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.
4
Apr
2011
Last Sip
I don’t know what it is but everyone is very sentimental about the last sip of anything.
We will drink almost all of something but be compelled to offer that last tiny bit to the original owner.
Lesson? Don’t share your drink.
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.
3
Mar
2010
Back to Chrome
I was outside the CSClub today, studying hard for that CS246 midterm when a conversation about Firefox’s stagnation broke out. Many points about it having an incredibly old base and just not being so great compared to Chrome.
So I looked back at why I switched away from Chrome the last time I was using it.
- Too much RAM usage on my netbook with Windows 7
- No bookmark syncing, Xmarks wasn’t working at the time
- Missing many add-ons I loved in Firefox
And effectively all these problems have been solved. My netbook is now running Ubuntu, Xmarks works and google has their own built in syncing with google docs and there are many more add-ons (like ad-blocker) so I’m not missing any functionality. Not to mention that Chrome feels like a faster browser and uses less vertical space by default.
So I’m back with Chrome. I might look like a google fanboy but I think of it as the same as I think of Logitech. I didn’t decide to buy a Logitech mouse (or three), keyboard, speakers and headset because I’m in love with the company. I chose it because those were the best products at the time. Google makes some really nice products, so I will embrace them.