wow, i cant believe you saw that movie, nice. How about The Secretary, that movie was 120% pure awsomness.

The meaning of the word stupid changed a lot during in the last centuries and the impact of this insult is different in other cultures. Posting in a thread without making any solid contribution is stupid. You waste yours and everyone else time. Entering a discussion just to tell people they are stupid is super stupid. If they are stupid they would never get your point and that makes you a little more stupid. If they are smarter than you, it is worse, because you are the stupid one calling others stupid (this way you have irrefutable proof that you are indded stupid).   It is a lose/lose situtation. Using the word stupid more than 4 times in the same post without finding a proper synonimon is also stupid. Failing to get the irony of a post is stupid. Responding to stupid people is stupid. I would boycott your posts, but that is also stupid.

Game reviewers these days cannot seem to divorce themselves from the number system. I think that few have the balls to try and succeed without them. Sites like Metacritic and Gamerankings feed this cycle where those without scores miss out on free promotion. I tend to enjoy the critiques that are done by sites that use simpler systems such as Buy/Rent/Pass at Arstechnica. Putting so much time into writing a review only to have it boiled down to a number that people will bash you for on other forums seems like such a waste of time. It should be possible to write reviews like Kotaku where you have to actually read the article to know their take on the game.

 I give this thread a 9.9.

You make a point though I do disagree. I've been doing reviews since 2003. I reviewed between 45-50 titles since then which is roughly 10 games a year and have not yet given a single 10. In fact if I look back at the short lifespan of our industry there are only a handful of games I could earnestly give that perfect 10 score to. Super Mario Bros, Super Mario World, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye007 and *possibly* Final Fantasy VI (or III) & Mario RPG. Though all those titles are on Nintendo systems, I do own and play games on every single system and enjoy each.

 The last game I would award a perfect 10 is from 1998. While all those are obviously astounding games only 3 of them would appear on my personal top 20 list, though I do not want to go in depth as to the reasons why I would give them 10's since that isn't the topic of this thread.

The reason why I don't see any game fit for a perfect score in over a decade? Because it's become much more difficult to review games impartially then it was 10 years ago. Now we have to evaluate storylines which were non present in the old school days, tiny subtleties in graphics and art direction, increasingly complicated gameplay and controls. Presentation. Writing, and most presently have to take into account the unique motion controls of the Wii and DS.

There's a whole host of other aspects no body had to deal with in the early to mid ninties. While many games still excell in certain elements from gameplay (GTA VC) to storyline (MGS series) none of them blend in all these aspects into a single flawless package. The industry is driven by such a powerful engine of innovation that something cutting edge 5 years ago instantly becomes obsolete today and reviewers are forced to re-evaluate and adapt their reviews to fit more with the standards and expectations of the current era.

Movies do not have these issues to deal with as the standards have been largely established several decades ago.

Well, films have changed quite bit, too. Each decade of film history has its own standards -- 1940s film noir, 1950s domestic drama, 1960s auteur film, 1970s sci-fi blockbuster, 1980s Hong Kong action, etc. Take the film out of that period, and it's very hard to judge.

I think videogame reviews need some massive institutional investment -- classes, seminars, books, articles, etc. -- to even begin to get better. I'm in academia right now, and it's terrifying how little attention is paid to videogames. It's like they don't exist. I'm trying to change this, in my tiny little niche, but it's going to take decades.

A good point.  There was a time in video games where you action/platformers were absolutely everywhere.  They were the "in thing."  There was also a time when arcade-style compete-for-points games were in style.  There was also a time when fighting games were the absolute craze.

Genres rise and fall throughout the generations and gamer taste changes even more often than console graphics.

On another note DTG, ProfCrab and I were talking about the numerical vs. alpha system of grading last night. While no review score is best, we agreed that alpha is much superior than numerical... After all, most numerical ratings are based on the 90+=A, 80+=B, 70+=C, etc.

With that in mind, how does anyone justify a 4.5 for Haze and Lair? With 50% being an "F", how does a reviewer justify dropping a game below that mark? If the game is a complete failure on every level, what does it have to do to drop below that 50% mark? Does the disc pop out of the tray and snap your cock off? Does it break your console? By my reckoning, something extraordinary would have to occur for any game to get a score worse than an "F".

To boot, that means the numerical system is now essentially a "5-10" scale. So what's the fuckin' point? Either go for a 1-5 scale or an A-F system. It cuts out nonsensical numbers and trims down the fat from your scale, allowing you to more accurately rate a game (even though in truth, nothing can ever be respresented by one number or letter). It also allows for less misintrepretation by readers who enjoy bibs, corks on forks, and short yellow buses.

 An alternative is also to try and separate yourself from the pack is to do something different akin to the "Thumbs Up" from Siskel & Ebert (fuck Roeper, I can't get myself to remember Ebert & Roeper).  The problem with doing that though is that you don't get the free advertising from Metacritic.  The other problem is that you have to be very good at it to still get clicks.  Starting out with a new site, your kinda stuck with some sort of rating system that Metacritic can use because you'll want all the advertising you can get.

As RP said, the rating scale is really fucked up right now.  Game publishers essentially push game publications around and skew ratings in many cases.  The 1-10 or 1-100 scale is horribly broken.  Making it worse games that are "good" games from big publishers are overwelmingly in the top 10%.  They may be good games but in order to appease game publishers, reviewers are taking a very softball approach to any criticism.  To give an idea of what I'm talking about by relating it to movies, if Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was reviewed the same way video games are being reviewed, it would have mostly 100's and a few decenting 90's instead of getting the B or B- that it gets from most movie critics.  So, not only is the scale broken, but so is the gaming press.

I give that post a 9.9. 

Sorry for not replying earlier. I've had a lot of work on my hands with regard to the website and today I've pretty much chained myself to the TV playing through MGS4.

As for the numerical system, I tend to lean towards it. You're right it's non-sensical if you simply view it as 90=A and so on. A 1-5 rating system deals with this issue to a certain extent because it relates to something more tangible or objective which is the school rating system.

Personally I'd lean to going for a 1-50 scoring system. Essentially Each 10 digits represents a grade (1=F, 2=D, etc) but it gives me enough space to express shades of difference between two games.

Perhaps I'm too much into trivialities and detail, but I find the 1-5 scoring system to be impercise. It's effective as far as giving a general idea about the quality of a game, but if I would like to compare or contrast a certain game with previous entries in the franchise or similar genre games there isn't enough room to point out minor pros and cons numerically.

Though I don't take reviews seriously anymore, if I did vouch for their credibility I may be interested in comparing any score discreptencies between MGS4 and 3 or 2 even if the score is only one decimal off. It would imply the game not being as ahead of it's time as another or simply not as polished. This is only useful if you actually trust or share the judgment of the reviewer and if you're detail oriented such as me.

I think one reason why the 1-100 (or 10) scoring system seems like such a waste of garbage is because we're used to seeing every marginally good game scoring in the high 80's or low 90's while even superman 64 class A shit won't score below 4. Most of the numbers go unused or overused so what's the point of 100?

Reviewers are prostitutes, so there's no way you can reach the results of IMDB.

IMDB doesn't give their own ratings, so if you want to do the same as them, reviewers can't give ratings. But they can't, as contrary to IMDB, they're convinced that the ratings they give sell or break games (thus the prostitutes if they're given incentives to give good ratings).
In IMDB, users who saw the movies/series/... or not rate the media. Besides, the rating doesn't stay the same, it changes based on these things :
- it's not just an average of the score, though they give that too. I don't know the english word for the kind of average they give (weighed average I think), but it's not a simple average, thus eliminating those that want to artificially lower or increase the score,
- even the users score given is not taken as is, but is a weighed average based on other scores they gave on other movies. I don't know if they separate it by genres or not, it's a secret. It thus eliminate the accounts made just to destroy or increase one or several movies.

Thus, the ratings actually change with the time, and counter the trolls, and you can't see stupid things happen like in the videogame industry, where the full scale of 1-10 ratings is not even used, which in itself is pathetic. On IMDB, a movie with 5.5 rating is average, as it should be.
The saddest thing is that IMDB is younger than videogames, even if it was there before the WWW. Papers reviewing videogames also were there before WWW but never managed to gain the excellence of IMDB. Instead, we got nonsense like metacritic and game rankings.