A healthy junk of reading.

Jeff Gerstmann wrote a fantastic article on game reviews that I think you should read. And he thinks you should also read the article he mentions, and so do I.

My two cents:I'm not a fan of things like metacritic and gamerankings. Reviews are, in essence, opinions, and like all things there are opinions that matter more to you than others. If you've read several reviews by the same person and relate to their tastes, then you're more likely to value that person's opinion. You shouldn't look at all the reviews to gauge the quality of the game, simply the opinons of the people behind them. sure, we're more lucky in the video game industry to have mroe glaring flaws to find (i.e. graphical tears, bad animations and the like), and more often than in other mediums there is a consenus, but when you get into games that don't have such easily identifiable flaws, opinions start to change from person to person. The bottom line is you can't just take the sum of all the reviews and say "this is how good this game is", but instead take in the opinions of people you value. I value GB's opinions on games because I've read stuff by them for a long time now and I relate to their tastes. When they give a review, I take their review into consideration when I'm thinking about buying a game, but I also value opinions from other websites as well. Take into consideration reviews of the people whose opinion you value, because reviews are two things and two things only: an opinion and buyer's guide, although at times people take them as much more than that.

You'll notice this a comment on the article. Guess who I am?

Edit: I just noticed that typo near 'glaring flaw'. I'm going to leave that there for irony.