I didn’t say anything like this. More like, sources that give every game not aimed at 18-24 year old males 50-75% scores do not provide a useful metric for judging the quality of those games.

As dumb an idea as it is, dumb people who can’t think for themselves are using it. These are the people who tend to have more power than they should, so it’s not just a matter of the consumer making an informed choice

Football Manager 2009 PC (GR) 78.1 – 10 reviews
Football Manager 2009 PSP (GR) 83.3 – 3 reviews

Football Manager 2009 PC (MC) 83 – 17 reviews
Football Manager 2009 PSP (MC) 83 – 4 reviews

So in reality the PC version on Metacritic is not only sitting at a higher score, it has more reviews!

Like I stated, using an average score to determine weather or not to buy a game is just a dumb idea. Rent the game and try it out. There has been one game this generation that I have sold because I didn’t like it. All the others have been keepers because I know what I’m getting into before buying it.

You also have to take into consideration that Metacritic is an average of all reviews given. Obviously, the best recommendation someone can give is to rent the game and see for yourself how you feel about it. For someone that is serious about gaming and has been doing it for quite some time, you start to get a feel for which review site is most in line with your views. For example, IGN’s scores are usually pretty in line with how I feel about the game. Example:

Raving Rabbids 1 got an 82 from IGN. I liked the game, but it was shallow, short, and repetitive. I would give it somewhere around an 85

Animal Crossing City Folk got a 75 from IGN. I LOVED the first animal crossing for Gamecube. I was addicted to it. City Folk could be considered a port to the Wii with a “City” to visit and some more intuitive controls. Nothing new in gameplay ideas. I would agree with the 75.

It is really hard for reviewers to not take into consideration that graphics basically suck. When you have Call of Duty World at War coming to 360 PS3 and Wii, is it fair to give them the same score for graphics because the Wii is running previous generation hardware? No! If the graphics aren’t up to par, they will say so. People argue over weather or not the Wii is competing the 360 and PS3 stating that its in a league of its own. Well you can’t have it both ways. If it is competing, reviews need to be harsh and critical of every aspect.

I see the Raving Rabbids games, Animal Crossing, the LEGO games, Ghost Squad, Tomb Raider and much else that is perfectly good in quality terms fall into the 50-75% bracket. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend any of these games to the average Wii user, who doesn’t care about online deathmatch, HD graphics or other things that reviewers obsess over.

Not really.

I don’t like metacritic. Mostly because people can just sprout off numbers and pretend that they mean something. People take it too seriously and it has started to get involved in the way developers get paid.

It attempts but fails to take into account different scoring systems and differing “trust” in different review sources. Already with messing around does the final score become useless because it can be weighted unfairly on these factors.

Different consoles have different sources because they have console only magazines and websites to draw from. Even if they are multi-platform, they may favour certain aspects of the game to be more important than others. Gameplay vs. graphics can become an issue for example.

Metacritic only take into account the reviews of a handful of sources rather than all of them. This is for quality, but even some of the sources they use aren’t very good. It ends up being the luck of the draw. If one crap website gives you 60% and another crap website gives 90%, then it could go either way on metacritic.

The IGN US review of Football Manager 2009 was big news yesterday. They were dumb enough to let someone review it that didn’t know anything about the game, the history, the sport, or about the genre and he gave it 2.0. The metacritic shot down from 90-odd to 70. IGN are a very trusted source on metacritic.

These days, reviewers aren’t the target market for many games. The market has expanded and the reviews only speak for a small fraction (the snobbish hardcore) of gaming community now. How many good kids games get marked down because the review found it too easy and childish? How many good lifestyle games get marked down because they aren’t really games?

Gamerankings uses as many sources as it can find, and I prefer that method of averaging out the good and bad reviews, rather than pretending that quality control is possible on a fundamentally flawed system.