I rate this post 1/5 stars because the font was broken on my machine and I couldn't see it.

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Seriously. I hear you. What I like is that you can list the rewiews as helpful or not helpful. If only the helpfulness of the review would weigh the review with its current score. That would make it much nicer.

Also, GOG games are impossible to figure out based on the rating. I see way too many 5-star reviews. But then again, nostalgia makes things better. Might and Magic Book 2 was a 5-star game when I first played it. Now it's a one and a quarter. I still love that game, so it's 5-star to me. But if I charged $50 for it at a store with other current 5-star games, nobody would buy it. So it's not 5-stars anymore.

I always have to research the game on other sites before making a decision.

I need a rating system where the game is rated by just anybody and then another one that is rated by people who have actually bought the game. And I think that people who bought the game and it doesn't work have a legit complaint and review of 1 star. In that way, we can see if a game doesn't work (like Dungeon Keeper -- tons of reviews say to stay away from it for Win 7 b/c although it says it works, it doesn't. I'm glad people made those reviews so that I can wait to play it when the Win7 fixes are shown).

There's 2 cents anyway.

Some are rubbish I agree but ones that mention a superior game, especially if it's free (such as Transport Tycoon over Locomotion) or game breaking bugs, can be useful provided enough information is given. I know Betrayal at Krondor was freeware for quite some time (it's how I first got to play it.) but didn't they rescind that? If so I can see why that's irrelevant.


P.S I'm still going to pick up Locomotion sometime though.

The idea that a game should not review poorly for being upatched is simply stupid. Bugs are part of the game experience, often taking away and making the experience worse.

A review should be about the product as sold and received by the reviewer. No more, certainly no less.

Ding!

Well, if someone reviews the disc version he has at home, than that's still to 99% the same game. Don't see why such a review shouldn't come in handy.

I think genuinely useless reviews are very much the exception, and most of those can be easily identified and ignored.

Really don't quite get the big problem here. Even the examples the OP gave, which are probably supposed to be the worst of the worst, would be of interest to me if I were thinking about buying this game. If it isn't patched, if it might be available for free somewhere else, if it's broken - all of it is good to know. Even if that's all they say, meaning they don't give any information about what exactly is broken, for example, they're still a good starting point for further questions in the forums.

Because that 1% is probably why you're buying it here rather than from eBay. Few of the games can't be had elsewhere, but it's rather poor to be reviewing a version that doesn't have the same fixes and possibly bugs that the version that's being reviewed does.

Plus, those reviews crowd out legitimate reviews that cover the specifics of this particular one. The worst reviews are the ones that are based upon recollections of a 15 year old game.

Yeah, because all the 5 star reviews are really fucking intelligent.

Sometimes there is useful information to be found in the actual reviews, but never in the scores given.

I agree with you. Perhaps here on GOG its different, but I find the one star reviews on Amazon very helpful sometimes because they tell me whether the game has DRM, install problems, game bugs, what OS has trouble running it, etc. which I find very informative before making a purchase.

Before I discovered GOG, I purchased the Fallout Collection which had Fallout Tactics. One of the 1 star reviewer said that they had to use the NO-CD crack to patch a retail game because they publisher put it on DVD and the original was on CD. This was very useful information and I'm glad someone wrote about it.