Does anyone believe that Average Review Scores are nonsense?

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Rock_on_2008 said:

SpartanFX said:

Well some thing that I noticed in game rankings/metacritics is that if you go through the reviewer's websites ,,you will notice some of the UNKOWN websites are wayyy off ,,,it seems that they even didn't play the game ,,Almost like they were paid to drop the average review score

let's take a look at an example for uncharted,,,which got 89.7% ,,All the reviews were above 80 except for 1 taht gave it 65/100(A/V ONION CLUB)WHAT THE HELL IS THAT WEBSITE ANYWAYS?,,,their reason:


"Frustration sets in when: Roots, rocks, and waterfalls look great, but as soon as the camera focuses on a face, the whole illusion is lost. If the characters weren't written so woodenly, it would be a bit easier to overlook their rubber faces.

Final judgment: A shiny, hollow bauble.
" which is not true at all

so it draged the META score low for no reason,,,


What do I do?

I only trust IGN and read their reviews to see if it makes sense

 I bet some reviewers make review scores and write reviews for games based on either screen shots or watching video footage.

Considering the current trend where games have been heading and the "hardcores" priorities, it's understandable that you rate games by screenshots and videos. But as what it comes to topic, the rating needs a context to work, which is where metacritic and gameratings fail, since the idea of the sites is to give the rating out of context and bias. Best way to get something out of ratings, is to read reviews from reviewers that share your taste in games. People who only like shooters rarely rate anything challenging high, no matter how you'd think your favorite 55% puzzle game is the best game ever made. It would be interesting to see how people would be crying if the Singstar audience would start rating peoples favourite shooters, for their preferences, to low 60's or low 50's. There's also a lot of factors that has something to do with the bias in the rating. Usually the most popular platform gets the "better" rating, which makes 360 games getting better rating in US and PS3 in Europe. In Wiis case, the different approach seem still to cause some point reductions. Although, if the generation would have started in the current situation, the launch games would have gotten better ratings in general.