Let’s pretend someone prepares a special soup for you and then asks you to give that soup a score on a scale of 1-10.  How nice right?  You love soup! Okay so now its just you and the soup.  There’s a spoon there too.  Maybe a napkin.  But nobody else.  Even the chef is out of the equation. You grip your spoon, hoping and expecting that what you put in your mouth is going to be the best soup ever.

You scoop up a big helping of the soup, and gently slurp it into your eager, trembling mouth.  Within seconds, the flavor fills your senses, awakens your taste buds, literally wakes you up.

It tastes…. like dog shit.

My question to you is this.

Do you have to finish the whole damned bowl to say that the soup tastes like crap?  Are you totally unqualified to pass judgment on that liquid bile until you’ve digested every last drop from the bowl?  If you feel that way, then you eat it. ‘Cause if I get a bowl of shit soup, I’m telling anyone who will listen to stay away from it.

The same goes for good soup, but I really don’t feel like painting another olfactory image for you right now.

Now, let’s blindly and recklessly apply what we just learned from our soup to video game reviews.

To be clear, Sarcastic Gamer doesn’t technically review video games.  Our people play and usually finish the games, and then relate their experience with said game to the handful of fine peeps that visit this site on a daily, or annual basis.  We don’t submit those scores to Metacritic, mostly because our new score system consists of only 2 stars meaning the mathmatical translation of those review scores would be either a 50 or a 100.  Additionally, there’s a lot of empty responsibility in being a part of the Metacritic quotient that we are virtually incapable of shouldering without turning into egotistical snobs.  Plus Metacritic would probably laugh us off the Internet…  Kinda like the way we all laugh when their bulletproof system gets tanked by angry fanboys.

With that out of the way, what the hell is a review anyway?  It’s you trusting some other guy who you have probably never met, and is probably somewhat of a prick when not in the public eye, to tell you which games to buy, rent, or avoid… right?

So, if that’s what a review is, (and that IS WHAT A REVIEW IS), then why in the wide world of sports do people get so damned worked up about them?

The people who review video games for the BIG BIG BIG BIG sites do it for a living.  It’s their job, and I am willing to bet that on more than one occasion they do the same thing I do at my job from time to time.  They mail it in because they’re just spent.  It happens.  Just like when I mail it in, the guys who review games sometimes get busted.  Sort of what happened to Jim Sterling earlier this week at Dtoid.  At least Jim doesn’t, fit the bill of the more agregious offender, in my opinion…

THE ALMIGHTY AMAZING VIDEO GAME JOURNALIST/SAVIOR OF ALL GAMING

In many other cases these are also people with INSANE video game pedigrees that want you to know how incredibly smart they are.  They evaluate video games in ways you and I would never even think of.  I’ve read a ton of elitist game reviews, where I couldn’t help but feel like the author was trying to tell me what a dumbass I am.  (I have hate mail and a wife for those purposes.)

Those guys are honest, but turn in total overkill reviews and are some of the hardest people in the world to impress.  I don’t necessarily need you to have graduated Magna-Cum-Awesome from the University of Framerate to counsel me on my game decisions.  As a matter of fact, the only thing I really want to know before I plop down 60 bucks for a title is…

Is this game worth it?  Is it fun?  What kind of stuff do I get to do in it.

Call me simple, but I think if you were being honest with yourself, you’d realize that your criteria aren’t all that different than mine.

Now we’re getting somewhere.  My point will be clear once you click here for the wrap-up.

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