QFT

Well, it's quite clear why: the silly search for "authority by proximity", and please underscore that "silly" a few times :)

Still those opinions are not worthless when you can't have an informed one... for example when you haven't played a game yet or you have just glanced a minute of it played in a shop or at a friend's.

Metacritic is a nice starting point to get informed and read a few reviews when deciding if investing your brows' sweat into a game is worth it :) Too bad the state of gaming journalism is still so pitiful.

To me,reviews don't mean much at all.

If I see a game i'm interested in,I don't think some random person's review or opinion of game should have any affect on whether or not I'm going to play it.I like to decide if the game I played was worth it or not.

However,I could understand people using it as a guide to decide whether or not to invest their time into a game.Still,this should'nt be brought up in an argument over a game's quality.

 I dont see any 60-65 scores there, but I do see a lot of 80+ scores from non-Xbox sites.

   Am I blind or is it just Tremble purposedly lying and trying to bash SO4 because it pisses him off how it gets so many good scores? Hmm...

@snyperdud

^agree

That also shows how juvenile and immature the gamers' community still is.

Movie buffs can appreciate reviews as literary pieces and analysis, then they actually go to _watch_ the damn movie, form their opinion and discuss or even debate with friends and other movie buffs, but I never saw one of them yelling "Your movie sucks because mine got 5 stars from Ebert and your only 3 from the Cahiers! Paramount sucks, Columbia rules!"

I decided that my last response was sort of a butthead post to make, so I'll go ahead and explain my reasoning for why Metacritic is worthless. There are two reasons for this: the first one is that there is no higher authority for the quality of an art form, and the second is that even if we wanted to pretend that critics are more qualified to say what is good (they aren't, just what is meaningful) then the particular critics of the video game media are compromised - chiefly by the community for which they write.

Claiming metacritic as a source of quality in an argument tends to be an appeal to a higher authority, which implies that there is an objective standard of quality to which a higher authority will be closer. This is a flawed assumption, because there is no such thing as an objective measure of quality in art.

The problem with the critics of video games in particular is that not only are they typically not educated in artistic analysis, they're pretty much nothing but fanboys who have been put in the high sat for no particular reason. The video game review is perverted twice by this: firstly in that they speak from a limited, skewed perspective that defines quality according to a very narrow band, and secondly in that they do not want to piss off their userbase. Why do more video game critics agree than critics in any other field? Because they odn't have their own voices. They play according to the expectations of the majority, and stay as harmonious as possible so as not to be decried by gamers who believe in absolute quality.

That post would have been a lot longer but I tried to express my thoughts in as few words as possible.

The "proper" way to do an average would be to throw out the top and bottom 10% of the scores and just average the middle 80%

Yeah man, I'm pretty sure he's purposedly lying and trying to bash SO4 because it pisses him off how it gets so many good scores.

Yeah right, I'm trying to bash SO4... this thread is not about SO4, it's just that someone asked for a link ...

So no more SO4 talk here!

LOL.  Awesome post dude.