I do view review scores as a snapshot of a personal opinion as well, because that’s exactly what they are, and that’s exactly what’s wrong with them. Why do I need a dumbed down snapshot of an opinion when the author went through the effort of writing out his complete opinion which he placed on the same page? Oh that’s right, because I’m in a hurry. No wait, it’s because I can’t be bothered to read the wall-of-text. Ehh, either way I’m just to lazy and stupid to give a s***, just advertise to me so I can bark about it in a forum.

Advertisements, that’s all those snapshots are, man. Publications and publishers created them with the explicit intent to use them to influence the market and plaster them all over magazine ads and game boxes.

Speaking of humanity, think of it like this: if someone was running for president and they were pandering for your vote, and you didn’t know anything about them, but The New York Times gave them short written review and a score of “9″ would you vote for them? I know that question is kind of rhetorical because indeed, most people would vote for a president based on that kind of information but hopefully intelligent people wouldn’t. Hopefully they also wouldn’t use that kind of information to make their videogame purchasing decisions.

You just have to view review scores for what they are: a snapshot of personal opinion.

Many games are expensive - many RRP at $120 here - when the dollar is nearly on par with the us one. Network games are cheaper - but are they really passing on all of the savings that result from not needing any box/printing/distribution/shelf space? And you can’t lend them to a mate or sell them second hand either.

Innovation is alive as it ever has been. Not everything has to be ground breaking. People like successful games to fill out the world or continue a story. There has always been a mix of a few great games (with incremental innovation), a few decent repeats, a bunch of competent but safe stuff, all the way down to a ton of shit-ware. Just be judicious on what you spend your money on I suppose.

Which comes down to being able to trust reviews I suppose. Game ‘journalism’ is pretty bad. Even when advertising dollars or swag isn’t involved (and it usually is), you can’t tell whether the reviewers are colouring their reviews for personal reasons or just to get page hits by creating controversy. You don’t get someone who loves boring pc rpg’s to review a wii game for example, but that seems to happen all the time.

Yes. For example there is a whole lot more chaff than wheat on the main Sony forums.

One reason why I like this blog is that, while the post count is lower, the quality is higher.

The most glaringly obvious scarlet letter that gaming journalism bears is the review score scene. You can’t sit there and tell me that summing up a complex personal opinion into a number isn’t specifically designed as a tool of marketing, or that it doesn’t cheapen the written review. If you did sit there and tell me that you’d know you were wrong and were just arguing for arguing’s sake.

The sad thing is when you read blogs and forum posts where people use accumulated game ranking stats to attempt to prove a point:

Kid A: Halo is the best game because it got a 10!

Kid B: Oh yeah? That’s nice, but uh… what’s a “10″?

A: It’s the best score a game can get.

B: I see, so does that mean that Halo is better than most games?

A: Well, it’s 1 better isn’t it? Most games go to 9 and there is nowhere to go from there.

B: Right, so why don’t you just make 9 the best and give Halo a 9?

A: *long pause* … Halo goes to 10.

The whole review score scene is so obscenely corporate that it ought to be abolished by intelligent game journalists who wish to keep their good name. However, it hasn’t been abolished so I figure they don’t mind whoring themselves out for whatever advantage it provides. For that reason I see whining as an applicable form of protest against the apparent retardation in gaming journalism.

Quality: Segitz, it’s easy to pick out individual titles that aren’t feature rich or are terrible. I don’t like most games on the shelves. But as an overall trend, games have far more content and features than ever before. This is fairly hard to disagree with. Mike, I’ll agree that we haven’t had any completely breakthrough genre-defining title like GTA3 recently, but game quality is inproving at a rapid yet incremental pace. Game mechanics and genres are shifting and evolving but not being shattered and remade.

Journalism: Sure, the mere existence of expensive red carpet media events is hard evidence that game journalists are easily influenced, but I suspect that publisher influence is much less of a problem than the cynics claim. I suspect that the number of blatantly dishonest reviews is fairly low. Most of the big game reviewers are passionate about what they do and are too internally driven to be blatantly bought. They are influenced by publishers, and that is a real issue, but it’s far more subtle and a smaller issue than simple bribes.

Also, if you make blanket statements like “videogame journalism is just retarded”, your expectations are probably unrealistic. In many ways, they are very easy targets, and it wouldn’t be hard to list out dozens of valid grievances, but bottom line: the purpose of gaming journalism is to spread information about game titles and hardware, to help gamers find out about which products they would enjoy, to provide a space for reflection and discussion of the medium, and to entertain. And journalism does that well. And journalism includes not only salaried journalists, but also sites like YouTube and gametrailers and amateur blogs and podcasts and discussion boards like NeoGAF.

Darrin, you are talking about inflation adjusted prices… Well yes, in the US they got cheaper, in the Eurozone they didn’t. And “free” games and whatnot… Are you kidding me? There were free games everywhere, even when the PS1 was still king. More feature rich? Come on… Did you ever play Heavenly Sword? Games are as “bad” (or good) as before, albeit sometimes bigger.