After reading thread after thread about a couple of recent exclusvies that have received some less-than-flattering review scores and written reviews, I've started to notice a pattern. "X site isn't reliable" or "Y magazine is biased, obviously". Now we could chock this up to fanboyism, but they do put up some arguements and it seems pretty sitewide that a huge chunk of the population believes in reviewer bias (of course there is bias, but this is more about the bias that makes reviewers reliably score a subset of games unfairly). As much as we like to think they don't, scores matter to us, a lot of us. This being said, are there reveiwers or sites that are more or less universally TRUSTED as being unbiased or fair? I would like to know, because I have a relatively small amount of gaming time, and I really like to get a good sense of whether I'll like a game before buying it.

Also, what are your thoughts on having a platform specific magazine/site review other platform's games. Such as having OXM review PS3 exclusives or OPM review 360 exclusives, etc? I would think that they would kind of be forced to be impartial or would lose all cred really fast. If OXM gave a PS3 exclusive a 9.5, I think I would snap that puppy right up. What do you think?

If you want respectable reviews, skip directly to the User Reviews section of any site, toss out the ones with obvious bias, and draw conclusions from the rest. Do not trust ANY professional reviewer this generation: every last one of them has fallen to bias, one way or another, and that makes them all worthless.

I trust people who don't get paid to review.

The only reviewers I would trust are from the US. Reviewers outside the US do not count. IGN and Gametrailers are the two main reviewers. Their reviews and opinions count. No one elses opinion matters.

Official magazines reviewers obviously do not count due to their bias reviews favouring their systems.

I've found Amazon User Reviews to be the best judge of general quality with any game. But if you don't trust reviews trust yourself: get a Gamefly account or rent games from a store.

Site X gives a game I like (or think I like, many times I haven't played the game I'm defending) a bad score (
I believe it's very hard to find reviewers that are universally trusted. There are always people to find "evidence" of bias. I think it's better to look through a couple of sites/magazines and find one that you like. I may not be the best person to ask though, I rarely read reviews these days...

About platform specific sites, I think it would work depending on if reviewers care more about the actual games than the platforms they are being played on.

This is the kind of attitude that has completely ruined the review system. Not even the reviews themselves (although they're a big part). Of course reviewers are going to be biased. Everyone is. Even those people writing those precious user reviews. Reviewers may be bad sometimes, but I actually trust them more than consumers much of the time.

A lot of "I don't trust this or that" is because gamers no longer want to accept review scores. They don't want a site to tell them that the game they've wanted to play for months or even years is average. So, they just say that the site is unreliable. It's the spoiled attitude gamers have gotten this generation, and it gets more severe all the time. 

That said, my most trusted review source is Vgchartz. It's the only one where I actually bother to remember any of the reviewer's names or what they say.

IGN

GameTrailers haven't let me down yet, albeit they tend to skip on reviewing the smaller games :(.

I think that some of the bigger sites do a good job with the written review, and that the scores should not be held so damned highly (I'm a hypocite of course, because I'm abnormally excited about ME2 being a 96 on Meta ).

Anyone have thoughts about OXM or PTOM doing the other company's exclusives?