bubbabing

Markh...

Lol, what were the odds that the writer of the one review I happened to mention specifically would drop in and read my comments. No hate intended on my part dude. My whole point was that ppc game reviews as a WHOLE are, generally speaking, overly optimistic and less demanding than reviews on other gaming platforms. Yours just happened to be the most recent I had read that seemed to illustrate this.

I appreciate your comments and perspective. Extremely high scores should be reserved for special games, though, in my opinion. Let's face it... while Tower Mogul is undoubtedly a fun, addicting game and one of the better ppc games out so far, it was neither groundbreaking (in reality a warmed up version of the old Sim Tower), nor without its share of bugs and glitches, both which argue against a perfect score.

Perfect scores go to perfect games. Take IGN's website as an example. In their PC section, out of the 100's of reviews they have archived from the past few years, you will not find one perfect 10. In fact, the highest score is a 9.7, and there is only one game that got that score and that was about 2.5 years ago. I do acknowledge, though, that if one is not using decimal points or half marks then the odd 10 can be given out. These should still be quite rare, though, or how do you reward the next game that comes out two weeks later and is better than the previous one?

I think a lot of it is coming to grips with your scale definitions. A really poor game shouldn't get a "6", it should get a "2-3". A half decent, albeit somewhat generic game, deserves no more than a "5-6". A "7" is a solid game that people who like the particular genre be will pleased with. An "8" is a very good game that is well above average, while a "9" has excellence written all over it and will typically appeal across genre preferences. If you start giving poor or generic games too high a score then you will get squeezed at the top end with the various degrees of better games.

Anyhow, peace my pocket pc brother! Review on dude! :)

bb

(edit) p.s. I would have to disagree with PDArcade's policy of automatically giving a 10/10 to the genre's best. At this stage of ppc game development some of the "best" in certain genres are far from great games. As the bar continues to be raised, as it undoubtedly will be in subsequent releases, you will have to give the next "best" game a 10 and the next as they have taken over the genre lead. Eventually, you have a whole list of 10/10 games that vary significantly in quality. This just illustrates what I was saying above, where giving too high a mark inititially leaves you no where to go when even better games come out.