Quote:
Originally Posted by Professor S
Broken? Not any more broken than anyone's opinion can be.
All reviews can be reduced to the opinion of one person, regardless than what "scientific" method is used. It's always best to read the article and evaluate the reviewers taste in games and then judge whether or not you felt the praise or criticism to be based on fair comparisons/judgements.
If I need a quick and dirty review, I use metacritic. If I want to see a number I want to know how the majority of reviewers rated it, not just one.
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Here's the thing: it would seem that one person's opinion is swayed by perception. It sounds like from the article that BaB linked to that there is a lot of hazing within the network of early adopters from other reviewers, and more disturbingly, from developers themselves.
It seems like developers have created a privilege system where they give reviewers games in advance, with one small caveat: the review needs to be positive.
It's gray area when reviewers write a review out of fear, or when the looming shadow of the developer is standing over them. The solution would be simple: IGN could simply turn down the early review copies of the game. But IGN doesn't need to do that. All they need to do is create a review scale where they don't get penalized for rating a game accordingly.
The point of finding a scientific or streamlined review system isn't to challenge the fact that a game review comes down to the opinion of one person. We all know reviews are 100% subjective, I think Typhoid hit that point well enough. The point of revamping the way games are scored might help reduce confusion and simplify things. And it would remain ambiguous too.
I dunno, that's just my feeling on the issue.
I enjoy meta-websites. Rottentomates is awesome, but you need to know how to use it. If a movie gets a 75%, it simply means that a majority of the critics liked the movie. From there you need to go and read individual critic reviews, and see how they scored the movie. I have a handful of movie critics who I fall back on, so I get a feel for how the general population feels about the movie, and then I read specific reviews.