Playing Games without Numbers by Baxter Cranch

That's stupid! You can't have games without numbers! They're your stats and guns and... Binary is numbers... and... Yeah! Only I'm not talking about the numbers in games. I'm talking about the numbers around them: review scores and the weight we put on them as gamers. Have you ever seen a comment on a review that went something along the lines of "X reviewer sucks and doesn't know anything about games." or "I bet Y reviewer was paid off." Have you ever been upset with these people? Maybe thought they were being ignorant? After all it is the reviewer's job, not some random guy on the internet's. His opinion can't be as valuable as a professional. What if I said you were the one being ignorant in the situation? Yeah, you, right there, the one reading this. Reviews are opinions and while reviewers are often better equipped to express their views and well review games, they're supposed to be impartial. Read this, it's about the HD remake of Nights that was recently released. The Polygon review gave it 5.5 out of ten. Not a good score to say the least, but Christian Nutt (the author of the linked article, which you should read) wanted to find out himself. Any ideas on what happened? He didn't find out. He loves the game as much as he did before and is clearly very happy about its existence, not at all what you'd expect from someone who just played a mediocre game. Now clearly he's an articulate guy and won't be spamming anyone with badly spelt messages in all capital letters, but he's the same kind of person. He's someone who loves a game despite the reviews. Take one of my favourite games for example: Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon. It's sitting at a nice 68 out of one hundred on Metacritic right now. Do I see flaws in the game? Heck yeah, but it's still some of the most fun I've had with a shooter in a long time. I am a fan; I think many of its reviews are wrong and/or missed the point. I manage though, I'll just take my copy, pop it in my 360, call over my roommate and we'll sit up all night shooting giant robot space bugs (seriously look at that sentence, this game is awesome). So before you go dismissing a game because of a poor review give it a chance. Take your own opinion into account; does it sound interesting or fun (Space bugs) to you? Do a little research, check if the game has a fan base or not. Reviews are just opinions; the numbers don't actually matter as much as we think they do.