Understanding Review Scores - Quit the Console Review War Crap

[Pemalite]

SanAndreasX said:

Pemalite said:

I usually don't even look at reviews anymore.
I just buy it, if the game is bad, shelve it and play something else.

The main issue is, my personal taste is not always going to align to the reviewers.. Some of my favorite games of all time were very average titles... Sure those games had flaws, but I still sunk a ton of hours into them.

The vast majority of my favorites are 80s-tier games according to Metacritic. A lot of the 90s-tier stuff bores me. A lot of games I like are 70s, even a couple of 60s. I honestly stopped caring much about Metacritic after what happened to Obsidian with Fallout: New Vegas, which I absolutely loved. Most people would probably say my tastes in games suck. Oh, well.

I think part of the problem with aggregate scores is that we've been conditioned from our years in school. 70 is supposed to be a C (75 in some scales), which is "average". In reality, my mother would start chewing me out and restricting my gaming privileges if my grades dropped below a B. When I was in nursing school, you had to have a minimum 72 (C-) to pass. There was no "D." If you made a 71, you failed.  So we're conditioned to see 70s as borderline failing grades. And when letter scores are involved, Metacritic tends to weigh a B as 75, a C as 50, a D as 25, and F as zero. At least they did the last time I saw one of those. And one less than stellar grade from some hole-in-the-wall site that barely has enough recognition to be captured by MC can sink a game's aggregate. 

7.8 out of 10, too much water.

When I was young/er. My schools actually didn't have pass or fail grades.
Ended up leaving school after I finished year 9 anyway and went straight into college level education... High School wasn't for me.

But you are right, it seems around the 70's mark is seen as a bombed game... Yet something like Vietcong in the early 2000's scored in the low 70s and I had an absolute blast with it.