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Old 09-12-2010, 12:03 PM   #4385 (permalink)
DudeEMETIB
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Florida
Posts: 1,599
I like number-score reviews, while I definitely agree that it's a shame when games are reduced to their scores, for better or for worse....and I do agree that I'm much more influenced by the actual written part of the review than it's end score....a number gives you a quick reference.

The same with movies, albums, or anything. For the masses, they'll always just look at the number and go with that. For some reason I will never understand, GTA4 is a 98 or something on Metacritic....so you'll always have a bunch of fucktards buying that game and "thinking" it's great, because they were told it. And it sucks ass when, as Chmpy brought up, a game gets a low score for a bullshit reason and it kills the game's sales.

But on a personal level, I think numbers are helpful. Sometimes the written portion of a review that describes gameplay, the experience of the game, graphics, difficulty, and what not can be a bit ambiguous about the overall feel of the game....so a number helps. Sometimes you "know" how a reviewer or review site generally feels about certain game types, or genres of music, or what not....and so a 8 from them, you might know would usually be a 10 for you....so that helps.

It also helps because, a lot of times, but hardly always, if the majority of people are giving a game an 8-10, it's probably at least pretty good.
You can quickly aggregate a number score, and see what a consensus feels about a game, but you can't quickly read a shit ton of reviews.

Also, I really like number-scores from individual people. For example, if Dave or Tony come here and say they just played a game that was "completely amazing" and maybe said "9/10! without a doubt" though it seems Tony might not ever use a number score, that would hold a lot more weight in my judgement of whether or not a game would be worth checking out...than if IGN says a game is 10/10.

Ratings are subjective, I don't think giving them a score is an attempt to assert an objective fact in quality....it's just a "hey this is what I thought" and then it's up to other reviewers, gamers, movie watchers, etc. to compare their opinions.
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