Is game reviewing 'broken' as a system?

[jonyboy13]

The system isn't defined as it should. 7\10 could mean that the graphics are shit but the gameplay and story are amazing. It could also mean that the gameplay is annoying, repetitive and lots of QTE.
The true problem though, is the reviewers themselves. Some don't know the difference between a fact and opinion and others just get paid to stfu about the bad stuff in a certain game. It's easily done since if they say something bad they piss off a huge publisher who will just boycott them, losing the site a lot of money.

At this point, I don't bother looking at most reviews. I just watch some gameplay on youtube and judge it by myself. Hopefully, one day reviewers won't be biased idiots and their sites won't be threatened by huge publishers.

 

[Pedro The Hutt]

You know, if you're so upset about the scoring, just read the whole damn review, that should tell you you need to know about what the reviewer thinks of the game. =P

That said, with some games having two groups of raving lunatics, one hating the game and the other loving it even though neither have ever played it (*cough*CoD/BF*cough*), game reviewing can be pretty ungrateful business. If you score it a 7.5/10 no matter what you think of it or what your text says, the fans will send you death threats for denying it its god given right to a 9 or 10/10 score, or accuse you of accepting bribes from the a publisher for skewing the score.
And if you give it a 9/10, even if it's because you genuinely and really enjoy the game, the haters will send you death threats and/or call you a pandering hack, a biased idiot, a mindless fanboy, or you get accused of taking bribes from the game's publisher in exchange for inflating the score.

So really, with some games, you're going to get flak and hate from one of those two parties no matter what you score it.

I'd say that these rabid fans can be just as much at fault for influencing a review's score as a publisher, if not even more so. The publisher won't spam the reviewer's inbox with some of the most hateful bile ever committed to text if the review isn't to their liking. And having worked for a medium sized Belgian review site myself, odds are that even despite less than favourable reviews, if the criticism is well founded, well described and with merit, they'll continue to send you review copies anyway.

 

[Soviet Steve]

The whole concept of reviewing something is flawed because reviews are always going to be subjective - You can argue the rational points and recount what is possible within the game but otherwise everyone takes something different from each title.

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

Games are reviewed with words, not numbers. If people didn't put so much emphasis on the score then there wouldn't be an issue.

As for scoring being broken, it varies from publication to publication.

This. The actual reviews are still there, so it really doesn't matter. As for the number on the end, yes, there has been inflation. AAA titles get special treatment in this regard, as admitted by a reviewer on this site.

 

[xDarc]

I don't agree with metascores on the internet for the same reason ron paul will not be the republican nominee even though he blows all the other candidates out of the water on the web.

The internet is just a bloated, biased ball of shit.

I long for the days when a panel of reviewers from a mag each scored a game, and you knew the reviewers personalities in a sense, identifying with one that best matched your outlook- and then weighted his scored against the rest.

In my mind a game like MW3 is a 6.5 at best because of all the recycled content.

 

[Deathninja19]

No.

I think it's a hijacked system with misconstrued averages, fans who don't have a fucking life and marketing taking quotes and awards out of context.

Internet high five to this guy here.

 

[Plinglebob]

While I agree that most the time the system for games is broken, I disagree with anyone who says that games shouldn't have scores or that no game should get a perfect score. Other mediums have had reviews with scores for decades and very few have an issue with it.

My personal, completely unscientific, view is the biggest problem (and the reason for the high score bias) is that a lot of people who review games are fanboys who have been given a megaphone. While this is true at one end of any group of critics, other mediums have the additional benefit of two important things. The first is an old guard. Gaming desperately needs its Barry Norman's and Roger Ebert's fast. People who have been reviewing games for years and so are able to give an un-biased opinion. The second is no-one can agree what a "Good Game" consists of. In other mediums there is a general concensus in what makes a film/book/painting "Good" ranging from Story to Acting to Cinematography to Brushwork to Story Structure. Games don't have that. Hopefully, both of these will come in time, but until then just pick some outlets who's views you trust and try and read between the lines of what they say.

 

[Baresark]

snip

But isn't the point of Metacritic to smooth out that margin of error?

Like how a junk rifle can be inaccurate, keep firing it at the target and the centre of the cluster of bullet holes will be actually your centre of aim.

You give the perfect example with your paper marking to the inaccuracy between two shots of a rifle, the identical paper marked by different people, to get the true score you have it mark it by many more teachers and the most accurate score is the average of all their scores.

Metascore. THAT is what we are talking about here. Frankly, critics might as well never reveal publicly their score to a game, they should send it straight to metacritic to find the aggregate. As a single score in itself is useless due to the inaccuracies in trying to quantify ones judgement. And it doesn't do any good as then the fanboys and haters say "GRRR, IGN skewed the result, if it wasn't for them this game would have had a different score! GRRR"

The worth of a single critic should be in their prose. What they actually write about a given work, that is the most important guide to the customer.

As to Modern Warfare 3, consider this: it may be hardly an improvement over COD4 but:
-COD4 is still a good game, 4 years later
-No other game has really surpassed it in what it does.

So, standards have NOT gone up significantly, MW3 is a bit better than COD4 in the most valued areas and enough things are changed around for it to get the same score as COD4. They may rate it a bit higher, but another critic will rate it a bit lower. THERE IS NO REASON FOR CONFORMITY! People can have varying opinions and judgements.

I agree that the value of a review is in the actual prose describing what the critic thinks of his/her experience. But, I think doing away with a number system altogether would the favorable thing to do. Let their only be the contents of the review, and not the completely arbitrary number scale that reviewers like to use.

The reason metacritic does things they way they do is because you can't possibly trust the aggregate data without seeing the constituents for yourself. If all people submitted a score to metacritic and the mean was available for people to see, it wouldn't tell the whole story. If you think the accusations of bought reviews are bad now, you wouldn't believe what they would be if you only saw the aggregate number. There would simply be one person to pay off, rather than ten. I have more often than not bought and very much enjoyed a game that has received a 7.0/70 on the numbering system. But, I always read the reviews and see why it got the score it did.

Unfortunately, when you get to the upper tier scores, the number is the most concentrated thing. For instance: a reviewer may think, after the initial play through of a game, that the game deserves a 95/9.5. But, the score shouldn't be based on initial feelings about the game, but readable data. How are the controls? Did the game keep you engaged? Was the UI conducive to what the player would need to enjoy the game? I have heard people like Yahtzee explain it best (there is a scary thought). When you played the game, even if you loved the experience, you need to look at it outside your feelings about the game to the hard facts of the game. Take his Arkham City review. He gave the game a recommend, but he wasn't afraid to say what the game did wrong (in his opinion). For someone, the things it did wrong may detract from the game enough where maybe it wouldn't deserve the praise it got in the first place. Not that I have a problem with Arkham City, I very much look forward to the PC release.

Also, all those things that you said about MW3 versus MW are true. The only problem is that the reviewers (in general) harp on other games and lower the score when it hasn't been enhanced over it's predecessors while using the same game mechanics. That is not an objective view of things at all. I think that the numbered score is the biggest worry for both companies and game reviewers. Most likely because a positive metacritic score looks best for both parties. I'm sure we all remember the Dragon Age 2 debacle. I liked the game, not as much as the first one, and I waited for a good sale on Amazon to get it. But most people think the game did not deserve the high praise it had gotten. And the focus of the praise was it's number score.

Also, the most important way of testing your number metric is to see if it fits into a "bell curve". This is the way that statisticians check the margin of error. Usually though, nothing on metacritic makes a proper bell curve, at least not what I have seen.

Edit: Also, one of the reasons why metacritic fails to perform on the bell curve test is because there simply aren't enough reviews. Another good reason to do away with the number system.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

The system's not broken. It's just shit to begin with.

Personally, I don't think you can measure quality and put a definitive number on it and it also seems to discourage people from actually reading the review to see what is good and bad about a game.

The number rating system is simply accommodating laziness.

This. 100% this. And yet, my engineering friend keeps asking me to grade games I play with a number scheme, and doesn't agree with me that the concept is stupid.

You CAN'T apply an objective number to a subjective opinion. It's a stupid concept, and as the quoted guy said, it simply encourages and accommodates laziness. Oh, and it leads to scores being ratcheted up because of fanboys whining how certain games "only" got a 9.

Personally, I grade games on a scale of: Avoid - Decent - Solid - Fantastic. Simple and effective.

 

[DustyDrB]

1) Perfect score =/= a perfect game.

2) Reviews are opinions.

3) Are reviewers paid off? Maybe. Maybe not. I go with saying they are innocent until proven guilty, and don't throw around that accusation like a jackass.

4) On inflated scores: The games that would be getting a ton of ratings from 1-5 on a scale of 10 are just not being reviewed. How many outlets waste their time reviewing the latest shovelware? How many sites spend that time reviewing a game they know will likely be of the lowest quality, and a game that their viewers really don't care about? And the most broken, unplayable games out there almost always cancelled.

5) Despite me commenting on scoring, I think it is a system we would be better off without. Art (or entertainment) is reviewed with words. It's about describing the experience. Numbers don't do that. The scoring system has deluded many people into thinking there is some absolute and objective measure to judging games when there is no such thing.

 

[Treblaine]

In my mind a game like MW3 is a 6.5 at best because of all the recycled content.

Yes, recycled content, but recycled content from a very very good game. COD4 garnered universal praise and no one had objection to that.

Points deducted for lack of originality, yes, but 30% off for that?

Half Life 2: Episode 2 came out so many years after HL2 with no new weapons nor new enemies, but scored a 90%, should it have scored 65%?!? Sure it was sold at a low price but MW3 adds a lot more to the core experience (the multiplayer).

And really, it's not like a game has come along that does the same thing as COD4 (fusion of RPG mechanics with online FPS competitive gameplay and game-changing killstreaks with focus on tight close quarters combat).

Tomb Raider to Tomb Raider: Last Revelations Over 4 years. It's the same engine, premise, very similar weapons and gameplay. Both got very similarly high scores.

People who didn't like Tomb Raider 1 bashed Tomb Raider mercilessly for how its "just the same game with a few small changes" but fans of Tomb Raider were happy to get a new adventure every year.

I see the same thing here, people who don't like COD (including COD4) begrudgingly accept praise for COD4 yet play the originality card when the series has continued success, as if originality REALLY made up 30% of a review score. To fans of the series - the people who would actually buy the game, the people who would actually read the reviews - then it being a lot like COD4 is a good thing.

 

[Slycne]

So I have a theory that's not often explored whenever this discussion of review score inflation comes up.

I think games are simply better these days or at least what we consider to be an average experience. With budgets in the millions of dollars, it's not often that we see Big Mother Trucker level of terrible being released now.

As with many things, I think the answer probably actually somewhere at the intersection of everything presented thus far.

 

[Treblaine]

snip

But isn't the point of Metacritic to smooth out that margin of error?

Like how a junk rifle can be inaccurate, keep firing it at the target and the centre of the cluster of bullet holes will be actually your centre of aim.

You give the perfect example with your paper marking to the inaccuracy between two shots of a rifle, the identical paper marked by different people, to get the true score you have it mark it by many more teachers and the most accurate score is the average of all their scores.

Metascore. THAT is what we are talking about here. Frankly, critics might as well never reveal publicly their score to a game, they should send it straight to metacritic to find the aggregate. As a single score in itself is useless due to the inaccuracies in trying to quantify ones judgement. And it doesn't do any good as then the fanboys and haters say "GRRR, IGN skewed the result, if it wasn't for them this game would have had a different score! GRRR"

The worth of a single critic should be in their prose. What they actually write about a given work, that is the most important guide to the customer.

As to Modern Warfare 3, consider this: it may be hardly an improvement over COD4 but:
-COD4 is still a good game, 4 years later
-No other game has really surpassed it in what it does.

So, standards have NOT gone up significantly, MW3 is a bit better than COD4 in the most valued areas and enough things are changed around for it to get the same score as COD4. They may rate it a bit higher, but another critic will rate it a bit lower. THERE IS NO REASON FOR CONFORMITY! People can have varying opinions and judgements.

I agree that the value of a review is in the actual prose describing what the critic thinks of his/her experience. But, I think doing away with a number system altogether would the favorable thing to do. Let their only be the contents of the review, and not the completely arbitrary number scale that reviewers like to use.

The reason metacritic does things they way they do is because you can't possibly trust the aggregate data without seeing the constituents for yourself. If all people submitted a score to metacritic and the mean was available for people to see, it wouldn't tell the whole story. If you think the accusations of bought reviews are bad now, you wouldn't believe what they would be if you only saw the aggregate number. There would simply be one person to pay off, rather than ten. I have more often than not bought and very much enjoyed a game that has received a 7.0/70 on the numbering system. But, I always read the reviews and see why it got the score it did.

Unfortunately, when you get to the upper tier scores, the number is the most concentrated thing. For instance: a reviewer may think, after the initial play through of a game, that the game deserves a 95/9.5. But, the score shouldn't be based on initial feelings about the game, but readable data. How are the controls? Did the game keep you engaged? Was the UI conducive to what the player would need to enjoy the game? I have heard people like Yahtzee explain it best (there is a scary thought). When you played the game, even if you loved the experience, you need to look at it outside your feelings about the game to the hard facts of the game. Take his Arkham City review. He gave the game a recommend, but he wasn't afraid to say what the game did wrong (in his opinion). For someone, the things it did wrong may detract from the game enough where maybe it wouldn't deserve the praise it got in the first place. Not that I have a problem with Arkham City, I very much look forward to the PC release.

Also, all those things that you said about MW3 versus MW are true. The only problem is that the reviewers (in general) harp on other games and lower the score when it hasn't been enhanced over it's predecessors while using the same game mechanics. That is not an objective view of things at all. I think that the numbered score is the biggest worry for both companies and game reviewers. Most likely because a positive metacritic score looks best for both parties. I'm sure we all remember the Dragon Age 2 debacle. I liked the game, not as much as the first one, and I waited for a good sale on Amazon to get it. But most people think the game did not deserve the high praise it had gotten. And the focus of the praise was it's number score.

Also, the most important way of testing your number metric is to see if it fits into a "bell curve". This is the way that statisticians check the margin of error. Usually though, nothing on metacritic makes a proper bell curve, at least not what I have seen.

Edit: Also, one of the reasons why metacritic fails to perform on the bell curve test is because there simply aren't enough reviews. Another good reason to do away with the number system.

I have also played 7.0 games and thoroughly enjoyed them and you know what they are still 7.0 games and they always will be

Because i think you fundamentally misunderstand what the score actually is. It IS NOT an absolute measurement of a games worth. What is is the the consensus of the industry AT THAT TIME!!

You may enjoy a game because - get ready to have your cranium exploded with this intensely profound revelation - you do not perfectly conform with consensus! You CAN HAVE A DIFFERENT OPINION! And you know what, the rest of the industry does NOT have to file up in line behind your opinion.

Example, I played Blood Omen 2, a typical 7.0 kinda game. It had stiff controls, it was repetitive, and meandering. Every critisciem about it was well deserved, the consensus of the industry is that it wasn't a very good game. But I loved it, because in this case I could deal with the controls and what it did offer was worth it to me. Personally, I'd give it a 9.0 but I'd never suggest any critics was either disingenuous or was unsuited to review such a game if they gave it a 7.0/10.

7.0 is well deserved as I know the average gamer would not tolerate the controls and glitches I had to deal with, and the appeal of being a badass vampire might be poor substitute.

Modern Warfare is NOT the only franchise that keeps high scores to spite only small iterative improvements. What about:

-Assassin's Creed
-Tomb Raider (classic)
-Zelda
-Mario Galaxy 1 & 2
-Gears of War (How has Gears 3 REALLY changed from Gears 1?)

Critics ARE going to talk about lack of originality, they are in this business to see progress. But when it comes down to it a good game is a good game. See critics don't REALLY deduct points for lack of originality. They talk about it but they don't. You know what, you can't re-invent the wheel every 12 months. I think the problem with being unoriginal is not continuous but it suddenly becomes intolerable WHEN... a better competition comes along. Nothing has come along to REALLY competes with COD, it wasn't BF3 with with its vehicle focus and doesn't have the RPG elements and crazy killstreaks that make COD multiplayer so engaging.

Some of the most applauded works of film and video games have been incredibly original. Star Wars is famously an aggregate of dozens of different sources, Fistful of Dollars a remake of a Japanese samurai film, Indiana Jones is often cut for cut remakes of those 1930's adventure-serials.

The reality is you can only have so many review for one product and face it, it's not like we are testing life changing drugs for clinical trails, you have to follow a rule of thumb on these sorts of things the maths exists to come up with a definitive score with only 20-30 reviews. And this sort of thing has to be done all the time such as a rifle being sighted in the point of aim is found with a group of only 5 shots, and that's sighted in enough to hit a target over a mile away. You don't need a perfect normal-distribution to say something vaguely conclusive.

Also it's pointless trying to be too precise as the system is self-aware, the metascore itself feeds back on further scores!

Metacritic is a rough guide and face it, as much as the bean counters may use metacritic when all the money has been counted it is the actual REVENUE that counts!

 

[DustyDrB]

So I have a theory that's not often explored whenever this discussion of review score inflation comes up.

I think games are simply better these days or at least what we consider to be an average experience. With budgets in the millions of dollars, it's not often that we see Big Mother Trucker level of terrible being released now.

As with many things, I think the answer probably actually somewhere at the intersection of everything presented thus far.

That's part of a point I've tried to make in several of these threads. You guys just don't review the terribad games because it's not worth your time (your readers probably don't care about the latest shovelware) or because those games don't make it very far in development before they are cancelled.

 

[Red Roark]

Personally, I think it should be like schools grade papers . 9.0-10.0 = A(near perfect), 8.0-8.9= B(Very Good), 7.0-7.9= C(Good), 6.0-6.9= D(Okay), 5.0-5.9= F(Not good), <4.9= Why does this exist?

If you like some aspects of the work in question, and feel that if done a certain way could have really salvaged the experience. Ie: wasted potential. Say you're reading a comic and you really like the villain and would love to see more about him and his involvement in the story line. They did something right to get you intrigued so that's positive points for it. But they didn't follow through and make his motivations clear and he continues to get little screen time. Or maybe that aspect is going well and he has clear motivations but he does something copletely out of character at the end that throws you out of the experience or makes the ending contrast with themes of the story so far (and it's possible to do that really well too, for a good example see the original ending in Watchmen the graphic novel. Really you can pull off anything it's more about execution.)

That's when I bust out my <4.9

 

[grumbel]

The main thing that has changed is that commercial games have gotten much better, you don't see the 5/10's because most companies wouldn't let those games out of the door and most are competent enough to not produce them in the first place. This in turn leads to a lot of games simply hovering around the 8/10, not because the review system is broken, but simply because the games are that good, at least technically speaking. And as others have already said, the bad games are often never reviewed to begin with, as reviews focus on hardcore gamer games, not say DS games for little girls.

That doesn't mean that all 8/10 are worth to play, as most of them are kind of interchangeable and forgettable, but reviews still focus on tech/fun more then they focus on artistic vision. Thus faults in the tech or gameplay will lead to severe down rating, while faults and stupid elements in the story will simply be overlooked.

In the end I don't think there is an easy fix, the numerical rating is still useful as a "technical competence" rating and the artistic merits of a game come across much better in a podcast with multiple people discussion the game, then with a score or a review written by one guy anyway.

 

[ElPatron]

Also, Sonic games, Zelda games, Mario games, GT/Forza games, God of War games, Gears of War, Uncharted games, Killzone games all say hi.

And I hate all of those reviews too, sans a few exceptions.


And I am glad you mentioned dtoid. Jim Sterling gave Sonic Colours a 4 and Generations a 8, even though it was largely mentioned they are not that different.

I am not saying he is biased (he already says that his opinions influence the score) but that was a low blow. It was all about the pageviews and comments.

And how he bashed battlefield because he can't control choppers? And his review of MW3 made it look like he didn't even play Modern Warfare 3 at all, it looks like copypasted text made by "robotic automatons" (his words, when he was defending that game should have different scores). I mean, I disliked battlefield too, but he gave it a 6 so that people would expect a ravaging low score for MW3, and then gave it 9.5 like every other reviewer out there.


Ironic, because the games he doesn't like get lower scores for being repetitive and unoriginal, but the gave 9.5 to a game that Jim himself said it wasn't a breakthrough or reinvented.

 

[scar_47]

Basing reviews on a numeral score is inherently flawed and only gets worse as the scale gets larger, look at a 1-5 VS a 1-100 scale the difference between a 3 and a 4 in the 1-5 scale is rather noticeable and should have some noticeable differences, whats the difference between a 84 and an 85 in a 1-100 scale? All the sites use numerical scales because its easy for lazy viewers. I've always liked g4 because the numerical score isn't very important its the pros and cons along with their reasoning that are the main focus of the review. Theres also the issue of skewed viewing the average scale is 1-10 so anything 6 or above should be above average to excellent, instead anything below an 8 is horrible and for a AAA title anything less than a 9 or 10 is looked at as if its a sin.

My biggest issue with reviews is that gamers as well as publisher's have kept pushing for the stupid numerical score, instead of focussing on reviewing things like how the mechanics work or plot development aspects that are central to enjoying a title in addition to giving you a good idea of what it will be like. And then theres the whole aspect of reviewers being people with prefernces, bias, and their own opinions. No one person looks at anything the same why would games be any different theres going to be variations in the score along with the reasoning behing it, thats why anyone with half a brain either finds a reviewer with a similar frame of mind or uses multiple good sources. Its a flawed system sure but it can still be of use if your willing to do a little work.

 

[xDarc]

In my mind a game like MW3 is a 6.5 at best because of all the recycled content.

Points deducted for lack of originality, yes, but 30% off for that?

It's also a lousy console shooter.
Aim.Down.Sights gimmick to slow down the gameplay for people trying to fidget with thumbsticks.
Killstreak rewards are about as valuable to gameplay as quick time events.

I never felt good about playing a shooter in which more than half your kills in a round could come from essentially tapping a button and clicking a map where the most orange dots are. It kinda still blows my mind to this day that millions of noobs to the genre think this is ok. This is why you don't see competitive FPS tourneys much anymore.

 

[predatorpulse7]

I think there is something broken/corrupt in it when almost every AAA game rating nowadays is from 8.5 upwards. No doubt, some of them have high enough production values to ensure a high quality game but a lot of the time I suspect that money has been handed out to people to boost up the game. Dragon Age 2 comes to mind, it was a piece of s**t(or let's say mediocre game) and yet in the first couple of weeks it was all 8's and 9's for it when it was thoroughly mediocre. Not to mention that some reviewers actually troll in their own way, by giving 5-6 to otherwise excellent games(that would genuinely warrant at least a 8) in order to get hits on websites.

When a magazine/reviewer gives a 10 it loses all credibility with me. 10 would mean that the game is perfect and NO SUCH THING EXISTS.

Look at some of the examples:

DE:HR has four 10 mark critic reviews on metacritic and while I enjoyed it thoroughly(even bough the DLC) it is by no means a 10 worthy game. 85-90 maybe but 100? No freaking way.

Dragon Age 2, which is a mediocre game through and through, got 100 on the Escapist, a mark of shame for this website.

Another quality game(in the high 80's-90 mark to be sure), Uncharted 3, got 19 critic 100 mark reviews.

And people still expect us to take this s**t seriously?

*facepalm at poor understanding of maths*

You know for every critic that "over-rates" a game there will on average the same number (or of equivalent "weight") who "under-rate" it?

If you get rid of the over-rating and keep the under-rating, then the actual average slips BELOW where the actual centre of opinion lies! And you can't just arbitrarily say that those in the middle have the "ideal" score, this is supposed to be objective! Do you not understand consensus through aggregate?

It's not the job of critics to be as much like everyone else as possible, it is their job to give their valued opinion and analysis. Yes, some may get carried away, but just as likely some will form an abnormally low opinion. The aggregate is drawn from the CONSENSUS, gathering together and weighing all the scores.

That CONSENSUS gets skewed by the critics who are paid by the game companies.I understand fanboys upping a game falsely but a critic should have a sort of professional distance. I repeat, a 100 game is a PERFECT game. No such thing exists. If a reviewer gives 100 then he is either a major fanboy(and thus isn't being professional) or was paid by the company that made the game. No two ways about it. This giving AAA titles at least 9's started with the last generation of consoles. On PC Gamer(one of the authorities when it comes to pc gaming), uk version, no game scored more than 96%(and those are some classics, alpha centauri, half life). Witcher 2, a very good game and pc exclusive(at the time at least) got a 89. I guarantee that on console Witcher 2 would have gotten at least a 9.3-9.5 by most console mags, especially if some money exchanged hands.

The point I am trying to make is that a lot of big name critics aren't being honest in their assesments. A lot of them are either bigging up the game(even genuinely good games but nowhere near the classics they are made out to be) or bringing good games down do go against the trend and/or troll to get hits on websites.

Why do you think that so few people care about scores anymore? They know that a lot of them are inflated. Reading Tito's DA2 review I nearly s**t myself laughing but then again I should have been crying because it would mean that this person was either very very ignorant/stupid about games and gaming or he was corrupt and was paid by EA. I tend to think it's the latter. When even Bioware fans(not exactly the most normal bunch if you look on their forums) say that DA2 is a steaming pile of crap, you know that you have to be wrong. Who can ever trust Tito's judgment on a game ever again? And this goes for all the critics who give near perfect scores all the time to games released by large companies. Apparently we're churning classics at a mind blowing rate nowadays.