Buying a video game is a big commitment. Home console games go for $50, and that's a hefty chunk of a minimum wage paycheck. Fortunately, thanks to the power of the Internet, a potential buyer can read professional reviews of a game and gauge whether or not he/she wants to buy it. The problem with this convenient process, however, is that the average reader is fanatical about the preciseness of a given score for a game he/she is looking forward to. Take IGN, for instance, one of the industry's biggest game journals. No Nintendo-developed game can be reviewed without someone bugging the editor about the final score afterwards. I remember a message in an IGN Mailbag that read something like, "Why did Metroid Prime 2 only get a 9.7? Halo 2 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas both got a 9.9. Does this mean GameCube loses?"
I frequently peruse the GameFAQs message boards to see how "gamers" respond to certain reviews. For every highly anticipated game, somebody is going to write, "IGN only gave [this game] an 8.5. I'm not getting it anymore." Whoa, wait a minute! Last time I checked, an 8.5 was darn good. I understand there are a lot of games out there, and one has to pick and choose which games to afford, but setting a 9.0 or higher standard is ridiculous and will get a person nowhere. Games are generally rated on a scale of 1 to 10. If I'm not mistaken (and I highly doubt I am), a score of 5 constitutes an average game. It is, after all, in between 1 and 10. But for some strange reason, people have come to see 7's and 8's as average and only 9's as something worth having. Egg Mania: Eggstreme Madness and Cel Damage are certainly not great games, taking verbal abuse from just about every major game journal, but they have enough fun in them for me to recommend-- under certain conditions.
The important thing to remember is that professional reviews are biased just like the reviews I write are biased. I expect different things from my games than the folks at Gamespot or IGN, and I write a review with my own enjoyment in mind. IGN gave The Haunted Mansion a 7.0. I thought the game sucked and rated it 3/10. Am I wrong? Obviously somebody disagrees with me, but that's how I saw it. A reader should only read a review to get an idea of the game. Whether that person will ultimately like it or not is yet to be determined until they actually play it. If, however, the majority of reviewers (from Gamespy to Gamespot) give a game a 2 or 3, one can bet the game isn't any good. On the other hand, as Stephen King once said, "If everyone is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say."
Another pet peeve of mine when it comes to reviews is the insistence that no game is perfect. Therefore, no game deserves a 10/10. But perfection is impossible, so why not just make the system 1 to 9.9? Why should a 10/10 be unattainable? I recently gave Mario Kart DS a 10/10. I can certainly think of a few things I'd like to see differently, such as better online play and a few tweaks to the weapon system. But Mario Kart DS is everything I wanted, and to want more than that is just being picky. Even The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the only game to receive a perfect score from IGN, had shortcomings (including some nasty glitches). A "perfect" game need not have the prettiest graphics and revolutionarily new gameplay. For a perfect game, everything it does, it does right-- and it's a lot of fun. Is there any reason to ask for more than that?
I frequently peruse the GameFAQs message boards to see how "gamers" respond to certain reviews. For every highly anticipated game, somebody is going to write, "IGN only gave [this game] an 8.5. I'm not getting it anymore." Whoa, wait a minute! Last time I checked, an 8.5 was darn good. I understand there are a lot of games out there, and one has to pick and choose which games to afford, but setting a 9.0 or higher standard is ridiculous and will get a person nowhere. Games are generally rated on a scale of 1 to 10. If I'm not mistaken (and I highly doubt I am), a score of 5 constitutes an average game. It is, after all, in between 1 and 10. But for some strange reason, people have come to see 7's and 8's as average and only 9's as something worth having. Egg Mania: Eggstreme Madness and Cel Damage are certainly not great games, taking verbal abuse from just about every major game journal, but they have enough fun in them for me to recommend-- under certain conditions.
The important thing to remember is that professional reviews are biased just like the reviews I write are biased. I expect different things from my games than the folks at Gamespot or IGN, and I write a review with my own enjoyment in mind. IGN gave The Haunted Mansion a 7.0. I thought the game sucked and rated it 3/10. Am I wrong? Obviously somebody disagrees with me, but that's how I saw it. A reader should only read a review to get an idea of the game. Whether that person will ultimately like it or not is yet to be determined until they actually play it. If, however, the majority of reviewers (from Gamespy to Gamespot) give a game a 2 or 3, one can bet the game isn't any good. On the other hand, as Stephen King once said, "If everyone is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say."
Another pet peeve of mine when it comes to reviews is the insistence that no game is perfect. Therefore, no game deserves a 10/10. But perfection is impossible, so why not just make the system 1 to 9.9? Why should a 10/10 be unattainable? I recently gave Mario Kart DS a 10/10. I can certainly think of a few things I'd like to see differently, such as better online play and a few tweaks to the weapon system. But Mario Kart DS is everything I wanted, and to want more than that is just being picky. Even The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the only game to receive a perfect score from IGN, had shortcomings (including some nasty glitches). A "perfect" game need not have the prettiest graphics and revolutionarily new gameplay. For a perfect game, everything it does, it does right-- and it's a lot of fun. Is there any reason to ask for more than that?
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