BioShock, Orange Box, Halo 3, Ratchet & Clank Future, Virtua Fighter 5, Zelda: Twilight Princess, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Oblivion, Gears of War, and so on.  Yes, they’re ALL great games.  What do they have in common?  Major publications or websites reviewed them as 10/10 games.  The highest score possible.  By all accounts there should be nothing better than “perfect”, right?  I call phooey!  The scales we use for reviewing games have lost their meanings.  Yes, I know I’ve ranted about reviews recently, but this is a different aspect of the problem I want to discuss today and it’s frankly making me disregard the ratings completely.

What does it mean to give a game a numeric rating?  Numbers, by their very definition, are quantifiable.  Aren’t we supposed to be able to compare numbers to see which one is greater or lesser?  If we’re representing our impression of a game with a single number system, shouldn’t we generally consider ratings from some games to be comparable to ratings in other games (even avoiding the question of cross-generation review comparisons, we’ll assume we’re only talking current-gen review scores here)?  Then what happens when all the “great” games get 10/10 as their score?  What happens if another game comes out that royally trumps them in every way?  Are we forced to go back an retro-correct old reviews?  Are we supposed to “bold” the 10 score, maybe color it red or even gold?  Should we taken Nigel’s lead from Spinal Tap and simply make the scale go to 11 because, well, 11 is greater than 10?  It’s getting ridiculous.

We all know “that guy” that is so polar that every sucks or everything’s awesome with nothing existing in the middle, right?  That’s how I feel the current review-scape is heading.  In a way, I almost prefer the simpler scales like “two thumbs up/down” or “skip/rent/buy” as they leave a lot more wiggle room without pegging Halo 3 in some mysterious quasi-space above/below/around/beside BioShock, Orange Box, Oblivion and other 10/10 games.  If they were all simply ranked as “buy” or even “must buy” games, I’d have much less problem with the current scheme.  Breaking scores down into the tenths place of decimals or single percentage points absolutely implies that we should be able to careful compare and rank games within the entire spectrum and pegging a game as “perfect” destroys that ability.

I think a lot of the problem comes from the fact that a lot of people (myself included) seem to only care about games rated 8/10 or higher, but in reality, shouldn’t an “average” game be ranked somewhere in the middle of the scale?  By its definition, if you take all the possible review scores and average them, you’ll get a 5/10 but a game review score of 5/10 pretty much says “run for your life or my stink will haunt you for months“.  Do we just need to get our bearings again?  And if so, what does that mean for our existing review scores?

How do you feel about the current state of game reviewing?  I’m not asking if you simply use reviews as a guideline or anything like that, I’m specifically asking if you see the value or need to get granular with scoring systems and then clump all of the best games at the absolute top of the scale with no room for discerning one from another?  I’d appreciate your suggestions or remedies for this problem.

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