Bara_no_Hime said:
basm321 said:
Now before someone goes off about reading the review vs looking at numbers, let me just say.....
The numerical score should be a representation of the written review and giving something 100% implies there is ABSOLUTLY NOTHING in the game that could possibly be better or fixed.
So, I am wondering if 10/10 scores bug you?
Yes. This is why the only critic I watch/read anymore is Yahtzee.
I'm a teacher. I have never, in my life, given any student work a perfect score. It is always possible to make improvements.
The same goes for games. Game reviews are a massive, pathetic joke anymore.
Think I'm being unreasonable? Here's our very own Jim Sterling to tell you why I'm right:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/4966-Hate-Out-Of-Ten
Blargh. Speaking as an education major and as a student, I'd like to let you know that any teacher who has that horribly, horribly wrong idea in their head is one that I drop without a second thought during the add/drop period. The only exception was this one professor who graded that way, but also made it so an A+ was an 85 or better on his grading scale -- and still made the students work their butts off to get that 85. If you're grading on the standard "an A+ is a 95 or better, and anything lower than that counts for less than full marks on your GPA" scale, while also refusing to give perfect scores,
you are a bad teacher. A perfect score does not mean the paper is perfect; it means that the student hit every mark on the rubric. If your rubric is so demanding that a perfect score requires absolute perfection, you suck at designing rubrics, and apparently didn't deserve a perfect score in your classroom assessment course -- either that, or you went through an alternative certification method, and never even took the course. What's more, there is such a thing as a perfect test; "no such thing as perfection" only applies on subjective assignments. If you give your students an objective test (so math, multiple choice tests, and so on) and a student turns in a test with every answer correct, you had better give them full marks; anything else counts as academic dishonesty on /your/ part.
Now, getting back on topic: A 10/10 for a game should be achievable, but the standard should be high enough that a game shouldn't get it just for being flashy. If we really want to look at this, up to about the fifth generation, the industry was still small enough and enough experimentation was going on that the quality merited lots of clumping on both ends of the scale. There were a lot of terrible games, and also a lot of truly exceptional games, with a lower number of truly average games than there would be on a bell curve. Starting last gen, and becoming complete this gen, the conventions became developed enough, and enough "design by committee" started to take place that both the truly terrible /and/ the truly exceptional games started to disappear, and we had a bell curve with nearly everything falling in the middle.
What I'm saying here is, depending on the scale used (American Education, or "let's use the whole scale") the majority of games should be getting either a 7/10 or a 5/10, respectively. Instead, they tend to cluster around the 8-9/10 range, with more 10/10s than 7/10s. It is highly unlikely that all of those games actually earned those scores.
This is one of the many reasons that I only trust the review if I have no way of playing the game first and no friend's word to take (not likely in this day and age except for the occasional niche release), and even then I only pay attention to the text, not the score. I remember one game in particular that got terrible scores, but it was because it was part of a niche genre that none of the reviewers were fans of. Most of their complaints were examples of well-executed features of the genre, and I wound up buying and enjoying it as a result. The reverse can be true, too; a lot of 10/10s have things that I would count as negatives listed as positive in the reviews.
