FF6. The thing I like most about this game is not the fact that the game has the best story line ever featured in a role playing game, nor the fact that this is one of the best looking games to ever be released for the Super Nintendo as a video game console. No, the simple fact that this game is so much fun to play is the reason why I consider this to be one of the best games on the Super Nintendo, as well as one of the greatest role playing games ever made.

OK, I won't even TRY to sort out the logic of those two sentences. And I think he needs to throw in the word "game" a few more times.

Metroid 2. Seriously, the main point of all the Metroid games has been the fact that they have all been fairly non linear. The non linear aspect of the game play remains an all time favorite of mine, because I love the non linear game play that the series has always seem to provided. Sadly enough, that type of non linear game play is not to be found in this game, at all. This is probably the worst attempt of making a non linear game, ever in fact.

OK, so he clearly (yet verbosely) says that the game seemed a little too linear. Fair enough. But later...

The whole non linear feeling of the game is not what a Metroid game is supposed to feel like.

Uh, OK.

Ultima: Exodus. This is probably the most challenging role playing game I have ever played, and it is definitely one of the most challenging role playing games I have ever played, that's for sure. I really had a tough time playing this game, mainly because I was overwhelmed by the somewhat complex battle system and very complex menu system. It was rather complicated and made the game a lot more challenging than it already is.

Maybe his name should be DaRedundantMan.

Super Mario 64. The graphics in this game are pretty good. The 3D backgrounds in the game are pretty good, and Mario himself looks pretty good. My biggest complaint is the camera system. Let me explain the graphics in even more detail.

The first thing I noticed here is that he says "pretty good" a lot. But then he goes and mentions the camera system in the middle of the graphics discussion? Then he does it again later.

That's enough for now. I could go on for hours about this guy. Literally. Just check out his reviews. Now I don't claim to be a great reviewer or anything, but this guy is ridiculous.

I don't really have a format when I write a review, other than trying to cover all the bases. I guess I try to convey some info about the game, then gradually shift to expressing my opinions on the game.

I think it's quite possible to overanalyze a game. In an effort to make the review complete, people often include too much detail, and thus become repetitive, reveal spoilers, etc. (BTW, that reminds me. Crawl, you might want to hold off reading any "professional" reviews on MDK 2 until after you finish it. There are many that go a bit too far in detail and manage to spoil some parts. One I read last night even managed to give away the most of the final boss fight, if you can believe that.)

Another thing I've been thinking about is the bell curve/percentile thing. Of the games I own, I won them for a reason, and that was because I knew or suspected that I would enjoy them. So if I want my reviews to maintain an average of 5, I have to:
A) Review some of the game I own that I don't like just to balance out the score.
B) Give some games lower scores than they deserve.

Option A sounds like the better choice (actually, it's the only viable choice), but I really don't own that many games I don't like.

So I suppose the best thing to do would be to rationalize a bit on why my reviews will have an average higher than 5. What I'll say is this: If I were to play every single game available, then review every single one, the average would be 5 with a standard deviation of about 1.67. That way, a 10 would be 3 sd above the mean, a lofty, yet not totally exclusive, claim for any game. If there are 5000 games in existance, then about 50 of them can be called a 10. Of couuse, that would mean 50 1s, too.
Maybe it'd be better to say a mean of 6 with a standard deviation of 1.5, to allow for a negative skew (i.e., more than half of the games score higher than 5). That is because I would really only give a game a 1 if it were literally unplayable. That means, on top of being a bad game, the game has one or more of the folowing problems: It is buggy and freezes/glitches, has a non-functioning password system, has totally unresponsive controls, causes nausea from a shaky camera, or any other horrible trait.

And also, like Crawl mentioned before, companies try to make good games. Granted, some clunkers get out, but to get a bell-shaped curve, a little more chance has to be involved. It's not like rolling 2 dice and getting an average of 7. Companies have control of the games they release; that (sort of) brings me to rating games relative to other games.

Is it really right to rate games relative to other games? Hypothetical situation: You are given every single NES game ever made, and you love every single one (bear with me here). Are you going to give the games at the bottom of your "preference" list a 1 just because they are at the bottom, even though you still liked them? Let's look at a (much) smaller scale. If I were going to rate the Final Fantasies I've played, I'd place 1 at the top and 4 at the bottom. But I still enjoyed 4, so I'm not giving it a low score.

In the end, I suppose the best thing to do would be to make a scale (like the Rolling Stone 5 Star scale) and stick to it. Even a 5 point scale can be informative (unless you're a bozo). I mean, Christ, Siskel and Ebert used a 2 point scale, and look where it got them.

Quote:

---

There are good popcorn movies (''The Mummy'') and bad ones (''The Mummy
Returns''). Critics should not give movies a pass via the popcorn loophole, but be as
rigorous with popcorn movies as any other kind. ''The Mummy Returns'' cheats on
story and character and condescends to its audience with mindless special effects
that are not engendered by anything we can care about.

---

I bought the last 2 issues of EGM, and their scores (at least in the issues I have) are much lower than gamefaqs scores. The mean still looks to be over 5, but I think the standard deviation might be a little higher, as there is more variation in the numbers.

BUT I'M SICK OF NUMBERS! The only time I assign numbers to a game is when I am forced, such as when I write a review for gamefaqs. Like I said before, I don't like trying to quantify intangible things. Subjectively intangible things, anyway. I wonder what would happen if Gamefaqs got rid of the mandatory number system. Hell, let's go one step further. Let's say they made it mandatory that there could be NO scoring of games! My, how the masses would be lost. I bet people would be really pissed. I mean, it's not like you need the score for a quick reference. There IS a heading to read.

I think people rely too much on numbers. It's funny how, out of the thousands of words that may be in a review, the one most people seem to dwell on the isn't even a word. I mean, regarding your Contra review, how many people probably said it was a bad review or that you were an idiot before they even read it?

Uhh..let's see. I think if I were to play every NES game, most of them would make me go "Eh, it's OK." If it's on the good side of "OK," it gets a 6. Bad side of "OK," gets a 4. Plain and simple. In a 5 star scale, they'd all get a score of 3.

As for writing reviews of bad games just to lower my average, I probably wouldn't do it just for that reason. When deciding to write a review, I try to write reviews for: games that need more reviews, games that my opinions on differ from the masses, or games who's reviews I feel have something missing. (It was kind of odd that, although there were only 2 reviews for MDK 2, both of them pretty much said what I wanted to say.)

Maybe I'll add more tomorrow. I still have posts to make and it's getting late. I'm not even gonna preview them.

On other news, an intersting thread has popped up at the Gamefaqs reviewer board. Someone asked, out of every game that exists for every system, how many deserve 10s? A few people said zero, but I couldn't tell if they were being sarcastic or not. Surprisingly, most people said 30 or 40. So basically, that boils down to only one game per system being a 10. "Hmmm...only 30 games deserve a 10. The rest deserve 7s, 8s, and 9s!! Oh yeah, and a few 1s for the games everyone else hates, too."

Add that to the list of reasons why I think most Gamefaqs reviewers are lousy reviewers (well, aside from that Crawl guy).

Maybe you could do this: If a game isn't worthy of 5 stars, it isn't worthy of a score at all. And the review could just say this: "It isn't as good as R-Types."

I'd rather get opinions from people I know, too. I've bought several games Crawl has spoken highly of. Of course, I do more research than that. (Look at 3 or 4 different review sites, check out screenshots, etc.) But I woudn't blame Crawl if I didn't like, say, Vagrant Story. People at Gamefaqs seem like thay'd say things like, "Facilitypro, you said [game] was good, and I spent 50 bucks and I hated it. It's your fault I wasted my money."
If mine was the only opinion they read before buying the game, they deserve to be disappointed.

Some sites go overboard in sheer number of reviews. At videogamereview.com, Shenmue has 248 reviews, and counting!