Since it's already come up repeatedly, I'm going to go ahead and confess: I voted on some games I watched greater than 3 hours of footage of (mostly livestreams) even though I didn't play them.
These games were Lies of P (5 stars, actually the best thing that came out this year and already familiar with the subgenre.)
BG3, and Starfield (0 stars, it doesn't take a genius to figure out these are some of the worst RPGs of '23, if not the decade. You can already smell and see shit, you don't have to bend down and taste it to figure out it's shit.)
And yes, as previously discussed, the negative ratings were motivated by a combination of "I'd rather sound my cock with rusty rebar than play this." and "This game doesn't deserve to be Top 3 ANYTHING."
I might have voted on a few others, but I'm not sure. Perhaps we should do a recount, along with including more games in the vote. I'm also ok with having my votes nullified if that's an option.
This has to be one of the weirdest phenomena in modern society.
Watching other people play games online is still an odd concept to me, but to then rate games on what you're seeing is just baffling.
I remember seeing screens of Flicky in mags and thinking it looked garbage, but playing it was addictive as hell and it's still miles better than half the dross churned out now. Yet if I'd have rated it on just what I saw, both via those screens and in the arcades, I'd have given it a 1/5.
When the next Codex top 100 games list comes around, only votes with mini-reviews that display the player has played the game to a respectable degree should count.