I was watching some YouTube, trying to find some forgotten gems from retro systems. I ran into one about the Jaguar and decided to watch it.
Well, the fellow said a lot of the games were great, and I was kind of curious about that because I don't think it's controversial to say there's only a handful of decent games on the Jag, but this fellow was rating everything highly.
Later on I sat down to think about it and I realized something... after every game the fellow would say "Oh, and you can get it for about $XX.XX."
At that point the light-bulb went off and I realized this fellow is probably deriving enjoyment from collecting the Jaguar games, not playing them. To him, if he buys a game, plays it for a few minutes to make sure it works, it's probably a winner for him.
For me, who is getting Jaguar games from uhhhh a friend, I don't care about collecting them, I just want some fun stuff to play.
Anyway, I learned my lesson: I'll believe non-collectors' opinions more than collectors because they are mostly concerned with gameplay instead of how it looks on the shelf, or how rare and difficult it was to acquire.
P.S. I don't know how "hot" of a take this is, but I figure it'll probably hurt the feelings of collectors, so that's why I prefixed it.
I think more general advise would be to understand the perspective you receiving and how it relates to yours.
Collectors are great for finding weird and evil things. Like "this cartridge had some special chip that makes it different from every other game on the system" and I think "oooh I kinda wanna try emulating that". Or "this developer made this weird bad game a few years before they found success with their breakout hit series" which can be interesting to check out.
Also a lot of "gamer" reviewers have their own issues. Fromsoft is a great example- they purposely neglect areas of their games that they don't want to focus on, and fans have interpreted their business priorities as genius design decisions that every game should copy. No more minimaps, no tutorials or onboarding systems, no explicit story. There are Nintendo fans who eat up every single thing they do and love to pay a premium for it- somewhat like Apple people.
Not to say those perspectives are "wrong" or shouldn't exist, but it's usually good to try to look at different perspectives.