Yes we can, we're too awesome to be tied down by convention. I want to see Halo fans like you squirm when VGC give Halo a 7/10!!! Hahaha hahahahahhahahaha aha!

My problem with game reviews is partially because they're based on a school grading system. Except in school, the rules are different.

If you receive a 10%, you basically wrote your name on the top of a page and wrote a paragraph about carnivals when you were supposed to write a five page paper on astrophysics. Anything from 10-60% means "so incomplete that I can't even grade this properly". The REAL grading scale starts at 60%, which removes 3/5ths of the actual scale from even being considered.

How on earth do you grade a game at 30%? What did the game do, cut out at 20% completion, call your mother a slut, kick your puppy, and then make the console explode? It's ludicrous and makes ZERO sense when you think about it. So reviewers are grading on a four point scale on top of awarding damned near every game obscenely high grades for repeating what their predecessors did before them. There is no sense of reward for actually doing something different and advancing video games. So what if Portal challenged how gamers think about their medium? Fuck, it only received a 9.5. OBVIOUSLY, retreads like Halo 3 and GTA IV are BETTER because they copied their own formula and updated graphics. The same goes for Braid and other games that are truly outstanding. THERE IS NO SENSE OF ACHIEVEMENT WITHIN THIS SYSTEM.

Meh. People may complain about movie reviews but I'd rather see a critic have the balls to say "I didn't like Apocalypse Now and this is why" instead of blindly awarding the movie with a 9 or better because everyone else thinks it's great.

Yahtzee referred to game reviewers as "circus seals". I can't think of a better way to put it. They spend a lot of time doing tricks for free shit (fish or a totally sweet Rockstar North jockstrap which is mildly ironic considering the lack of testes found on the average reviewer), and they're naturally formed to have their head right around waist-height to a human for other, more obvious, reasons.

No trick, no treat.

I don't know if this is a country-wide rule or just a local rule, but I don't think a kid can get anything less than a 50% on an assignment if they complete it fully.

Still can't go to sleep.

I don't know if it's a law but it's pretty much an unspoken rule, even in college. If you just manage to finish the paper, you pretty much automatically have half credit at that point.

Ahh....I was hoping you'd rant about that. I love your rants.

"Master Rocketpig, you disappoint me. Yoda holds you in such high esteem."

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Fuck me, I'm quoting the prequels. I'm gonna take some sleeping pills or something. This is just ridiculous.

Come on, I just typed a multi-paragraph rant ten minutes ago!

You have to let me catch my breath again before asking me to run another sprint like that.

If a game truely changes a medium then it ought to get scored highly because it would make it a great game to play. I still feel that a game ought to be reviewed on its merits and not given a free pass because it may do something differently. If a retread is still a really great game to play then it also ought to receive a high score. I don't see a problem here except that perhaps Halo/GTA IV and pretty much every other 90+ game got scored a little too highly, not that they didn't deserve to be rated as good games. Just because a game is like something else or even its own franchise isn't a particularly good reason to score it down because people buy them expecting a similar experience and they get disapointed if they franchise is unable to replicate that.

I don't mind that you don't like Halo for instance, I don't even mind if you get the Halo: Reach review and score it a 6. It means nothing to me that you would since our tastes are obviously different.

What?  do you want me to actually do posts reviewing the whole review of a reviewer?  

I do read reviews, why else did I buy the magazine?  To look at the pretty pictures?  I bought the magazine, read the reviews and thought that they were a pile of shit.  The scores were just the icing on the cake.

Oh, don't get me wrong. Some "re-treads" can be excellent games and deserve to be rated highly but SHOULD have an extremely hard time getting into the top 10% of all-time game rankings.

For example, let's look at a movie like Casino Royale. Yeah, it's a Bond flick. It's a remake (kinda). On the other hand, it's nearly flawless in its execution, flair, style, and substance. It's EXACTLY what it's supposed to be as a Bond flick. It deserves some pretty high fucking marks and reviews for doing that. Should it get into the top 10%? No, probably not. But it should be rewarded for its effort.

To put that in game terms, I'll bring up one of my favorite "example" games, The Darkness. It's nearly flawless in its execution (until you get the "I WIN!" power, which kinda breaks gameplay) and offers some truly engaging moments that 99% of games would kill for? You know what? In a movie system, I'd be "yeah, they got that about right" with its low 80-something Metacritic. Instead, it sits at 80-something while people bitch about FF-whateverthefucknumbertheyreatidontcare or the latest "let's do this again, kids" bullshit game that has enough of a PR budget to buy every reviewer in the land a hooker, some blow, a totally awesome sword-gun-thingie, and a pair of balls to bring back to the wife (or possibly just to roll around in their mouth while they review the next game to remind them who gives them shiny things that they like).

I was referring to what you did with my article and compared it to the point of the article, period.

You're not really great at drawing allusions, are you?