I've always had problems with video game reviews because the reviewers have a tendency to hyper inflate their scores. The reviewers base their technique on the grading scale of high school and so a 7 is a mediocre game and a 5 is very poorly designed game. A 0 is unimaginable. Video games are expensive and I'd like to know if the game is actually as good as its graphics look (which, surprise, is not always the case)

But...

The recent shenanigans at gamespot.com has proven to me that video game reviews that appear on the internet and magazines cannot be unbiased when the money comes from advertising of said video games. CNET owns gamespot.com. They also own metacritic. Now I'm not painting a dire picture of the future of metacritic but I figured the forum of a review website that intends to remove bias by aggregation discuss video game reviews in more detail.

So what do y'all think? Who are your good reviewers? Who do you trust?

I trust reviews that arent bias, or that just sound stupid. I actually dont go to reviewers on if i should buy a game. If it looks good or my friends say its good, i get it.

I don’t trust any one persons opinion unless I know them personally on some level, be it someone I work with or someone I know here on Metacritic.

If I jump on Metacritic and see that the user reviews for a game that I’ve never played before are fairly high (at least a few months after its release), I take it that there is a good possibility that I will like the game. If I’ve already played a game, I don’t really care what anyone else thinks about it unless it’s in the form of an open discussion of which to share points of view.

At the end of the day, the review that I value most is the review of the general public, they have no reason to lie, and if 9 out of 10 people all agree that something is awesome, it fills me with more confidence.

One of the reasons I like Metacritic so much is that it averages many reviews. That way, even if some reviewers are making their scores artificially high, hopefully the rest of the reviews will balance them out. So far, every game I've tried that was rated highly on Metacritic has been a fun game.

I don't look, or care about the scores. I read what good things are in the game and what faults are in the game, watch gameplay videos, get testimonials from friends and people on other forums and then make my decision on whether I'm going to buy the game or not.