I've written a lot of game reviews, but never attached any numbers to them
I want to start adding a 10 point scale but I wonder what "average" should be
Should it be 5/10 like a bell curve or should average be 7/10 like the big boys in ign do it?
I want to give slightly above average games a sixty percent but I don't want people to misinterpret that as me giving them a failing grade either.
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>I've written a lot of game reviews, but never attached any numbers to them
It's best to keep it that way.
I want to touch Shantae's shantaes.
I hate scores that don't have an appropriate scale.
I like the pass/fail approach. Obviously a lot of games are pretty OK, and worth playing.
If you're going to make a scale, you probably need some consistent metrics to measure it, which is difficult because stuff won't always apply
I don't think it's porn
You can have lewd images without them being pornographic
I thought that too, that's why I generally omitted numbers
But I've written hundreds of reviews and in retrospect I want a way that I can organize my favorite games into tiers or at the very least have a header
People only care about the header, if I can start it with a number that will head the entire discussion.
Also I think I write too much in my reviews, too much text is off putting so I'm going to start with at least two pros and cons of each game.
Then I'll attach the regular paragraphs like I typically do.
I think the scale is misrepresented as a lot of people compare the number to public education grading. 0-59=F, 60-69=D, 70-79=C, 80-89=B, and 90-100=A/A+
so when using that system, a 70-something score would be considered 'average'.
Depends on how big you are, by reviewing to your own scale, chances are that your scores will be lower than average meaning if your review counts towards the metacritic than most games will benefit by you not reviewing them so publishers probably wouldn't send you early copies. If you are small enough that your review wouldn't be put on metacritic or you don't get sent review copies than you can score however you want.
I want to do a bell curve
I'm only one person and I only review games I play, therefore the glut of my reviews should be over the five (out of ten) and thus passing
That said I play a handful of really SHIT games on occasion and those deserve a below five.
Then again how do I make a consistent scale when comparing two games of wildly different genres?
Right I think you hit the nail on the head there. People look at a 70 as a game to be shunned or disgusted by. Any triple A game that gets below an 80 is ridiculed, when it converts to 4/5 which is pretty good
Even here we (at least ironically) hamstring games up when they don't get massive unanimous praise.
I could always make a bar that conveniently outlines what each number is with the midpoint in neon green titled "average"
I do it for free and for fun, but also because I play more games than anyone I've ever met or know online and otherwise. Professional reviewers who are paid to play games play less than me.
I typically don't jump on any bandwagon to play games the day of release so being embargoed is no skin off my nose.
It should be a bell curve representation, rather than just making half the scale useless.
It would be interesting to have a bell curve scale where you just put 0 as the average top of the curve, and do a + or - scale as it goes above or below average with an image placement to make it very easy to compare to a clearly represented average.
But I'm sure people wouldn't like lower numbers, or the observed connotations of a negative, even if it's just ever so slightly below average.
>I want to start adding a 10 point scale
DON'T
Go to bed Scott
>I want to start adding a 10 point scale
Enjoy any 7/10 = shit
Use 5 stars, and don't do "half star" bullshit.
1/5 = bad
2/5 = mediocre
3/5 = average
4/5 = good
5/5 = excellent
protip user, the more available scores there are, the less it means. So if you're giving out scores 1 through 10, those scores mean less than if you gave scores 1 through 5. And if you're giving out 9.2's and shit like that then you've become a joke.
No one will ever take me seriously unless I preface the review (or end it) with a big fat number
I imagine people just want to get through my information as quick as possible, so why not summarize it with a convenient little header?
I can't even put my 2 cents into metacritic without a number
I'm not whoever that is
I'm so small you'll never find me.
Even so I want to continue writing about video games.
I know better than to fellate games with 9's left and right. I don't think any reviewer should give more than two games a 10 per year and even that's generous.
I would give maybe a single game a 10/10 a year.
mediocre and average mean much the same and I'd certainly call 2/5 a pass
Also 80% looks way worse than 4/5, just like how 60% has massively negative connotations against 3/5 stars
Make it a 0-3 score based on separate aspects that make up the game
You want to give it a good scoring system that has always worked? Then use reaction pics like GamePro did
Should be 5/10 bell curve. However, what most people don't put into account is the sheer amount of shit games that exist, so when they see all the AAA games sitting in the 7-10 area, there's still a monumental amount of 1-5/10 games that have no polish, no effort, and no publicity. Thus major sites have no interest in reviewing them.
That said, the AAA polish and marketing hype does skew the amount of 9-10/10 games
Review score numbers are garbage. If I was a reviewer I would use something like this.
Highly recommended
Recommended
Fans only
Avoid
If you want a scale, consider instead making it a word such as:
Essential.
Outstanding.
Great.
Good.
Decent.
Mediocre.
Sub par.
Bad.
Terrible.
FFVIII.
It's impossible to score games because everyone has a different opinion on them based on how they play them. A person who plays for fun moght like a game better then a completion person or someone who likes to explore. The only thing you can really critique is if the game controls well or not and that's more a pass / fail. I would stay away from a number system.
X/5 is patrician
Make up some gimmick rating system
>not calling them shantaetaes
Here's the part where I recommend trying to keep your integrity. Don't give into the evil of putting numbers on things like this.
5 should always be "not good buy not bad". "Average" tends to lean more towards it being good than bad so I'd say average is around 6 or 7
If I break it down like that then even the few games I would give a 10/10 would fail to be "perfect"
Homestuck for instant would instantly fail on the merit of its shit art
Metroid Prime would fail on the merit of its back tracking
Breath of the wild would fail (it should) for the low fps and the lack of enemy variety
So here's an important question I also want to know
Is a 10/10 game one that has zero identifiable flaws and thus """perfect"""" or is it the game you enjoyed above all other games in a given year?
This is an important question so I'm attaching an image of Tifa's generous tits with it.
A more suitable "worst game of all time" would be a meme game that everyone admits is shit like crazybus
No it's possible to score. I'm not objective, I am a human being just like everyone else. There are things I enjoy and there are plenty of aspects other than a game's function that I can grade on .
I would give Clannad a very high score, even though it's just a VN for instance. There's no gameplay but it's very emotionally gripping.
Would only work for Conan o'brian and other memesters
I'll just continue being ignored if I don't tow the line and slap a big fat number on things like every other big brother who made it huge.
In fact name me one reputable place you can find a review without numbers other than yahtzee.
>I know better than to fellate games with 9's left and right. I don't think any reviewer should give more than two games a 10 per year and even that's generous.
>I would give maybe a single game a 10/10 a year.
You completely missed the point of my post. I was thinking you must have bad tastes if you started the thread with poorly drawn ecchi of a mediocre game, but now you're leading me to believe you're a bad writer too.
The point of the review score is so that readers can gauge the tone and of the review and get a sense of your tastes before reading. You don't need to have a scale that has ten points when five points works fine for this purpose. People who obsess over Metacritic numbers are not people who care about game criticism. May I remind you that BioShock Infinite has a 94 while God Hand has a 73?
link us ur medium page OP
i know u want to
>Even here we (at least ironically) hamstring games up when they don't get massive unanimous praise.
Most posters here are not being ironic. They truly believe that.
So, I still say you should not do scoring, but if you are going to do a bell curve. This means nothing should ever get a 0 or 10, ever. And also, don't give one score, give many scores to different categories, make quite a few fine grained categories, and do not average them for an overall score.
Use specific tags instead of numbers.
If something is great, good, so-so, make it that.
At least that's up to the reader's arbitrary interpretation of the word, not numbers.
Fuck numbers. Fuck reviews. Fuck you.
tfw 90+ metacritic means a shit game
Do it like how I review things:
Split the game into five categories you believe are the most important and stick to those from now on (Gameplay / Characters / Story / Art / Music for me)
Then rate each category out of 10 and explain your reasoning. Add it all up and you have your score out of 50, then multiply that by 2 so Americans can figure out what grade that is.
Hey OP, can't really contribute anything to the thread but I like the discussion you and other anons are having. I like the points raised by the other anons here, how some people misrepresent or misinterpret the scale, so I want to persuade you not to put numbers, but if you do, guess you gotta go with 1-5 instead of 1-10 or 100 or something.
Have an orgasm for my useless post
youtube.com
>I would give Clannad a very high score, even though it's just a VN for instance. There's no gameplay but it's very emotionally gripping.
This is a good review because you told me why you enjoyed the game and what it lacked for it made up. Adding a number score makes it look like you were paid to give a good a review. Just stay away from number scores and stay with personal reviews because readers are more inclined to base your review on your grade rather then what you write.
It doesn't mean nearly anything. Any aggregation of opinion can barely mean anything just simply based on how radically tastes differ.
I don't think aggregation is inherently wrong, it is simply a statistic and whe websites themselves make that clear. The statistic is not particularly meaningful though, as it replaces all nuance with a number. And one's subjective opinion is always exceptionally nuanced, mapping that to a qauntifiable value is almost dishonesy.
We all do, user.
Even if metacritic is full of shit, people (even from here) hawk around the numbers very closely
I'm convinced a large portion of the userbase here is aware of how dogshit metacritic is, especially the user reviews section full of spiteful children.
That would be advertising. My opinion will not be bought. I play games, I beat them, then I write about them, simple as that.
I would be ok with giving one game per year a ten/ten """perfect"""" score. As for the other end of the spectrum, I don't have time to play shovelware garbage. Anything deserving of a 3 or lower gets dismissed or not even picked up by me.
It's more complicated than that.
Consider this
A website gave the witcher 3 a score that was slightly below the massive praise it was getting. The backlash caused a tremendous dip in advertising revenue from users no longer attending the site.
Big game journalists are running scared of their own fan bases
No one wanted to give breath of the wild anything below a perfect score as the vicious cycle of "10/10" kept feeding in on itself.
That fatass Jim Sterling gave BotW a more deserving score and was subjected to a DDoS attack. I don't like Jim as a person, but what he wrote about BoTW was at least more true than the endless perfect scores it received.
No one gave an actual fuck about my real legitimate Clannad review I posted a few months ago.
I don't.
I want to touch Rottytops
Splitting scores into categories is worse than scoring games in the decimals. Number fetishism like this is why Metacritic is so popular. Use. Your. Words. That's the point of the review. To convince people and to inform people, not to just tell them what you happen to think. You have to argue why and exactly what you like or dislike about a game.
And for God's sake where are the articles? I want to actually read something here. Someone post something they've written, c'mon.
Not that guy, but categories seem fine. I assume you mean numeric scores per category are a problem instead of some simpler quantifier.
Aside from writing a book (which you'd get if you broke down into categories anyway) it could help navigation and flow through the review.
What if you're already sold on the story, but want to know about the audio/visual presentation?
Don't give anything a perfect score ever. That is not how a nornal distribution works. If you have a normal distribution and 50 corresponds to 50th percentile there is no 100. 99th is the highest.
But I feel concerned by what you are saying. You are puffing up you chest and telling us you won't be bought out, you won't be corrupted. Still, every point you're making for using a scoring system is that you want to match up to the major review organizations that you are also poo-pooing.
Take a stance.
Did you even finish reading my entire post?
You split them into categories and then explain why you rated each part as such. No shit it'll be terrible if you just toss a bunch of numbers.
>No one gave an actual fuck about my real legitimate Clannad review I posted a few months ago.
You're on Sup Forums, no one gives a fuck about anything so long as it's video game related.
Normally I'm not an advocate of number scores, but I think in this case I would consider 5 to be an average. I don't think we should go by school grading curves because that's honestly on a completely different system. They mostly go by how good your memory is in retaining certain facts, or deducing mathematical equations, and they don't want you half-assing it, so they needed to raise the standards.
With a video game, though, it's a whole different ballpark.every game is normally graded by it's overall execution and how well it brings new ideas and old ideas together. It would be like a school grading students not only on their memory skills, but in figuring out new mathematical equations, or discovering new scientific theories. That's why I don't think they're comparable.
As for the games themselves, I grade them on one element: the gameplay. Sure, I'll overall judge how well the entire thing comes together, but make no mistake, a man who needs crutches isn't gonna be an olympic medal winner, and so too a game will not be good if it's being propped up by a thousand things, but the gameplay is nowhere to be found. Take a few examples:
>Uncharted
>take out the boring story and the boring graphics
>you're left with a mediocre quick time event simulator
>3/10 game
>Shantae or Bayonetta or Dragon's Crown
>remove the disgusting sex fanservice and cinematics and graphics
>left with nothing but garbage platforming and button mashing
>4/10 for each
>Dwarf Fortress
>no graphics to subtract, no story to subtract, it's literally nothing but gameplay so it has no crutches to prop itself up with
>9/10 at the least
>Ben Kuchera is a fan of video games
The dude constantly whines about video games; because he's trapped in his shitty career with no respect
The dude is right no, most game bloggers have no respect for video games as an artistic medium
If your rating system is known to include such bias, I think this is fine.
Otherwise it's shit.
>No one will ever take me seriously unless I preface the review (or end it) with a big fat number
No one was going to take you serious to start with and fuck meta critic.
You should be considered with learning how to actually write. Any dumbass can slap a number at the end of a few shoddly composed paragraphs.
4/10
>That fatass Jim Sterling gave BotW a more deserving score and was subjected to a DDoS attack. I don't like Jim as a person, but what he wrote about BoTW was at least more true than the endless perfect scores it received.
Hate to break it to you but he gave it a 7/10 purely to get a reaction.
>goes on to scream from the rooftops he still thinks it's worth playing and people shouldn't be up in arms over a number (but are anyway)
The last time I saw someone post an article they wrote they were shamed for self-advertising.
No one assumes the big names working for the big sites are self-promoting so IGN gets a free pass for their shit to get posted here. But if any lesser known article is linked or posted people shreik for a pastebin or ridicule the poster for shilling, even if they post a screengrab.
I want to mesh and fit in with what's commonly done
Part of my motivation for using numbers is to make the article easier to digest for the average person who glances at what I have to say. A number prefacing a review indicates
Being bought and paid for has nothing to do with attaching a number score to your review. I want my information to be more easily digestible so that people won't glance at my wall of text and immediately dismiss it in favor of someone who wrote far less, or who included a brief summary at the top.
Part of the impetus for me in wanting to categorize games with a score came from a chart I saw in Sup Forums of all places. There's a list of all the shows Oji-san gave a 4.5 and 5 to.
I want to be able to make a concise list of excellent games I approve of strongly enough to give such a high score.
No shit, he said as much before he ever even played the game on a podcast.
And I'd still consider it a more valid score than the endless jerking off of other game journos.
Don't forget, you're discrediting him for liking Horizon and Skyrim, which is fine, but you're completely behind IGN and gamespot for liking Zelda, even though they gave Horizon and Skyrim positive scores as well.
Because they aren't being hypocrites in their scoring and have no previous bias against the product they're reviewing? Are you serious?
wew, got em. upvoted
Yeah that's exactly how he words his "response" after he's baited a bunch of people.
His reviews are laughably poor in quality.
My reviews are very encompassing. They're generally way too long though so I trim them down and fuse topics together to create a message that isn't too overly wordy (it takes awhile to finagle the flow of the review into something I like)
Even after all the trimming I still get complaints that they're too long. I don't want to trim any more information than I do, at the very least I can add a summary for the impatient.
how is it a valid score if it's a reaction that he holds without even playing the game?
You don't need to circlejerk in the opposite direction to anti-circlejerk
It's the literally the opposite. The fewer scores there are, the less they mean because because they come too vague. By your own logic, might as well just have 2 scores, thumbs up and thumbs down. But that removes nearly all meaning from them.
There's so much hate for the 0-10 system here and it's completely misplaced. Any system of reviewing will be shit if the reviewer is shit.
>I want to start adding a 10 point scale but I wonder what "average" should be
>Should it be 5/10 like a bell curve or should average be 7/10 like the big boys in ign do it?
5/10 should be within neutral range which is what I assume you mean when you say "average." The actual average should just develop naturally. IE, let's say you review 10 games and, coincidentally, most of them are good. Then the average score of those 10 games will be higher than 5, don't give good games a lower score just to keep the average at 5 or vice versa.
>I want to give slightly above average games a sixty percent but I don't want people to misinterpret that as me giving them a failing grade either
Slightly above average games, by which I'm also assuming you mean slightly better than neutral should still be in the 5 range. Your scale should look like this:
~
What does the quality of his reviews have to do with the reviews and their intent themselves?
Should be a three point scale.
>What if you're already sold on the story, but want to know about the audio/visual presentation?
Then you'd skim until you found the section of the review that talks about those aspects.
Even when you explain it, you're still focusing on numbers. That's unhealthy.
The bigger problem is that when you rank each aspect individually you're subconsciously divorcing them from each other. Everything is always about the big picture and how each aspect impacts each other. A five out of five game might not have a five out of five soundtrack or five out of five story. This shit is so nebulous. The less numbers the better. But I still think clarifying between bad good great and excellent is important.
Shoo shoo baiter
Are they poor?
Why is he so popular then? He can't be getting all this money from writing literal shitty reviews on games.
>Because they aren't being hypocrites in their scoring
>the people who gave Skyrim a 10/10 and called gamers entitled for not blindly trusting their scores
>"NOT HYPOCRITES"
>how is it a valid score if it's a reaction that he holds without even playing the game?
Because it at least acknowledges the occasional flaw, instead of every other game journalist who jerks it off as perfection.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't actually agree with many points in his review, and I think he's a big fat casual. But I'm just saying that I'd still trust a 7/10 score over a 10/10 score.
then they are both wrong and you just like lower numbers.
the anti-jerk point evidently stands though, as in it's a bad score if it isn't explicitly based on gameplay comparisons
The problem with that is that not all categories are equal and some games are more than a sum of their parts. Gameplay should obviously be worth more than the other categories but sometimes it depends on the individual game and how those elements interact with each other.
There's not a mold all reviews should follow, format wise.
Most of the concern is on the rating scale, is it not?
If it's a sum of its parts and doesn't require breaking down traditionally, then don't do it.
>presentation
Will someone please explain what the fuck that word means in the context of a video game review?
It seems like the most meaningless word in existance
>the presentation of the game was excellent
What the fuck does that even mean?
Have you read any of them? They're complete trash that reads like a 12 year olds rant. The only value his reviews have is the score and his ability to tie it into his next Jimquisition episode.
>My reviews are very encompassing.
Super. You add a number and no one's going to read them.
I like more accurate numbers, and it's objective fact that Zelda isn't perfect, or anywhere near it, and no matter how much you think the flaws are made miniscule by the benefits, they're not.
You can't magically whisk away the fact that hard mode is DLC. you can't sweep the sub-30 FPS under the rug. You can't pretend that non-remappable controls are somehow an innovative feature.
>it's a bad score if it isn't explicitly based on gameplay comparisons
Yes, this is true, and the gameplay has a ton of issues, like input lag as a result of the FPS drops.
It's code for how much they were paid by the marketers.
Without context it seems to be arbitrary.
Maybe being used as a shortcut.
For instance, visual presentation could be things like a consistent and intuitive user interface.
Audio presentation could be voice acting and soundtrack work, including mixing and handling them in situations like 3D audio/surround sound as well as making sounds reflect the weight of their origin.
I've always used a 4 star system, but a bit unorthodox of one. Essentially, for every good aspect of a game that I think is notable, it gets half a star. Bad aspects don't subtract a half unless it's exceptional. So, a game with a lot of good things can hit a 4-star rating, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. Consequently, a game with just a few good things can earn a meager 2 stars, but also not have anything exceptionally bad about it.
So really it's less of a quality rating and more of a "how impressed I was" rating.
Sometimes they write presentation as if they mean that the game presents itself seriously, as if it's the plot. That's three wildly different things between us that can all mean "presentation"
ITT a lot of autism
OP I've thought about this and if I were ever to do any kind of grading/ranking system, I wouldn't use numbers or the traditional A-F, both of those systems are far too loaded. Instead I'd do a categorical scale like A-F but with different letters/labels.
So something like
Terrible > Bad > Okay > Good > Excellent > Perfect
And never use Perfect except for memeing
If you're going to have a Perfect, you'll need Shit too.
haha caca
Drop the perfect and I love that system. Leaves room for improvement in every game.
>I like more accurate numbers, and it's objective fact that Zelda isn't perfect, or anywhere near it, and no matter how much you think the flaws are made miniscule by the benefits, they're not.
By that merit you'd almost never give a game over 7/10 if you think it's accurate to botw. A game having some flaws is an inevitability.
Wrong. The middle of the road shouldn't be "okay".
"So-so", "Neutral", "Variable", or "Preference/Taste" (think of a word) would be better suited.
>Is a 10/10 game one that has zero identifiable flaws and thus """perfect"""" or is it the game you enjoyed above all other games in a given year?
this is just another reason numbers are so terrible they dont actively convey the point yoir trying to make. ssbm is unmatched in its mechanics and gameplay to this day and though im a tournyfag and its my favorite game ever id never call it perfect when certain flaws like shit balance, even legal stages having changes and a very basic training mode all of which are problems many new games can solve. you run into the same problem with dmc where 4 is honestly probably the best gameplaywise but has shit content and isnt everyones favorite story/atmosphere thus unable to be perfect. so dont use numbers becuase when you asign a single value across a varity of elememts youre attributing greater importance to some and are you really going to be the guy who ranks something else over gameplay? if not youre going to have to give perfect scores to imperfect games
That seems like a decent idea
Divorced of numbers while still getting a general idea across
Shit is reserved for colossal flops like No Man's Sky and thus is omitted from the gauge unless necessary.
Just change the word to Magnificent
The highest millitary award isn't the "perfect" medal, but it's the very best you can get.
What about "acceptable"? How is that for a middle score?
Actually, I think BOTW is a 4/10. I'm way more harsh on it than Jim. The thing is that I don't give it any slack whatsoever because it had all of nintendo's funding and advertising and they personally knew the hardware inside and out. So any flaw in the game should not exist, period.
10/10 doesn't mean perfect. There's no such thing as a perfect piece of art. There are no upper or lower bounds. 10/10 just means that a game's virtues are so great that they overshadow it's flaws completely.
Wow that's the exact same thing as zero through five stars except it requires more context. Good job dude.
One thing that needs to change will ALL reviews is it actually needs two scores, numeric or otherwise.
Using BotW as a scapegoat. I'm not a Nintendo or Zelda fan, but I respect it enough to say it's probably a good game but it's not for me.
All the 10/10s in the world will not convince me, and for it to be touted as the best game of all time (or equivalent) is worse.
Therefore, two scores: one for people interested in the game specifically/already (fans, etc.) and a score for the general public (average joe).
So it may be a 10/10 for Zelda fans, people expecting that from it, and a 7/10 for people looking at it for what it is to them, foreign.
There's no point in just relabeling the scores because of an autistic hatred of numbers. That doesn't mean your reviews will be separated from the bias and other issues that have sown distrust in scores in the first place.
That image pisses me off so much. I might put my reviews out late but I only write them up after fully completing a game, sometimes with every achievement, and never on baby bullshit easy mode like that shit did
It makes me want to wretch that such unqualified assholes are paid to write about games. So many of these paid assholes are dogshit at games.
What reviews?
Those were just random names off the top of my head.
If I were to really do it, I'd probably use really weird labels, or crazy letters that seemingly have no association. Why? Two reasons, one to again, create a sort of "clean slate" where people don't have preconceived notions, and two, as a sort of "clickbait" tactic to get people to go "wtf is this rating system" so they want to read more. Point two would probably backfire if any of my previous endeavors are anything to go by(oh here we go, something like this ), but eccentricity is my style, mang. Can't just drop that shit.
That's both wrong and retarded. If you get something wrong you got it wrong and the score should reflect that. Virtues are such a nebulous subjective comment that any amount of them can make up for shortcommings with that logic.
I'm not going to read the entire thread, but one thing that stood out was that you want a header for all of it. Maybe this? You could always change the variables, but it still is on a 1-10 scale technically since it's all divided; however because of it's design most people don't really notice that. They see things that the game excels at or is weak on.
did Sup Forums like it should be infinitely negative in opposite direction
>ero-factor and visuals not at 0
>gameplay not being the only thing filled in
fucking scoring systems!
That's a pretty fucking good idea
What is cohesion?
It's not. The concept of 10/10 representing perfection is silly. For one, each score should represent consistent intervals. A base 8/10 should be as much better than a 6/10 as a 5/10 is to a 3/10. If 10/10 is a literally non-existent upper limit, then it might as well not be included at all, same with 0. So you'd be left with a 1-9 scale for no reason other than autism.
after ejaculating to the ero scene, how long the controller/disc/console/screen/whatever stuck to the wall
Like do all the parts of work together. Music fitting in with the context of the game (ie not screamo in a cute girls in Edo Japan game), gameplay not being all over the place. Basically does it all compliment each other.
not him but I'd think it would be how well everything works together. Like RAGE would be my example of bad cohesion -- both the gunplay and the driving mechanics were alright but they didn't really make sense together.