Comments on: Gamespot Finally Do The Logical Thing

By: Patrick Rose

Patrick Rose — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:48:45 +0000

Review scores annoy me and they should be culled and replaced with a word scale. Since you want the review to tell you whats good about the game, not the score.

By: icouldbeahero

icouldbeahero — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 23:41:22 +0000

Now we are going to be unable to accurate tell the difference between a 9 and a 9.5, so we will have to remove the decimal choices.

But then, what is there to distinguish between an 8 and a 9? Clearly the even numbers will have to be culled as well.

Oh, but I can decide between this game which got a 6 and this other one that got an 8…

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 20:13:38 +0000

Gamespot are on to something here. Why restrict ourselves to base ten? Decimal is the past; it’s scratches on rock, it’s Roman numerals. The future? The future is fractions of Pi, and all scores being expressed in the golden ratio. I see no other way forward for game journalism.

(Cynic Mode Engaged: Or, you could just view the removal of everything between 0.0 and 1.0 as simply a step towards honesty. Maybe soon GameSpot will get around to removing everything below 5.0, thus giving a true reflection of their scoring system? ;) )

By: The_B

The_B — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 17:56:48 +0000

Binary systems are clearly the way forward!

*(Note: this may be extreme sarcasam and not actually represent the true feelings of The_B or indeed anyone who knows him…)

By: Iain

Iain — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 21:51:53 +0000

If you *really* wanted to screw people up, you should have a hexadecimal rating system, with a range of scores from 00 to FF…

Base 10 scoring systems are *so* last millennium.

By: James Wallis

James Wallis — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 21:48:33 +0000

“Who is that guy?”

I’ve been asking myself that for several decades and I’ve still not got a decent answer.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 21:15:48 +0000

In fact, if you drew the angel and devil faces inside the shaded block, you’d have more or less the perfect scoring system.

For me, though, the axes would have to be 0 to 1. That way the area would produce a result within the same range. You’d probably want to square-root it to be on the safe side, too. Well, I would.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 20:53:26 +0000

Jim: the angels and devils thing is ace, we should totally go with that. Who is that guy?

Iain: I started to think I might be a geek when, while watching the Dead Poets Society, I found myself thinking “What an awesome rating system! That totally quantifies greatness in a really logical way.”

I talk like that in my thoughts.

By: Iain

Iain — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 11:47:39 +0000

Skog and I came up with a hugely pretentious marking scheme for the (now sadly defunct) Truth Lasers blog.

It was based on the marking scheme Robin Williams calls “excrement” in Dead Poets Society, where you plot a graph of perfection versus importance and use the area to “greatness”. We did it using arbitrarily large numbers, 300 for each axis (if I recall correctly) so that you had an “area” score out of 90,000. Clearly the way forward…

By: Rossignol

Rossignol — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 11:09:14 +0000

I’ve long contended that all games should be marked out of 12,000. More numbers means more journalism!

Also, what about this scoring system: http://www.spaaace.com/cope/?p=46