Topic: Lets re-visit the review scale once again

I've brought this topic up before in the past under different leadership. It was a mixed reaction of positive and negitive. I think with all the 9's we have been seeing for various games throughout the year I've been wondering once again if some of the reviewers had the option of going 8.5 or 9.5. Its no secret that no one wants to give a game a perfect 10 as they might come under fire for it. What if there was a middle ground and NL started .5's. It does seem a lot of reviews read either close to a perfect 10 or maybe the reviewer didn't want to give a game an 8 because it was just too low!

Just a thought again as this has been one special year for video games 3ds in general!

There's no point. It's not like they're going to go back and review all of the games they already scored.

Better to stick with the current system for consistency.

I don't like number scores in general. A gathering of multiple impressions of any given game works for me. I just want an idea of the fun factor.

Numerical scores are necessary for the industry. They push developers and inspire sales for great games.

Plus it's nice to have numerical lists that separate amazing games from lesser quality ones. Everyone likes to say 'oh but everything is subjective in life'. No that is wrong.

Some games are objectively better than others. The Last of Us is objectively a better game than most games on the market, and the high scores help identify that. Super Mario Galaxy (since nobody will argue this one..) is objectively a well-made platformer and one of the best in its genre. High scores help identify this.

If people were forced to completely read every review to determine the aggregate opinion, there would be more cases of people purchasing games due to outliers.

They wouldn't have to go back on anything. It would be going forward. Besides its just an option and I'm sure a few reviewers wouldn't even consider it at all. It just there if need be as an extra option for the reviewers.

So games are going to be split among different review scales?

That would be a huge problem for the site.

Not at all. Same scale across the board. Just saying some reviewers don't like certain systems so they use what works for them. Let's just say it would take a while before some reviewers here actually started using the new scale. Its not like we would even know! Besides from what I heard way back before NL I thought I heard they used a 0-5 scale.

It makes sense in that regard. Numbers mean something to many people, and that's fine. It's just that I've seen 8's, 9's, and 10's for games that don't interest me based on descriptions, regardless of their general greatness.

I think all reviews should be done in formulas, and let the users solve for "X".

They don't need 0.5 scores, they just need to use the full scale. It's ridiculous when 8 becomes average, because then everything ends up being scored 9/10. EDGE is still the only place that gets it right.

You can read the reviews and find out.

Number systems are already flawed because they are inconsistent among multiple reviewers. There's no reason to make them more complicated. Just read the review

Personally I like Numbers and (in Nintendolife's case) the small little condensed review at the end. Some of us don't have the attention span or we just don't want to waste time reading a long written review when the basic and most important points can be summarized in a paragraph or so. That being said this is my number one spot to get reviews on Nintendo's downloadable games (since most websites don't review Nintendo Downloadables). I find that Nintendolife is usually a little more generous than other places when it comes to their reviews so I mostly just focus on the downloadable reviews.

The number is an accompaniment to the review, not the review. If you're interested in the game, you're probably gonna read the review and thereby get a better understanding of the basis of the score. If you're not as interested in the game, a glance at the score will give you a general feeling - perhaps if it's particularly good (or bad!), you'll go back and read the review to find out why. If you're in a rush, or still not hugely interested in the game, the conclusion generally gives a solid overall impression.

X.5 scores thereby are wholly unnecessary - the review score is only really an approximate anyway. The real "score" is the content of the review itself.

i usually don't pay too much attention to the score nowadays, just a general 'oh it was reviewed well' or 'oh that one was apparently crap'. it's more important to me that a review touch on areas of a game i'm concerned about and, if the review didn't answer a specific question I may have had, that the reviewer (or someone else with an answer) be accessible enough to respond when it's brought up in the comment thread below.

that said, where does it end? If NL were to start using a .5 scale, we'd have people asking for a full-on decimal-point scale, for visuals/plot/control scheme/etc. to all be separately scored, etc. and so forth (and we occasionally get those people asking for such already), so what does it matter? if you're curious as to why a game got a specific score or whether the reviewer would have called it a high or low [insert number chosen], all you have to do is ask nicely and i'm sure they'd be glad to explain why they felt it fit that particular criteria over others on the scale :3

The thing I've noticed on sites that use scales like this, is people will complain it's just a few decimals away from the score "it deserves".

Exactly. It will be a never-ending cycle.

The tagline should be enough of a review

Lots of good points ITT, probably summed up by:

People take them to be a kind of objective determinant of the "fun quality", which is surely misguided. Games will always be a subjective medium, enjoyable mostly to fans of a genre.