Gaming Websites

To keep up with all the news surrounding video game culture, I find myself checking up on five different gaming websites, usually on a daily basis (especially on weekdays, when they update regularly). The hub site where I begin everyday is GameRankings.com, a metaranking site compiling all of the professional reviews given to every game that comes out and producing an overall ranking (out of 100%) for each one, thereby allowing me to see how well-received a game really is. When it comes down to it, any typical review site could be either right on the money or a bit high or low, so relying on one review site alone might not be the best indicator of a game's quality.

Then there are four sites which keep me abreast of news, previews, and reviews: IGN.com, GameSpot.com, GameTrailers.com, and
1Up.com (which is my least favorite as it's the only site of the three that doesn't create video reviews of games). All of these sites are very similar, but between the four of them, it's pretty hard for me to miss anything. Usually, when a game comes out I like to look at the GameRankings.com metaranking along with the other four sites to see specific commentary on the pluses and minuses of each game, all of which help me decide if it's worth picking up someday.

Generally I would say the metaranking is a pretty accurate reading on a game's quality, and as I look back on the games I have thus far, my impressions of the games usually line up fairly well with the critical reviews. As I see it, the different quality brackets for games line up something like this:

≥ 90% = incredible...hard to dislike
80-90% = very solid...not perfect, but worth having
70-80% = only worth getting if you're really interested in it
≤ 70% = very risky...most likely utter crap

To give you an idea where my games stand, BioShock is my highest ranked game (95%), Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is my loweest ranked game (74%), and Mass Effect (my favorite game) is close to BioShock but not quite there (91%). The average score of my eight hardcopy games (i.e. not XBLA) is 85%. In practice, it will be very hard for me to raise this number by much, as the number of games scoring averages significantly higher than this is small. As silly as it is though, I do take my average metaranking into account when buying a new game, always hoping to raise the number (or at least not lower it).