Unbaised gaming reviews sites?

[freakyflow]

I've been reading a lot of gaming review sites over the past little while and cannot believe how full of shit they are. Most of the time I read a review and its well clear they are being payed to write it.

For instance Ive recently bought 2 new games that are mediocre at best, but they both received 9/10 reviews across like 20 gaming sites, the industry is so biased.

The only valid reviews I can find happen to be forum posts, anyone know of any good gaming review sites that they are not in the industry's pocket?

[Squeetard]

Nope.

Any game review site is there to make money, so their lips are locked onto the side of the publishers ass where the wallet is.

[TwystedMonkey]

Actually there is one site I know that is fairly honest..... it sad because the guy only reviews one game a week but he is honest, BRUTALLY so. He has only actually liked 3 games (Portal,Painkiller and Silent Hill 2) But even with other games he talks about the good and the bad of them. I warn everyone that checks this out now this guy does not shy away from swearing or BAD taste humor (which is the only kinda humor I like heh) He does not give a number rating to anything except that those games I mentioned earlier are his top three anyways the address is
The Escapist : Video Galleries : Zero Punctuation
I am interested to see if anyone else is as big a fan of his reviews as I am. I seriously enjoys Wed now just to watch his new morning review. heh sad but true....

[MpG]

Sorry, I like ZP a lot, but not so much that it deserves the title of 'unbiased'. It has its own niche, and one of the biggest reasons people watch it is to watch games get torn apart and mocked, no matter how good they might be. And he does it in a way that you generally don't mind it, even if you actually liked the game (unless you were born w/o a sense of humour). But just because it doesn't praise every game to the heavens, that doesn't mean it's automatically unbiased.

Personally, I think there's too much money in electronic entertainment, and too many people who care about that x/10 ranking, to find an unbiased organization of any size. The best you can do is to hold off on buying the game for a few weeks, then go googling for a day to get a general consensus as to what the game's strong and weak points are.

[FreqE1]

I love the Zero Punctuation reviews, they are hillarious!

Read other reviews to hear some good then listen to his to hear the bad. You still won't have an absolute picture but you'll have a better clue as to how good the game is. I agree that you really need to wait untill actual end users have the game in hand and report on their experiences.

I found the same problem with a lot of hardware reviews (thank Beaver I found this site) when I started looking into buying the parts for my first rig. According to the reviews I read the nvidia 650 boards were the 2nd coming and I almost went that route. Then I checked out some forums and ditched that idea fast.

A lot of reviews are nothing more than the slightly re-worded OEM press release IMO (not here). For games, beleave the gamers not the advertizers.

[sswilson]

Doesn't one of the larger game sites have a member driven rating system that works fairly well?

One of the problems I can imagine about reviewing games is how subjective game play is. Well and good to report how well the game plays on certain hardware, and any obvious bugs, but everybody's tastes are a little different. (I got bitten by that bug with The Witcher... everybody said it was a great game, but I didn't realize it was a "cut scene" style game a-la the final fantasy series).

[freakyflow]

Lol thats pretty funny thanks for the link, I way prefer a jaded opinion over the usual crap I read. Metacritic.com has a decent rating engine but its still skewed because 95% if the info its takes are from lame top review sites, and not the more underground user driven ones.

I also just found this farcray review and laughed pretty hard ( warning very immature website) Far Cry 2 - Video Games Suck