Not the critic who counts, but the counter of critics
October 8, 2010 5:40 AM Subscribe
Replacements for metacritic?
I absolutely loathe metacritic's new layout, it's appalling, and the number of extra clicks I now have to use to (poorly) see what I want has shat me up the wall, so I'm looking around for replacements.
For movies there's always Rotten Tomatoes, and I can use allmusicguide for music and i could use gamerankings for games I suppose. But a) I'm not sure these are actually the best options and b) that leaves me without a decent aggregator for television reviews.
Stuck in Australia, with a lot of shows not playing (and our digital reception wiping out six channels atm), I need to know what's worth buying/downloading, and tv websites too often fall into slavish fandom and don't aggregate or provide concise objective opinion.
What do you use as review aggregators for music, games, movies, and especially television?
I absolutely loathe metacritic's new layout, it's appalling, and the number of extra clicks I now have to use to (poorly) see what I want has shat me up the wall, so I'm looking around for replacements.
For movies there's always Rotten Tomatoes, and I can use allmusicguide for music and i could use gamerankings for games I suppose. But a) I'm not sure these are actually the best options and b) that leaves me without a decent aggregator for television reviews.
Stuck in Australia, with a lot of shows not playing (and our digital reception wiping out six channels atm), I need to know what's worth buying/downloading, and tv websites too often fall into slavish fandom and don't aggregate or provide concise objective opinion.
What do you use as review aggregators for music, games, movies, and especially television?
In case anyone hadn't noticed it, this earlier thread about the awful redesign doesn't give any other sites as alternatives but Rhaomi's comment does contain this link to a partial and vestigial version of the old site (which seems to be out of date and probably useless but may be of interest to anyone wanting to compare the old to the new).
I don't know about TV shows or movies, but sadly metacritic still seems to be the best aggregator for game reviews. Wikipedia even has a category for this but all the others on that list make new metacritic look like the early Google in terms of simplicity and elegance.
Or maybe I'm missing some new thing about it that makes it so unusable?
I wouldn't say it's "unusable", it's just less usable than it used to be for no apparent gain. For example, compare this to this - the way the new design presents information is just flabbier and harder to skim quickly than the old one.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 7:30 AM on October 8, 2010
I don't know about TV shows or movies, but sadly metacritic still seems to be the best aggregator for game reviews. Wikipedia even has a category for this but all the others on that list make new metacritic look like the early Google in terms of simplicity and elegance.
Or maybe I'm missing some new thing about it that makes it so unusable?
I wouldn't say it's "unusable", it's just less usable than it used to be for no apparent gain. For example, compare this to this - the way the new design presents information is just flabbier and harder to skim quickly than the old one.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 7:30 AM on October 8, 2010
The Movie Review Query Engine IMO is a nice site to summarize reviews, and usually the rankings are posted:
www.mrqe.com
for instance here's The Godfather.
posted by thermonuclear.jive.turkey at 8:19 AM on October 8, 2010
www.mrqe.com
for instance here's The Godfather.
posted by thermonuclear.jive.turkey at 8:19 AM on October 8, 2010
Mod note: The question is about alternatives; you don't need to agree with the idea that Metacritic's design is problematic, but this is absolutely not the place to have an argument about it.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:22 AM on October 8, 2010
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:22 AM on October 8, 2010
http://apps.metacritic.com/ seems to use their old interface.
posted by ShooBoo at 9:18 AM on October 8, 2010 [2 favorites]
posted by ShooBoo at 9:18 AM on October 8, 2010 [2 favorites]
I believe that one's just static (and now out-of-date) data, ShooBoo.
posted by Rash at 1:12 PM on October 14, 2010
posted by Rash at 1:12 PM on October 14, 2010
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posted by Shike at 6:16 AM on October 8, 2010