I guess you never really played a MMORPG. 70 hours are nothing in a game that is designed to last an absurd amount of time. I can't comment on Skyrim but looking back at my playthrough of Morrowind, Diablo or the X-series, I have probably enjoyed way less than half the total time I spent on them.

Given honest and pure review, every game out there falls into gray area - Unless it just simply doesn't work.....or formats your entire hard drive like Pool of Radiance.

Guess I'm gonna send a Bitch-Slap-O-Gram to Kevin Smith:

"That's for not handing over some royalties to HftB. Bitch." : )

That's the problem with ideas - someone else probably already had it, implemented it, and made money from it. Where's my royalty money, Kevin? Where's my $*@%^ money?!?

Back to the original point...

Stars / numbers just don't do the trick for me. I loved this part, that part just didn't cut it, and overall it was good. Okay, sorta good. I mean, I can see how someone else might love it but I have other, more fun, games to play. So does it get a good score, do I come up with some arbitrary weight for each good and bad, or apply them equally and average it out?

What I like to do before buying a game is go into its subforum and read there, to check for game-killing bugs and gauge the enthusiasm of today's actual players, not the gamecard nostalgia score.

I actually enjoy weighing the pros and cons of a game more than I do either praising it to death or absolutely trashing it. In fact, I haven't written reviews for many of my favorite games for this reason. Or maybe it's just because it's more fun to pick apart flaws than it is to heap praise :P. I dunno.

I think that it's easy to hyperbolize in one direction or the other to try to "balance out" someone else's opinion. If simply asked what I think of Halo, I'd probably say that it's a relatively above-average shooter with notable highs/lows being combat and level design, respectively. If I were responding to someone saying "OMG Halo is the best shooter I have ever played!", I'd be more tempted to lean more towards bashing the game's flaws.

Get a room, you two :-p
I prefer BAZINGA!
It's amazing you've missed it while hanging out on the forum.

While you're at it, check out Giants: Citizen Kabuto. But have a spare pair of pants handy, because you will piss yourself laughing.

I did not read the entire thread, but here is another thing to consider in regards to the strongly polarized arguments:
We tend to talk about the games (movies, books, music whatever) that do stand out in some way, either the very good ones, or the very bad ones, while the inbetween games just don't matter all that much. They are not interesting to talk about, you don't really need to warn people about them, or praise them. Heck, chances are that most of them don't even pop up in our minds all that often. Amazing games like Planescape, Bloodlines or Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, and utterly horrific games like Limbo of the Lost or Stalin vs Martians do though. I could tell you about the alright game Spellcross, but why would I?