Archive for the ‘Comparisons’ Category
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12
Jul
2011
Out of Ten
Out of ten scales have gone terribly wrong. This isn’t particularly geared towards out of ten, it works equally well with out of one hundred as well but out of ten is used rather frequently.
The idea of an out of ten scale is that 5 is the middle, which should represent average. Or at least it used to. When a book is rated 6/10 that is an above average book. But when a movie is given 6/10 that is an average or below average movie. And these days a video games has to be an 8/10 or it is not even worth playing by the general consensus. More recently I’ve been looking at guitar reviews where almost every reviewer seems to give 9/10 or more to every guitar I see reviewed.
Now these average numbers don’t matter in and of themselves, as long as you know what the average score is you can judge based on that. But as a reviewer it allows no freedom in scoring. A book that is a 7/10 is certainly worse than one that is 9/10 and there are specific reasons to point out why. But both are good books. A 9/10 video game and a 9.5/10 video game have about the same difference in score as the those two books compared to the average. The same 2 point difference has to be squished into a .5 difference now. There are no in-between points. But you can still say that the 9.5 game is better.
The problem actually comes in low scoring games. Since everything below 8/10 is seen as a failure in video games, how can you accurately score things? 6/10 and 7/10 might seem natural. These scores are just below a good game. But what exactly is the difference between 3/10, 4/10 and 5/10? These seem like they are arbitrarily given out. Any score within this 3-5/10 range can effectively be given the same score.
The other problem lies with how something is reviewed. As price is highly variable in many of today’s products, in order to compare the high end and low end products on the same spectrum you have justify the higher scores on low end products as “for the price”. This is a good camera “for the price.” The downside to this is that you cannot compare things that are not “for the price.” My newest guitar receives mostly 9/10 and 10/10 on review sites yet it is also apparently “significantly worse” to the $2000+ guitars. None of these reviews can accurately score that.
So we should stay with a very easy to use four point system. Or maybe even less than 4 points. Bad, Satisfactory, Good, Great. Just as arbitrary as what we are using now, but with less of the fluff. There are still awards given out at the end of the year anyway, and rankings could be done entirely separately to distinguish the greatest games.
10
Jul
2011
What Affects the Sound of Your Guitar
Everything.
Depending on who you ask, the most important part is different, but I’ve heard different people say that each part affect your sound vastly. From the strings, which are sometimes made by the same manufacturing company even for different brands to the distance where you pick the strings from the tail.
But the most important part of all of this is that there is not a ‘correct’ sound there are only different sounds. Unless you want the exact sound someone else is making, whatever sound you make (as long as it’s in tune of course) is ‘correct’, just different.
So stop worrying about the specific for a guitar and play a bunch then buy the one you like. And if you can’t play anything, buy a $50 guitar in the classified or borrow a friend’s guitar to try it out.
2
Nov
2010
The Music Industry is Doing It Wrong
So they’re online. They’re finally (mostly?) online. But they still whine and complain about sales. The problem is they aren’t taking advantage of the great differences in selling online.
What do I mean? Sales and bundles. Look at what Valve has done with Steam. Valve does basically 4 things with products to make them sell better.
- 10% off on pre-orders or new products. Little bit of a discount for new items let’s them stand apart from older products and gives a little incentive to buy them.
- 4 for 3 package deals or buy 4, get 25% off. Link people together, get more sales from people who sometimes wouldn’t have bought it otherwise.
- Multiple product bundles. Things like a discography or similar artists for a larger discount.
- HUGE HOLIDAY SALES! Steam has holiday sales so popular people complain about buying things just because they are so cheap, even if they have no intention of playing it.
The point of all these sales? To sell people things they might not want, but in such a convincing way that they can’t help but do it. Another part of all these sales is to only do them on whole albums, selling all the filler songs that are generally lackluster.
The differences between music and games is actually better for music sales as well. People become bored of music much sooner than they become bored of games. People don’t (usually, minus one old roommate) become obsessed with music and not listen to anything else like they do with games.
Many people have vast libraries of music. Thousands of songs. You can’t expect people to pay $0.99 at a time to spend a thousands of dollars on a library of that size.
So that’s it. You now have direct control over the price of items. The cost of selling an item has gone significantly down. (transport, packaging, materials? hah!)
Use it.
2
Oct
2010
A Movie Review: The Gamers: Dorkness Rising
I was browsing around Netflix (finally in Canada!) and because some newer movies I wanted to watch weren’t available I went looking for something on the other on the other side of funny, something I would laugh at.
I went into this movie with the worst intentions. I wanted a B movie to laugh at for crappy effects, terrible acting and an even worse plot. I’ve seen many bad movies from MST3K and that’s what I wanted to experience again here, something so bad it was laughable.
But I didn’t get that. I did get a B movie. And it did have some crappy effects. And it did have some poor acting. And the plot wasn’t always the best. But I laughed with it.
Why? Because I liked it. It was a B movie for sure, but I liked the humour, I liked the characters and I liked the plot. The effects weren’t the best but they were surprisingly good at times. The plot wasn’t amazingly fantastic, but it didn’t seem in the least bit contrived in the least. Hell, everything in this movie I can related to fairly well.
So now instead of laughing at the movie and telling people how bad it is I want to find a place to buy it online (for less than $30 >.>) and show it to as many people as I can. It’s not amazing but it’s pretty damn good.
If you want to see some stuff like it check out Journey Quest.