He merely switched to the Dark Side.
What's wrong with that? ;)

I made it more scary! You know, to go with the scythe :)

And yeah, I was watching at least some reviews. Though I started ignoring IGN for example a looooong time ago.

For me if I am undecided on a game I take a look at the overall cumulative picture of user reviews after a game has been out for a little while. Metacritic or even large retail sites with reviews like Amazon are good for this. If I look at real people's reviews and base it on the big picture of many reviews of people who bought the game, not just one person's, then I think I get a better picture.

To me professional gaming site reviews are completely irrelevant other than maybe to consider as previews to look at pictures and such.

Metacritic in particular I think exposes the wide gap gaming site reviews and user reviews. Many times they aren't even close to being on the same page.

If you look at Dragon Age 2 you get this:

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/dragon-age-ii

Critic Reviews
Positive: 38 out of 45
Mixed: 7 out of 45
Negative: 0 out of 45

User Reviews
Positive: 356 out of 1252
Mixed: 134 out of 1252
Negative: 762 out of 1252

It's not even close! How can the reviews be worth anything to prospective customers if the reviewers are so far out of touch with them?

The problem with reviewers is they don't pay for games. Whether a game is $5 or $60 it makes no difference to a reviewer so indies get slated and big budget productions get high scores. This is before you factor in publisher bribes. The only review you can trust is one from someone who has actually paid money for the game.

What those numbers isn't telling you is that there was this gigantic hate campaign against BioWare for something or other that probably wasn't all that important to begin with (at least I've forgotten it), which resulted in tons of users voting 0 or 1 for DA2, thus screwing up the user score completely.

So in this case it's really the reviewers (in general) who are right and the users who are wrong. Dragon Age 2 may be a flawed game, but the user scores on Metacritic are so far off the mark it's ridiculous.

The numbers were balanced by the reviews which were paid for. There is no point asking us to not mention publisher bribes when it goes on all the time. BioWare's own staff even went on Metacritic and uploaded 10/10 scores. EA even tried to get all reviews under 60% removed from Metacritic. Yes there was a lot of hate about Dragon Age 2 and no it didn't deserve the massive amounts of 1/10's but it only countered EA's own PR machine that tried to sell it as GOTY when it was nothing more but a cut down, poorly funded and under-developed game that anyone in their right mind would give a 6/10 or possibly 7/10.

Well, what you say is true, but what kept you thinking there was any integrity up until this point in time? Because whatever it is, it's clearly working for the big publishers and we need to "fix" it if possible.

Reviews are not necessarily untrustworthy; however scores are bad ... bad ... bad If you read a review you can often tell if the game might be something you would want to play. or might want to avoid. This is especially true if you learn the tastes of a particular reviewer.

Scores are too easy for big sites to manipulate; if a score is too low there are too many reprecushions for the larger sites to be cut off from info. If you notice what happened to Ziff-Davis after the Kane & Lynch for example.

I really should read ars technica more.

I stopped trusting them ever since they acted like Halo 2 was the greatest thing to ever be produced since sliced bread and anyone who didn't show up at the midnight release was an asshole, back in the day.

Then again, I never understood how a generic sci-fi shooter like Halo could become so popular.

I think most video game review sites are bribed either directly or indirectly (i.e. Publisher 'rents space' of X review site to fill the place with Y game's ads just days, or even hours before its review on such site). And the lack of professionalism and massive ignorance -*cough* GameTrailers *cough*- is disgusting sometimes... [url=]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9a24SvrIXs[/url]

As tacitus59 says, scores are bad when reviewing something so open to one's own interpretations and opinions. I mean, one can point out technical flaws of a game, but coming up with exact numbers (with decimals and all, heh) for its story or music?

I just kind of figure if Yahtzee can't say anything to totally ruin it for me then it's probably worth a shot:)

Yahtzee (and any professional reviewer for that matter) are not so much educators as entertainers. It's best to bear that in mind when reading/listening to their reviews.

Giant Bomb held off on reviewing until the patch went live. After playing on launch with the patch, they reviewed it. That's an excellent way to do it.

Rule: If a game is from a big publisher the lowest it will get it will be a 7/10. 7 is the new 4.

Rules are meant to be broken: Gamespot gave Brink a 6/10. Kudos.