Jawbreaker

@ Blake Snow:

"Let's see; a self-proclaimed game expert subjectively telling me what games are good or not? No thanks."

Try not to be such a fool. The great critics don't simply tell people what items are good and what aren't. They help expand the medium by providing a high-profile discussion of the artistic elements that have a nasty habit of getting lost in commerce.

Without the best film critics (for example) there would be less language to discuss the things we all take for granted about film, and the filmmaking landscape would be very different. Say what you like about the auteur theory (it's at least half crap) or the ideas of Laura Mulvey and even Pauline Kael -- their writings aren't remembered as much for the films they liked or didn't (Mulvey wasn't even a reviewer) but for the way they talked about movies, and what movies represented. These people discussed film in a way that affected how the medium was appreciated on, eventually, a much larger scale.

Does gaming need someone like that? How could we lose? Is something like that even suitable in a medium that is based around variable experience, rather than variable interpretation? That's a totally different question.