Zekkyou said:
Which is completely irrelevant to the validity of a metascore. Games are (at least for the most part) reviewed with their target audience in mind.
That rarely happens and you know it. DKC: TF got lower scores because it wasn't seen as ambitious enough for Retro Studios and that it wasn't Metroid. That GS review says a lot ("unimaginative level design, too hard, etc."
The game's main critique point from a lot of people, critics and fanboys alike, was that this game was a 2D platformer. From what I've seen on forums and polls (with plenty of votes) this is considered the best 2D platformer of this generation.
Does Bayonetta 2 scoring higher than Yoshi mean it's inherently better? No, but it does mean that at least on a limited generalized scale, it is better to its target audience. That certainly seems to have been the case with those two, at from what I've seen on VGC.
Does Bayonetta 2 share the same target audience as GoW? Why does that game sell better then? (the answer is obvious: Greek mythology is much more desirable than what ever the fuck Bayonetta is supposed to be). But yeah, I shouldn't really be comparing Yoshi's Woolly World to a hack & slash game, so just ignore that part.
Stuff like MC and GR provide targeted generalizations. No more, no less. If 100 critics say [x] is great, and [x] is the type of game i like, then it's pretty likely i'll also think it's great. Not always, there will always be variance with such things (especially when dealing with relatively small sample sizes), but frequently enough for me to value it as a view point i can't, as an individual, properly see through.
But they target a very flawed group of people.
- Review sites accept money from the companies they review games on. It's only fair that I question their integrity then. They aren't neutral. This is what we call conflict of interest. It's like reading Caesar's Bello Gallico without questioning why Caesar wrote it: propaganda material for the senator's at Rome. It's hardly an objective piece of literature.
- Metacritic works with weighted averages: some sites are considered more important than others. It just so happens that the same company that owns GS also owns Metacritic... Guess which review site has the most importance according to Metacritic? Again, conflict of interest...
- Some of the sites they include in their database are rather questionable...
- Some review sites use extremely high or extremely low scores to increase the traffic on their site. It happens frequently. Because it sadly works. As source material metacritic/review sites are rather useless. And since evaluating and analysing all kinds of sources is what I've been doing for the past 5 years I think I know what I'm talking about!
I think we'd see a lot less bickering about stuff like metacritic (and a lot less silly comparisons) if people took a moment to consider what the data actually represents, and that it doesn't exist on a singular field.
I did just that which is why I'm against it being used so often on gaming forums.
Anyway, i'm going to call it quits here. I think this is the 4th or 5th time I've had this discussion on VGC, so needless to say i'm somewhat bored of it. You'd think i'd have learnt not to bother by now 
Don't worry, you don't have to respond to this, I've said anything I wanted to say anyway. :p
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