The Witcher.

I was going to say that there's no way it belongs here... but the metascore of the first game is actually the same as the first Assassin's Creed's, so it shouldn't really belong here worse than Assassin's Creed. I always thought even the first Witcher got a pretty good reception - obviously not as good as the later games in the series - but turns out I was wrong.

No way. I still consider first Witcher to be the best when it comes to story and art style. Combat is just one dimensional and boring. If they could update combat to be like DA Origins then Witcher 1 would be the best Witcher game.

For me Killzone is one of the best examples. First one was not that bad but second Killzone just put franchise on the map. It was even talked that Killzone 2 is Halo "killer". Not even close to that but still, it was really fun and one of the best PS3 shooters.

Just want to put in my two cents. Metacritic is a bad system to go by for any kind of objectivity of game quality. It’s a consensus among a very specific type of gamer, and often it doesn’t match up with what the average gamer thinks, much less all the all the niche gamers. Also, meta-scoring has no agreeable scale, scores are all over the place (I’ll get into that more deeply below). I think we get more interesting answers if we allow opinions to be personal, and not a scavenger hunt based on Metacritic opinions.

Sonic 1 for me (and I’m sure many others) was THE defining game that most loudly announce the 16-bit era was here. But, some people played it way later and might not see it in the same way. I touch on this POV discrepancy situation with Mario Bros (83) in my own first post, which for me was a next to pointless game… however, I didn’t play it in 1983 when it might have been cutting edge. I played the game around the time of the Super Mario Bros (NES), after gaming had advanced significantly… it’s difficult to quantify how much gaming jumped in quality between about 83 and 87, but it might be something like Legend of Zelda to Chrono Trigger/FF7 → while I did pick up many earlier games, by that time I found many of the games from just a few years prior to be so archaic that they were barely playable, and I couldn’t figure out what there was to enjoy about them.

You have to be comfortable in the fact that many people are inevitably going to see your favourite games as trash. No opinion is objective, and consensus of any particular elite group isn’t going to make it any more objective, because they have are ultimately just different people…

There’s a good case to be made that taking Metacritic scores seriously is a sign of credulity. And if you do harbour any legitimacy toward them I’d invite you to change your opinion on the value of that site.

Video game review scores are only as valuable as the context the reviewer places the score into. And it won’t all work out to a comparable average either, as somehow that “meta standard” changes drastically by time, by platform, whether the specific game was given out to reviewers, or if those companies are sponsoring review sites/mags. Either way, it’s an average lacking context or justification; an 8 out of 10 on PSX or SNES generally required a lot more justification than an 8/10 on N64 (as an example). Case and point to demonstrate the variance is so high that it is to the point where there is a non-existence of standards or objectivity: Wipeout 64 and NFL Blitz 2000 got 84 and 85 on Metacritic; on Gamerankings historical data for SNES titles: Street Fighter 2 and Street Fighter 2 Turbo got a touch above 80% (Super SF2 and Alpha games 76% and lower), Super Castlevania 81%, Dragon Quest 5 under 82%, SimCity 77%, Terranigma 73%, and Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War got 69%. Legend of Dragoon and Lunar Silver Star Story got 74 and 78. In fact, if which would put Lunar, Legend of Dragoon, and Terranigma in the bottom 1/3rd of N64 games according to Metacritic, Fire Emblem 4 would be in the bottom 17% of N64 games. Metascores are next to trash without context.

But the point I’m trying to make is we should treat this as subjective, everyone can take part, and we can see everyone’s context as unique.