Games

I've actually been surprised but how many gems I've found in games with a 70% rating or a 82% rating. Sometimes ratings can be impacted by feelings about a company or a media incident when the actual game is rock solid.

My favourite is when you have a friend, or known reviewer, going on about how something sucks, and you realise that it sounds right up your alley.

I specifically rented The One, because of Roger Ebert's 1 and 1/2 star review in the newspaper, trashing Jet Li's The One (just to totally date myself).

Yeah there are some absolute gems like Astral Chain which got positive reviews like 8/10 but in reality are close to 10/10 for me personally. One of the best games on the system.

Then there are a few infamous examples like Godhand and Deadly Premonition which were completely slated by many reviewers but I found to be very strong titles. 8/10 personally.

They're well informed lemmings who read the title only.

But for the topic at hand, it seems that it's similar to how the movie industry operates. When hundreds of millions can be on the line, a sure bet is better than a risky bet.

Although from a consumer standpoint it's true a well. Official reviewers are often bought (directly or not), pressured in other ways, operate on nonsense scales, and are infamously not actually that good at video games. Player reviews are a Little better, but you have to be adept at weeding out whinging from people who suck at games or just suck broadly.

Streamers/YouTubers are the only real option, imo, as they actually show what they're doing (no lying!) and have to build up an actual reputation of some kind to be noticed.

The point (well, not his, which is about the absurdity of publishers using it as an actual official measuring stick) is that different people like different things. For some people a visual novel or walking simulator can be a 10/10 "game" for the story. For me, it will never be better than a 0, because I cannot enjoy a game without compelling gameplay mechanics. That's an extreme example, but the point that different people put massively different value on different elements, many of which many players literally don't care even a little bit about.

An 8/10 isn't objectively a worse game than a 9.5/10. It's the average of a small handful of opinions, mostly from people who played the game at surface level and not like an actual player would, that's heavily and inconsistently influenced by a variety of practices by publishers trying to get their grades pumped up. Game reviewers are almost never actual journalists with journalistic ethical standards. They're not being "less than honest", but they're inherently influenced in ways outside their awareness that break the core premise of a score.

Most reviews (including games) shouldn't include scores at all. They should break down the different elements of a product, the strengths and weaknesses of each part, and let people draw their own conclusions.

The correlation that failed you is the one between your anecdote and the topic of the article 🤣