The 'Perfect' 10.

Now, unlike a lot of people, I am a champion of review scores. I have heard a lot of arguments for and against that have provided valuable reasoning and critique on the 'out of 10' scoring but I came to realise the other day that the reason for most of the arguments is pretty much all to do with subjective pragmatics (or what YOU think the little numbers mean).

I personally take the review score as an overall roundup of how entertaining the game is, essentially a more in depth 'get it or don't' scale. The problem is the fact that I have an opinion on what review score symbolises and that it differs from other people's interpretation. The score can take on a whole new meaning depending on how you interpret it. For example, I was talking to a close friend about this very subject and when I asked him of his opinion, he said that he sees review scores as how close to 'perfect' the game is, with 10 being nothing of real substance to complain about that effects the core experience in any way. This seems to be what DTOID seems to go by with the descriptions explaining of their scores especially when it comes to the coveted '10'.

Let's re-iterate how DTOID defines the '10 bomb':

'10.0 /10 Flawless Victory: Games rated 10 aren't perfect, since nothing is, but they come as close as you could get in a given genre. The new must-have game in its sector, we're talking pure ecstasy.'

With that answer I quickly responded "Deadly Premonition 10/10".

Don't get me wrong, I love Deadly Premonition, and I am thankful that Jim praised the game as highly as he did but you have to be as crazy as our beloved Francis if you think that Deadly Premonition fits the criteria of near-perfect as DTOID describes it. Now Jim does back up why he loves the game so much when he describes the game as 'being absolutely terrible in a completely hilarious way' but just because a game's knowingly awful doesn't stop it from being awful.

Now this is where reviews and scores collide and sometimes end up opposing each other, which is why I choose to take review scores as I do rather than how close to perfect something is.

But then again, how do you define perfect? If you take Perfect to mean the enjoyment factor of the game then that is perfectly reasonable to give the game a 10 or do you see it as a mixture of gameplay, narrative, sound design, controls etc standard as I do, that means that the game obviously doesn't fit that criteria or maybe in your opinion it does maybe satire excuses it all or maybe because the gameplay is awful for a reason maybe that means it's not bad but how do you define bad and...aaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!

Look, game review scores should either be a representation of entertainment value or quality as seen by the reviewer. You can't have it both ways.

I like review scores, but they don't seem to like me very much.