I saw mentions of Metacritic and such earlier in the thread.
One very important thing to note is that word-of-mouth is still the best review format for any given video game. Attempts to quantify quality are always prone to error, given how enterprising hatred can result in folks bombing Metacritic's User Scores (4chan's /v/ used to do this quite often back before that board went downhill) and so on. There's also the inherent bias in a 10-point scale: rarely does anyone give an honest score of anything between a 2 and a 6. 7s, 8s, 9s, and 10s are common scores, as are 0s and 1s. This naturally skews matters, especially when many user reviews are coming from young adolescents.
Don't get me started on aggregate reviews, either: video game reviewers, as extensions of video game journalism which was more or less morally bankrupt and lacking integrity from the word "go", are prone to the usual politicking from marketing and Big Business, and those practices are allowed to continue due to ignorance on the part of a large portion of the consumer base (video gaming as a hobby blew up in the mid 00's, population wise, and many casual "gamers" as we now refer to them are still playing catch-up; just ask around and find out how many of them still think IGN is a good video games news site).
Nothing will ever be as useful as turning to a friend and asking, "hey, did you play Game X? Did you like it? Why or why not? What sort of games do you usually like that your tastes and preferences might have affected your opinion on Game X?"
tl;dr: quit being sheeple, video games have yet to mature enough as an industry for reliable ratings systems to have emerged.
One very important thing to note is that word-of-mouth is still the best review format for any given video game. Attempts to quantify quality are always prone to error, given how enterprising hatred can result in folks bombing Metacritic's User Scores (4chan's /v/ used to do this quite often back before that board went downhill) and so on. There's also the inherent bias in a 10-point scale: rarely does anyone give an honest score of anything between a 2 and a 6. 7s, 8s, 9s, and 10s are common scores, as are 0s and 1s. This naturally skews matters, especially when many user reviews are coming from young adolescents.
Don't get me started on aggregate reviews, either: video game reviewers, as extensions of video game journalism which was more or less morally bankrupt and lacking integrity from the word "go", are prone to the usual politicking from marketing and Big Business, and those practices are allowed to continue due to ignorance on the part of a large portion of the consumer base (video gaming as a hobby blew up in the mid 00's, population wise, and many casual "gamers" as we now refer to them are still playing catch-up; just ask around and find out how many of them still think IGN is a good video games news site).
Nothing will ever be as useful as turning to a friend and asking, "hey, did you play Game X? Did you like it? Why or why not? What sort of games do you usually like that your tastes and preferences might have affected your opinion on Game X?"
tl;dr: quit being sheeple, video games have yet to mature enough as an industry for reliable ratings systems to have emerged.
![[Image: 1qVSsTp.png]](http://i.imgur.com/1qVSsTp.png)
