I made a fairly persuasive arguement about why public ratings don’t really reflect game contect in a MW forum a couple months back. I’ll link it up if I can find it.
Pretty much the way games are being rated now is a sham compared to how they used to be. Point in case is Bioshock. Sure it’s a great game but what did it bring to the FPS realm? Nothing and it yet it received more perfect ratings than I care to count. It’s only great feature was the graphics, which are meaningless when it comes to replayability which oddly enough was almost completely ignored in most reviews of it.
The problem with reviews (that I’ve noticed) is that they seem to spend less than an hour playing a game or using a piece of software and then write a long, drawn out explaination of whether or not they were happy with their first glance. Even CNET is guilty of this, their review of Microsoft Onecare used screenshots taken during the first release of the beta test and many of their complaints were on bugs that were fixed midway through the beta. This review is still up and oddly enough just to the right of it is an Apple ad. Imagine that.
Does this mean you should completely ignore the ratings? I do, but most don’t.