I use the site Metacritic quite often so I don't have to 50 bajillion game sites just to see the latest reviews of No More Heroes 2. Metacritic is just convenient. Many users on this site use it to gauge whether a game is good or not, which is another appropriate use for Metacritic.

Anyways, I was skimming through older game reviews for games such as Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron for N64, and Shenmue on Dreamcast. I noticed that quite a few of the review links are nowhere to be found. Clicking review links tends to lead to broken links or the site just doesn't exist anymore. Why would Metacritic keep those reviews if the websites don't even exist anymore?

EDIT: This is a serious thread because I couldn't figure out a good (horrible) way to ripoff one of Rol's threads.

Good question. They're probably just not up to cleaning up they're site.

You may only be able to read the summary's of the broken reviews, but the Meta scores they help create are interesting enough to keep them around in my opinion.

I hope they don't start removing old reviews at random. Last I checked, the Ocarina of Time is on the verge of not being listed on the list of highest rated games simply because it's near the minimum number of reviews required to be listed.

Yeah, that's it. I mean, they'd have to sift through thousands of reviews and remove broken links and re-adjust all those scores.

Yeah, and then the Metascores would change and wouldn't represent what the games actually received in the first place. 

Their choices really are leave the reviews alone, or get rid of them all. I prefer the former.

What's the minimum?

Ditto.

Four.

Is it really that low?

They need to keep the reviews from now defunct sites to maintain consistency to the displayed score. If they removed them then if you actually looked at the shown reviews and compared them to the MC average it might look wildly off.

What they should do though is clean up the site to clearly indicate non-active reviews and remove the links that lead to no longer reviewing sites. I see no reason why you couldn't have a list of reviews that are 'active' and a list that are 'historic' or something like that - i.e. you can't open them and get to the original link.