Played Arkham City and finished main story line so far... an excellent title, 8/10 on my scale (and the scale IS from 1 to 10) and I am known among my friends as the one who rates low... (sure I could mark it a less because I never had much interest in the super hero genre but that would be rating the setting and not the game).

What I think it is... is so called balance voting. Where there are so many 10 out of 10 votes in order to alter/have any effect on the scale and be heard people counter vote very low. So while in reality the fair (universally fair) rating for a good game might be 7 out of 10 (a non game specific example) people will vote much lower to counter the mass of fanboyism 10 out of 10 votes.

In the end essentially it becomes a positive (10 out of 10) versus negative (0 out of 10) style system with nothing in between (essentially a binary voting system)... which is why I referenced G.W. Bush of if you are not with us then you are against us mentality...

well it's not like you'd be missing much sice SC2 is basically the same thing :D
I actually think that like and dislike voting is ultimately the most fair solution

User votes are pretty useless because of the positive versus negative voting. The only way a game can get a 10/10 from me is if it's perfect. That's something I know after only a few years (Baldur's Gate Trilogy comes close, still play that after 10 years).
Anyway, it means that reading reviews is the best way to beforehand get an idea of the quality of the game.

But for two of the most overrated games:
- Final Fantasy VII: boring, lame random encounters, angsty teenagers..bah.
- Halo: generic all around. No replay value, most boring backtracking ever.

What about:
Three Dog: I fight the good fight with my voice!
You: [Intelligence] Oh, so you fight the good fight with your voice.
Three Dog: I can see you're very smart.

I agree, as someone who's played since 1998, I really never thought the story was anything groundbreaking, just seemed like a good place to learn how to use units. Have to give them credit though, they really can do cut-scenes!

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

That same example again (and to be honest, it seems the worst).

To be honest. the writing in Fallout 3 is decent (they do manage to come up with great stuff once in a while) at best and awkward at worst (Those example are bad, but I've definitely seen worst).

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3.

That's probably a large part of why I didn't like it. I own SC and somewhere around here I have a key for the disc. I expected after so many years there would be something substantially improved or changed or added about it, and the only substantial changes were definitely not for the better. They focused on esports, removed the other races and removed both cloning and LAN only play.

I tend to hope that there's some redeeming quality to the game, but I don't think there is.

No such thing as an overrated game. The fact that you don't like it or don't get it doesn't mean the game with millions fans is overrated. You are not a target of that game, simple as that.

I disagree. If game receives significantly more praise compared to an equally designed game it is overrated. Some games receive better reviews or critical acclaim mainly due to marketing and hype, hence, they are overrated. My best example, again, is Halo. Without the marketing around its XBox release, it would have been a mere medicore shooter.

It has nothing to do with personal opinion. For the most part I liked Halo and played through it, but it was not as good as a lot of people made you believe.

Or my example, Civ 5. On its own, without the Civ licence, it would have been medicore at best, imo. Nobody would have looked at it twice. But slap "Civilization" on it and *bang* reviews in the 90s ...

And guess what: This a discussion forum, thus it's very nature is to give people place to express their personal opinion. If everyone went here with this point of view, they would just discredit whatever they wanted to say because it's their opinion and is not relevant to the subject at hand, and the discussion forum would boil down into tech support, basically.

A redeeming quality I can find is more mission variety. Most mission in SC1 were "Destroy enemy base" and I could become quickly repetitive. In SC2 there are more types of missions.

It's overrated, their target audience was the professional esport market, anybody else is just icing on the cake. I could be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure that Blizzard made a really big deal out of balancing the game specifically for esports.

Halo definately

Gears of War is really really overrated in my opinion..

basically all Zelda games as well

and any 3D super mario