In my humblest of opinions, one of the criterions for defining a ''bad'' game would be if the title offers little or no entertainment to consumers. I was originally going to use the word shallow, as opposed to deep, immersive entertainment. But then I thought of games that feature very simple and straightforward concepts, but that can entertain most of us for countless hours. Examples of games like this from Minesweeper to Tetris abound in videogames.
Other criterions to be taken into consideration should probably include level design, story, controls, production values (graphics, sound and music) and many other elements I'm pretty sure come to your mind. However, no matter how badly a game was designed, how sloppy it turned out to be, all of that is secondary to FUN.
The problem with this is that the secondary elements can be objectively evaluated to a great extent, but the primary element cannot. Bad controls, bugs, bad sound, uneven learning curve, etc... are all things you and I can sit down, measure, and more or less agree as to how should be evaluated. But fun?? Boy, that one is hard. Fun is an inherently subjective notion. You may like Citizen Kane and I Scary Movie; you may love Metallica and I Beethoven. Or you could like them both. Or neither. Who is right? (Mind you, the comparisons I just made are not meant to imply one or the other is bad!)
Naznatips hit the nail on the head when he wrote that full-time game reviewers are hardly a representative sample of the entire videogame consuming market. Perhaps game reviews from other demographics, ages and sexes should be encouraged, but that is the topic for another discussion.
That a console has a unusually high ratio of badly reviewed games is not a cause for serious concern. That a console has an unusually high ratio of bad games -as in games that are simply NOT fun to play- is not cause for a worldwide panic either.
However, if your console features many bad games, games that most people will play a few times and then discard in search of a more rewarding experience, there is one concern here. I'm referring to that which has many times more impact on sales than marketing hype: word of mouth. Good word of mouth, not hype, has been what sold wii all the way to the top of the heap this generation. I am in no way saying Nintendo didn't toot its own horn and market its console; all the commercials are proof that they did. But I am sure it was people saying: ''Hey, you should definitely check this out!'' that made the biggest difference. If you seriously disagree with me on this, please explain to me why.
My simple point is that the market is fickle. If people are constantly dissapointed by purchasing one bad game after another, word of mouth could be: ''Hey, dude, save your cash, don't buy this. I've rarely had any fun with it''.
Fortunately, as it has been pointed out already, bad games sell considerably less than good ones. As long as ''good'' word of mouth outweighs ''bad'' word of mouth (sorry, can't give you guys any graphs or statistics to show you how this stands currently, just my intuition) wii has no cause for concern at all.
Make sure the shadow you chase is not the one you cast.
