Hm? Whosa whatsit?

it's very true, you can give 10 reasons why you shouldn't play any game
no matter how great the game is

not for my favorite game...

 Really? What is it? I bet you good money I can name 10 reasons not to play it :p

thats the point. i was just warning anyone who comes in not to even try.

the mark of the beast!!

(que the crazy b!tch from trading spouses)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=6B9GlayKS_0&mode=related&search=

it was so dark-sided... dark-sided..

 Oh. Clearly, my sarcasm detector needs new batteries. 

Note: this isn't meant as any kind of flame.

I think you're confusing the terms bad graphics with the most up to date graphics (probably a better term for that but too tired to care).  Okami does not have bad graphics and it does not have the most up to date graphics.  Just because it doesn't push the max amount of poly's doesn't mean it has bad graphics.

 With something like Resistance (hate bringing this up again and a little off topic) it does push the limit on poly's but the game is ugly.  It doesn't have any style and all the designs are just boring.  With Wii Sports, it's very simple but very clean and that's exactly what they were going for.  Odin Sphere is a recent game that's probably one of the prettiest games I've seen in a long time but all it is is simple 2D sprites.  Is that bad graphics?  No.  Is it the most up to date uber realist graphics?  No.  Is that a bad thing?  No.

Anyways, I'll stop being off topic and bedtime. 

That is a pretty good comparison - and comes to the "heart" of what reviewing a title is about.

The score that a reviewer gives a game is completely subjective - its what THEY think of the game.

Now - by definition - game reviewers are pretty much hard-core gamers. They have played so many games, and so many styles of gameplay - its only big titles, with polished graphics, complex/clever storylines (etc) that will attract great scores from them.

I have NEVER seen a reviewer base a score on what they think someone else (i.e. casual gamers? non gamers?) would think of a game.

...

For the record, I think Wii Sports is EASILY the better game. Any game that my parents can play and enjoy, pretty much gets a perfect 10 in my opinion!

Concerning Wii Sports being a niche game, I tried to explain in my last post that it wasn't really one, but that it had the important properties of one. It gets generally average review scores and only appeals to a small portion of a website's (Gamespot's, for example) reader base. It's a niche game as far as the readers of such sites are concerned, and so it's a niche game as far as the sites are concerned.

I'm somewhat confused concerning your second paragraph - perhaps I'm not understanding something. You say that people who are willing to write user reviews ought to have opinions in line with the professional reviewers, but I don't see why this should be so. To bring up Mega Man again, Gamespot's X8 written user reviews are overwhelmingly glowing (9+ range) relative to the critical review (6.8). I believe there's still strong self-selection bias at work - very few people are going to write a user review essentially agreeing with a 7.0-ish score for a game, while quite a few people are going to write 9+ "r u kidding this is the best game evar" reviews. Even if you weed out the clearly silly user reviews, the intelligently written ones still tend to award higher-than-critical scores. Again, though, I get the feeling that I may have simply misunderstood what you were trying to say.

I'd also point out that metacritic might not be the best place for user reviews. The Wii Sports average is based on a mere 70 votes. I could bring this down a whole tenth of a point by voting a single zero score, assuming it averages. Gamespot's 6000 votes award it an 8.5, as do gamerankings' 300, and this website gives it an 8.1 with 90 votes.

To go off on a tangent, I think that reviewer bias concerning these games is subject to two competing interests. On the one hand, I think that most reviewers know full well that their tastes are out of line with the mass market and that they'd be quite capable of upping scores to compensate. I get the feeling that this is what happens with a lot of sports games, actually - the people who go into game reviewing are going to tend not to like them terribly much, but they recognize this and so score them as sports games. The problem for these nontraditional games is that 'nontraditional' isn't really accepted as a category yet. People know that if a game called "NBA Hoops" gets a 9.5, it's just a really good basketball game, but is still a basketball game. However, a great many people will buy just about anything else that gets a 9+ score. And this generally works - for the vast majority of gamers, anything with a 9+ score is worth buying. People who generally dislike RPGs probably loved FFVII, people who generally dislike FPSs probably enjoyed Halo, etc. A website would anger a huge number of its readers if it were to score a game like Wii Sports at a 9.0. People don't yet understand that nontraditional games, like sports games, are an entirely different product than traditional games.

Not the best written paragraph, but I think I made a point somewhere in there.