How do people learn about new games these days? For some reason I stopped reading the online game mags a while ago, and now to start again seems a bit overwhelming. Would be nice to only hear about the real must-play games.
ArsTechnica tends to have very good reviews and I get the vast majority of my gaming news from them (the rest is from friends I know in person.) But that works for me because I am a long time reader and know that their tastes in game are similar to mine. If your tastes skew far differently they may not be a good source. Also, it helps that I read their technical content anyway so I see the gaming news in the course of what I am doing anyway.
In general, the best place to possibly get good reviews is to have friends with similar tastes as you and ask them what they like. Not only will you get recommendations you know are good, you will have someone to talk about the games with/play multiplayer with.
And despite the fact they will be dated, don't forget some of the classics. Planescape Torment and Quest for Glory V were fantastic. Even with dated graphics they stand up well to many modern games, at least to someone with my taste in RPG games.
I generally don't get games on release, unless its something I'm already a fan of and I'm eagerly awaiting the next installment, but theres only one game this has happened with in the past two years (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, I'm looking at you). This means that I hear about the great games months later, or friends bug me to get them or whatever. I do occasionally browse through gamespot, steam and Impulse to see what games people have rated highly and sometimes I'll buy one.
Then again, the only games I've played this year are Modern Warfare 2, Dawn of War 2, Company of Heroes, Fuel of War and Red Faction Guerrilla - all but Modern Warfare 2 came on the THQ multipack I got off steam because I wanted a copy of Company of Heroes. Before this, I'd never even heard of Red Faction Guerrilla, but have been playing it a lot over the past two weeks!
You should really be careful when you ask to filter the information for you. Dig the information yourself or take the advice from friends, I don't see any other way.
I don't follow the recent developments, but I have a few people or teams whose opinions resonate with me, so I regularly read what they say. Here's "Top 9 Games of the Decade" by Auriea Harvey of Tale of Tales, whose opinions I value very highly.
If you're not familiar with their games, check their blog to see if is the kind of games you're interested in. But again, to even know these people whose advice I follow, I used to read many websites, magazines and even visit conferences.
I effectively just track metacritic and one review site that I browse over to every couple of days and read the reviews that look interesting. I go out of my way to avoid learning about future releases, with the exception of Atlus games which can be missed in a way that Halo 3 can not be missed (Halo 3 will still be something you can get two years from now). This way I am only rarely excited about something in the future, which right now I consider a waste of time; there's so much good stuff now that drooling over something six months away is just silly.
I am not completely successful; I knew about Fallout 3 for a while because it got onto some of my RSS feeds that had nothing to do with gaming per se. But for the most part it works.
In all reality you are either a gaming machine and can play all sorts of new games and find information and reviews for each purchase or you can just watch TV and look for the new game commercials, there are a ton and I hadn't noticed until recently.
I personally just buy games at a lag usually they are much cheaper (after a year or two) and time proven, if you are a pc gamer steam is amazing and for consoles I really have no idea I guess I just hear word of mouth about the new games.
I watch Zero Punctuation, and then no matter the verdict I still don't buy the game, because I don't have a console and I haven't booted Windows in over two years.
