I don't remember that. I remember 7's been very strong from magazines and word of mouth being more strong than any review. I remember I and people buying games with zero thought and hoping they were as good. I remember many thing about the late 00's, MGS, GTA3 and Vice City and the like booming off of strong word of mouth despite 1% of the gamer buying magazines and no proper use of the Internet. I remember when 5 or 6 was an average game, 7 meant good and 9' or 10's being hard thing to gain but I also remember noone gave a shit.  

None? I dont care for Opencritic at all.

I sometimes check Metacritic, and if the score is below the 70s then i probably will wait for the game to be on sale, however thats barely happened at all. I rarely look forward for games I dont expect to be good.

I think wors of mouth is more important than ever with the price of the hobby and the state of the world's economies and I think people are doing their research and coming to consensus on masse about games. We can see this with Expedition 33 or Doom the Dark Ages, people saying they think it's a good game but for some reason feel bored and think it's too long and that becoming the widely accepted belief is so much stronger than games media reviews unless high 80's is now enough for gamers to loose interest and they need insane hype or 90+ aggregate to justify 79,99 day one purchase. Either and both could be true. 

I like how we are mostly agree that if the 7 slips out of the equation we slip out from buying but I would like to hear from the one user who only buys games 85-90.

Yeah, and I never understood what makes a critic opinion "better".

If a friend of mine says "Hey, play this game! You will like it", and a critic says "Don't play it, it's trash", why would the critic opinion be above?

Critics generaly plays lots of games and have a job of writing reviews, it's quite different from someone who just plays games as a hobbie

For what it's worth, you will never see something like "critics review bombing" a game

Eh, I've very rarely had a good time with a game below the 60s.
Even then there are games in the 80s and above that I don't like that much or got bored with quickly.
Usually below a 60 is a no go unless the game is really cheap or I'm pretty interested.

I generally don't care about aggregate, I use Metacritic only to find reviews for games that interest me and go directly to lowest rated ones to see what are major complaints and if they bother me.

No, 90. If a game got 89 back then, people were like "flop!" and that was that. Of course, back then, reviews seemed to be far more accurate and meaningful. When OOT got the scores it did, the game lived up to them completely. I think that was in large part due to the journalists at the time being less beholden to their bosses and less influenced (bought out) by the big-three. In short, there seemed to be more honesty back then. You could trust them more.

Reviews and reviewers have zero impact on me.