Review aggregators are inherently awful. My favorite gaming site is Kotaku, my favorite thing about it is they don't give review scores.
That said, I love playing around with Metacritic data. I broke down the top 10 best reviewed games of all time

Metacritic doesn't distinguish between games that have the same aggregate score, so I went in and weighted the titles that have more reviews—it's more impressive to score a 98 if it's based on 86 reviews than if it's based on 24 reviews

There's other weird factors. Games from the pre-internet era are obviously more difficult to find review scores for. And some genres just tend to review better than others, the types of hardcore games that the types of people who become game reviewers would like.

I wanted to break down games by where they're made, to help localize an industry that can feel clinically global sometimes. I know many games are developed in multiple places by multiple companies, but I mostly tried to simplify all the data to make it digestible.

Anyway, let's look at the results: it's pretty wild that Nintendo takes 6 out of the top 10 "best" games of all time, with Rockstar taking 2. That's *multiple* Mario and *multiple* Zelda games in the top 10

When I think of Rockstar, I think of them as a Scottish company, but they used all their studios around the globe together to make Red Dead Redemption 2, so I listed their headquarters in NYC as the location for that one

The most interesting entries in this top 10 are the outliers: SoulCalibur on the Dreamcast! Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2! And Metroid Prime, my favorite game ever maaaade—Metroid never gets its due.

For games that are on multiple platforms, I used the version of the game with the most reviews, making it the "de facto" version of the game that presumably most people played.

Here are the best-reviewed games of 2020 so far (using North American release dates), with data up to date as of last night when I put this together.
So many of these are remakes/re-releases/endless sequels, and I used to think this was a bad thing.

But lately I've been thinking, there are so many games coming out every month, how am I ever going to play all of them? But the last few years, this focus on well-designed re-releases of classic games has allowed me to revisit games that I would've never played otherwise.

I'm playing Okami for the first time ever on my Switch, after hearing about it for the last 14 years. I'm so glad that Okami consistency gets re-released on newer platforms so I can actually revisit it in 2020, rather than let it disappear into the abyss of 2006 PS2 games.

All media struggles to remain publicly available as technology advances, but it's easier to keep a classic novel in print over decades than it is to port a classic video game to entirely new hardware every 5 years. Too often, this means video games lose their history.

But lately I've been really happy to see older video games stay alive through remasters and re-releases. A lot of this seems to be led by the Switch, which has gotten more 2006-era games on it than I would've ever imagined.

The Switch is super popular but with weaker hardware than its competitors. Publishers are scrambling to put SOMETHING on it, and hey, you've got this perfectly great game from a few years ago that's gathering dust. I'm glad we can actually dust it off and play it again.

Let's break down the best games of 2020 so far:
-1 remake
-2 enhanced re-releases
-2 spinoffs
-3 sequels
-1 prequel
-1 entirely new IP

Previously I really hated this about games, that it felt like a dearth of original ideas. But video games are the marriage of art and technology, so the iterative nature of technology is always going to be a part of the medium. Rather than shunning it, I gotta learn to embrace it

Here's the most well-reviewed Switch games ever released. It mostly makes sense, but it's fun to see some unexpected 3rd-party games up there, like Divinity: Original Sin, Undertale, Celeste, and Dragon Quest.

A lot of 3rd party games that originally thrived on other platforms are getting a second lease on life through their Switch ports, and that warms my heart

Here are the most well-reviewed PlayStation 4 games ever released. The PS4 is 4 years older than the Switch, so it's got a longer history of titles to pull from.

I had never thought about how much of Sony's game development is based in SoCal until I made this list!

And here are the best Xbox One games released so far. Funny how much it looks like the PS4 list... but just slightly less good.

Look at how tiny all the review quantities are for Xbox One games—in our current generation, the PS4 has become the gold standard for home console gaming, and Xbox One versions are considered secondary. So these multiplatform games have far more reviews on PS4 than Xbox.

Literally the only game on this list that isn't also available on PS4 is Forza Horizon.
Although it's worth noting INSIDE—one of my fav games of all time—was first developed with Microsoft platforms (Xbox and PC) in mind.

Microsoft's fall from grace as a game developing company has dovetailed with the pleasant surprise of the best indie Xbox games all getting ported to Switch, like Cuphead & Ori and the Blind Forest.

It's nice that Nintendo has carved enough of its own niche in the industry that Microsoft doesn't see it as competition anymore, enough that they're comfortable putting their own first-party games on Switch. This would've been inconceivable to me a decade ago.

Doing all these platform comparisons made me want to make the same list for PC games. Which, obviously, aren't limited by console generations.

For how long the history of PC gaming is, it's wild that this list is even more dominated by a few companies than the console lists are. #RememberWhenValveMadeGames

I'm not a huge BioWare fan, but I'm super impressed that they netted 2 of the top 10 best-reviewed PC games of all time—Baldur's Gate II and Mass Effect 2—a decade apart from each other and under different publishers!

Mass Effect 2 ends up being the only EA title to appear on ANY of the spreadsheets I've posted in this thread so far??