Are Game Reviewers unable to Review Wii Games?

[Bodhesatva]

To go off on a tangent, I think that reviewer bias concerning these games is subject to two competing interests. On the one hand, I think that most reviewers know full well that their tastes are out of line with the mass market and that they'd be quite capable of upping scores to compensate. I get the feeling that this is what happens with a lot of sports games, actually - the people who go into game reviewing are going to tend not to like them terribly much, but they recognize this and so score them as sports games. The problem for these nontraditional games is that 'nontraditional' isn't really accepted as a category yet. People know that if a game called "NBA Hoops" gets a 9.5, it's just a really good basketball game, but is still a basketball game. However, a great many people will buy just about anything else that gets a 9+ score. And this generally works - for the vast majority of gamers, anything with a 9+ score is worth buying. People who generally dislike RPGs probably loved FFVII, people who generally dislike FPSs probably enjoyed Halo, etc. A website would anger a huge number of its readers if it were to score a game like Wii Sports at a 9.0. People don't yet understand that nontraditional games, like sports games, are an entirely different product than traditional games.

I agree strongly with this portion of your post. I'm not arguing at all that critics CANNOT review Wii Sports - style games effectively; I'm just saying they haven't figured out how to yet. In fact, several of the critiques I've read thus far on metacritic say that almost precisely: they acknowledge that the games are targetting someone other than themselves, and that this target is new and growing. Therefore, reviews aren't easy to do yet. Sports games (Traditional ones, at least) now have 15 years of history from which the reviewers can draw experience: how does this new sports game stack up to its hundreds if not thousands of predecessors? Wii Sports / Play / Big Brain really don't have that type of pedigree to fall back on yet, and thus it's difficult for someone who may not thoroughly enjoy the game themselves to get a good sense of what others -- for whom the game may be more palatable -- may think. 

I also think your criticism of the sample pool on metacritic is a point well taken. Still, one should note that even on these other sites, Wii Sports is rated more highly by users than by critics. As you can see, that's quite uncommon, due to those 0.0 "OMG THIS STINKS ROFL" scores you've alluded to.