Red_Avatar: This is going to be a fairly sensitive issue but it is such a good example, I thought I should bring it up anyway:

Dragon's Crown has been getting almost exclusively positive reviews across the board. Check Metacritic and you'll see a wall of green scores ... and then two yellow ones dangling at the bottom - both written by female reviewers, both focusing mostly on the scantily clad female characters, both down-rating the games for it. Also, both comments sections are a battlefield of people disagreeing and this brings me back to a favorite topic of mine: what's the point of having someone review a game if their own views lay so wide apart from that of the majority?

Especially considering that, if the art style puts you off, you won't be needing a review to tell you - there's been plenty of trailers and teasers. Gameplay is far more crucial than big boobs jiggling. Clearly, from reading all the comments (and talking to a female friend who got me interested in the game), most people don't give a darn about it and that includes most female gamers. So why let it affect the score (besides being a crappy reviewer)?

Link : http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-3/dragons-crown/critic-reviews

HGiles: How about not disgusting the gamers who don't want cheese in their games? If a book, movie or other entertainment option includes lots and lots of cheese, it's treated and sold differently than books/movies/whatever that don't. Games still seem stuck in the young-male mindset of 'More boobies!'. If you want games to be taken more seriously, start promoting more serious and less salacious games.

Game developers need to gain professionalism and respect for gamers just as much or more than game journalists. I don't like it when a journalist sinks to the developer's level, but I don't blame them specifically for it. It's an industry-wide problem, and until there's industry-wide buy-in on making games a professional industry the problem will stay.

PoSSeSSeDCoW: You're right, people with dissenting opinions to you or even just different priorities shouldn't be allowed to write reviews.

Aver: Funny, I have seen comments like "Girls in this game have huge breasts and huge, deformed hips! It's objectification of women!", but somehow I didn't see comments like "Guys in this game are huge mountains of muscles. They have muscles so big that guys have shape of carrot! It's objectification of men!"

roninnogitsune: and in turn, critics are not above being criticized themselves.

Tallima: I love metacritic because a score goes into an aggregate of other scores with text attached.

Red_Avatar: it has no place in a review to slam a game so hard when it's down to taste.

Crosmando: The Elf chick is my favorite, boobs are disgusting

Darvin: Absolutely; it's totally fair game to criticize a critism. However, that's not what the original poster was talking about. He was talking about squelching or otherwise removing these opinions in their entirety. That's a completely different than counter-criticism.

Darvin: Using metacritic as a launching pad to read different reviews is a good approach. It only becomes a problem when people take the average out of context and portray it as something meaningful in and of itself. Sadly, that happens very frequently and without context it's not particularly useful information.

Darvin: A review is entirely about taste. It's a subjective exercise in rating the various aspects of a game and formulating an opinion about it. It's fine to disagree with that opinion, or to disagree about the relative importance of different aspects (art style, gameplay, story, etc) but so long as this person has played the game and is sharing an opinion about it then that is a review by definition.

Aver: Hold on Crosmando! It's console game! You shouldn't say a single good thing about this! :D

langurmonkey: A review shouldn't include someone's taste. A person's taste doesn't give you the information you need to determine if a game is good or not. That is the problem. That is why people nowadays have so little faith in reviews.

langurmonkey: There is a difference between a review and sharing your beliefs. People don't read reviews to see what other people believe in like "jiggly boobs are evil and if we don't stop this jiggly boob threat, it will take over the world and destroy women's freedom". People read reviews to find out if the game play and graphics are good. When someone asks you for a light, for example, that someone wants a light, not your life's story.