IGN's review of ChoroQ

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Originally Posted by MarkRyan

Personally, I hate rating games period. But I think using the entire scale, 1-10, is a lot more flexible than the A, B, C, D, fail shit. There might as well only be a 5 star scale if you're going to limit what a "good" score is to three numbers.

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That just so happens to be the system Im in favor of.

Besides, that was Next Generation's system for years, and it worked just fine.

***** - Revolutionary
**** - Totally Excellent
*** - Good, competent
** - Fair, weak
* - Straight up bad

Besides, the X.Y system is retarded. Nobody has yet told me what the difference is between a 8.8 game and an 8.7, or even an 8.5.

Your idea of "flexibility" seems to be muddling up and confusing readers with a vague, unclear, non-rigorous, unexplained, and non-descriptive rating system so that pretentious reviewers can pat themselves on the back some more - "silly game doesnt deserve an 8.3, but an 8.1! Ahhh! Yet another triumph of the written word, by me!". Ill have none of it, though.

By your own admission in this thread, you idiots over at IGN cant even decide on what a 5.0 means, its different throughout the site. If the writers cant figure it out, then do you expect the readers to? Give me a break.

I despise rating systems in general, and avoid them whenever possible. There is far too much interpretation for them to be of any real meaning anyway.

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Originally Posted by Jeremy

I despise rating systems in general, and avoid them whenever possible. There is far too much interpretation for them to be of any real meaning anyway.

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Telling people that you avoid rating systems in your reviews is like me telling people I dont throw the split-fingered fastball when I pitch because it cant be controlled adequately. In either case, we're too terrible at the mentioned task to weigh in with our opinion.

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Originally Posted by diffusionx

Besides, the X.Y system is retarded. Nobody has yet told me what the difference is between a 8.8 game and an 8.7, or even an 8.5.

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It's basically used to rank games. Like you may agree that Halo and Metroid Prime are both A games, but Prime got a .1 score higher and is therefore ranked higher.

And before you say "Who cares?" the answer is "our readers."

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Originally Posted by diffusionx

I agree with the PC guys. I mean, really, we've all, with the possible exception of IronPlant, had our 13 years of compulsory educaton, so that system is ingrained in our head. You see a game get a 6.5, and its not decent, its not great, it sucks. And really, whats the difference between a 2.3 and a 4.4? Theyre both terrible.

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I think the problem with that is that if you work on that scale, then half of your ratings system (1 through 5) is rendered useless. This was one of the bitches I had at GameFan - because of a handful of reasons, the GF 1 ~ 100 scale ended up being "95% of games fall between 80 ~ 100, and the other seventy-nine numbers are there when you want to trash a game and you just pick a random number."

If you want to equate a ratings system to a school grading scale, then just switch to ABCDF and be done with it. I think that if you are going to use a one through ten scale, then five indeed should be "average."

But I think even a one through ten scale gives the reviewer too many possible choices for a score. Some will think I'm crazy, but I think the less choices, the better. Five stars is probably one of the best systems out there, done like NextGen indeed did. The more numbers you have, the more confusion over what means what, and the more nonsense each number becomes. Seriously, for anybody who read GameFan, what in the hell was the difference between an 81, an 84, or an 87? I worked there, and I can't even begin to tell you. Given one hundred possible choices for a final score to a reviewer, especially the GameFan crew, was an absolute mess from the word go.

The fewer choices for a review score the reviewer is given, the more sense the final score will make, and the better off the reader will be.

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Originally Posted by diffusionx

That just so happens to be the system Im in favor of.

Besides, that was Next Generation's system for years, and it worked just fine.

***** - Revolutionary
**** - Totally Excellent
*** - Good, competent
** - Fair, weak
* - Straight up bad

Besides, the X.Y system is retarded. Nobody has yet told me what the difference is between a 8.8 game and an 8.7, or even an 8.5.

Your idea of "flexibility" seems to be muddling up and confusing readers with a vague, unclear, non-rigorous, unexplained, and non-descriptive rating system so that pretentious reviewers can pat themselves on the back some more - "silly game doesnt deserve an 8.3, but an 8.1! Ahhh! Yet another triumph of the written word, by me!". Ill have none of it, though.

By your own admission in this thread, you idiots over at IGN cant even decide on what a 5.0 means, its different throughout the site. If the writers cant figure it out, then do you expect the readers to? Give me a break.

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I'm bringing it up, and I'm gonna be yelled at. I know it.
GameGO had the best rating system, bar none. Take Ebert & Roper's system and apply it to facial expressions. Happy face; demonic, evil, posessed face. You like it, or you don't. Simple. Thumbs up, thumbs down.
...either that or just tell people what you think you should do witht the game.
Three choices:
Buy it.
Rent it.
Avoid it.
Maybe one would add a "convince friend to buy it so you don't have to spend any money on it, period" option, too. I wouldn't. It's that simple because that's what you're going to do: buy it, rent it, or avoid it. It's not like all the games you buy are going to sit in a row and you're going to divide a specific amount of time with it based on scores. 24.6 minutes with Katamari Damacy, 46.3 minutes with Halo 2, etc. It's a waste of...
...well, everything.

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Originally Posted by shidoshi

I think the problem with that is that if you work on that scale, then half of your ratings system (1 through 5) is rendered useless.

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True, but you cant fight the fact that the system we used for school is ingrained in all of our heads. Its not unreasonable to emulate that system because readers are innately familiar with it thanks to their years of education. Every issue, EGM has a long-winded diatribe in the front of their review section trying to tell people that the system they use is not like the one they used in school. Why waste the space? Use the one like school and move on.

Either do that, or replace it with a different scale. Like Next Generation's, or the standard movie-critic scale. Both are easy to understand and, in the latter's case, easily recognizable.

A lack of flexibility would, arguably, force people to actually read the text, anyway. Attaching so much weight to a score leads to the situation we have now, where nobody reads the review (also, IGN's writing is awful, but I digress). But really, Next Gen's and Ebert's are easy to digest and the score stands as a complement to the review, and the two are to be taken as a whole.

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I worked there, and I can't even begin to tell you.

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Exactly. If the editorial staff that is assigning the scores cant make heads or tails of the rating system, then how can you expect readers to? Its horrible.

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Three choices:
Buy it.
Rent it.
Avoid it.

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I like this system as well. It was kinda like Daily Radar's, too. And say whatever you want about DR, DR was way better than IGN is at the moment.

I was going to mention GameGO in my "no scores" post, but figured that yeah, folks would just bitch me out for it, luckily diff bitched me out for the same thing that he always does, how cute.

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Originally Posted by diffusionx

I agree with the PC guys. I mean, really, we've all, with the possible exception of IronPlant, had our 13 years of compulsory educaton, so that system is ingrained in our head. You see a game get a 6.5, and its not decent, its not great, it sucks. And really, whats the difference between a 2.3 and a 4.4? Theyre both terrible.

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Ass

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Originally Posted by shidoshi

But I think even a one through ten scale gives the reviewer too many possible choices for a score. Some will think I'm crazy, but I think the less choices, the better. Five stars is probably one of the best systems out there, done like NextGen indeed did. The more numbers you have, the more confusion over what means what, and the more nonsense each number becomes. Seriously, for anybody who read GameFan, what in the hell was the difference between an 81, an 84, or an 87? I worked there, and I can't even begin to tell you. Given one hundred possible choices for a final score to a reviewer, especially the GameFan crew, was an absolute mess from the word go.

The fewer choices for a review score the reviewer is given, the more sense the final score will make, and the better off the reader will be.

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That's not crazy, that makes perfect sense. I think the majority here can agree with that.