because of that.

But something like Mass Effect?  I counted eight times in my last playthrough that I got stuck in geometry (and none of those were actually trying to get stuck), lost count of the unplayed parts because of frame rate, game crashed twice, and numerous other problems.

So that's 8 times I got stuck and had to reload a save, lets just say 2 times the game crashed (it was more than that), and 4 unplayed parts due to framerate (much more than that), that's a total 14 big problems.  That playthrough only took about 22 hours, that means I had a horrible experience every hour and a half of play!

You just answered your own question.  Hype and marketing fuels game sales, especially in America.  And consequently, the 'scores' and 'popularity' of those games.  And if you're basing the general opinions of games either by reviews or the opinion of people on forums such as this, then these two points are what you need to look at.