Sega discusses the importance of Metacritic scores

Im just gonna pretend the last part of your comment was sarcasm

Now why was that low-ranked? I CARE ABOUT MY HEARTS, NO LOW HEARTS FOR ME, WAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!!!!!

SILENCE YOU RACIST EVIL HOLIER THAN THOU SONY FANBOY, YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW, ENJOY 3rd PLACE THIS GENERATION YOU BASTARDS!!! : )

You are a racist, I remember the incendiary comments clearly. But you, being Indian, probably have that sort of attitude built up from a young age. Caste system, and all. Your parents have failed you so it's to be too critical.

*Your parents have failed you so it's hard to be too critical.

Wow Bowser that was one of the most ignorant remarks I've seen you make. You're basically assuming that all Indians are racist.

As much as I enjoy ragging on the Wii, that probably is the only system that would get my parents to finally play videogames, that probably goes for most of us here am I right?

not true my mom is in her 50s and plays her 360 all the time
thing is she was a gamer all the time
i come home form school and he be hoging my new game
Wii just gets NON-gamers to play

I know, my parents are absolute NON-GAMERS, they have never picked up a controller in their entire life. Although the 360 and PS3 also have games that can get non-gamers to get up and pick a controller but I think a Wii would be more up their alley, it may feel less intidimating to them.

@Chinpo:

It doesn't work for my parents.

My mom is too scared of the controller. She thinks it's going to bite her, or she'll break it. I even showed her pictures of people getting injured with it, to show her that it's practically unbreakable, but she's still afraid of playing it. The closest I got her to playing was trying to bowl when she was drugged on codeine. She never released the ball.

My dad, on the other hand, was willing to give it a try. I started up a game of Wii Tennis, and he was surprised that he would have to swing the other way to get the ball on the left side of the screen. I believe his first words were "What the fuck?"

My dad originally got a PS3 to play blue ray movies, and hasn't used a controller since he tried to play Golden Eye with me on the N64.

He has now finished a lot of games, some include GTA4, Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia and he's playing through Fallout 3 right now.

showing your mom pictures of people getting injured by the controller isn't the best way to get her to play.

Just make a 2d side scrolling sonic game for a real console (Wii, Xbox 360, PS3,) with only Sonic, Tails, & Knuckles as playable characters. I would be brilliantly happy.

Old-school sidescrollers are only good if you own a pair of nostalgia glasses.

What? More like the Detroit Lions of Gaming...And it hurts me to say that.

I wouldn't say the Lions are an appropriate sports analogy. The Mets are probably better because you remember them doing well in the past (like SEGA) but lately have shown great promise but ultimately shoot themselves in the foot and implode from within. Actually I think the Mets comparison is dead on.

I'm a Bears fan and I think thats a better NFL comparison. Again, a team we all remember from our childhood as being great (superbowl shuffle) but as of late are the definition of mediocrity always making the same problems year after year. The Bears haven't had a good QB since Sonic had a great game.

And they also cannot seem to get out of the shadow of their "cross-town rivals" (Nintendo and the Yankees)

*looks at his own name*

*starts silently weeping*

@ ExMcCloud:

No one is the Detroit Lions of anything except the Detroit Lions.

the games that Sega publishes are generally good. They can't seem to get their heads straight when it comes to their old franchises though.

I'm really looking forward to Alpha Protocol, as I've heard it described as a gritty mass effect-type game... with actual consequences for your actions.

I'm also interested in seeing how Madworld and The Conduit will pan out sales and reviews wise.

I'm guessing Bayonetta will come in between a 7.5-8.5 meta (Conduit will clock in at an 8.7-9.2 and Madworld with a 8.6)

I'm thinking the Conduit comes in a little lower than that average. If I had to guess I would say somewhere around 7.4-8.1 meta for the conduit.

Madowlrd will probably be around an 8.4 or 84/100 meta avg.

Bayonetta I could see being the lowest which will probably come in around 6.5 -8.5. I know that's a big window but that ones hard to peg with the limited information thus far.

Out of all those games Madworld will end up being the critical darling that is a commercial flop. That's pretty much the story of Clover Studious games anyway. I think the Conduit will probably push somewhere around 600k-800k which will be good for that game and will merit a sequel. Bayonetta will barely crack 1 million across both platforms.

Yes, SEGA as a publisher is definitely much better than SEGA as a developer. Oh, how I still mourn the assimilation of Smilebit. :(

Put Virtua Fighter 5 and the Phantasy Star games on the list ;).

they have my blessing for valkyria.

Rotten Tomatoes is a perfect site if you wanna see reviewers give niche/artsy/obscure movies a great score, and bigger more popular blockbuster titles a crap score. In fact, most of their Top 10 movies i've never even heard of.

"Average" is around 70% to 75% on metacritic. Only around 10% of games score below 50%. If a game scores 50%, it's a stinker, not an average game.

Ah, well let's go with Giant Bomb using the 5-star scale. 2.5/5 stars is a 50% for metacritic, but an average game. 50% out of a 100% scale generally does mean absolute trash, then there's 1up's system which has been totally misinterpreted (where a C is 50%, which totally doesn't match up to the system we used in school, and we can presume 1up is using)

so yes, that is somewhat the effect. What a reviewer INTENDS by giving something a 5/10 does not reflect how the 5/10 is interpreted on metacritic

People always give the same old whine about Metacritic - and numerical scores in general. It's tired as fuck.

With single-review numerical scores, there's some degree of a fair point to the rant. They aren't particularly valuable, because maybe that reviewer didn't get the game or whatever - useful as a summary of what that reviewer thought, yes, but as an actual evaluation of the game on its own, no. (Same is true of the text of the review.)

But the aggregate largely solves that problem and that's why publishers - and everyone else - can generally rely on it.

I'm sure there are a few exceptions but go look at a Metacritic score list, pick some games you played, and ask one question: do these scores approximately represent game quality? There are definitely going to be games you personally would score differently, but if you try to make as objective a judgement of the game as you can, is it *really* all that different from the Metacritic score? How much?

Personally, I just did a quick run-through of the Wii chart, looking at the first ten games I played. I'd say nine of those games are within 10 points of what I'd have given (the other one's maybe 15). That's pretty damn accurate.

Try the same exercise, with the same 10-point range. If you want to do it properly, write out your trying-to-be-objective scores first using the 7.5=okay/average scale that Metacritic follow, then compare them against the site. (And don't pre-pick games you know to be controversial.) Maybe you'll get a lower proportion of accuracy, but I'd be willing to bet that for the majority of people, it works out.

Some of the perceived problems with Metacritic scores are due to people being arsey about them - like, game A got a 93, and was totally better than game B which got 96. Nobody gives a shit when the numbers are in that range, both games are great. But I think there's a distinctive difference between a 60 and an 80. And if publishers are looking at an actual metric for 'how shit is this game' - something Sega first-party badly and frequently needs - Metacritic is the best game in town.

Oh, and if 'World of Goo' wasn't 'remotely left of field' then what the fuck is? Metacritic: 94. #3 Wii game. Argument over.

Aggregate doesn't help, though, because it's still an aggregation of single reviews. I seriously think the whole "second opinion" system that one mag (who was it? My hated Game Informer, or GamePro, or EGM, i forget.) had was one of the more brilliant moves, as it showed whether a game was truly bad or good or there was merely a lack of consensus. Equally true with Famitsu scores, if you break them down into four reviews set out of 10, instead of one out of 40

Magazines and web sources themselves should have aggregate reviews. Helps weed out all the problems with personal opinion and/or lazy, stupid, or biased reviewers

You have a grotesque obsession with numbers, huh.

Metracritic is mainstream media incarnate. Reducing games from all their glory, the hard work of real men and women, to a subjective the greatest slur to our hobby. Yes, let us all ignore what one thinks of the content, the style, the controls of Game A; give me a number, give me a number so I can be told what to like. The fact that you subscribe to such a manuscript fills me with such great disappointment, but if you enjoy neutralising your own thoughts then go ahead.

Your little experiment fails at the first hurdle because a number is wholly subjective.

"7.5=okay/average scale"

Who on earth says I subscribe to that viewpoint? What if I think, shock-horror, 5 should be average? Or maybe three? Wouldn't the results be greatly skewed if we lower the barometer?

Does Metacritic take into fact factors of manipulation such as hype or bribery, the prejudices or the reviewer or the the editorial stance of a site?

Your argument has more holes than a whores panties on a Soho corner. Try harder.

If there is no thing I can count on during the weekends here at Joystiq its the ranting and raving of Bowser. The point isn't whether or not you agree with his metric of what is and what isn't average but that you participate in his experiment with the criteria he has established.

I agree that in the end no one should wholly rely on an average of numbers but it does give consumers, publishers & developers an idea on a general consensus. Metacritic is a good tool for everyone to get an idea of the quality of a title. I usually feel that the median is more accurate than the average. That way you can usually eliminate the hype and the hate in one swoop.

For example, we know Bowser hates anything with violence with a fierce passion. It wouldn't be fair for him to write a review of Killzone 2 because we all know he has a built in bias. This is the point Bowser is making is that none of us know the built in bias in favor or against for these reviewers. No one should assume they all have good or evil intentions. That's why I think the median is a better barometer of quality than the average.

Didn't proof read that ... sorry for any errors.

I've never heard of those teams, must be some obscure half-baked american sport. (joking)

Is it just me, or do most players in most US sports have 10 inches of padding on every inch of their body. Everyone i've ever met from the US who has sat down to watch a game of Rugby League (especially the State of Origin here in Australia, best of 3 battle between rival states) cannot believe the brutality of it all.

Rugby League FTW: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=qJdqTh5yqrs&fmt=18

Our other sport, AFL, is also a big hitting game, but more aerial in execution lol: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=JDMBoG4-sRU&feature=related&fmt=18

Nobody cares, homeboy.

Maybe because not everyone operates on the same premise. I know it's a crazy concept to understand that everyone is different. Liberation preformed admirably on the PSP in terms of it's metacritic average.

It's seems to be your personal crusade to inform of the world of how inept Guerilla Games is as a developer. I'm glad Sony didn't use your logic because we wouldn't of ever had the pleasure of playing Killzone 2.