I thought I’d summarise a couple of the must know gamer sites, which could be useful for any gamer. Clicking the pictures will make you go to the website mentioned (opens up in a new window)
Metacritic
This is the holy grail for the non-informed gamer. This site takes a bunch of reviews, and ‘averages’ the score to give us their METASCORE. On this site you can easily see the highest scoring games for any console from the Playstation era or later. Simply click the ‘Games’ tab, then select ‘High scores’, which shows the highest scores for games across a variety of platforms of the last 90 days. A good feature if you want to look for more great games is looking at the highest scores of all time. Once you’ve selected a game, press the ‘See all * Critic Reviews’, which gives a good overview of reviews, often proving more useful than you think when deciding whether or not to buy a game.
Pro:
- Clear and easy to use lists of games based on scores
- Frequently updated (more then once a day)
- Good summaries of reviews, giving a clear idea of what a game is like
Con:
- Metacritics philosophy on using grades: ‘[The] METASCORE may be higher or lower than the true weighted average of the individual reviews, thanks to this normalization calculation. Normalization causes the scores to be spread out over a wider range, instead of being clumped together. Generally, higher scores are pushed higher, and lower scores are pushed lower’
- Low graded user reviews often are badly written or with bad argumentation
- User scores are often based on the hype, or the anti-hype (For example Critically acclaimed Little Big Planet (ps3), although it might not deserve the 95 metascore, has a user score of 65)
GameFaqs
This site has some of the best walkthroughs on the internet, easy to find with the simple search function at the top. You can also find release dates (which are moderately accurate), cheats for most games, and it has Q&A for a lot of games (answering questions you might have faster then looking through a complete walkthrough). A great feature to look at as well is the Top 10 lists. These often contain interesting or funny lists, which are defenitely worth checking out.
Pro:
- Some of the best walkthroughs on the internet are easily findable, and often completely up to date
- Good release dates on most games
- The ‘Top 10 games’ on the main page often give a good idea of what the most played mainstream games are of the moment
Con:
- The forum behind the site has one of the worst communities on-line
- Heavy advertising on front page (no pop-ups though)
- It’s intertwined with gamespot.com at certain parts (a gaming site which is known to bend under pressure)
/v/’s Recommended Games Wiki
This site is completely different then the others. This is a site completely written by amateurs that came from /v/ – The vidya, and thus has some of the lesser known games. Simply click any console you want, and you’ll get a big list of recommended games. Note that they use the metacritic score system to indicate how the ‘mainstream’ crowd likes a game. For the inexperienced buyer it’s not recommended buying anything indicated in yellow (neutral metascore), let alone red (negative metascore). Note the special lists that this wiki has, for example the ‘LAN Games’ list.
Pro:
- Good recommendations for almost any console
- You can get recommendations on games you else would have never bought
Con:
- Editable by everyone, which gets messy from time to time
- Some recommendations aren’t that good
- Some parts of the site are slightly outdated
- Hardly any interactivity, just lists
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