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games

Game Reviews as a Sport

April 21, 2011 9:24:05.869

This looks like the future of game reviews to me:

From hate to love back to unmitigated odium, it looks like Portal 2 customers are gaming review aggregator Metacritic in an attempt to both sabotage and rehabilitate the average user score by playing “score tennis,” tagging the physics puzzler with extreme scores and pithy appeals.

That happens to be about Portal 2, but you can see the same dynamic at work with Dragon Age 2. Probably with other games I haven't looked into as well. To see this for yourself, just google "XX Review", where XX is the name of the game you want to know about. Other than universally loved or hated games, picking through the plethora of results isn't easy.

Relying on the "major" sites isn't necessarily an answer either; I was listening to the Joystiq podcast on Dragon Age 2 yesterday, and it was clear that their knowledge of the game was superficial - at best. The best you can do is read widely, then make up your own mind as to whether it's worth taking the plunge.

posted by James Robertson

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