Well, of the games I've played, it still should be a candidate at the very least. I think the reason you're not seeing it talked about so much is that it came out a while ago and giving the upcoming holiday onslaught, people have a lot of other games to think about.

I find some of the responses rather interesting- no replay value? Name one other single player experience (since you're obviously not including multiplayer) that lasts for as long as GTA4's that has more replayability released in the last year, sans perhaps an RPG (which probably lacks multiplayer- and I'm ok with that). And I should add that I really feel that very few games come as polished as GTA4, especially given its scope. I know a few of you said you encountered glitches- I didn't. Not to say that it didn't happen for you, but I feel like that if I can put over 30 hours into the game and not experience one, any that you did should be barely counted against it given the game's size and scope.

I doubt I'd want a job that requires me to play games. Beyond the fact that I'd have to play games that I would think are crap, I discovered about 5 years ago that things that become serious are never fun (and a job should always be somewhat serious). When I first started college, I got interested in politics and thought it was great. I loved reading/watching commentary and loved to debate it myself. But after I selected it to be my minor and had three high-level political classes, I realized that it wasn't any fun to do all those things I loved before- it was work.

So gaming is something I do to enjoy- I'm not going to muck it up by making it serious. If I had to play games all day at work, I doubt I'd want to go home and...play more games.

If you got a newer 80GB, yeah, they don't play PS2 games. None of them do now, actually.

The older 80GB ones (with Motorstorm or MGS4, I believe) were compatable with like 80% of games.

You're expecting me to help you choose between a hockey game and a basketball game?

Just choose which sport you like better. Or if you bought the last year's iteration of one of these two games, get the other one this year.

A few years ago I came to this conclusion, but still saw the value in reviews from a mechanical standpoint. After all, if I was willing to disregard the final opinion on whether the game was good, at least reviewers could tell me whether a game was mechanically sound. And then Mass Effect came out. And every one of those reviewers who ranted and raved about that game's visuals and tech prowess have never come out publicly to say they were sorry for omitting the fact that the game was, in fact, broken mechanically-speaking.

Shame-usBlackley

It's interesting you bring this up because it actually leads me to believe that this isn't an issue with short lead times for reviews but the reviewers personal hype for a game itself. I remember a guy I worked with finally got Mass Effect for the 360 and I watched him play it for the first few hours- even I could see a lot of the glitches/slowdowns/etc in that game. Just putting a minimal amount of time into that game would've yielded many of those problems. So I really do think that the real culprit is personal hype. Most big franchise game reviews I don't trust at all for this reason.

I absolutely hate when I lose a sports game where I outshoot an opponent by a large amargin and can't come up with a win.Nifty_Shark

You do realize the purpose of golf is to have less strokes, right? That might be your problem. :P

I agree with a lot of you guys, but certainly not the article. Game reviews for me are relatively irrelevant, especially when a demo is available. The biggest problem with reviews now is that I find myself in less need of a direct opinion and more in need of facts. This is what I've felt reviews have been lacking for too long now, though I can easily find tons on the forums. They're at least 60% pure opinion- we all know that everyones tastes are different, so this 60% is just fluff. Also, placing too much opinion in a review can skew the fact to be more favorable or allow the review to completely ignore the facts- I liked the music, so it doesn't matter that there's only four songs throughout the entire game (or whatever).

I really just find articles like this one to complain because games that received high scores have faults upon further inspection- if you can play through an entire game (or a significant portion) and say, "wow, this is amazing," you've got a great game on your hands. Score it appropriately. Most gamers aren't going to play it twice; heck, wasn't there some kind of study saying that only 25% of games get finished in the first place? I can only use GTA4 for reference since I don't own any other majorly hyped recent title, but I find it to be a case of, "jack of all trades, king of all men." Every singular aspect of the game has probably been bested by another game, but when you look at how many great aspects they managed to put in a single game, then you see why it deserves such accolades.