The review system is really, really broken. They seem to get people who either (1) don't know the genre and can't say anything intelligible about it, (2) don't know crap about literature, science, the arts, humanities, film, TV or 20th century history, or (3) don't know anything besides their own narrow niche (usually, all the games made in a certain genre from Year X to Year Y).

Basically, the only use for the current review system is as a "lemon strainer" -- i.e. truly awful games will usually get panned. But the moment reviewers actually have to do some aesthetic analysis and think about what a game might mean, things seem to go haywire.

IGN for solid, traditional reviews

Zero Punction for reviews by a fellow gamer

I generally go by metacritic as a first-step general ranking, knowing that personal tastes can adjust a score +/- 15 points (ie: Some 60 game I think should be a 75, and some 95 game I think should be 80)... At least 4 different reviews have to be published for a game score to be listed, and generally not all reviews are going to have the same balance. Then I look at the short summary of all the reviews on metacritic, and then the full reviews of the games that give some of the highest scores for the game and also some that gave the lowest scores, and then I use that... If I have to pick just one review source because all the scores are close, I generally prefer IGN. I think it better to go by the words in their reviews then their scores though.

(although I say some scores are +/-15 on metacritic, that is rare they are that far off, and generally the order works out right... and IMHO, slightly better then gamerankings. Although some prefer gamerankings...)

Metacritic.com

but thats just all the reviewers put in one..

different strokes for different folks, right ?

None, just word of mouth from other gamers.

IGN's good for balanced, professional reviews. GameTrailers for nice, entertaining video reviews with decent scores.

IGN being owned by Fox makes no difference to me...all I care about is how the reviewers write their reviews, and they do it well, in my opinion.

If they're that wrong about a game, I'll sound the alarms...they've given the scores I'd usually give games for a long time, so I'm good with IGN.

If you're that worried about Big Businesses and "The Man"...I think you're taking videogame reviews too seriously.

I trust IGN and sometimes Gameinformer. The later is starting tto irk the hell out of me though. It seems they change their review staff way too often and I am starting to dislike many of the articles coming from these new staff members.

I trust IGN most, because alot of their revenue comes from subscription fees, not only that but they are not a site dedicated stricktly to reviewing video games they review all kinds of media. Therefore, they are less likely to be pressured by advertisers for higher reviews because they have multiple advertisers from different media outlets that are willing to advertise on their site. If Eidos throws wa bithch fit about a review and threatens to pull ads then IGN would be like, fine, I think we can get the new Micheal Bay film to fill your ad space. See ya jerks.

Gamershell.com, the only independent site (which gets just as many visitors as IGN or gamespot) that doesn't rely on money from gameproducers.

I see a lot off people here now backing up IGN, do these people refuse to learn from the lesson that has been thought just yesterday or are they just refusing to admit they might have been fooled themselves?

I like gametrailers (although they were very generous to assassins creed), and Nintendo World Report, for Nintendo games obviously.