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, 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's 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 which display the player has actually played the game to a respectable degree should count.
I disagree, I think it's really odd to Vote something as good if you have not played it, without the context of gameplay it's impossible to understand if you would enjoy gameplay aspects like controls and all. So Voting a 5 on lies of P is not warranted, it's impossible to know. The best you can do this way is "this looks really interesting and enjoyable to me".
However that is not true for the opposite: You can easily gauge from a video if you would not enjoy a game, by understanding it's themes, story, seeing it's graphics and all. That the gameplay might be better than the rest is irrelevant, nobody is going to play a game when everything but the gameplay is shit.
A "I'm never going to play it, because it's shit/looks disgusting/the content disgusts me or whatever" is a valid zero in such a Vote in my opinion.