The Jewphin Rants About...Review Scores
By: TheJewphinIGN gave Grand Theft Auto IV a 10 out of 10. I do not care if you like Grand Theft Auto IV. I do not care if you love Grand Theft Auto IV. I don't even care if Grand... if GTA IV (too tired of typing it out) is your favorite game. A 10 out of 10 is a perfect score. It implies that the game could have done no better. That there was absolutely nothing wrong with GTA IV. And there were problems with GTA IV. For example, there were the friendship building missions where a drug dealer would call you while you were attempting to run over hookers and ask you to drive him to a bar to grab drinks. If you refuse, your friendship score goes down and you are brought further away from the perks of said friendship (not that I know what those perks are because there was no way in hell I would waste that kind of time). If you accept, you are stuck driving to the character's house, picking him up, driving him to a bar, waiting through repetitive dialogue until the character gets bored, then driving him home.
And don't get me started on the mission checkpoints in GTA IV. You start a mission which requires you to drive to a drug dealer's place (because it's always drug dealers) and pick him up. The drug dealer tells you to go pick up his friend across town. You get his friend and start driving to your little brother's Bar Mitzvah or whatever BS they are using as an excuse to force you to drive across the city. And then someone side swipes you and you have to chase him down. And if you lose him? Well, then you get to start the mission over again. Pick up first drug dealer sixty miles away, drive to friend across town, head towards bar mitzvah, get side swiped, start chasing car, get hit by a bus, start the whole goddamned mission over again.These weren't deal breakers, mind you. The game was still fun and interesing. But it wasn't a ten. It was not without issues. But that's the world we live in now. We create a number system to review games and then we don't even hold true to the stupid system we created. You created a site that rates games betwen one and ten? Then why the hell is your average score a seven? How does your scaling even work? Is it logarithmic? The problem is that no one wants to buy a game that got a six. It doesn't matter that six was above average, making it more worth playing than not. No, because game websites are afraid that if it isn't in the eight range which, I remind you, should only include the top twenty percent of games BY DEFINITION, people won't play the game. So we keep raising the averages, changing mediocre to good, good to great, great to amazing, and amazing to a freaking ten out of ten. It's the video game version of a click bait article. "You'll never believe what happens next!" Yes, I will. I have never failed to believe what happens next. But you know what? I have stopped trusting you when you say that. Your tens are meaningless to me now, if only because you gave GTA IV a freaking ten out of ten.Look, there are a lot of problems with the ways we review games. I almost wish we could move back to the two thumbs up system. Did that guy like it? Thumb one. Did the other guy like it? Thumb two. That shit was clean. And if you knew who guy one and guy two were, you could even tell how much you'd like it based on whether or not guy one liked it.There's a lot more to say here - specifically with the idea that games are all bunched into the same grouping such that GTA IV's ten out of ten is put up against Killer 7 - a much better game. But I will save such words for a different time. Good night loyal reader. And please don't forget to give me a review. My recommendation? Ten out of ten.
