I like to read over "some of them but not all of them. The end score does not matter at all really. If What I am reading gives me a better understanding of how the game actually plays then it can help me get my yes or no. IF its a review that is all about how it looks or nothing but comparing it to another game I find it useless.

it kind of matters. it affects me a lot more for games that i'm not really sure about but not really for games that i plan on getting anyway. if there is a game i'm dead set on buying it has to get really bad reviews like less than 60% for me to not end up buying it. luckily there are demos now and that gives me much more insight in what i get and don't get.

I take reviews into consideration quite a bit, simply because there's no source I trust more. I enjoyed a lot of games that reviewers didn't (such as the Spawn games I played), and that's entirely personal opinion. But I often do find myself agreeing with reviewers more than disagreeing with them, and when I choose to ignore them (such as when I bought Prototype), I often regret it.

It's really easy to focus on a couple things that reviewers do wrong, or the things they say that you disagree with. It's a lot harder to appreciate everything they do right.

I look at them. The write up is more important than the score. I'm primarily interested if a game is fun and if it's to my taste.

Wii games I'll look at the top and bottom reviews on Metacritic (I add 10 to the avg score as some sites will always score them low no matter how good they are) and then look at some Amazon.com reviews

360 games I'll just read the IGN review.

I'm glad I haven't listened to any of them for my JRPG purchases this gen.

As I've been trying to tell people for years, you don't need to listen to reviewers at all. There's way too many resources on the internet and way too many ways for you to judge a game yourself, even before playing it, to allow yourself to simply let some guy with their own bias and opinions to tell you whether or not to buy a game. Because at the end of the day, that's what you are going to a review site looking for, the justification for your purchase, and these review sites know it. So why should we give them an ear at all? Why should we care if they gave a game a 8.8 or 9.8?

In the end, you could have looked up hours of videos of the actual gameplay on various sites (gametrailers, youtube, etc) or read up on the game from actual news sites that don't focus on reviews. If you just focus on the review, you're basically just saying 'IGN/Gamespot/kotaku/etc, tell me what I should play'.

So you should get opinions about games from sources that don't have opinions?

I mean...yeah. People read reviews because they want to get different opinions about a game. You're acting like that's a crime. And those sites aren't telling you what to buy, just what they think is good. But then again, it's probably pointless to point out the obvious here.

Reviews are entirely irrelevant to me. After seeing some of my favorite games ripped apart by reviewers i stopped listening. I prefer to rent a game that i am unsure about before i buy.

For me, reviews have become increasingly irrelevant. I find out most of what I need to know about a game from these forums anyway.

I like to check metacritic and individual closing statements in review just for the sake of it. I find that I usually agree with the overall score on MC, so I find it to be a pretty valuable source of information.