Fixing Reviews: The Lying Score

Review scores are tricky; they are not for everybody. For a scoring system to have any worth, it must have consistency. Not everybody is ready for that. You can’t call a game a master-piece only to call it a disappointment at the end of the year. Review scores must also be honest and, believe it or not, even less people are ready for that. Here, I’m not talking about the flawed notion some outlets have that the average between 0 and 10 is 8. That’s just being mathematically deprived. Instead, I’m talking about Metacritic, Amazon, App Stores and whatever other place that aggregates scores from users in order to present a single information: that the cosmos has voted and decided that game X is a 8.6 out of 10.

Guess what? They are all lying.

They are lying because they encourage users to lie in their reviews. Yes, that means the liar is ultimately you, Mr. User.

Amazon Buy 2, Get 1 Free until Saturday

Looking to buy some new games? New Medal of Honor, maybe? Perhaps the new Castlevania? Rock Band 3? Or Fallout: New Vegas. Maybe you want something smaller, like Super Scribblenauts (which is a thing, apparently) or Kirby’s Epic Yarn. How

The Page Turner

Well, after finally finishing Mark Danielewski’s ‘Only Revolutions’–an eternal, idyllic and American love story/maze which took me a few years to get through–I knew that I could begin tackling my goal for the summer: to read more. And so Graham

The Price War

Think games are too expensive? Of course you do. Well, if you’ve been following the recent threads on Cheap Ass Gamer, you’d be aware that pretty much every game to have come out in the past year is now being