260: 1984 Out of 10

[MGlBlaze]

I despise some game rating systems out there. Why use a system that uses a percentage score or decimals? What is the quantifiable difference in a single percentage point or one-tenth of a point? It's why I usually avoid places like Gamespot or GameTrailers now. Reviews should only be five stars, with no partial stars. Maybe more, but not much more than 5. Even just a 10-point rating system (without decimals) is probably too much. I remember seeing one already posted that used six stars.

1 - Abysmal
2 - Bad
3 - Average/Compitent
4 - Good
5 - Awesome

Any finer points should be obtainable through the review itself.

The mentioned 'review inflation' would be easier to combat and harder to create (I hope, anyway. I could be wrong.) by simply using a more condensed rating system like that. I know The Escapist and some other places like G4 already use it, but everyone should.

Of course it could be argued that 'as long as we know that a 7/10 actually means it's probably bad or at best average, then it's fine.' I say this is very short-sighted and inconsiderate to potential new gamers who wouldn't know this and would get shafted by a game they thought was good and looked interesting, but really wasn't. It's another thing holding Gaming back from becoming truly mainstream. The industry as a whole really needs to get more mature about how they go about things sometimes. /rant

Anyway, I quite enjoyed the article.

 

[KP Shadow]

This is why I enjoy critics like Angry Joe from Blistered Thumbs. He judges a game on its own merits, rather than how it holds up compared to some other game. He's perfectly willing to give a game a score of two out of ten. And then there's one show that refused to review two games because they didn't want to add a 0 out of 5 to their scoring system.