BigKid.com.au

I trust the person who gives the lowest score.

I tend to trust myself. Part of it is gut instinct, and part of it is informed judgement. Games these days get so much coverage on the internet that you should be able to determine whether you’ll like a particular game, and you should be able to make a decision on whether you’ll buy it a long time before it hits the shelf. I find that demos are most useful to sway me one way or the other (if I’m undecided on whether I want to play something), but they very seldom make me automatically want to buy a game (although Battlefield 1942 has done this very thing).

Being a longtime writer myself with the Stratics Network and more recently with IanStorm, I find it more than a little disturbing when sites like GameSpy choose to do deals with companies and such. For example, Origin does most of their “big” revealing interviews with them as well as their Developer Diaries, which are on GameSpy and not on an EA site or UO.com. It makes me wonder if EA have some deal going with them. IGN are another commercialised site.

IanStorm - http://www.ianstorm.com/ - whilst small, prides itself on good interviews and reviews. You can be 100% sure that any review or preview we post, we have actually played the game and we are extremely objective. With our UO site, which is my personal baby, we pride ourselves on posting both sides of the argument. If an article is published about 1 thing, we will present the other side as well. We do not bow to the game companies, in this case OSI, and what they want. Instead we provide a balance. If we think something stinks, we will say so whilst providing evidence as to why that opinion came about.

I used to browse multiple sites for game news every day, but it got old. The coverage became edited copies of one another. Game news turned into news that a new review/preview/interview had been written - on way too many sites. Eurogamer (http://www.eurogamer.net/) became one of the few sites I visited, since it had actual content and had writers that participated in discussions about the articles they wrote. BK was and still is a regular bookmark I use, not because I know some of the guys behind it (or because I can kick their asses in BF1942), but because it’s local, and because they provide BS-free, thought provoking content.

Other than that, all I can say is, it’s been good not keeping up to date on anything and everything - BF1942 came as a nice surprise to me.

I usually go to Gamespot and the game review database when I want to find a review quickly. The best feature of gamespot is definately the reader reviews, seeing as it’s usually possible to find people with diverse opinions of the game. The reader review mark average usually hovers around the gamespot reviewer mark, but when it doesn’t it’s good to be able to contrast the experience of the every-man with the journo.

I find it helpful to read as many reviews as possible, as using only one opinion is a shortcut to buying shitty games. If you see a dozen reviews with similar scores, it’s a pretty good indication of a game’s quality. It would a terrible world if everyone loved the same thing. And everyone has a (slightly) different opnion.
Other than that, personal instincts are the only way to make sure. Demos for PC games, rentals for console games (these tend to be available way before playable cover disc demos which usually have pre-alpha code anyway). I reckon I’ve dodged a few bullets this way.

Check out www.metacritic.com , it collates reviews from a number of different sources, listing each review and its score, ultimately giving an overall score….