griffinA said:
Barozi said:
griffinA said:
MontanaHatchet said:
Millennium said:
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. |
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.
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Not many people on the internet have much consistency. People are just reaping what they sew when they said things like "Wii Sports sucks because it got a bad Metacritic score." If that is your justification for judging a game's quality then you have no right to argue with the system when a particular game you like gets a bad score.
I agree with you that the people whining about the low scores are just whiners but I disagree about trusting "professional" video game reviewers more than user reviews. If everyone has their own bias, then you should trust the guy that just dropped $60 of his hard earned money to buy the game.
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If I have the choice I trust the guy who has enough gaming knowledge and can rate games objectively and not some guy who bought the game for $60 and then sells it after 1 hour of gameplay because he doesn't like the beginning. Those people are also extremely biased and either try to justify their purchase by praising the game (although they didn't like it as much) or by smashing the game because they think it wasn't worth their $60 even though the game wasn't half bad, they just expected something different. I'm not sure who suffers more. That guy who bought and then sold the crappy game and wasted some money but gets a refund or the guy who is forced to play it from the beginning to the end even though he hates it.
Either way it's unfair to attack reviewers, because everyone is biased in a certain way as Monti already said.
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Bolded seems contradictory to me.
Look, both a User Reviewer and a "professional" reviewer are just giving their opinion about the game. What's wrong with a customer saying "Hey I actually think Demon Souls didn't deserve the praise it got, I think it was more of an average game"?
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But a professional reviewer shouldn't exactly express his personal opinion. Because a totally subjective opinion doesn't help anyone to decide buying a game or not.
Reviews should be objective. Of course it's not 100% possible, but they at least try. If people wanted to hear random opinions, they wouldn't buy magazines or read internet reviews.
In my opinion Zelda is an (slightly above) average action-adventure series. However if I must write a review about any game of the series, I would need to accept that the developers made decision that I don't like as much, but many people do like, thus rating it better than I think it actually is.
For example I almost don't care at all about online multiplayer modes. I see the quality in that section when playing Killzone 2, but was at the same time dissapointed with the singleplayer mode. In my opinion I would rate the game way lower than in my official review.
At the same time I think reviewers should only review games in genres they like or at least don't hate.
