Jeff Gerstman fired from Gamespot

[Jack of Arcades]

Reviews are usually a joke, it's hard to find good ones.

[ThaSaltCracka]

[ QUOTE ]
Reviews are usually a joke, it's hard to find good ones.

[/ QUOTE ]I don't agree with this. Most of the reviews I have read for games I have most recently played have all been pretty spot on.


The big issue here is that it now throws the legitimacy of any review in question.

FWIW, this has been a problem with music reviews as well. Several record labels have threatened to pull advertising money from magazines or websites if they get bad reviews from them.

I say [censored] that [censored], [censored] POS companies. You think this is communist Russia? Worried about bad reviews? THEN MAKE GOOD STUFF!

[astroglide]

lame graphic overuse, toss. i have watched most of the game being played for hours on end.

[AceLuby]

[ QUOTE ]
Review scores are usually a joke, it's hard to find good ones.

[/ QUOTE ]

FYP

The reviews themselves are usually good, but the scoring system is terrible.

[goofyballer]

1UP.com usually seems to tilt their scores upwards less than most other sites (IIRC they gave NHL 2K8 a 40).

[Jack of Arcades]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Review scores are usually a joke, it's hard to find good ones.

[/ QUOTE ]

FYP

The reviews themselves are usually good, but the scoring system is terrible.

[/ QUOTE ]

The 100 point scale is useless, nobody's going to be able to say "hmm, this is a 7.4, it's better than that game I gave a 7.3 but worse than that one I gave a 7.5)."

I made a spreadsheet of all PS2 reviews from IGN (minus duplicates).

1254 (88%) were rated as 5 or better.

877 (61%) were rated as 7 or better.

752 (52%) were rated as between 7 and 8.9

The average rating was a 7, and the median was a 7.3.

Here are the ranges for IGN's 100 point scale:

1-1.9 Abysmal
2-2.9 Terrible
3-3.9 Bad
4-4.9 Poor
5-5.9 Mediocre
6-6.9 Passable
7.0 Decent
7.5 Good
8.0 Impressive
8.5 Great
9.0 Outstanding
9.5 Incredible
10 Masterful

IGN seems to recognize that their scale is bogus, which is why they made it more granular toward the end.

Here are the totals for the above ranges:

Abysmal: 2
Terrible: 28
Bad: 52
Poor: 104
Mediocre: 140
Passable: 237
Decent: 196
Good: 191
Impressive: 200
Great: 165
Outstanding: 97
Incredible: 28
Masterful: 0

Using this scale you get a decent bell curve, but you still get the weird anomaly of having more "great" games than "mediocre" ones, and more "Impressive" games than anything but "passable," but that's due to 13% of games getting exactly a 7 or an 8.

47% of all games were rated "good" or better. Were there really 700 good ps2 games?

[DVaut1]

[ QUOTE ]
47% of all games were rated "good" or better. Were there really 700 good ps2 games?

[/ QUOTE ]

700 sounds like alot. Then again, 7 years is an eternity in the life of a console and the PS2 (up until very recently) was still going strong with a constant flow top-tier releases.

And I'd also be willing to bet that 100 to 150 of those "good" games are iterations/releases of the sports franchises.

EA Sports alone has Madden, NCAA Football, March Madness, NBA Live, MVP Baseball, Tiger Woods, NASCAR, NHL, FIFA, Fight Night, Arena Football; Sega/Visual Concepts has the '2k' series of games (annual NBA & NHL releases plus history of '2k' versions of college basketball, college football, MLB, NFL). Most of these games usually garner "good" or better ratings from IGN.

[ThaSaltCracka]

I don't think it unrealistic that most games that are released are at least above average. I mean, why else would it have been released if they didn't think people would buy it? People won't generall just buy [censored]. A video game is not like a CD, where you can sell tons of pop crap because its popular. It actually has to be good for a lot of people to buy it.

[Dire]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't think it unrealistic that most games that are released are at least above average. I mean, why else would it have been released if they didn't think people would buy it? People won't generall just buy [censored]. A video game is not like a CD, where you can sell tons of pop crap because its popular. It actually has to be good for a lot of people to buy it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Maybe this is just semantics, but I equate average with the mean. So it'd be impossible, by definition, for the majority of released games to be 'above average'.

[DVaut1]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't think it unrealistic that most games that are released are at least above average.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think some people would argue this is a contradiction in terms.

I think what JoA is arguing is that on a 1-10 scame, a rating of "5" should indicate a median game, ie., a game where roughly half the games available are better and half the games are worse. Instead, IGN seems to use the rating of "7.3" to indicate a median game. I suppose this is okay, except they use a 1-10 scale, so a rational reader might expect the median game to be a 5. IGN even heightens the confusion by labeling 'median' games, ie, games which have a rating around "7.3" as between "decent" and "good", while maintaining a "5" rating is still "mediocre", when "5" really means (using the history of how they've rated their games as a metric) "clearly below average".