Game critics have failed casual gamers, in my opinion. Never a great casual

[tolu619]

Machina said:

So? They don't deserve to be above 9 just because they're good core games :S I can give you a list as long as my arm of equally rated games across all platforms which missed out on the 90% mark.

"the same people who gave games like GTAIV, Little Big Planet and MGSIV near perfect scores, mostly for graphics" and "most of the time, the reasons cited are graphics and popularity" is revealing more of your own prejudices than those who reviewed them imo. I happen to dislike all 3 of those games and consider them overrated, but not on the basis that reviewers mostly gave them those scores for good graphics. They were scored that way because reviewers thought they were superb all round: gameplay, graphics, presentation, sound design, lasting appeal/value, innovation, etc., not just graphically.

And I'm not even sure what you mean by popularity/sales being the second major reason cited for high scores by reviewers. I don't think I've ever seen that happen.

Popularity..........he probably means that if a new Halo were to come out for example, and they messed the gameplay and story up but it still looked great graphically, just because of the already established popularity, it would scor about 80% whereas a better, but less known game(I assume he's talking about wii games specifically) would score about 70%.