Common Sense MediaReviews 56

I usually write pretty thorough reviews, but for this site, there's not much to say about it. For one, it used to be good. Then they over exaggerated everything to the max. Most critics on Common Sense Media don't even have kids, miss obvious details in every game, movie, or book, and if they even held it, they didn't finish it. If you go on this website, only look at the kid reviews. The parents are just as overprotective as the critics. The kids are the ones who experienced it. They will tell you what you want. It's also full of spam...

Just read their negative latest review on 'Brian Banks' from Common Sense Media.

These Common sense media critics like Tara McNamara, are total and complete losers. Bashing a great family, faith movie is so wrong in so many ways. Everyone is so sick of Common Sense Media. They're almost like evil Hollywood tribalists in disguise. Pretending to be family-friendly when in fact they're wolves in sheep's clothing.

Are they truly a non-profit? I'd like the Feds to step in and investigate this top to bottom.

They pretend they're a family-friendly, faith-based organization - but they're far from it. If you look deeply into their reviews, they actually bash faith-based films while giving great reviews to sick and twisted movies.

Don't trust these guys. They'll go on a Thursday to the box office to try to up their competitors with a negative movie review. Horrible people running this website.

Movie critics in general are simply losers who wish they could be filmmakers. They will be forgotten as that heavy-set critic with glasses who died - roger something. Movies live on - critics don't.

I'm extremely disappointed with common sense media's review information because they are leaving out so much information from the content they're reviewing it's like they aren't even trying and honestly I'm just as surprised by movie content as I would be if I didn't look up the reviews on common sense media if not more so. In my opinion the only way someone would be happy with common sense media's reviews is if they're a teenager trying to watch movies or other content their parents would rather not allow them to see. As for me I'm big into family friendly content that for the most part won't make anyone uncomfortable so I'll only use IMDb for information from now on.

In nearly every situation, Common Sense Media provides well-written yet succinct critiques of movies, games, music, and even websites. Unlike most other "family review" sites, they do not have an extreme Christian bias and will review any movie with an open mind. They give two ratings... one is mostly for parents, which is the recommend age for the movie.

It is very detailed and not just a rating like PG or PG-13... they will specifically explain that one movie is good for 11 and up and another might be 14 and up.

I do have one minor issue with them... they decided to give the website HomestarRunner.com a score of "15+", implying that the site would be inappropriate for anyone under 15. While I do agree with the 4/5 they gave for H*Rs quality... the fact that they think that the Brothers Chaps mostly harmless collection of flash cartoons is only for older teens and adults makes me wonder if they even watched them.

But besides that whiny rant, I actually enjoy using this site to see what they think of things. They can be trusted in most cases.

I've seen my parents use this site before for the purposes of "checking on" games before I play them, and the results are laughable. The main reviewers on the site- those who are paid to do review the games, are terribly biased.
The main premise of the site is a place for parents to talk about and review media (as the name suggests) and share the ideas to the public, which works on paper, but everything has become terribly colluded.
I once read an article on their site about the "Top Ten Worst TV Shows For Kids" and Nick
S Fred was very high on the list. Fred was notorious for his YouTube career in the past, but the Television Show was quite tame. Most parents hated it for how annoying the character was, and though I agree with them, the site had no reservations when it came to bashing every single thing that was "bad for kids", when it truly wasn't.
(Spongebob was on this list. Are you kidding me?)

This goes for the game-by-game, website-by-website reviews as well. For example- there are two similar games called Animal Jam and Club Penguin- two MMOs that are built for kids and can be perfectly safe when used properly. As someone who has had experience with both games- one is obviously better than the other (coughanimaljamcough) but the parent who reviewed the site gave Club Penguin the better rating in Safety and Learning. This makes no sense to me as the Disney team hasn't updated their filter in years- you can say shiiiiiittt and other variations of swear words, but you can't say 'war', lol.
In the Learning category, it was given a 3/5, even though it has no educational content whatsoever, even Animal Jam has more educational tidbits than the Disney game. One of the selling points is actually the "education" aspects lol

I realize that turned into a bit of a rant about two reviews, but this circumstance applies all over the site.

There are, though, positive aspects, as there are negative ones. There are a handful of genuine reviews on the site, if you're willing to dig for them.

I also understand that this is a site built for concerned parents of young children, but really, take everything you see here with a grain of salt.

Thanks,
Whitehat

UPDATE:
I forgot to mention that I saw someone from the website commenting on an article about how to use a Proxy Server, haha. The typing style was very similar to one on the site and it drove me up a wall just reading it- the user using the official Common Sense account was ranting about how kids shouldn't have freedom on the internet. It made them come off as very standoffish. Not really the way to represent your website;)
But a good read if you like comment flamewars!