If you had asked me a couple years ago if any game deserved a perfect review score of 10/10, I would have said no. Every single game that I'd played had some type of flaw that warranted the deduction of some amount of points. Therefore in my mind, a perfect score of 10 was always something to strive toward, but never something that was possible to achieve.

The last few years though the quality of games released has gone through the roof. Thanks to titles like GTA 4, Bioshock, and Metal Gear Solid 4 I've started to reevaluate my position on the subject of perfect review scores. This all came to a head recently when I was given the opportunity to write the official Gamer Limit review for Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

After discussing it over with some of the staff members at the site, I decided to give the game a perfect 10/10. Feel free to read to my actual review if you like, as it will provide a lot more details about my reasoning then I'm about to go into here. Simply put, in my opinion Uncharted 2 is the best game released on the PS3 to date. Naughty Dog has created such a memorable masterpiece that it represents the pinnacle of game development for this current generation of consoles. How could I not give the game a 10?

Now something I found very interesting about Uncharted 2, which I point out in my review, is that it doesn't do anything that hasn't been done before. The cover and shoot gameplay mechanic isn't anything new, the tomb raiding puzzle/adventure gameplay style has been done to death, and the multiplayer combines elements from many other games already existing on the market. If this game takes lots of ideas from so many other titles out there, how is it that it could possible deserve a perfect score?

While it is true that Uncharted 2 doesn't do anything new, it does do a lot of different things, all of which have been polished to a level of quality that is extremely rare these days. The single player story is better then most of the action movies released so far this year, the multiplayer is addictive and extremely diverse, the colorful cast of characters are accompanied by some of the best voice acting heard in years, and the replayability is through the roof.

How often do you find a sequel that manages to keep everything good from the previous game, while solving all of the problems that nagged the original? Not only that, but add in a multiplayer mode that rivals, if not beats the pants off of other games who have been doing multiplayer for years like Gears of War 2. Everyone was worried that Naughty Dog might stumble and trip over themselves by attempting too much, but instead they managed to hit a home run and show why they are on e of the best developers in the business.



I think that if a game manages to do a multitude of different things extremely well, and doesn't half ass a single part of the entire package, it deserves a perfect score. Uncharted 2 does this, so in my mind it should get a perfect 10.

Not everyone agrees with this line of thinking, as is evident with the recent GameTrailers Uncharted 2 score fiasco. A great deal of commotion erupted when the site decided to give the game a 9.3. As you watch the entire review it appears that the score it going to be in the high 9's to possibly a 10, but then in the end the review score of 9.3 is shown and a lot of people were shocked.

In a later episode of Invisible Walls, the reasoning behind the lower score was explained. According to the reviewers, while the game was extremely good and did a lot of things right, it did not attempt to do anything new and hence does not deserve the acclaim of getting anything higher then a 9.5.

When I read this I was very disappointed in the site. If you take a look back at many of the games that actually try to innovate, you'll notice a pattern of shitty games. Mirror's Edge and Assassin's Creed are two recent examples of this. They both tried to innovate and create something new and unique, and they both had major issues that really brought the gameplay experience down.

A majority of the best games ever made are not ones that try to innovate. They are the ones that take already existing gameplay formulas and mechanics and try to perfect and polish them into something that's actually fun and entertaining to play. COD 4: Modern Warfare and Bioshock are two great examples. Neither of these games did anything new, but they both took a lot of elements tried in previous games and perfectly melded them together to create an excellent experience.

My point is, games like Uncharted 2 shouldn't be punished because they don't attempt to innovate or try something new. They should be celebrated for getting so many things right that other games could not. Perfect review scores like 10 should be rare, but they shouldn't be impossible to get. There is no such thing as a perfect game, and there never will be, but games can come extremely close to perfect. Uncharted 2 is one of these games, which is why I think it deserves a perfect 10/10.

Many of you know me as a long time Dtoid community member, but what most of you don’t know is that I’ve recently become a senior writer over at Gamer Limit (gamerlimit.com). I’ve only been writing for them a couple of months now, but I’ve tried reviewing as many games as I can, hoping to get more experience so I can get better at it. Lucky for me, most of my reviews so far have all been for really good games like Shadow Complex and The Beatles: Rock Band. That all changed recently when I volunteered to play and review a new Xbox 360 game titled Darkest of Days.

When I first volunteered to review this game, I knew that it wasn’t getting good reviews. I hesitated at first because of this fact, but eventually I decided that I shouldn’t let other people’s opinions of a game effect my own judgment. After all, there are plenty of games other people have hated which I loved. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed immediately comes to mind. I also knew that I liked the general premise of Darkest of Days, and that I’d been interested in it for a while, so I decided to volunteer to review it after all.

What I soon discovered was that it was not only a horrible game, but one of the worst games I’ve ever played. If you want to read my review of Darkest of Days you should head on over the Gamer Limit and look it up, but I’m not going to link it hear because Yojimbo will give me lots of shit for pimping my articles through the Cblogs. What I will tell you is that there were many occasions I seriously considered not finishing the game because of how horrible it was. It only took me 10 hours total to beat it, but it was 10 of the most excruciatingly painful gaming hours of my life.

When I had finally concluded the game and put it back in its box, vowing to never play it again, I discovered that I had created a list of negative notes that were multiple pages in length. I knew it was finally time to begin my review, but I honestly wasn’t sure what to do. I knew I wanted to give it a bad score, but I wasn’t sure how bad that would be. I decided to turn to my fellow writers over at Gamer Limit and ask for advice. They all told me to give it whatever score I wanted, and to not worry about what anyone else thought.

You know, we bash games all the time here in the Cblogs, and we never really think twice about it. After all, it can be fun to take a game and completely rip it apart, finding every little problem with it and driving a game into the ground because of them. Developers of those games don’t typically come to the Dtoid cblogs and read what we have to say though.



Things are quite different at Gamer Limit. When I write a review, we actually mail that review directly to the publisher so they can read it themselves. In this case the developer, 8monkey Labs, gave us a free copy of Darkest of Days, so they were expecting a review from us in a short period of time. When the review you write is going to be sent to and read by the actual people who made it, it makes you stop and think about exactly what you want to say.

These people spent years of their life creating this game, and even though the final product might have ended up bad, you can tell that they put a lot of hard work into it. When someone has spent so much time on something and put so much of themselves into it, it can extremely hard to crush their spirits by telling them how bad of a job they did. It’s happened to me before and I can tell you it sucks! Unfortunately for them they just didn’t make a good game, and I couldn’t allow my feelings to interfere in the matter.

The other problem I had writing a bad review was I didn’t know how it would affect Gamer Limit’s relationship with the developer and publisher. This is another reason I asked my fellow writers what I should do. My editor-in-chief specifically told me to not worry about the publisher and to just write exactly what I thought of the game, not letting anything else influence me. He let me know he would take care of the relationship, since that kind of stuff is his job after all.

I decided that the best thing to do was the give them a really bad score, but to make sure I backed up all my reasoning without being childish or immature. I can honestly say that I didn’t enjoy writing this review. When I was done, someone I know asked me if I enjoyed tearing down the game. My response to that was an immediate “no”. I simply could not take pleasure in destroying what someone else had created.

The thing I regret the most was that I spent so much space writing about the negative aspects of the game, I ran out of room to write anything really positive. There actually were some good things about Darkest of Days, but if you read my review you wouldn’t know it. That’s mainly because the positive things are extremely overpowered by all the negative things. I felt like if I was writing such a bad review, I needed to make sure I included as many negative points as possible. This was just one of those hard decisions I discovered I had to make. It sucks, but it is what it is.

As you can see, my first experience writing a bad game review for Gamer Limit was not a very pleasant one. I thought it would be easy, but ended up discovering it was not only hard, but painful as well. It’s just not easy to tell someone that all their hard work didn’t pay off, and that they created what essentially is a horrible game. I made it through though, and now that I’ve done one I’ll be more comfortable writing another bad review when the next piece of trash comes along. That’s not to say that I’ll ever enjoy it though.

Today I decided to sit down and figure out exactly how much money I'm going to be spending on all the games I was planning on buying this Fall. In order to exercise some level of "control", I decided to only include games that I was 100% sure I wanted to play. What I quickly discovered was that my list was much much much larger then I thought.

Below is the complete list of titles I came up with, along with release dates and prices. As you can see, if you add all those dollar amounts up you get $780. Add in the 7% North Carolina sales tax and it brings the total up to $835. I don't know about you, but that is a whole hell of a lot of money.

I'm honestly starting to think that I need to reconsider whether I really want some of these games. Not only is $835 a lot of money to spend, but there are just too many games on this list to physically attempt to play in the alloted time. Just check out October 20th. There are three games coming out on that same day I want to play, and all of them are probably 40+ hour games. What the hell was I thinking when I made this list?

On another note, weren't a lot of games supposed to be pushed back to 2010. Looking at this list, you wouldn't think any games had been pushed back at all. Damn video game developers and all their stupid creative genius. I wish they would just take a break for a while.

So how much money do the rest of you plan on spending this Fall on games? Anywhere near the insane amount I plan on spending?

Sept. 22
-Halo 3: ODST- $60

Sept. 29
-Dead Space: Extraction- $50

Oct. 13
-Brutal Legend- $60
-Uncharted 2: Among Thieves- $60

Oct. 20
-Borderlands - $50
-DJ Hero- $120
-Forza 3 - $60

Oct. 27
-Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time- $60

Nov. 3
-Dragon Age: Origins- $50

Nov. 10
-Modern Warfare 2 - $50

Nov. 17
-Assassin’s Creed II- $60
-Left 4 Dead 2 - $50

Q4 2009
-New Super Mario Bros. Wii- $50

I might be a little late to the party, and everyone might be sick of these by now, but damnit I need to tell everyone why I love Destructoid. You see, when I first joined the Dtoid community well over a year ago, I came for two main reasons. The first reason was because I needed a place where I could meet people who were as passionate about video games as I was. I have a lot of friends who play video games, but most of them aren’t passionate about them. Yeah they might play some of the big name titles like MGS4, GTA4, and Madden, but that’s about it. They don’t play any of the lesser known titles and they don’t pay attention to what’s going in the industry.

Because of this, I could never really talk to any of my friends about video games the way I really wanted, and that bothered me. I needed a place where I could meet people just like me, who I would actually be able to have real conversations with about the video game industry and all the crazy games coming out. I realized the best way to do this was to blog, and out of all the websites I looked, Dtoid had the best community blog section. This was the place I needed to be.

The second reason I joined Destructoid was because I was hoping it might be a way to get a job as a video game journalist. At the time I absolutely hated my real life job, and I wanted a change to something I was passionate about. Since I was passionate about playing and talking about games, I thought being a games journalist might be the best fit for me. Unfortunately I had absolutely no experience at all, so no one would even consider hiring me. I of course didn’t blame them. I then thought that if I started blogging and writing about games, maybe someone would think I had talent and might hire me. At the time the idea seemed extremely farfetched, but when you have a dream and a goal you have to start somewhere right. If you never even start toward your goal, you won’t get anywhere.

Well it’s been 1 year and 3 months since I joined the Dtoid community, and what I’ve gotten out of this site has just exceeded every expectation I ever had. First of all, I found exactly what I was looking for, a place I could fit in perfectly. I have had so many incredible and in-depth discussions about games here that I never thought I would have with anyone. Besides that, I have met tons and tons of incredible people, from every walk of life and every part of the world you can imagine. I’ve even forged some bonds of friendship with certain people which I hold very dear.

As for my hope that joining Destructoid might help land me a job as a video game journalist; for the longest time I tried and tried to write good pieces so that someone would notice me, but no one ever did. After a while I sort of gave up and submitted to the fact it would probably never happen. I never lost all hope, as I’m a very optimistic person, but the dream faded more and more with each passing day. Then one day I got an extremely unexpected email from an unexpected source, offering me a chance to write for a new and upcoming gaming site. After checking out the site I accepted the offer, and I’m now proud to say that I’m an official staff writer for GamerLimit.com. If you get a chance you should check out the site. I write under my actual name: Shawn Evans.

Unfortunately, being a writer at Gamer Limit has reduced the amount of time I can spend writing for the Dtoid cblogs, but I still visit the site as much as I can, and of course I'm still part of the Cblog Recap Team. Most importantly though, my heart still lies in this community. Actually, it’s really the community that makes Dtoid so great. There simply is just no other video game centric community like this on the entire internet. There is a reason I visit this site 20+ times a day, and that’s because of all the incredibly awesome people here. Everyone from the staff to the community members make Destructoid a special place. Thank you, to everyone.

Destructoid …. I <3 You!

So about a month ago Destructoid held a special edition Gears of War 2 Friday Night Fights. Coincidentally, I had just recently started playing the game, so I thought I would tag along to meet some more Dtoid community members, and to blow some of them away. After all, the best way to introduce yourself to a fellow Dtoider is to blow their head off with a shotgun blast. Don't you agree?

One of the perks for attending this FNF, was some Gears of War 2 related prizes that were being given out by the staff. The winners were being chosen using trivia questions, and I just happened to answer one of them right. Well, I've been waiting patiently for the last couple of weeks for my prize to arrive, and finally today I got my wish.

Check out the picks to see what I got.

I can’t take it anymore! Hollywood wants to destroy every childhood memory I hold dear, by remaking all of my favorite cartoons into horrible movies. They already took Transformers and made into the laughing stock of the cinema community. From what I can tell, they plan on doing the same thing with G.I. Joe in a couple of months. They even have plans to bring Voltron to the big screen, which I’m sure can only turn out horribly bad. Now though, they have gone too far, because today it was announced Hollywood would be remaking The Secret of Nimh.

I read this story today as I was perusing through IO9.com and I immediately threw up a little bit in my mouth. I don’t know about the rest of you, but “The Secret of Nimh” holds a very special place in my heart. I consider it to be one of the classic animated movies of all time, created from one of the most classic children’s novels of all time. I mean they just don’t make movies anymore like this. It was dark, gritty, and edgy, yet humorous and light hearted all at the same time. It had very memorable great characters, including evil villains, old mystical wizards, a clumsy crow, and some of the most adorable mice you’ve ever seen. The whole movie was blanketed in a cloud of mysticism that really set the tone for the entire thing, especially the end. They just do not make children’s movies like this anymore. Hell, they don’t even make adult movies like this anymore.



Now Hollywood wants to take this classic movie and remake it in a CGI shit fest. Now look, you might think I’m going to far by saying this. I mean after all I haven’t seen a single second of footage yet, so I could be totally wrong. Trust me I’m not wrong. Read this quote from the makers of the new film.

“It's likely the new "NIMH" would combine live-action and animation in the manner of "Alvin & the Chipmunks" and other kiddie hybrids.”

Did any of you see the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie? It was absolutely horrible. That’s another childhood cartoon I watched, and used to love until Hollywood went and ruined it. If they are trying to relate the new Secret of Nimh movie to the before mentioned Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, it can ONLY be a bad thing. I just have to many examples that prove Hollywood does not know how to take cartoons and turn them into movie. Maybe the problem is that cartoons just don’t translate well into movies anyways, but that’s a discussion for another time I think.

Hollywood is completely out of ideas right now, so they are scraping every last cent off the bottom of the barrel by taking my childhood cartoons and turning them into movies. Now they want to take a classic like The Secret of Nimh and remake it as well, most likely destroying it in the process. I just can’t take it anymore. FUCK YOU HOLLYWOOD!!!!

All I can do now is watch this trailer from the original movie, to remind myself of a time when 2D animated movies ruled the world.