Some friends and I were recently discussing music reviews in general, and how they are all but useless. I believe Pitchfork was mentioned by name as a place for particularly terrible and useless reviews. But the point I made then, and will make here, is that rather than focusing on the content of the review, I focus on the reviewer. If I am familiar with the reviewer's perspective, and enjoy reading their writing, then I typically enjoy the review. But that's not to say that I necessarily accept their opinion as indicative of what my own will be, but rather that I can use their opinion to help me think about how I am likely to respond.
For example, I no longer read any of the TV reviews over at the AV Club. I just never really found a reviewer whose experiences seemed to align with my own--with one exception: Nathan Rabin. In particular, his series "My World of Flops," which is somewhere between a review and a story about all sorts of different pop-culture entities (not just TV), hits all the right notes for me. If you have not already read it, I highly recommend his latest, on Paula Abdul's short lived reality show. Funny, sad, and glorious all at once.
Victor Lucas of Reviews on the Run is another example of a reviewer whose opinions I do not share, but feel as though I understand him well enough that I can adjust for what is likely to be my own opinion. Victor is a notoriously generous critic, so I do not put much stock behind his 9's or 9.5's. But the flip side is that when he says a game is awful, you can be sure that it is really awful. Or pretty much any time he gives a game less than an 8, I interpret that as a fail.
What's nice about his reviews for Reviews on the Run is that he is balanced by the curmudgeonly Scott C. Jones, who holds games to, if not a higher standard than Victor's, then certainly a stricter standard. Happily, this pairing works, by and large--with Victor's scorn and Scott's praise carrying the most weight--and when they both give high marks to a game, it typically means that we can be confident that the game is good and worth a purchase--adjusting for personal taste in game genres, of course.
An interesting consequence of shifting the focus from review to reviewer (one that hadn't actually occurred to me until just this moment) is that it undermines the supposed value of meta-critic or other kinds of review-aggregating scores. If what matters is the reviewer and whether their opinions usefully intersect with mine, then averaging their score with a bunch of other reviewers'--whose opinions do not intersect with mine or of whose tastes I have no understanding--only diminishes the value of the review.
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