Ok, well I wrote this myself so if it sucks I take the blame =P

10) Because you are a smart person and can form your own opinions without someone else summarizing it for you.

9) Because you are also a lazy person and will let that score dominate your opinion if you look at it!

8) Because its not objective but subjective, which basically means that its an arbitrary score and only has value to the person who set the score. Which is why YOU should score it yourself.

7) Because the reviewer may have been French and rumor has it that they used to judge couple's ice skating in the Olympics.

6) Because different game styles don't always translate to a number system properly.

5) Because you have no way of knowing what kinds of personal bias or preferences are being expressed in a number but you can usually pick them out in a written review when someone complains about something you enjoy about the game!

4) Because a single numeric value cannot properly explain the rediculous number of nuances in a game. A well written review with no score conveys the quality, style, and appeal of the game and allows you to score it yourself with the only bias that matters...yours!

3) A score is meaningless without context. A FPS fan considers the perfect game something completely different from a JRPG or Platform fan and reading the review is the only way to know that the gameplay elements YOU love have been done right.

2) Becuase if you are interested enough in the game to look up a review score you should be able to spend five minutes reading the review to make sure YOU like it.

1) Because people are tired of hearing you bitch about review scores!

So for an ironic twist, what score do you give my top 10 list?

edit: changed the order a bit =P

Wow, what great reading material!

Woah, I thought you closed it for a moment there Montana and was like WTF?

The post buttons didn't show up.


Anyway on topic, I kinda agree but I kinda disagree. If a game scores 70+ I will read the reviews and have a look at it and basically ignore the score after that, if it scores lower than 70 I generally won't even look at the game as it usually just isn't worth it.

Oh montana, you silly face. Even as a mod your replies still aren't worth the two cent.

Actually, when I see something with a low score, I tend to read the review just to see why it was scored that way.

If I ignored the scores, I'd end up spending as much time reading reviews as playing games.

""Anyway on topic, I kinda agree but I kinda disagree. If a game scores 70+ I will read the reviews and have a look at it and basically ignore the score after that, if it scores lower than 70 I generally won't even look at the game as it usually just isn't worth it.""

==> +1 for Rath

As with Rath, I kind of agree and kind of disagree. I think scores DO help to give us a ballpark range for how good the game is and help focus our interests on the game. If there weren't review scores, games like Zack & Wiki would be completely ignored.

But, I also agree you should read the actual reviews of the games you are interested in. The score should attract you to the review, but then the review should be read to determine if the game is a good purchase for you.

Here's a reason to screw scores:

1. Any scoring system with 20 or 100 different levels (like most gaming sites use) is ridiculous and impractical. There is no real difference between a 0.1 and a 4.9; all you need to know is that the game sucks. There is no difference between a 6.5 and an 8.0 either; you just need to know the game is solid, but flawed. Any more than about 5 levels only creates confusion and makes reading the review a must to even vaguely grasp the reviewer's opinion.

And a couple reasons to ignore the majority (but not all) reviews completely.

2. Gaming journalism is, let us say... very shady. A journo who has been flown around to several all-expense-paid events over 18 months leading up to the launch of a game is essentially incapable of giving that game a fair review.

3. Gaming journalism is even more shady. In the past few months, we've seen score embargoes placed on both Madden 2008 and Manhunt 2. There were no doubt reviewers who had to mark up their review scores, some with no choice to withhold a review for awhile.

I agree, the review itself is a far more useful indicator of whether you will like the game.

What I really dislike is the trend of scoring out of a hundred or out of ten point something. A review score gives an indication of how good the game is, simply marking it out of ten is sufficient, but they try to be ridiculously accurate for some reason. If a game is really excellent then it deserves 10 out of 10, not 97%, what's the difference really? It's just impractical, some games end up with higher scores than others that the review states it isn't as good as.

I don't know why but this gets me disproportionatly angry.

#11. Scores aren't based on FUN.