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Four-Point Scale
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Ever notice how the average score given by a review show somehow tends to be above average? If you take a stroll on professional game review websites, you will notice that score tend to be in the 6.0 to 10.0 range, even if they're nominally using a ten-point scale. This is called the four point scale, which is also sometimes called the 7 to 9 scale. Two takes exist on why this is so. The first view considers the four point scale to be a bad thing, and holds this as evidence of a website's lack of integrity (often toward mainstream outlets). The accusation is rarely leveled at the writers themselves, with the blame usually placed on a site's editors or Executive Meddling. The game journalism industry, like all forms of journalism, thrives on access. Game magazines and websites need to get a steady flow of new games, previews, and promotional materials directly from the publishers in a timely manner, or they're irrelevant. Unfortunately, the game industry does not have to provide this access, and games review sites and magazines are far more reliant on the companies that produce the games than movie critics are on movie companies; indeed, since most websites are expected to provide their content for free, industry advertising is perhaps their most important source of income. There are tales of editorial mandates or outright bribery, but the whole system is set up so that providing a highly critical review of a company's triple-A title is akin to biting the hand that feeds you. This is especially true of previews, which tend to have an artificially positive tone since if a journalist pans a game the company didn't have to show them in the first place, they're unlikely to be invited back to see any of their other work. As such, you're unlikely to see major titles, even the worst of the worst, get panned too hard in for-profit publications. This results in sites like IGN giving insanely negative reviews in order to appear "balanced" by panning smaller titles that don't provide them with large enough kickbacks. In addition, there's the fact that many of these game review programs draw their audience by reviewing the most anticipated upcoming games; games which are anticipated due to their high degree of quality and polish. Because of this, many critics are incentivized to only review good games for fear of losing ratings. As such, many game reviewers will simply never get around to reviewing the lower quality, bargain bin, shovelware games in order to balance out the scale, hence skewing their score average upwards. The other view considers the four point scale to be the result of a perfectly reasonable way to award and interpret review scores. This can be understood fairly easily by comparing with the way school assignments in America are graded. In any given class, people will usually get scores ranging from 60% to 100%, with the average being around 70-75%. This then leads people, both reviewer and reader, to expect scores to mean something similar to what they already encountered in real life. Getting ~60% means "this sucks, but it can still be considered a game", ~75% is "average", ~85% is "decent/solid" and anything above 90% is a mark of excellence. An additional reason for this lies in a form of selective bias for reviews: You're more likely to go to the trouble of writing a review for something in the first place if you really liked it and want to tell others about it, or absolutely loathed it and want to ward others away from it. While this obviously doesn't apply quite as much to professional critics, it is a major factor in the overwhelming positivity or negativity among user-submitted reviews. The situation with the four point scale has led some reviewers to drop rating scores altogether, or favor an A/B/C/D grading system. Professional reviews tend to keep a rating system to reduce the chance of being misquoted or misinterpreted, as it will be evident that you did not mean the game was "excellent" if there's a big "6/10" or "D" at the end of the article. The same basic concept applies to every industry; reviewers tend to place things in the upper half of whatever their reviewing scale happens to be, and for the same reasons. That said, it's generally agreed to be much more prominent in gaming than in industries like film. Review aggregator Metacritic, for instance, explicitly has different categorization between films and games: an 85 average is considered "universal acclaim" for films, and "generally favorable" for games (with 90 being considered "universal acclaim" for games), and a 45 average is considered "mixed or average" for films and "generally negative" for games (with 50 being considered "mixed or average" for games). If reviewers get too negative there's always the risk of fan backlash, because Reviews Are the Gospel. Contrast So Okay, It's Average, where being just below this scale is acknowledged to have some quality, but not a lot. See also Broke the Rating Scale and F--. See also Damned by Faint Praise; when this scale is in effect, scores like 7 or 8 become faint praise. It is possible to avert this trend, such as by ranking a product's features in relation to one another (one such review for a video game might start: "Soundtrack > Graphics > Plot > Gameplay > Immersiveness") or by giving purely text-based, non-numerical reviews, but this only serves to bypass one's own cognitive biases, not to satiate company execs. |
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Company of Heroes 2 received 1 star out of 5 on the basis of it being no improvement over the original, actively blocking elements of the game in order to provide marketable DLC packs, and requiring endless grinding (in an RTS no less) to unlock vital in-game content. | |
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Actually inverted by EGM in 1998, where they revised their review policy in order to give HIGHER scores, specifically 10s. There was a period from late 1994-mid 1998 where no reviewer had given out a single 10 (Sonic & Knuckles being the last one to receive one). After a slew of excellent high-profile games such as GoldenEye and Final Fantasy VII passed through in 1997 with 9.5s, the mag revised its policy in the summer of 1998. Previously, a 10 was only awarded if a reviewer believed the game to be "perfect". But as Crispin Boyer pointed out in his editorial discussing the change, "Since you can find flaws in any game if you wanted … there's really no point in having a 10-point scale if we're only using 9 of them." Thus, a 10 would be given out if the game was to be considered a gold standard of gaming and genre. The very next issue, Tekken 3 would break the 3+-year spell by receiving 10s from three of its four reviewers, and later that year, Metal Gear Solid and Ocarina of Time became the first games to receive 10s across the board in the magazine's long history. | |
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The Simpsons: In one episode, a journalist who travels around America visiting locations to review visits Springfield. He's repeatedly tricked and abused by the residents and storms off to give Springfield the lowest rating he's given anywhere: 6/10. In "Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner?", Homer becomes a food critic. At first, being Homer, he gives everything an excellent review. While his fellow critics eventually convince him to be crueler, he still won't give anything lower than "seven thumbs up". |
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Dr. Ashen's review of Karting Grand Prix mocks this, with Ashen referring to the game as "irredeemably awful", then giving it a score of 73% "because I'm a fucking idiot." In an earlier review on the Gamestation, a flea-market handheld game system resembling the original PlayStation, Dr. Ashen gives the system 7/10, saying that it's the lowest score one can give "before the company pulls their advertising". And in yet another review he gives a product 8/10, but "only because it's made in China, and I'm terrified of their government." |
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As a reality TV example from Dancing with the Stars, you can trip, shuffle, and walk your way across the dance floor for two minutes and still get a four or five. Two and three are put in play extremely rarely, when the judges are trying to force an inferior dancer off the show. In ten seasons, no one has ever been given a one. The Head Judge Len once gave an explanation of each of the ten scores, and getting on the floor and moving your feet grants you a 2. Being vaguely aware that there was music playing was a 3. Dancing mostly in time to said music gets a 4. To get a 1, you literally would have to not dance at all. The Australian version of the show tends to vary a little more with bad dancers getting in the 40-50% range. There are some rarer exceptions: Nikki Webster got a 1 from one of the judges, almost certainly a publicity stunt as people have danced far worse and gotten more. A couple of contestants have gotten 1s from all the judges but you pretty much have to dress up like a clown and go completely insane to get that (which one guy did). Averted in the German version Let's Dance. While recent seasons have seen a surge in 10s and quite a few 30 total dances, judges aren't afraid to go low if a dancer, even if trying, just isn't delivering. 2s and 3s are very common during the first stages, and not often but regularily dancers fail to get double digits total. Especially "the evil judge" - who always exists on these shows - Joachim Llambi shows 1s on a regular basis and even draws a minus before it on occasion. He calls host of the show Sylvie Meis a "rule lawyer" in those cases where she has to remind him of whatever he does, they will still get a minimum of 1. It took quite a few seasons for the first triple 1 though. On Strictly Come Dancing, Craig Revel-Horwood, in particular, has been criticised for his "low" marking - he marks out of the full 10 (and isn't afraid to use 1s or 2s), while the other judges give out sub-6 scores so rarely that it tends to look like a personal insult when they do. This criticism ignores the fact that, logically, if you're using a ten-point scale then a five or six should be average and a seven or above should be good. Things get even worse once the season passes the quarter-final stage, when any mark lower than 9 tends to be roundly booed by the audience. |
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Eventually this reached its ridiculous-yet-logical conclusion when EGM was denied a review copy of the Game Boy Advance The Cat in the Hat movie tie-in game, which the developer said was because they "didn't want Seanbaby to make fun of it". Or, to put it another way, they acknowledged right out the gate that their game was so bad it wouldn't even rate a 1 in the normal review section. Seanbaby obligingly went out and purchased a copy just so he could lambaste it. | |
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A mission in Borderlands 2's "Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage" DLC involves the player characters being sent after a game reviewer who gave a negative review to a game Mr. Torgue really likes. The review: "Gameplay's pretty dull. It sucked. 6/10." Torgue is half upset because he thinks the game in question is very good, and half upset because by any logical standard a score of 6/10 is above average. | |
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Neoseeker both averts this and plays it straight. Some reviews, such as Code of Princess and Pokémon Black and White (at least before it was edited) had reviews that consisted of little outside of bashing the game, then gave it a seven and six, respectively, to the games. However, since it allows user reviews, there are some reviews that use 5 as the average, and some that use 7 as bad. | |
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The UK Official Dreamcast magazine aimed to avert this trope (back around the turn of the millennium even) by insisting on a rating scheme where 5/10 was strictly "Average". This led to a huge amount of complaints from fans who missed the intention behind the scheme and complained that a game they liked got a "harsh" score (The creators of Fur Fighter commented that the 7/10 they got from the magazine was the lowest score the game received). Eventually, the magazine staff made a phrase for each number and put it under each review score so the reader knew what the rating actually "meant". (For instance, any 7/10 rating had the word "good" under it. Shenmue was the only game that let us find out that the word under a 10/10 was "genius"). | |
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ScrewAttack has the same review system, with the exception of using "F' It" rather than "Skip." It's also the system used for the video game reviews in Boys' Life (the magazine of the Boy Scouts), under the names of "Buy," "Borrow," and "Bag," but not many people care about that. | |
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Jim Sterling of Jimquisition uses a 10 point scale for their reviews on their blog, but completely averts the trope by making the scores actually mean something, such as 5 being average, 7 being good, and so on. However, the trope is played straight by the fans of the games they reviewed, which caused Jim a lot of grief; their review of No Man's Sky caused fans of the game to DDOS their web site because they gave the game a 5/10 for having potential, but wasting it on bad game design. Their site was attacked again when they gave The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild a 7/10, saying that the weapon durability system and other factors annoyed them greatly, but they still enjoyed the game overall. Jim then made an episode pointing out how absurd people were acting over their 7/10 score and wondered how on earth such a score is considered to be horrible. They would since prefer going with impression videos of a game they played to show all the bad and good bits. | |
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Discussed by Jim Sterling on the Jimquisition after they gave The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild a 7/10, leading the fandom to go berserk over the "low" score. When they still reviewed games and gave them scores, they went out of their way to avert the four-point scale, and according to their scale, a 7/10 was actually a rather good score (good overall, even great, but with a large flaw that affected the experience. In this case, the weapon durability system), but it proved to be enough to take BOTW's Metacritic score from a 98 to a mere and lowly 97, leading to the fandom to DDOS their website, and them to drop reviews altogether in favor of "Jimpressions," which features no score and is simply a "Did they like/dislike it?" video. | |
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In Happy Wheels this trope is played straight: If you sort by ratings, you'll inevitably end up with crappy levels that received the 5 star rating either by the creator being the only one to rate it (as suggested by the page image), or by having a "rate 5 stars" message at the end of the crappy level. One sure fire way of finding a good level, is to see the "featured levels". Even then you'd be more than likely to see a a crappy game that was rated five stars because the maker promised a poorly drawn picture of a naked woman for five stars. | |
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Zig-zagged by Mac|Life back when it was still called MacAddict. At the time, they had three review sections: a generic one, one for interactive CD-ROMs and one for children's software. All three used a four-point scale with their mascot, Max: "Freakin' Awesome", "Spiffy", "Yeah, Whatever" and "Blech!". The catch-all section had reviews written by a panel of reviewers, summarized with the responding four-point scale and a good news/bad news blurb summarizing the product's strongest and weakest points. If they could find even one good thing to say about it, it usually got a "Spiffy" at worst. "Yeah, Whatever" was usually reserved for So Okay, It's Average products, and "Blech!" was all but nonexistant. The interactive CD-ROM section, however, was just the opposite. It used a three-reviewer panel for each CD-ROM, and it was very rare that any of the three had anything good to say about any of the interactive CD-ROMs. You could pretty much guarantee at least one "Blech!" per issue here. And finally, the children's section used feedback from actual children, with a summary from a regular reviewer. The children's panel and the main reviewer were weighted to give the overall rating, but even then, you'd be hard-pressed to find a "Blech!" All of this went out the window when the magazine repackaged itself as more staid and formal, going with a standard five-star scale (which has remained with the shift to Mac|Life). |
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Similarly, Asura's Wrath was given a 6/10, a "slightly above average" game to Joe, but since he was in complete awe of the title from beginning to end, he awarded it his Badass Seal of Approval. | |
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Nintendo Power uses a three-tier system for digital download reviews ("Recommended", "Hmmm...", and "Grumble Grumble"). | |
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Pokémon GO and Ingress have a system where high leveled players can vote on whether or not a submitted portal/stop should be implemented in the game based on several factors (historical/cultural significance, easy access on foot, accurate location on the map, etc). Said factors can be given a rating from 1 star to 5 stars and giving a nomination 1 star is an automatic rejection (usually reserved for low quality nominations). Most players vote either 1 star or 5 stars and rarely in between. This is due to the systeming punishing players by lowering their review rating (which in turn makes their votes have less of an impact) if they make too many votes that do not agree with the majority. | |
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Certain games in the Rhythm Heaven series give an explicit numerical score for the player at the end of a rhythm game. Over 85 is Superb, between 60 and 85 is OK, and below 60 fails the stage, forcing the player to try again. | |
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Penny Arcade, not surprisingly, parodied this. Another example. |
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Magazine Famitsu averted this in its early years by having four reviewers who each scored the game out of ten. A 40/40 was something almost impossible to attain, the first one being given in 1998. From then to 2007, only six games hit 40/40... but at some point, their policies seem to have changed, such that in the following two years, seven games received that score, and a further twelve have hit it since, while entire years have gone by without a game scoring under 25. Games part of established franchises tend to be even more ironclad; compare Resident Evil 6's Metacritic score (60) with its Famitsu score (39/40). | |
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Averted by NME, which has a 10-point scale and freely uses all the points on it. They very rarely give out a perfect 10 (usually only once or twice a year, if at all) and this will almost certainly be their album of the year. They also occasionally break the bottom end of the scale by giving out zeroes or even minus figures when they're feeling particularly snarky. | |
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Most Retsupurae videos making fun of flash games end with a sampling of Newgrounds reviews. This subject has come up so many times that it's become a meme to leave outright flames on a Retsupurae video ending with 9/10 or 10/10. Occasionally it even gets inverted, when someone leaves a glowing review with an inexplicably low score. In "Sonic Boom City - State of the Review Edition", the guys read the reviews for a game they couldn't get to load. One review: "Didn't load but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. [2.5/5 stars]" The guys behind Retsupurae, slowbeef and Diabetus, have joked about this several times as well. During the former's Dead to Rights Let's Play, while talking about the critical reviews the game received at release, Diabetus comments that "a 7/10 rating usually means the game is fucking awful". The description for their "Retsufrash" playlist (videos where they make fun of Flash videos and games) also notes that the Flashes in question "deserve the full scorn that an 8 out of 10 offers". |
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Generally averted by Rolling Stone; if you look on their website, the vast majority of albums score 3 or 3.5 stars. Higher-scoring albums are usually later albums or remasterings by classic rock artists. | |
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EGM also received criticism from readers that some games would receive high scores one year, but the next year, a new-and-improved sequel or an extremely-similar-but-better game would come out to lower scores; alternately, a game that received high scores upon its original release may be ported to another system, or remade years later, to lower scores. Reader logic was that if Game B was better than Game A, objectively, Game B had to be rated higher on the numerical scale (see an entry above). This was addressed multiple times in the reader mail and editorial sections, where it was explained that they did not follow this rule, as long-running and generally high-scoring yearly sports series like Madden or Tony Hawk's Pro Skater would have hit the 10-point ceiling years ago due to improvements in each version. Furthermore, at least technically speaking, games will always be improving due to the more powerful consoles and computers that are released every few years. Finally, innovation naturally tended to score higher because of its originality than when all those ideas were incorporated into every game the next year. EGM explained that instead, they rated games based on the current marketplace, and specifically compared new releases to others within its own genre, while their level of standards would naturally increase into the future as games became more ambitious. | |
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Arthur: Exaggerated in "On the Buster Scale", where Buster rates every movie he watches (all being action movies full of robots and explosions) a 10+/10. However, he does consider demoting a movie to just 10/10 because it's not in 3D. | |
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Hot Pepper Gaming falls prey to this as well. A fine example of this would be Erin's review of Clash of Clans, in which she savaged it so badly that they punctuated her screed with drumbeats... and then she gave it three out of five. | |
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A very notable exception to the rule is the VNDB (Visual Novel Data Base), which, as the name suggests, is a listing of (Japanese) visual novels on the market. When a user attempts to give a 10/10, the site actually warns them that this score is reserved for absolute perfection that is unlikely to ever be improved upon and as such, should be given only two or three times at most over one's lifetime. As a result, the list only has two entries over 9.00note Steins;Gate and White Album 2 and less than 50 entries over 8.00, out of a database of well over 10,000 titles. Since visual novels have fairly low requirements to function, as opposed to regular video games, their quality is almost entirely based around the story and therefore highly subjective. As such, even a game that scores around 7.00 can still be very enjoyable. | |
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In Great British Menu, a score of 7 is considered average, and anything below an 8 is considered a disappointment; the lowest score ever given in a judging round was a 2, leading the subject to Rage Quit. On the other side, though, scores of 10 out of 10 are far from unheard of, being essentially an indication that, in its current state, the dish is worthy of being presented at the banquet. | |
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Spanish mag Nintendo Acción runs on this, to the point some Pokémon fans complained when Pokémon Black and White got only a 94, when other games got 96-98 scores. Though in their defense, said review also lambasts the game's graphics, despite the great animated sprites and the Scenery Porn the game has. | |
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Chris Livingston, of Concerned fame, brings this up in his "Bullet Points" series on Crysis 2: | |
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Attack of the Show!'s Gadget Pr0n segment has never rated any reviewed item below 70%. Even a digital camera with grainy picture, difficult menus, unresponsive buttons, low battery life, insufficient storage space, and inadequate low light sensitivity that is several hundreds of dollars too expensive will still get the equivalent of a B+. | |
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When Jello Apocalypse started doing film reviews, he had to go so far as to put out a video explaining his scale, saying that "I'm not the American education system." By his scale, anything above 5/10 meant "this movie is a good use of your time", with only a 6 meaning "you liked it but you probably wouldn't watch it twice or tell your friends to go see it." He himself heavily averts this; his reviews of the Pokémon films had the highest scores be 6/10s. | |
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In Futurama, Dr. Wernstrom gives Dr. Farnsworth the lowest rating ever: A, minus, MINUS! | |
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The opposite end of the spectrum occurs for certain DDR clones. In The Groove 2? An "A" is somewhere around low 80%; after A+ is S-, S, S+, one star, two stars, three stars and four stars. | |
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On Strictly Come Dancing, Craig Revel-Horwood, in particular, has been criticised for his "low" marking - he marks out of the full 10 (and isn't afraid to use 1s or 2s), while the other judges give out sub-6 scores so rarely that it tends to look like a personal insult when they do. This criticism ignores the fact that, logically, if you're using a ten-point scale then a five or six should be average and a seven or above should be good. Things get even worse once the season passes the quarter-final stage, when any mark lower than 9 tends to be roundly booed by the audience. | |
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The old Polish computer game magazine Top Secret rarely gave any game a rating below 7, even when the review contained mainly complaints about the game's quality. | |
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They switched to letter grades in late 2012. For three years, they managed never to go lower than C-minus (The X Factor winner Tate Stevens' debut, the video for Eli Young Band's "Say Goodnight", Luke Bryan's "That's My Kind of Night", and the video for Florida Georgia Line's "This Is How We Roll"). The magazine finally gave out four Dsnote David Fanning's "Doing Country Right", Waterloo Revival's "Bad for You", Eric Paslay's "High Class", and Jana Kramer's "Said No One Ever" and a D-minusnote Danielle Bradbery's "Friend Zone" in 2015 and 2016, but still never gave out an F before the magazine stopped publication in 2016. | |
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Guitar Hero sort of justifies it, because "failed a song" means "got a bad review" and so if you get less than three stars you failed. It's more like a Hand Wave than a real justification, though. | |
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He did give out a numerical score for Wolfenstein (a two out of five stars, which is already an aversion of this trope). Likely the reason he did give out a rating, though, was because he did the review almost entirely in limerick form and just needed a rhyme. | |
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The guys behind Retsupurae, slowbeef and Diabetus, have joked about this several times as well. During the former's Dead to Rights Let's Play, while talking about the critical reviews the game received at release, Diabetus comments that "a 7/10 rating usually means the game is fucking awful". The description for their "Retsufrash" playlist (videos where they make fun of Flash videos and games) also notes that the Flashes in question "deserve the full scorn that an 8 out of 10 offers". | |
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Video Power was an early 90s show meant to cover everything related to video games, including reviews of recent titles. It only takes watching a few episodes of this to notice the host never does a game he doesn't recommend. | |
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For British television dramas, "average" is actually 77%. Even so, very few dramas go below 70 or over 90 (much was made over the Doctor Who Series 4 finale getting 91% for both parts). | |
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Video game magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, or EGM, made a conscious effort to avert this: most (previously all) titles they featured were handled by three separate reviewers, and highly varying impressions were surprisingly common. Closer to the end of its run, they switched from a 1-10 scale to a 'grade' system (A, B, B+, etc.) for the purpose of avoiding the Four Point Scale trap entirely. Towards the end of the mag's original run, they handed off the really awful games to internet personality Seanbaby, who wrote humorous reviews lambasting them for being so bad that nobody would - or should - ever play them (many of the reviews can be seen, in extended and uncensored forms, on his website). Eventually this reached its ridiculous-yet-logical conclusion when EGM was denied a review copy of the Game Boy Advance The Cat in the Hat movie tie-in game, which the developer said was because they "didn't want Seanbaby to make fun of it". Or, to put it another way, they acknowledged right out the gate that their game was so bad it wouldn't even rate a 1 in the normal review section. Seanbaby obligingly went out and purchased a copy just so he could lambaste it. There were letters from the editor talking about how some company or another wouldn't give them information about their games anymore because of the bad scores they handed out. This happened at least twice with Acclaim and once with Capcom. In their first encounter with Acclaim, EGM had handed out very low review scores to their Total Recall game for the NES; when Acclaim threatened to pull advertising if they didn't give the game a better review, editor-in-chief Ed Semrad wrote in an editorial column that they could go right ahead, because they were sticking by the review even if it cost them money, because journalistic integrity was more important than a paycheck. The second time this happened, it was because EGM had blasted BMX XXX (and rightfully so); this time, Acclaim threatened to never let them review another game of theirs ever again, to which EGM said "fine by us". Capcom's case was a somewhat different affair: it wasn't a review that got them angry, but instead EGM badmouthing the constant stream of "updates" to Street Fighter II; when Capcom asked EGM to apologize for the remarks in exchange for not pulling advertising, EGM again said that they would not retract the statements even if it cost them Capcom's money, because they felt honesty and independence in their publication was more important. In all three cases, Acclaim and Capcom pulled ads from the mag for a few months before buying adspace again (plus, Acclaim would go bankrupt shortly after BMX XXX anyway). It should also be noted that EGM's review system was heavily inspired by Famitsu's review system. The first issue of EGM, however, featured scores that ranged from 'miss' to 'DIRECT HIT!'. Actually inverted by EGM in 1998, where they revised their review policy in order to give HIGHER scores, specifically 10s. There was a period from late 1994-mid 1998 where no reviewer had given out a single 10 (Sonic & Knuckles being the last one to receive one). After a slew of excellent high-profile games such as GoldenEye and Final Fantasy VII passed through in 1997 with 9.5s, the mag revised its policy in the summer of 1998. Previously, a 10 was only awarded if a reviewer believed the game to be "perfect". But as Crispin Boyer pointed out in his editorial discussing the change, "Since you can find flaws in any game if you wanted … there's really no point in having a 10-point scale if we're only using 9 of them." Thus, a 10 would be given out if the game was to be considered a gold standard of gaming and genre. The very next issue, Tekken 3 would break the 3+-year spell by receiving 10s from three of its four reviewers, and later that year, Metal Gear Solid and Ocarina of Time became the first games to receive 10s across the board in the magazine's long history. EGM also received criticism from readers that some games would receive high scores one year, but the next year, a new-and-improved sequel or an extremely-similar-but-better game would come out to lower scores; alternately, a game that received high scores upon its original release may be ported to another system, or remade years later, to lower scores. Reader logic was that if Game B was better than Game A, objectively, Game B had to be rated higher on the numerical scale (see an entry above). This was addressed multiple times in the reader mail and editorial sections, where it was explained that they did not follow this rule, as long-running and generally high-scoring yearly sports series like Madden or Tony Hawk's Pro Skater would have hit the 10-point ceiling years ago due to improvements in each version. Furthermore, at least technically speaking, games will always be improving due to the more powerful consoles and computers that are released every few years. Finally, innovation naturally tended to score higher because of its originality than when all those ideas were incorporated into every game the next year. EGM explained that instead, they rated games based on the current marketplace, and specifically compared new releases to others within its own genre, while their level of standards would naturally increase into the future as games became more ambitious. |
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He rated Deus Ex, one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time, a game that rivals Half-Life for the title of "Best Game Ever", a 3 out of 10. | |
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YouTube had a rating system that let people give a video a score of up to five stars, though hardly anyone gave less than three, unless the video was particularly bad. This led to a few wide-spread incidents of vote-bots giving dozens or hundreds of one star ratings to people whose videos disagree with the attackers' own political or religious beliefs, where a drop even to four stars will greatly reduce a video's traffic. Youtube has since dropped the 5-star system and changed it to a simple like/dislike system. Similarly, Netflix allowed movie ratings, and aggregated all the user reviews into a star rating. Because there are people that will like something no matter how bad it is, and some people that will hate something no matter how good it is, 1 star and 5 star ratings are impossible. However, if a movie doesn't get above 1 and 1/2 stars, you should probably avoid it, and if it reaches 4 and 1/2 stars, it's probably worth watching. So the scale is skewed, but still relatively accurate. It has since shifted to simple like/dislike too, and at certain point it didn't show the full score, as the rating only serves to determine what will be recommended to the viewer. |
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Dance Central received a 7/10, the highest possible from Joe: to others, this may seem like a weak score, but he reasons the game wasn't only fun, it was built specifically to take advantage of the Kinect. Not only did he give it his "Badass Seal of Approval", Joe also placed it at #5 on his "Top Ten Best Games of 2010" over other big titles during that year such as Halo: Reach, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. | |
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Then in 2007, Halo 3, The Orange Box, and Super Mario Galaxy were awarded 10s three months running, and since then the score has been awarded a lot more frequently. (See this interview with the editor for a discussion of their reviewing philosophy from around that time.) In contrast to 10/10, they've only used the dread 1/10 score twice - for the godawful Kabuki Warriors, and FlatOut 3. | |
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Halo 4. 1 out of 5. | |
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When Assassin's Creed II was due for release, Ubisoft got caught in a major shitstorm when they announced that they won't give the game out for testing unless the reviewer agrees in advance to give a positive review. Apparently, it didn't need the "boost". Eidos also pulled this trick for Tomb Raider: Underworld. |
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Eidos also pulled this trick for Tomb Raider: Underworld. | |
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The user-rated difficulty rating scale on GameFAQs is a 2.5-4.0 scale, when counting only the games with least 50 difficulty level votes. Easy games have a difficulty rating of less than 3. Average difficulty games, which represent the majority of games for most genres, are between 3 and 3.5 in difficulty. Minimum threshold for low-end Nintendo Hard starts at around 3.5. Difficulty rating 4 or above are reserved for the hardest of the Nintendo Hard, and several genres (such as Adventure, Puzzle, and Sports) have no games rated with such high difficulty. Only a very small number of games exceed the 4.5 mark, examples of such games include Ghosts and Goblins (NES), Battletoads (NES), Silver Surfer (NES), Ikuraga, and Touhou Chireiden: Subterranean Animism. The choices available for voting a game's difficulty are as follows, and the point value in brackets: Simple (1), Easy (2), Just Right (3), Tough (4), and Unforgiving (5). |
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Four-Point Scale | |
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Surprisingly, IGN is often pretty good about averting this trope (witness the 3.0 they gave Ninja Gaiden 3). In fact, they completely averted it in the very early days where they scored games on an integer scale rather than a decimal scale. However, once they moved to a decimal scale around September of 1998, this cropped up more and more frequently. For example, in 2000, they wrote a very critical (and angry!) review for the PC version of Final Fantasy VIII but still gave it a pretty solid 7.4/10 note Although when reviewing ports separately from the main game, it's not uncommon for the text of the review to focus solely on the quality of the port, as the game itself has already been reviewed previously, and then assign a new numerical score based on the original's score adjusted for how good or bad the port was. Similarly, in 2000, they wrote a very negative review for RealMyst but still gave it a score of 6.5. | |
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Four-Point Scale | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_ebc16967 | comment |
There were letters from the editor talking about how some company or another wouldn't give them information about their games anymore because of the bad scores they handed out. This happened at least twice with Acclaim and once with Capcom. In their first encounter with Acclaim, EGM had handed out very low review scores to their Total Recall game for the NES; when Acclaim threatened to pull advertising if they didn't give the game a better review, editor-in-chief Ed Semrad wrote in an editorial column that they could go right ahead, because they were sticking by the review even if it cost them money, because journalistic integrity was more important than a paycheck. The second time this happened, it was because EGM had blasted BMX XXX (and rightfully so); this time, Acclaim threatened to never let them review another game of theirs ever again, to which EGM said "fine by us". Capcom's case was a somewhat different affair: it wasn't a review that got them angry, but instead EGM badmouthing the constant stream of "updates" to Street Fighter II; when Capcom asked EGM to apologize for the remarks in exchange for not pulling advertising, EGM again said that they would not retract the statements even if it cost them Capcom's money, because they felt honesty and independence in their publication was more important. In all three cases, Acclaim and Capcom pulled ads from the mag for a few months before buying adspace again (plus, Acclaim would go bankrupt shortly after BMX XXX anyway). | |
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Four-Point Scale / int_ebc16967 | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_ec80dae4 | type |
Four-Point Scale | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_ec80dae4 | comment |
Zero Punctuation does not give out numerical scores for just this reason. He did give out a numerical score for Wolfenstein (a two out of five stars, which is already an aversion of this trope). Likely the reason he did give out a rating, though, was because he did the review almost entirely in limerick form and just needed a rhyme. In response to "How can you even call it a review without a score?" from his Super Smash Bros. Mailbag Showdown: "If you want a score, how about four, as in four-k you" accompanied by the commenter being flattened by a giant number 4. It is also worth mentioning that, his lack of using scores aside, Yahtzee subverts the whole reason for this trope in the first place (that is, reviewers not giving bad reviews more or less to keep their jobs). His job practically is to give bad reviews, and he often receives criticism when he praises a game. Kotaku doesn't give scores, either, making some commenters confused. Their system of summing up reviews is to ask "Should you buy this game?" with the possible answers being "Yes" for a good game, "Not yet" for a game with significant issues that might be patched in the future, and "No" for a bad game that's irredeemable. |
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Four-Point Scale / int_ec80dae4 | |
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Four-Point Scale | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_eddc4ca3 | comment |
An odd trend turned up in amateur reviews of Hogwarts Legacy after the pre-launch controversies over antisemitic content and the transphobic views of the IP creator died down. A surprising number of reviewers summarized it as something along the lines of "it's a mediocre open-world game, but it's Harry Potter so 8/10". | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_eddc4ca3 | featureApplicability |
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| Four-Point Scale / int_eddc4ca3 | featureConfidence |
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Four-Point Scale / int_eddc4ca3 | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_f5799bd9 | type |
Four-Point Scale | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_f5799bd9 | comment |
Parodied in the TV show The Critic. Jay is told by his boss that his job is to "rate movies on a scale from good to excellent." Jay himself in an inversion: he dislikes everything and the best score he ever gave a film was a 7 out of 10. | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_f5799bd9 | featureApplicability |
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| Four-Point Scale / int_f5799bd9 | featureConfidence |
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Four-Point Scale / int_f5799bd9 | |
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Four-Point Scale | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_f6701287 | comment |
IMDB seems to actively encourage this, listing any review that rated a movie or show a 7.0 or worse under "Hated It". | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_f6701287 | featureApplicability |
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| Four-Point Scale / int_f6701287 | featureConfidence |
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Four-Point Scale / int_f6701287 | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_faed6ad0 | type |
Four-Point Scale | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_faed6ad0 | comment |
Ice Age (formerly Stars On Ice, Russian Dancing With The Stars on ice), uses standard figure skating scales: 0.0 to 6.0. To put things into perspective, the worst average score in the entire history of the show, awarded to the worst pair on the very first day back in 2006, was 4.8. It's becoming worse over the years: now the average score is 6.0, noticeable mistakes mean 5.9, and bad performance is as low as 5.8. To add insult to injury, judges sometimes complain about how they don't have enough grades to noticeably differentiate between performances of similar qualities, apparently ignoring the fact that they have 57 other grades at their disposal. | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_faed6ad0 | featureApplicability |
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Four-Point Scale / int_faed6ad0 | |
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Four-Point Scale | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_fd37c3b | comment |
Alex Navarro (a co-worker and supporter of Gerstmann's) often broke the four point scale when he reviewed games including Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, Robocop, and Land of the Dead. | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_fd37c3b | featureApplicability |
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Four-Point Scale / int_fd37c3b | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_fd8ef85e | type |
Four-Point Scale | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_fd8ef85e | comment |
Similarly, a web site that hosts community content for Left 4 Dead allows people to give reviews on the created content, ranging from 1-100. Trolls or people who exaggerate how much they hate the custom content will generally give a rating between 1-20. Anyone that wants to praise the author to hell or if the author is using an alt account, they will give scores of 90-100. For the latter, the people will ridicule others who give scores between a 60 and an 80, even if the content doesn't meet the standards of receiving a high score. In other words, if the content is decent, you better either give high scores or risk being flamed by the community for being too harsh or a troll. | |
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Four-Point Scale / int_fd8ef85e | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_fe6cdec | type |
Four-Point Scale | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_fe6cdec | comment |
With certain artists it shifts the scale about one-and-a-half stars lower. | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_fe6cdec | featureApplicability |
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Four-Point Scale / int_fe6cdec | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_ff4647d6 | type |
Four-Point Scale | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_ff4647d6 | comment |
The titular host of The Angry Joe Show states this is a Pet-Peeve Trope of his. The "Angry Reviews", "Extended Review Discussions" and "Rapid Fire Reviews" have all used just about every number on the 1-10 scale (whole numbers only with no decimals). According to Joe and his team, a 5/10 is their flat average, with reviews for video games building towards the team justifying a higher or lower score. For instance, a 3/10 to Joe will have some decent points, yet he'll detail the negatives and why it's ultimately not worth recommending to his audience; conversely, Joe will preach for a 9/10, but explain why it falls short of a 10/10. Still, there are some examples in the show's history where the trope is Played With. Dance Central received a 7/10, the highest possible from Joe: to others, this may seem like a weak score, but he reasons the game wasn't only fun, it was built specifically to take advantage of the Kinect. Not only did he give it his "Badass Seal of Approval", Joe also placed it at #5 on his "Top Ten Best Games of 2010" over other big titles during that year such as Halo: Reach, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. Similarly, Asura's Wrath was given a 6/10, a "slightly above average" game to Joe, but since he was in complete awe of the title from beginning to end, he awarded it his Badass Seal of Approval. |
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Four-Point Scale / int_ff4647d6 | |
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Four-Point Scale | |
| Four-Point Scale / int_ffce3af6 | comment |
RPGFan is notorious for this - with rare exceptions, even a game the reviewer will spend the entire piece criticizing will still get at least a 70. They posted an editorial about it, providing an explanation of their methods and somewhat admitting that the lower half of their scale is pointless, but sidestepped describing their reasoning, instead saying that you should focus on the text of their reviews. They later added a link to a guide◊ with every review, but still have not explained why they score games this way. | |
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