Here's some advice to help you guys decide if the "important sites" are BS-ing you.

 

1. Look at multiple "main" sources

2. Check platform specific  sources

3. AND THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE, Check the USER REVIEWS. This is spcially good, because it comes directly from your people that have had experience with the game, or have the same taste as you. They talk about the game, and how it plays, rather than how it stacks up or tech stuff. 

 

For example:

Wii sports

technically, not the best game in history. Sites rated it with an average 7.5 

 but the game has much more to it as the experience and fun it brings, is un-ratable. The user review was around 9.5

 

Why, well, even thought it's not squirting the juice out of the wii or whatnot, people like it, and most likely you'll like it.  That is why user reviews are IMO the most sinsere source of a review. 

This argument annoys the crap out of me. Perfect scores in review systems -- for any medium -- have never been about perfection. What does that even mean? It's impossible to define. That's why score systems are designed to stay in the realm of reality. A perfect score means that the game/movie/whatever is as good as it could reasonably be expected to be, and that if it has flaws, they're minor enough to not detract significantly from its greatness. That's all a perfect score should ever be expected to mean. Why have numbers on your score chart if you're not going to use them?

@ zen

You should see Game Informer's NMH's score.

Reviews are not opinions. People and especially reviewers needs to understand that. Your job isn't to play a game and tell us how you fell about it, it's to tell us how good the games does what it is trying to do. It's not hard to understand that a personal opnion about Wii Fit from a PC only FPS head, is pretty much worthless, as it's not aimed for him at all.

Who is the game aimed at? What does it try to do? does it succed? See, it's not hard, but yet so many reviewers are apparently way to dumb and self absorbed to realize anything.

Of course they're opinions! Hardly anything about games can be measured objectively.

Opinions, all of them. Particularly broad and subjective ones, in fact.

See, you are the very problem.

What problem? The problem of reviewers expressing their opinions? Because I don't mind being part of that.

Very good post. A few other problems are the following:

1. Please note: this one does not really affect you for buying games, really only for comparing: Gamerankings does not take into account Japaneese and European reviews. This means that they have more American reviews, and almost everybody is nationalistic in some way. I'm willing to say that this messes up 90% + of the reviews. A solution is using Gamestats, as they have more Japaneese and European reviews, and less American, but I don't know how good this is.

2. Reviewers are oftenly two types of people. A) Conservative people, who do not want change. They prefer traditional fighters, racers, and pretty much everything traditional. B) People who want each game to be different from the last one. You have to change the formula to make the game good.

Problem: Neither of these look enough at the "quality" of the game. The game might get 1+/- just because of this. I haven't looed a lot at the reviews and so on, but I am certain that one group is much bigger than the other, making Gamerankings (and here also gamestats) wrong.

3. Some reviewers look at how good the AI, Grahpics, controls, character list, and so on, before fun factor, while most gamers look at fun factor first (at least I hope so). Take a game as Big Brain Academy: Wii. That game could have been made on the GBA, graphics wise. Yet, it is a fun game (alert! Biased opinion by me!), and some reviewers put that first, while others just say: the characters look WORSE than Miis! 5/10.

The biggest problem is really the review systems that have 5 things, like: Value, Graphics, controls, and so on, but no fun factor.

4. Most reviewers are REALLY hardcore. Most people, even you guys, are far from as hardcore as them. That makes a problem, because all reviewers represtent 1 part of the gaming world only. Or at least the ones that are counted to Gamerankings, and Gamestats. The reviewers in papers and so are of course not that hardcore, but this is still a very big problem.


I'll add some more when I remember them.

So, even if we like reviewers, I think most of us agree, that the numerical score is pretty much useless, except as a tool to flame a game you never had any intention of playing to begin with.

Numerical scores should be done away with. If you must have an overall scoring arc, use a star system like Xplay. Keep it low, like "out of 4 stars" that way, there is a lot of room for interrupretation.

Nobody can quantify a game out of a scale of 100 with accuracy, considering its an opinion anyway. 8.64 out of 10? Are you kidding me, really?

kingofwale said: I'm not surprised that Gamespot gave the game only 8.5. They give R&C 7.5 and Uncharted 8. So I have to say, it's pretty high for a Sony title. After the disgrace with Kane & Lynch, I no longer consider gamespot a respectable website.

I also believe Gamespot is biased against Sony.