Gaming When did 8/10 become a bad score?

great article, i remember the days when i saw 4/10 and thought maybe not but then everything 6+ was always worthwhile. i disagree'd with alot of reviewers in my youth as i thought the mediocre games were ace

 

I don't doubt the crash-test of NCAP itself...it's the additional points that bug me.
If your car doesn't have a limiter-warning...no 5 stars. (Who uses that?)
No Isofix, no 5 Stars (even if the rear seats are unreachable with a baby seat)
No codriver belt-reminder (that's the Beep that indicates if there's a backback on the seat next to you) ;-) ...no 5 Stars

 

when everything is about 9 or 10, 8 is a bad score, it's just a matter of perspective.

 

I haven't read all of the thread, but I remember the crap we (collectively) got when we gave S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky a 3/10 for being quite badly hampered by bugs - so hampered that you could play through 10 hours of the game before a glitch became apparent, with no way to fix that glitch without losing save games. I feel part of the problem is the fanboys who're blind to reality and in gaming that seems even more apparent than any other industry I've written about over the years.

Comment thread is fun to read for those interested! http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/pc/2008/09/12/stalker-clear-sky/1

 

I think a lot of websites are highly pressured by the main audience at the moment: the console, mainstream "hardcore" gamers, who play FPSes, racing games, et cetera. By giving popular games a low score, they are at risk of irritating that massive fan base.

When I take a look at the 40/40 games on Famitsu, I totally understand the list - a few Zelda's, Skyrim and others. However, looking at the 39ers shocked me. There is no way that MW3 and BLOPS are anywhere near the quality of Ocarina or the Wind Waker.

As a result, I tend to take recommendations from those I know - not the reviewers who are between a rock and a hard place.

Sent from my Orange San Francisco using Tapatalk

 

COD MW3 what did other sites give that repeated garbage?

Sites will give scores to the games that make their audience happy. When there is a written component tho, its easy to see who knows there stuff and who just follow the marketing spill and go with the high score.

 

8 outta 10 reviewers received cash or free gifts for their stupid reviews so therefore NO ONE cares about your review score.

2 minutes of You-Tube game play footage is all i need to know if a game is good or not so take your review section and stuff it up your ass!

I can't believe morons still by games depending on a PAID review.

 

It's more like the distributors are doing 'pimp' work more shamelessly the last couple of years to sell their games. One of them is bribing reviewers to get high chart scores. They manage to literary create such a mass-hype that anyone wants it even if you don't play it, aka Appleism.

Some people lost all senses with reality and do such worshiping of particular 'items' that they even want to kill a reviewer for it. I would like to call them 'worship extremists' because that is what those people are. The outcome is a never ending flame-war, you just can't negotiate with extremist see, its their holy believe that what they think and say is the only truth. All other is irrelevant, ignored or waves away as not true and then you have created comment extremists.

To me it seems that since people can comment on reviews of any kind their influence is increased tenfold on the reviewer in a good way or a bad way. I would suggest to not let people comment on reviews at all, just read it, take it as it is or not and that's it. Nobody cares about your or my opinion anyway, and all is forgotten a few days later or when the next review is placed. All comments on this article will be forgotten next week. No one will go back a year later and read this article and its comments again or even comment on it.

So in the end typing a comment is a waste of your time. A few people agree with your comment or they don't and that's it. But for a moment you felt it was important to say something about it and then you move on with other things in your life and forget what you have written here.

 

8/10 became a bad score when games reviewers started handing out 10/10 scores to games that were merely 'very good'. I have played lots of games that were awarded 8/10, or the equivalent, and I found those games to be 'very good'.

 

Games getting scores that are skewed towards the top end of the scale is nothing new. It's been happening ever since the good old days of the ZX Spectrum (and probably even earlier). I remember Amiga Power railing against the concept that an "average" score should be 7/10, and attracting some controversy by awarding some exceptionally low scores. That was over 20 years ago

 

Sorry but this is not just happening here, I used to lecture for a living and we were graded out of 5 in 4 categories and this was converted to a % and weighted based on student numbers. My target 96% (yes so a student who have gave 4 out of 5 was considered bad) if you had an off day and a student gave you a 3 you would be up in front of the boss.

So no surprise that games have gone the same way

 

7 out of 10 and upwards sounds good to me!

 

Its an interesting article and a valid point. Anything below 90% can be deemed as a less than great game!!.

As a PC/computer games player since there real begining in the 80's, i've seen the change in both the games availible and the way they are received.
Back in the 80's and 90's games were considered excellent with a score of 75% or more, and for a game to reach 90% or more it really had to be something both inovative and superb. However, in those days, games were inovative and different. I remember when 'Elite' came out, which was so far removed from other games it generaly was breathtaking..and rightly scored a 9/10....a feat that was rare for any game.

For me the whole PC game market and scoring, infact if anything the dimise of PC games being inovative came with the FPS. When FPS hit the shelves it was rightly "Like 'Elite' before it" considered an amazing new inovative game style...at the time, Military flight sims were the cream of gaming. WIth the advent of FPS, all things changed.

The first FPS games were rightly scored very high....it was something new, but then the very genre took over all gaming, and inovative new games generaly stopped as every devolper jumped on the bandwagon of making very simple forward/back/left/right- shoot games that were guaranteed to score 90%+ and sell big time, other games like highly complex simulators would now score lower marks purely because the did'nt involve running around and shooting people.

The bar was now set at 90% and was reached by all but the abosolutely worst FPS games, with all other genres having to accept lower scores for not being an FPS. Of course, such a simple game genre was easily ported to the emerging consoles, and the decline of the PC was born.

Now it seems, with so little room to move where marking is concerned, its all about the second number that dipicts a games greatness.e.g

First person shooter = 90% base rate. where 91% is good / 92% is very good / 93%+ is great.

 

Devaluation of numbers is human nature.. Unless you have a clear definition of what "84" really means, the scale will start slipping eventually.
Example: Ray Wiever has tested "Ultra Onslaught 2000" and found it to be a great game, score is set to 84%... A while later, the sequel "Ultra Onslaught 3000" emerges, and even if it's not as spectacular for it's time as the old one was, it's still better than the old game. The result is that the grade will be set a bit too high.

If there was a clear definition that 8/10 meant for example "one of the top games available right now" and 9/10 was "this game will be a bechmark for gaming experiences" (5 being: playable, good enough to kill off a few hours with but nothing you'll install again in a few years), that would make it easier to accept for even the fanboys to accept an 8. That in addition to several earlier comments that you perhaps need to separate gaming experience, story, bugginess etc.

personally I've stopped listening to game reviews, they all get 90% anyway...