[QUOTE=Rev]1 review doesn't take much time. 20 reviews takes much more time. One of the side effects of no review scores (or something comparable) means you have one less way to filter what you read. I think most people can agree that they have time to read 1 review but that isn't what you're saying. You are saying that we should abolish all review scores so unless you are just picking games at random or looking only for things that could possibly be interesting you are reading every review. Either way you run a good chance of missing a game that you may not have considered before. Still, it's only one of many ways people hear about games but by abolishing review scores you are removing one more tool that people use to research games.[/QUOTE]
I don't know. I tend to use things like reccomendations here on the boards ans site to determine if I want to play a game. For older systems and newer ones, there are great full length reviews available all over the place. And if you type "best games for *insert genre* on *insert system* into google or youtube you can get instant reccomendations, with reasoning. You can do similar searches for "best non violent first person games", or "hidden gems for X console" or "most overlooked shooters" etc. With youtube let's plays, "best of" reccomendation lists, forums, quick shot reviews, long form reviews, deep genre history guides, video reviews, 100 games in X minutes videos, etc. it seems to me scores are possibly the worst way to find games worth playing, and are, thus, the bigger waste of time.
Knowing Destiny has a 77% might turn someone off from it. Meanwhile, a "let's play" video not only shows them what the game is about, but also demonstrates how it is played. With the ton of people still playing Destiny, I would assume in many cases, seeing how it plays would win over a ton of people who would have been turned off by the review scores. Given how quick a "let's Play" is, isn't that a better use of limited time than searching metacritic?
I really don't think of review scores as a tool anymore. It's like batting average. People might argue that batting average is one tool for assessing how good a baseball player is. I would argue it is a completely useless number that actually provides no usefull information about a player, making it less of a tool than nothing at all. Similarly, deciding based on some number what games might be worth your time, regardless of personal preferences, past experience with games, personal motivation for playing, financial considerations, genre burnout, franchise fatigue, and a pile of other considerations makes the scoring pointless. Some of my favourite games score low, and some of the best scoring games do nothing for me. If I "weeded" games out based on score and not review content or personal reccomendations, I'd be wasting my time by paying attention to many things that wouldn't appeal to me, and missing some really great experiences I would love.
You can use a blunt insturment like review scores to "speed up" a search, but you're not getting good search results doing that, so you're actually wasting time.
I want you to compare the Metacritic top scores list of games:
http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/release-date/available/ps2/metascoreTo the user score rating (you can hover to see which have too few scores to really qualify)
http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/release-date/available/ps2/userscoreIn particular, check out both the Dynasty Warriors games, Drakengard, and Predator: Concrete Jungle.
Is there really enough agreement to argue this is a good tool?