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Just what is a good game, anyway?

Published: Thu 10 Jul, 2008 | 9 Comments
Tags: reviews, opinion, zero punctuation, metacritic

We've all heard it - that classic catchall phrase, "one man's junk is another man's treasure". We all know, too, that it means that everyone has different tastes - what suits one person might be completely inappropriate for some other person.

 

Why, then, do we pay so much attention to reviews? Why does someone else's opinion, someone we don't even know (typically), suddenly matter?

 

Maybe it's got something to do with the fact that we don't have any access directly to the material itself. Maybe that's why sites like metacritic (which aggregates many reviews or opinions into a single, "meta" score) are as popular as they are.

 

Metacritic is a great place to prove my point - the massive disparity in many reviews (movies and music both conform to this as well) suggests to me that reviewers can (and often do) have markedly different opinions about exactly the same content.

 

Take the recently released Alone In The Dark, for example. Reviews for that title alone range from a rather impressive 81% all the way down to a rather unimpressive 33%. These are single, freak scores either - the 38 reviews (at time of writing) are spread very evenly between the three extremes.

 

Some of those people proclaim it as a great game and well worth your time, whilst others curse the day it was released and wish harm upon the developers - who's right? What is right, anyway?

 

Do you have a strategy as to how you approach reviews? Is there a particular site that you like, a magazine you trust or even a reviewer who's opionion you seek? I can't go past Yahtzee myself >_>)

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