Kids today, in my day we had to to wait for the game reviews magazines to arrive by boat from England when they were already three months old and we were glad for it. To contact the magazine you had to send a letter in the mail and it MAY be printed six months later.
A more valuable exercise is to actually see some of the review scores from the then popular Mean Machines magazine published in the UK
http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/
The lowest review score I saw in the magazine was 9% and they even advertised it on the front of the magazine:
http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/review/300/road-fighter.php
"Appalling, ruinous, awful, dire, hideous, tragic, frightful and ghastly are just some of the words you could use to accurately describe this festering catastrophe of a shambling mockery of a sick parody of a game cartridge. I quite honestly haven't seen a game so fantastically bad for many, many years, and the only ones I recollect being as disgustingly rubbish as this were old computer budget games that cost £1.99 each. This pustulent title costs ten times more! What's wrong with it? Well, apart from the game being unbelievably simple - there were better and more complex race games than this on the VCS in 1979 - it's also very badly designed and incredibly frustrating. The fuel limit is extremely tight, and one mistake is all you need to bring up the game over message! This is irksome enough on the early levels, but later on it's so annoying it makes you want to smash the cartridge up with anger! Heaping several more generous helpings of irritation is a totally rubbish control method. There's no inertia on the car, the brakes are hopeless and unless you've got astonishingly amazing mega-reflexes, it's almost impossible to avoid crashing into a blue car if it's on your side of the road when it comes onto the screen. Even if you remove the gameplay, there are no redeeming features. As you can see from the screenshots, the graphics are a woeful joke, with infantile sprites, brain-dead backdrops and no animation on the cars. And if you think it looks bad, wait until your hear the sad, booming cacophony of naff effects and chronic, wheezing, inept tunes. Ugh! It's definitely Black Armband day for Nintendo owners everywhere."
- Julian Rignall (Jazza) still reviews games in the US.
This was the highest score I saw in the magazine (98%):
http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/review/279/super-mario-world.php
Here's some other ones to laugh at
http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/review/131/days-of-thunder.php
"What a dire excuse for entertainment! This really stinks and is about as playable as something that's not playable at all. The speedo reads 150 mph, but the car feels like it's being pushed by a couple of arthritic OAPs. With no gears to change, an incredibly simplistic course and no crowd, Days of Thunder has all the tense atmosphere of an episode of Eastenders. The only thing I liked about the game was the introductory sequence, but that's hardly enough to make it worth the asking price. I don't know what Mindscape were playing at when they decided to release this, but if you want to play something good then avoid this like the plague."
http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/review/169/shadowgate.php
" Aaaaaaaaaaggh! I hate this game. It's so-o-o-o frustrating I want to smash it up and then set all the pieces alight. "Playing" it involves struggling to solve puzzles that are made completely obscure by the hopelessly crap commands menu. Making progress even more annoying is the ultra-slow cursor, which moves like a slow-motion crippled slug in a sea of molasses. Another very irritating factor is that during the game there's never any warning of impending death - you're just dumped out of the game in seconds if you make one wrong move. And since it's very easy to make a simple mistake and die, you have to keep saving the game every ten seconds, which gets very tedious. Even the biggest adventure fans will find this a frustrating bore."
And people are complaining about 8/10 scores, man-up and grow a pair. Modern Warfare 3 just made the news for making more money in a week than Batman Returns, some of us grew up playing crap games and still want to know if they are crap.
A more valuable exercise is to actually see some of the review scores from the then popular Mean Machines magazine published in the UK
http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/
The lowest review score I saw in the magazine was 9% and they even advertised it on the front of the magazine:
http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/review/300/road-fighter.php
"Appalling, ruinous, awful, dire, hideous, tragic, frightful and ghastly are just some of the words you could use to accurately describe this festering catastrophe of a shambling mockery of a sick parody of a game cartridge. I quite honestly haven't seen a game so fantastically bad for many, many years, and the only ones I recollect being as disgustingly rubbish as this were old computer budget games that cost £1.99 each. This pustulent title costs ten times more! What's wrong with it? Well, apart from the game being unbelievably simple - there were better and more complex race games than this on the VCS in 1979 - it's also very badly designed and incredibly frustrating. The fuel limit is extremely tight, and one mistake is all you need to bring up the game over message! This is irksome enough on the early levels, but later on it's so annoying it makes you want to smash the cartridge up with anger! Heaping several more generous helpings of irritation is a totally rubbish control method. There's no inertia on the car, the brakes are hopeless and unless you've got astonishingly amazing mega-reflexes, it's almost impossible to avoid crashing into a blue car if it's on your side of the road when it comes onto the screen. Even if you remove the gameplay, there are no redeeming features. As you can see from the screenshots, the graphics are a woeful joke, with infantile sprites, brain-dead backdrops and no animation on the cars. And if you think it looks bad, wait until your hear the sad, booming cacophony of naff effects and chronic, wheezing, inept tunes. Ugh! It's definitely Black Armband day for Nintendo owners everywhere."
- Julian Rignall (Jazza) still reviews games in the US.
This was the highest score I saw in the magazine (98%):
http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/review/279/super-mario-world.php
Here's some other ones to laugh at
http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/review/131/days-of-thunder.php
"What a dire excuse for entertainment! This really stinks and is about as playable as something that's not playable at all. The speedo reads 150 mph, but the car feels like it's being pushed by a couple of arthritic OAPs. With no gears to change, an incredibly simplistic course and no crowd, Days of Thunder has all the tense atmosphere of an episode of Eastenders. The only thing I liked about the game was the introductory sequence, but that's hardly enough to make it worth the asking price. I don't know what Mindscape were playing at when they decided to release this, but if you want to play something good then avoid this like the plague."
http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/review/169/shadowgate.php
" Aaaaaaaaaaggh! I hate this game. It's so-o-o-o frustrating I want to smash it up and then set all the pieces alight. "Playing" it involves struggling to solve puzzles that are made completely obscure by the hopelessly crap commands menu. Making progress even more annoying is the ultra-slow cursor, which moves like a slow-motion crippled slug in a sea of molasses. Another very irritating factor is that during the game there's never any warning of impending death - you're just dumped out of the game in seconds if you make one wrong move. And since it's very easy to make a simple mistake and die, you have to keep saving the game every ten seconds, which gets very tedious. Even the biggest adventure fans will find this a frustrating bore."
And people are complaining about 8/10 scores, man-up and grow a pair. Modern Warfare 3 just made the news for making more money in a week than Batman Returns, some of us grew up playing crap games and still want to know if they are crap.