Do Reviews Still Serve a Purpose?

Via Voodoo Extreme, a post on the Sony-sponsored ThreeSpeech blog asking if game reviews are a thing of the past. Post author 'Azz Hassan' opines that the proliferation of blogs and easy access to game trailers has made the 'biased views' of reviewers a thing of the past. Responding via the Ars Technica Opposable Thumbs blog, Frank Caron offers a rebuttal to the piece. 'The argument presented in the article seems to come with the very slant that it so viciously protests: one of a negative view towards a medium that the writer feels is inadequate. Yes, there is a ton of available media on the net that can help you get a look at a game as it develops, but the problem with videos and pictures is that often the intangible elements are impossible to understand simply from seeing the game in motion--only the written or verbal communication of a person can adequately capture these details.'

Comments

Absolutely they do

[tttonyyy]

...but maybe not as individual reviews.

http://www.metacritic.com/ is a fantastic site which does weighted averaging of scores from many reviews. I use it for games in particular - it's useful to check the reviews that give a high score against the reviews that give a low score to see what is good and what is not about a game before buying. The "averaged" score almost always corresponds with my experience of the games too, so the system seems to work.

So reviews do serve a purpose, but, as with many things in life, to get a balanced opinion you need to sample from a set great than 1.