Take a look at this thread here on N4G.
http://n4g.com/news/873304/...
What you'll see when you go to that thread is an article that David Jaffe wrote defending Eurogamer's 8/10 score for Uncharted 3.
Now look down in the comments section. You'll see one side adamantly refuting Eurogamer's review, and the other side defending it.
But why? What's really the point?
Look; everyone and their grandmother knows that reviews are opinions right? I hope everyone knows that. A review is literally a person who played a game and then speaks about how their experience with the game was.
The problem is that reviewing has been given too much emphasis and power, and the scale has been radically overemphasized and made ridiculous. What I'm about to say will sound vulgar, but sometimes it's the only way to get a point across.
Opinions are like a$$holes, everyone's got them and they all stink. So the a$$hole of an IGN reviewer is just as repugnant as the a$$hole of a Eurogamer reviewer. Stop pretending like it's any different.
These numbers being thrown around this gen are having too great an impact on the industry. Reviews mean nothing. The only time reviews should matter is if a significant amount of them point to the same problems with a game or praise it for the same things. If many people can agree about a problem or when something is done well, chances are you'll agree too. But other than that, it's just an arbitrary number.
And while I'm on the subject of numbers, I think it's important to clarify something. A 10/10 DOES NOT mean a PERFECT game. If you talk to any professional critic who gives the best score they can give to something, you'll find that they did in fact find some problem with whatever they were reviewing, it just wasn't serious enough for them to have a diminished experience. A 10/10 game is a game in which the reviewer's experience was just so incredibly good and fun that little nitpicky issues didn't matter to them. It's the kind of game where they just couldn't put it down, or they felt the overall package was so good that anything less than a 5/5 or 10/10 or A+ would be just wrong. I'll give you an old example.
Anyone who's ever seen Electric Playground or Judgement Day/Reviews on the Run knows Tommy Tallarico. Tommy Tallarico is my favorite reviewer of all time (although he doesn't do that anymore) because he's not afraid to seriously bad mouth a game. I may not agree with his scores sometimes, but you can't say he doesn't review a game professionally. Anyone who knows him, knows he hates JRPG games with a passion. Especially Final Fantasy games. However, 10 years ago he gave Final Fantasy X a score of 10 out of 10. A guy who hates FF games, an FF game that has noticeable issues, received a "perfect" score. Is FFX a "perfect" game. No. Does T.T. think it is? No. He gave it a 10 because the entire package as a whole, he felt, deserved a 10. It's not about perfection. It's about the entire package being too incredible and fun to the reviewer that anything less than a 10 would be wrong to them.
Personally, I like reviews without scores. Kind of like what Yahtzee does on Zero Punctuation. No score, just a review of the things you like and dislike about a game, leaving the "scoring" of it to the reader/listener/player at home. Scores are arbitrary numbers. There really is no agreed upon scale as everyone attaches their own biases to said arbitrary number. An 8 to one person is amazing, to another it's an insult. That's why reviews with no score are the best. They leave it up to the reader/listener/viewer to decide if what is being said is good or bad.
So, all I'm saying is give up on placing so much emphasis, stock, faith or whatever into reviews. They don't mean a thing at all. No reviewers opinion means more than any others, and that's just an inarguable fact.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
***Now look down in the comments section. You'll see one side adamantly refuting Eurogamer's review, and the other side defending it. ***
I don't see that at all. What I see are lots of people talking about how review scores have changed how people think about games and how some people overreact when their expectations aren't met.
"Personally, I like reviews without scores."
Yes! Couldn't agree any more with this one. A scoreless review with a detailed conclusion or summary on what's positive and negative about the game would well suit the review. That way it would encourage the audience to actually read the review's contents instead of gawking at some number and either go "zOMG PERFECT 10 IGN IS NO LONGER IGNORANT" or "lol 8/10 eurotrashgamer sux trolling article lookin 4 hits" I guess I'll have to address this problem by becoming a gaming journalist and start a site with a scoreless review system. Whether or not I agree with Eurogamer's review is another story, but I am open to reviews, both positive and negative regardless of my take on a particular game.
Frankly, I am quite embarrassed as a SONY fan that some of my fellow PS3 owners have to stoop down to the level of raging lunatics over some 8/10 review. The sad part is, they haven't even once played the SP campaign to see for themselves, yet somehow muster up some "opinion" of UC3 saying it's better than Arkham City. Ugh.
I agree with you on almost all of your points, but I really don't understand why a guy who hates a certain genre of games, Tommy Tallarico and JRPGS, would feel the need to review a game from that genre.
I can't really think of a game genre that I hate, but if I did hate a certain type of game then I wouldn't review a game from that genre because my review would be biased before I even started playing the game. The sad thing is that there are a lot of reviewers who don't adhere to this rule.
As for review scores having power, perhaps they don't have as much power as people think. Enslaved was adored by game reviewers, yet it sold very poorly. I actually thought it was kind of amusing to see game reviewers write follow up pieces asking why no one was buying it. From the way some of them read you would have thought they worked for the PR division of NT or NB, it was as if they couldn't believe that people actually decide for themselves if they want to buy a certain game or not.
Reviews can be useful to gauge the quality of a game and whether or not it is worth checking out, but only if the person reviewing the game is both honest and unbiased. Unfortunately I doubt if we will ever see a reviewer of any form of entertainment who has both of those qualities. People need to do their own research and make their own decisions on what games are worth the price, because "the review said it was 10/10 and I don't like it" won't get you your money back when you try to return it.
No offense but its strange how when its UC3 everyone lashes out at anyone who disagrees with any scores or says it will be GOTY or says it doesn't sound like it deserves it. But when it comes to other games like Skyrim, BF3, Batman AC, Rage and Gears 3 it seems to be okay to brag and insist that the game WILL be great long before it even comes out. I don't see as many 'shut up fanboys' or 'stop over hyping the game' or slaps on the wrist for saying a game will be GOTY before it comes out.
Right now many people are boasting about Skyrim being GOTY and they don't get the tongue lashing I get when I say UC3 will be GOTY.I watched other games get low scores that were ignored or called unprofessional but the minute UC3 gets a few 8s everyone descends on them like vultures. Rage got lots of low scores but that doesn't stop people from claiming it's 'brilliance'. But every score UC3 gets lower then a 9 is claimed to be the 'truth' by people on N4G.In my opinion despite people saying people are judging the game positively before they played it, I see just as many people ready to believe the negative reviews before they played the game too.Everyone is so ready to believe Eurogamer and haven't even played the game either. They could be talking complete crap for all you know.
Long story short, how about some chastising for the people ready to believe Eurogamer's score without even playing the game.Stop the fighting to fight the people who don't agree with the review.People have a right to an opinion too. Some people don't think the 8/10 sounds legit and the reviewer sounded like he was nitpicking. SO WHAT?