Metacritic and Gamerankings have become in gaming community some sort of prodigies that decide which game is good or bad, and which is worth buying or not. I do agree that it might help making some sort of decisions but many people take rankings too far.

I don't understands some peoples obsession with 90%+ rated games that apparently are the AAA titles that everyone should play, and nothing below that is worth even mentioning. Which is quite ridiculous that title with score of 91% is apparently that much better then the one with 86% for example.

This emphasis on those high scores leads to Gaming community ignoring many titles that still should be perceived as good, because they just in 80's or 70's on metacritic. Are good games no longer good enough? What's the point of endless debates about how great is the Metacritic score of 95? And what's the point of frustration when score goes down? Game is still as good as it was when few reviewers rated it higher? Or does it change when meta score go down, and therefore its no longer a good game. In fact sometimes fresh, unique game that has certain issues can be more enjoyable then another 90% blockbuster with great budget.

Another weird thing is that many fanboys use Metacritic as a form of attack on other consoles, stating that console A does have loads of AAA titles to console B therefore its so much more superior. They attack games on other consoles for not having score high enough.

Well i do not like gaming media/journalism overall (this probably affects my stance), i want to be a journalist myself but in gaming media i see loads of bias, lack of professionalism, fanboyism everywhere. Its really hard to be objective in the World of Video Games but many so called Journalists sometimes are not even trying. Reviewers should be taken into account to certain extent , but their say shouldn't be a guide to gaming.

GTA IV is a great example (it is a good game without a doubt) with a very high score, yet many that have played it know that it does not deserve those scores. Or is really Wii Music as bad as Metacritic Score portrays it?

Why do people tend to look at reviews and scores with such admiration?

They exist to give people more things to argue about.  That's all really.

They're strong arguments in console vs console arguments, as it's hard to find a better source for the "general consensus" on how good games are. In quotemarks, because the whole concept is kinda dumb. =P

I personally wouldn't use them to compare games between console generations, and would hesitate even with different consoles during the same generation.

I don't don't know what you're talking about tbh.

Since when have games in the 70% range not been considered good? Most gamers believe games in that range are above average. A lot of them even go on to sell millions. Games that are in the, say, mid-high 80's are usually really damn good like Resistance and Paper Mario, or even Uncharted.

I've learned that if a game gets low scores there is absolutely no chance in hell you will be able to prove that this game is actually good on internet forums. And vice versa. Everybody says how they dont care about reviews, that reviews are just opinions and blah blah. But everybody does care.

It usually is like this:

- Exclusive game on your platform with high metacritic score? = use it as a weapon on forums.

- Exclusive game on a different platform with low score? Trash it everywhere, and who cares that you havent ever played it.

They're a joke now. Reviews aren't legit anymore, it's all based on hype and adspace. There's no way in hell that GTA IV is as good as it was reviewed to be, and it's definitely not Oscar worthy.

I generally like metacritic and gamerankings for comparing two games which have as much in common as is possible ... For example, if you have two exclusive games released for the same platform in the same genre at about the same time with a focus on similar features metacritic and gamerankings will give a good picture of which game you will probably enjoy more.

Unfortunately, two games released at different times for two different systems in two different genres are often compared which makes little/no sense.

I can't stand the layout of Game Rankings but Metacritic is a great way of finding out about a game you don't know much about. Reading a couple of reviews is fairly meaningless unless you know you usually agree with those authors. An averaged out number gives you a good idea of whether it's any good and the links to all the different reviews with different ratings really helps you decide whether a game is officially good but not your thing, or officially bad but you'd enjoy it.

If you're trying to find an objective measure of 'quality', you can only really look to either metacritic or total sales. The idea is that by including a larger sample of opinions, you eliminate bias.

This idea is pretty flawed, since both groups and individuals are subject to bias. An elite group of reviewers can easily fall prey to groupthink, just as the mass market is influenced by advertising.

Nevertheless, if you really need quality to be objective, you have nothing else to fall back on. Though I think people are better off just accepting that it's just subjective.

Well from my personal experience I agree with the Metascores most of the time.

Of course GTA IV shouldn't have gotten a 98, but I would certainly list it as an AAA game.

They give a good indication, even when you're own opinion is drifting slightly apart.