AceTKK

FWIW I agree with the original post. I've been gaming on various platforms and reading gaming publications for over a decade and I agree that some reviewers are a little too generous with their scores. A 10/10 really should be reserved for a revolutionary game whose excellence raises the bar for the whole industry. I get the impression that many of the offending reviewers are not serious gamers and aren't approaching their tasks with a critical eye. So, what games would you guys say deserve a 10/10?

-Ace-

Jwilker

how many games fit that bill? Should 10/10 only come every few years?

That's not a challange or anything. Upon re-reading it it kinda sounds like that. I'm just curious how many 10/10s you think there should be over the last decade?

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John Wilker

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bubbabing

How many games should get a 10/10 depends a bit on the scale being employed. If you are using full numbers only with no decimals (scale out of 10), or even full and half numbers (scale actually out of 20), then you might give out one 10 a year... maybe. If you are using full decimal points (scale actually out of 100), a 10.0 should virtually never be given.

You see, the issue here is one of perfection. However fun a game is, if the reviewer has really spent some time and dug into it then it is highly unlikely that they haven't encountered some aspect that could have been improved upon somewhere. Most games have something less than stellar in them (or maybe a lot). So if the reviewer finds anything less than perfection in every area then they can't give a perfect score or there is nothing left to reward that ultimate game that may come along down the road.

mta

Rhuarc

In my opinion one good example of a game deserving a 10 is Snails by PDAmill. Everything about that game screams high quality (at least in my opinion) if I were to rate it a 10 then 95% of all the games I have played for my ppc other than that one would not rate above an 8, and most would be in the 4-7 category, with a few being between 8 and 9.

L8er
Rhuarc

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jlapier

I agree with you Bubbabing, it'd be nice if the reviews were a little more critical, but personally I'm not going to take to heart any review that has at the bottom: Final Score 10/10 followed directly by a button: Purchase this Title. Note the "affiliateId" variable in the link for the button - yes, this means PDArcade gets $$ from Handango when people read the glorious review and buy the game via the handily provided link. Of course, the site has to make some money somehow, I suppose, just like we all do...just doesn't make for very trusting reviews....

cherdman

If you don't trust reviews then try trusting yourself. Try the game and be your own judge. Use reviews as a starting point.

Jwilker

then why care what the review says at all?

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John Wilker

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jlapier

Quote:

Originally posted by Jwilker then why care what the review says at all?

My point exactly. If a review isn't going to be monetarily uninfluenced, then, as I said, I'm not going to take that review to heart.

Jwilker

it does suck that reviews are linked to money. How lame

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bubbabing

Credibility on the part of the reviewer is essential to the overall usefulness of their review. This credibility is in question if:

1. a reviewer is perceived to be on the strings of the company that produced the game in any way;

2. the reviewer is perceived to be a "fanboy" of a particular platform or game type;

3. the reviewer is giving out scores that are consistently out of whack with reality (could be too high OR consistently too low);

4. the review reveals that they have really spent very little time with the game and don't really understand it;

5. the review contains obvious errors and inaccuracies;

Any one, or combination, of these severely damages the review and should cause the reader to take it with a grain of salt. Thus, reviewers need to try and eliminate even the appearance of any of the above. Remember, the audience is sovereign. Their perception (whether accurate or not), is their reality.

markh

hello! this was my first visit to Aximsite, as I'm not an Axim owner I was always scared to visit. Anyway, I am actually the reviewer from Pdarcade for that game and I'm pleased that I found this article as it allows me to resp[ond to a few conclusions which were jumped to.

firstly, unknown to you was the fact the on PDArcade, for many years we had reviewed palm and pocket pc games in differnt styles with different ratings and catagories for analysis. Pocket PC games used to just have one final grade. The tower Mogul review was the first review on the pocket pc side of things since the changeover and the overal rating was really what I was thinking of rather than the mini things which I was really a bit apathetic about rating as I had always wanted 1 rating at the end.

Anyway, if the text was looked at more than the gradings you would see that the 10/10 was something which was probably expected by the end of the review. Also, further in my defense Tower Mogul is a very good game and has scored 10/10 in other reviews before and after the pdarcade one.

we don't have any .5 ratings at the moment which also makes grading difficult.

with regards to the handango link. I got a bit anoyed by that.

The tower mogul game, I think was also the first handango linked game. And I personally do not benefit from any money made this way. I'm pretty sure it is also something extremely low. I had no more gain in giving the score a high rating than I did a low one.

Again, Tower Mogul is one of the best pocket pc games around and as I read your comments I agreed with a lot of what was said about the part scores and in retrospect disagree with a lot of my part scores anyway as I wasn't really interested in them at the time.

I will mention a lot of what has been said and I am angry with myself for not properly looking over the scores, I may have ignored them due to the fact that they are mixed up in html code and I am normally hunting for typos.

If you look at all of the top 10 recently published pocket pc reviews on pdarcade you will see that they are all acurate overal scores.

This one slipped the net in the rushed changeover.

Thanks for your comments and I will emphasise again that I had no personal monetory gain from the review or the number of handango links.

just adding to the conversation a bit now: the reason a lot of pocket pc review scores are high is due to the fact that review sites genrally request reviews for the games they are interested in and are excited to play they don't request to review crappy text based card games just to give them 0/10

ok hope that settles a few points, I'm really glad I visited Aximsite now and I will no doubt continue, if only to make sure there is no more hate messages to me :)

edit: also PDArcade usually gives the 10/10 score to a genre best and we tend to rate games according to the competition in that Pocket PC genre.

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.