...All you need is Meta critic (for the raw stats) and Zero Puntuaction (for the smart comments).
Kevin Gifford wrote an outstanding piece on GameSetWatch on this topic. The gist: game publishers only care for scores. Most gamers only care for scores. My question is: would we/they care more for reviews if their content were even remotely interesting? The truth is: most game reviews are just painful to read (nothing new here - I bet there are at least 30 posts on this blog relating to game criticism - or lack of thereof). Also, the numerical obsession - the urge to quantify the ephemeral quality of the game - was institutionalized by game journalists back in the '80s so if there is one to blame for this poor state of affair is the journalists themselves, not Metacritic which did not invent anything new: like most interactive databases, it simply provides an easy, crystal-clear access to information.
random incoherent thought: I am currently playing F.E.A.R. Files for the Xbox 360 - I did not bother to read any reviews, because a) really, who cares? b) being a fan of the series, I would play the game even if the scores were relatively low (as in the case), c) I agree with every single comment made by Zero Puntuaction - still, I am enjoying the game (it's not great, but it does not matter to me - I would play endless variations for the same reasons why I would watch yet another season of "24" or another zombie movie - it's the mix of familiarity-cum-innovation that keeps me going back to the same things over and over again). I don't use reviews for making purchasing decisions: I know how the business works from personal experience. Sometimes I read reviews after the fact, i.e. after buying and eventually finishing the game. Ditto for movies. The big problem is: excellent film criticism is abundant, e.g. Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Filmmaker et al. But when it comes to "good" game criticism, aside from EDGE magazine there is a depressing, empty wasteland. Nothing much has changed in the last 10 years in terms of writing about games. Meanwhile, this thing called the internet ("the one with email") has dramatically changed the rules of the game - in fact, the most interesting criticism about games comes from game developers themselves, fans, academics and game journalists who write on their blogs.
Other recent games that I bought and played just because/even though they look flawed-but-interesting: Kane & Lynch, Blacksite: Area 51, Timeshift. They are all indeed flawed, but at the same time they are also very interesting for reasons that most reviewers failed to notice - especially in the case of Blacksite: Area 51 (BTW, Harvey Smith has all of my support).
Anyway, "gamers [that] endlessly argue about scores, about Jeff's 8.8 for Zelda and about Fran from IGN's 7.9 for Mario Kart: Double Dash" are not very smart, but at the same time, they are the inevitable outcome of an idiotic system for rating games (again, established by the game journalists).
"Game publishers [that] care about the score, the Metacritic average" are not too smart either, but hey, they have to deal with the above mentioned idiotic system for rating games and with scores of gamers that would not buy the game because of that - a vicious circle. And I am sorry, but there is no way out. The few magazines that dared to get rid of the score system were lambasted from the gamers - and, I bet, by the game industry as well - and they quickly re-established it (one recent example is Computer Gaming World/Gaming for Windows). Onc e you pop, you can't stop.
Here's an excerpt from Kevin's piece:
"Game publishers, nearly all of whom these days are multi-million-dollar corporations with shareholders and Wall Street analysts breathing down their necks harder than their gamer audience, don't care what Jeff Gerstmann or any reviewer has to say about their games. They care about the score, the Meta critic average, and it's been that way ever since the Internet became the primary vehicle for game media. [...] And now that the Internet's largely shattered the notion that a professional game-media writer is somehow more qualified to bring judgment upon a new release than V3GETA80051 down at GameFAQs, the obsession with scores has become game media's undoing. Text, videos, podcasts, whatever -- nobody cares about any of it except that decimal number at the end of the review. And game writers' realization of this has made them lazy." (Kevin Gifford, GameSetWatch)
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