Fifty

[haruvister]

Throughout my gaming childhood, I was brought up by Amiga Power. Yes, it was more of a kind of rambling, sardonic uncle than a proper dad, but it was cleverer than a room full of foxes at a beard-stroking convention and funnier than a kitten in a teapot. One of its most admirable qualities was its review manifesto. Simply put: in a world where review scores are a necessary evil, 0 should equal worthless, 100 is perfect, and - here's the crucial point - 50 is average.

But these days it seems to me that, in the eyes of certain fan boys anyway, scores begin at 80 and end at 100. I've witnessed great dismay at, say, LittleBigPlanet's inability to muster a perfect score in EVERY publication. Yet who can blame anyone for being dismayed after the storm of hyperbole swirling around games like Halo 3 and GTAIV? The precedent, it seems, is set.

Yes, 2007 and 2008 have produced some of the best games ever. And I'm really not ungrateful. But I've just glanced at the last 50 Xbox 360 games on Metacritic, and only four of them muster a score below 50. When 93% of games released score above the numerical median, does this mean that median must be forced upwards? Or is it just that review scoring is horribly unbalanced and should thus be ignored?

 

[Vallen00]

It could be that the quality of most games has been raised and the scoring system is now inadequate. It could also be that games need to be judged differently. A game should be primarily judged on gameplay and storyline. In-game music, voice acting, replay value, and evn graphics should take a backseat to those two things. Scores would probably be more balanced if they did, but that will probably not happen.

 

[Novajam]

Reviewers get paid to muster up a certain score. The publisher buys advertising on the publications website/magazine, and then if the price is right, they get a positive review.

It's hard to judge a game review these days. The best way decide whether or not to buy a game is to do your own research, read about it and try to pick out the bullshit. The user reviews section here on The Escapist is pretty good too. We're not afraid to say if something's crap.

 

[searanox]

Another issue is that gamers tend to look only at triple-A titles, which tend to be fairly good in the first place, not to mention far-between. If you actually look at all the games released and factor in those mediocre Diablo clones, budget titles, straight-to-bargain-bin releases, etc. then you'll find the average is actually around the 5.0 mark. The problem is, most magazines simply don't have the time to review all those games, and so only review the ones that gamers are interested in, focusing their attention on lengthy, in-depth articles on the more important games rather than all the shovelware. It also helps that the magazines get paid by publishers for big exclusives, of course. Fact of the matter is, all these "crap" games that we complain about are actually some of the best ones available, compared to most. The difference is, most of those other games don't get coverage in mainstream gaming media, don't get advertising, and aren't necessarily targeted to the same market to begin with. Why do you think Staples has a huge budget computer game section? People buy those games, but they don't read the reviews about them like other gamers do - often because there are no reviews to begin with, but also likely because they look for different things in their games than we do.

 

[PurpleRain]

You do have to admit, due to modern graphics, new technology and time put into these games, scores may reflect accordingly.

On the other hand, I fail to see how buggy pieces of crap like Alone In The Dark managed to geat a good score.

 

[Obiter]

I generally ignore numerical scores. They simply don't capture the nuance of gameplay. There is no meaningful difference in my mind between an "8.2" and an "7.8". The only thing a numerical score contributes is to broadly identify particularly mediocre games, say anything getting less than a 7 (though even there you can find a remarkable consistency between asshat reviewers opining on a game they don't understand [http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ds/mysterydungeonshirenthewanderer?q=shiren]).

I much prefer to rely on qualitative reviews (i.e., critically written full-length ruminations). At least with these you can identify the biases of a reviewer and compare them to your own. Unfortunately, the world of gaming journalism has yet to produce a single reviewer who functions in the same way as do restaurant critics or book reviewers, which is to say a person with whom the reader can identify a shared taste and come to rely on. They hey, since I'm here, I'll give a shout-out to The Escapist as one place where the primordial soup of games reviewing is beginning to shows signs of emergent intelligence.

Another hugely valuable resource is word of mouth from other players. Discussion threads are better than MetaCritic! Since people generally only go online to ***** about something, you can be sure that flaws in a game will show up very quickly in conversation.

 

[Unknower]

I'm pretty tired right now so take that into consideration when you read this post.

I don't know about the school systems in other countries, but at least here you get a grade between 4-10 in tests, where 4 is fail and 10 is win. This leads to 7 being "satisfactory", not bad but not great either ---> average. Even though some reviewers give games scores from between 0-100, the school grades still affect their thinking, thus 70 ends up as the average score.

About Metacritic. Example: let's assume I'm right about 70 being the average in 0-100. 3 is the average in 1-5 scale, right? But when they change that 3 to the 0-100 scale, it changes to 60. Also, Metacritic doesn't take into consideration that some sites, like Gamespot, give scores from 1-10, rather than 0-10, which raises the score of some games.

 

[Caliostro]

I'm going back to the root of the problem here, again:

How do you express a complex opinion numerically? If I ask you to rate all your real friends from 0 to 100, could you? How do you accurately "measure" the quality of a game? Is there like a "qualitometer" that you hook up to a game and it uses some space-age 4 dimensional quantum equation to translate a game's worth numerically? If so, why do we need reviewers at all?

You can't. Numeric reviews are all bullshit, generally speaking hypocritical bullshit to be accurate. Not even the actual reviewer can tell you why Game X got 89% and no 88 or 90... or 79... It's all made up, based on a very biased and subjective scale. It's like eyeballing measures and weights...

Generally speaking, when a review comes with a number attached, like some contrived "price tag", I don't bother reading it or even give it much consideration at all. It shows the reviewer doesn't trust his own review enough that he feels he needs to add a little random number at the end so people get the idea whether or not he liked the game.

 

[haruvister]

Thanks for the link, harhol. '73%' should have been the subject of this thread.

Wouldn't it be smashing if all games reviewers could abandon numerical scores? Seriously. The automated twitch one feels towards the bottom-right of a two-page spread: I'd love to see that made obsolete. It's the reason, for example, I abandoned Empire magazine in favour of Sight & Sound. Out with star ratings; in with verbs, abverbs, nouns and adjectives! Like Caliostro says, the qualities of art aren't quantifiable. I mean, say Mozart's Requiem is only 95% genius... WTF is the other 5%?

 

[qbert4ever]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm a fan of the number system, and anybody that needs to ask "why is it 88 instead of 89?" is somebody that reads waaaaaay too much into it. Review numbers are just a simple system to tell you at a glance the reviewers general feeling toward a game. The difference between 88% and 89% is that just that, one percent. The person writing the review feels that game x was good, but game y is just a teensy tiny bit better.

Simple as that.