GS is using a mirror?

The way i see it when critics give very good games bad reviews or underwhelming scores is that they play the game, don't like it, but when it comes to writing the review they can't actualy find anything wrong with, so they make up stuff wrong about it, or find some minor falt and blow it WAY out of proportion, which is something i've seen GS do a lot.

Haha that's pretty good.  Yeah, people have made some pretty good points on here with some valid citations of cases where reviewers specifically apply personal bias to their game reviews.  Honestly, all you can really do about it is read the full reviews, and looks for the things they criticized.  Decide if those issues are big to you or not.  Other things I recommend:  Read multiple reviews, at least 3 or 4.  See the story from different angles.  Be sure to read the full range of scores too, don't just read the good reviews.  Honestly though, avoid gamespot entirely.  And no, I'm not just saying that because of the Twilight Princess review, they have a history of ridiculous actions.  I would go through them all, but it would take up too much of my time.  I suggest going through IGN, 1UP, Game Informer and EGM (if you have subscriptions), and Nintendo Power reviews for Nintendo games.  Yeah, it's a lot of reading but you'll usually get a pretty well rounded view on them.  Personally I don't mind doing 10 or 20 minutes of review reading before deciding to purchase a game.  

I suspect the Wii is even harder for reviewers to deal with objectively in a short amount of time because the motion controls often DO require more precision and practice than a traditional controller. When they're well-implemented, you can get good at the controls with practice and achieve a degree of finesse and immersion impossible with buttons. But when they're not handled well or bad choices have been made, as has been the case with many of the early releases, the learning curve for any game can become frustrating.

The problem is that it's impossible to review objectively when you don't know if it's YOUR approach to controlling that's the problem, or the game itself. We've seen wide disparities on some games' review scores in part because most reviewers will never, ever assume that they're not playing the game right or haven't learned the controls well enough. It's like the guy at the arcade who kicks the machine when he loses and says the joystick must be busted -- he knows that isn't true at some level, but he stands by it just the same.

Publishers seem to be figuring this out -- we're seeing more and better tutorials and practice modes in Wii games, which will hopefully make motion control more consistent and workable for ALL players.

Not exclusively, but they do influence them...

It would seem a lot of reviewers still haven't gotten over the whole "but it's not in HD so it can't be good!" thing. They'll turn around eventually. =P

 I've noticed this, too.  A friend of mine says that games should remove the physical skill so everyone can play it.  For this reason, he enjoys games with the standard controller.  The truth is he just isn't that good with physical activity and Wii games kick his butt.  At least he's come to accept that fact, but I think eventually he's going to have to adjust or drop out of gaming all together since odds are the next generation will feature motion controllers.  Kind of a shame, really.  It does mean that there are people (even reviewers) who fall into this category and in my opinion, the powers that be for any publication should move those guys to other projects.  They're not doing the site/magazine any favors by reviewing games they obviously can't play.

What this means is that Wii gamers are going to have to rent more games because it'll be harder to guage reviews at this point.  Some reviews are just all over the place and even opinions of those who are not reviewers are all over the place.  The only way to know for sure is to rent the game and try it for yourself.  I've always said that even before the Wii came out, but now even more so.  Don't let other people decide what games you'll like.

-Darkness 

yer i dont trust reviewers. Same thing happened for red steell mso tof them bitched about shit controls, therefore giving a lower score. Persoanlly i had no issue with the controls i found them quite easy to use. Granted they werent perfect but they didnt prevent me from finishing the game. They were still better then any dual analoge controls i used.

The things that actually did bug me in red steel were the many glitches and stuff in the game (ie in a cerain unamed level so not to spoil to much, when oyu were walking down the kill you could get stuck in one of the containers if you ducked behind them and had to restart).


I really thing there is alot of people finding it hard to adopt to using the wii mote. Example of this is excite truck. To me its so easy there i nothing to it but some of my mates are struggling to control it, however they never knew how to hold a n64 controller prolerly either so im not suprised.


To sum it up there will always be people that either favoure another console or just plain suck at gaming reviewing these games.


Another thing to ad is even if a game gets a avergae score of 7 from all the reviewers doesn't mean its a bad game. I have enjoyed many games with a score around that. People seem to think these days that a game must have a 9/10 to be enjoyed.