I buy a lot of video games, but I rarely buy one without having either read positive reviews or gotten a personal recommendation from someone in the know. They're just too expensive to risk getting one that is no good -- even with the ability to sell them used. I just discovered that metacritic has a great collection of game reviews from many different sources. They combine and average the reviews into a single easy to understand rating, but you can follow the links to each review to see the full descriptions.