Never watched Digital Foundry but Ive been playing Trails In the Sky (rpg by Falcom) a lot since I got the CRT tuned up and UH… I really like that I can crank the refresh to 85hz and set the frame rate to automatic.
I’m about to really start caring about frame rate I think.
i do lots of background research and i’m broadly interested in criticism as a practice but i also hardly know any videogame critics past or present worth taking seriously both in terms of critical perspective and as writers (let me know if i’m missing any!)
i like faqs they kinda count as reviews. no one thats written a gamefaq has been able to keep their opinions out of it and its really special
i dont think ive read a professional review seriously in over a decade except to make fun of the dumbass who wrote it
I like reviews because sometimes people are easily frustrated by the same stuff as me and that helps me avoid stuff that would be a bad match for me.
I mainly lurk on here for recommendations and it’s served me pretty well, other than purchasing a bunch of aspirational schmups I will never play past the first few minutes, because I am bad. (Except for the raiden collection for iOS which I spent a million hours with)
The idea of reading steam reviews horrifies me because I paint “gamers” with a broad and bad brush. Whenever I do read them they’re usually fine and useful.
One thing I do, not as a strategy per se but just as it happens, is start watching a longplay and sometimes stop it and get the game if it looks interesting enough. That’s never ever my intention when I start watching a longplay but it happens frequently.
I read reviews for fun which is weird because they usually aren’t fun.
Anyhow that’s how I roll 
Me, I’m great and my opinions are all stellar, unfortunately my writing is constrained to shitposting on selectbutton dot net
When new fighting games come out I will obsessively read message boards and Steam reviews and Discord chats for information on the netcode, even though very few FGs actually use rollback netcode and 99% of the people discussing FG netcode are totally ignorant so the answer is almost always “shit sucks”.
I don’t remember the last time I read a professional review for anything.
At this point in my life I know what I like and that’s like…3 games. That ain’t gonna change. I ain’t gonna find more room in my heart for more games, and I think that is good.
only to see if a port is good or bad (like how all the resident evil ports on switch have some sort of problem where they run like shit)
I check metacritic and mentally DQ every game that has less than 85, just as god intended.
I think review scores are like ads in that I hope they don’t affect me but they most assuredly do
Metacritic is a good way to see the mainstream western appeal of a game. Usually a game with a low score will be a little too rough and a game with a high score a little too safe
remember a couple of years ago people made a joke site based on idle thumbs called “objective game reviews” and every “review” was just dryly listing the features with no opinions
but the problem was that they covered such a wide variety of games and the descriptions were so good it was way more useful than 99% of actual review sites
they should bring that back
I always read reviews. It’s probably a holdover from my studies but I’m always really fascinated by different opinions expressed in a somewhat shared methodology. I do wish reviews talked more to each other though.
I dunno about reading reviews, but writing reviews is hard. You gotta think about what you played, make sure your thoughts are coherent, put those words into writing, consider whether or not what you just wrote means anything to your potential audience, oscillate back and forth regarding whether your review says too much or too little about the game, suddenly remember an insightful point that causes you restructure everything you’ve written so far, cut out half of the stuff you’ve written because you realized that nobody’s gonna want to read something that long, and then triple check your work only to dejectly hit post because you’ve lost the ability to discern whether anything you’ve written is intelligible. It’s exhausting.
hard to believe anybody writes reviews at all tbh
reviews are ok. I give 'em a 7/10
I’ll look at reviews on site, a couple of video reviews, then convince myself I don’t need to get a game, then get it later anyway.
I find reviews useful at times, but often my tastes will let me LOVE games that aren’t going to be ‘overwhelmingly positive’ and enjoy those top reviewed games, but overall I’m pretty well convinced I understand games better than the general public and find their vapid views uninformed and tawdry. Bunch a freakin’ gun nuts and weebs basically.
in retrospect, i do look at user reviews (never professional reviews), and I look specifically for negative reviews, where someone got ass-blastingly mad at a game and left a bad review because of some esoteric design decision that infuriated them. nothing makes me interested in a game faster than seeing that.
i usually leave reviews on steam too. usually just as some feedback or “i would want someone to tell me this before i play”. it’s funny, though; i seem to be a bit of a tastemaker among my steam friends, as often i’ll leave a positive review (or merely play!) some obscure game and that’ll get other people to try it or talk to me about it. the one good thing about steam is that social play aspect, i guess
