I read reviews to get a general sense of where a game/film/whatever succeeded and failed. What usually happens is a film or game will have struck me as interesting, and I'll use reviews to see how well it does what it intended to do - which most "professional" reviews cover to some extent. For instance, I was interested in Homefront because it sounded like it might have an interesting single player campaign. However, the common consensus among the "professional" reviewers was that while the multiplayer was fun, the single player campaign did not live up to its promise, so I passed it over. On the other hand, I was interested in Crysis 2 for more or less the same reason, and since the general consensus was that its single player campaign more or less held up to its promise, I eventually got it.
What I try very hard not to use "professional" reviews for is trying to see if a game or film is good or bad before I buy it. This tends to result in me forming opinions about games without actually playing them, which I find abhorrent in both myself and others. What's more, professional reviewers tend to talk out of their ass with almost the same regularity as user reviewers. Even reviewers who I respect - say, Roger Ebert - sometimes write in their reviews opinions that seem to have only the most infinitesimal basis in reality. Not that I hold it against them, but no reviewer is consistently reliable (or even coherent).
Incidentally, why do people seem to take Zero Punctuation as a serious review? Yes, Yahtzee more often than not brings up salient points (in clever and funny ways, no less), but as a review, ZP is usually pretty useless imo.
What I try very hard not to use "professional" reviews for is trying to see if a game or film is good or bad before I buy it. This tends to result in me forming opinions about games without actually playing them, which I find abhorrent in both myself and others. What's more, professional reviewers tend to talk out of their ass with almost the same regularity as user reviewers. Even reviewers who I respect - say, Roger Ebert - sometimes write in their reviews opinions that seem to have only the most infinitesimal basis in reality. Not that I hold it against them, but no reviewer is consistently reliable (or even coherent).
Incidentally, why do people seem to take Zero Punctuation as a serious review? Yes, Yahtzee more often than not brings up salient points (in clever and funny ways, no less), but as a review, ZP is usually pretty useless imo.
