Quote Originally Posted by Aussie2B View Post
I think you guys have a bit of a twisted view of professional game reviewers. They're not making a lot of money, and a lot of these mags/sites are on hard times too so nobody is really rolling in it. They are pressured to give high scores, but I'm skeptical that they're getting directly bribed. It's more a matter of publishers pulling advertising, which is the real way in which these publications make money, or denying exclusive access, which helps sell more mags/get more hits, allowing them to get more advertisers. If the reviewers give low scores that hurts the publication, they could theoretically lose their jobs or have their pay cut.
I agree with this.

On top of that, let's not forget there's a review scandal every few years so some of the worst excesses of bribery are avoided.

Basically, I think most of the bias you see in game reviews is pretty obvious to any reader - just look at the ways they usually term problems. But most of the game reviewers I've liked over the years have been very straightforward in describing problems, and describe what they see in a way that's not hard to dismiss.

The other half of that is in previews, in which reviewers are very "let's wait and see" even in games where you'd be hard pressed to bet that the game will shape up before release. THAT is where the most damage is probably done - do you think that game publishers would pay to skin a review website with their game's logo and characters if there was a bad preview? Yet the preview is the time when criticism about what works and what doesn't would be best. On the other hand, there have been some games that were restarted when near completion and it helped out a lot - although the only example I can think of (TimeShift) ended up being forgotten anyway.

About Duke, well, you can just about say "Always Bet Against Duke" at this point. It's a shame really, but I am so incredibly tired of seeing that boxart. Very Do Not Want.