Hilarious Zelda Review

[Yoda9864]

Originally Posted by KillerGremlin

There is a major problem with reviewing games nowadays. And it's that the gaming rating scale is flat out fucked up. It's a sad day when even going to metascore shows you that Halo 2 nets a 95 and Halo 3 nets a 96. Or Wind Waker nets a 93.

If we are falling back on a 1 through 10 scale, 1 being a pile of shit and 10 being the most amazing thing you will ever play, games like Wind Waker and Halo 3 should be getting 7s. 9s and 10s should be reserved for games that are perfect in almost every aspect including ORIGINALITY. Just because Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is a well polished version of GTA: III doesn't mean it should get the same or better score. The point of a review, in my opinion, is to actually be able to collect meaningful information by reading the review and then putting that information together with the score. If a reviewer gave GTA: III a 9.6 and then gave Vice City a 7.5 or an 8.0 and then said, "Vice City expands upon GTA: III in the most impressive ways. Fans of GTA: III will definitely want to pick this up!" you would get a better feel for the game, no? Seriously, I mean look at this shit: http://gonintendo.com/wp-content/upl...ogalaxyvg9.jpg

11/10? Are you kidding me?

Very few games deserve to be in the 9 or 10 range: Ocarina of Time, Half-Life, Super Mario 64, Pikmin.

Now, the counter-argument might be something like, "well what if the sequel improves upon the gameplay so much that it actually makes a better game" and that point is valid but in all honesty most sequels make minor tweaks. Tweaks I say!

The solution is getting rid of the number score. Make readers read! There was a review called "The Honest Halo 2 Review" or something to that extent that came out a few weeks after Halo 2 did, and it basically summed up all the pros and cons of Halo 2 in an honest well-written way.

Even if Yahtzee tries too hard to be critical or to be funny, he makes some valid points. Wouldn't it be nice if IGN, just once, wrote a review for Zelda that just said, "This is like every other Zelda game only with new puzzles and slight derivations. If you are a Zelda fan you will love it!" And then, instead of giving the game a 9.5 or something they give it a 7 or an 8. And bam, everyone is happy. I'd still buy it, I'm a sucker for Zelda. And I'd feel better too, because when they do give a game a 10, you know it's going to be real real good.

While I agree with you that the ratings scale is somewhat broken now, I don't agree with your "unoriginal sequel" scoring. If the first game was great, why would an equally good sequel score lower? If anything, the sequel should get only a slightly lower score (i.e.-9.5 down to a 9.0) and it should be noted in the written review that it's the same as the original.

At one point I agreed with you that reviews should not have a number rating. But then one of my magazines started doing that (can't remember which one), and after a month or two, I really started wanting to know how the game compared to other games and found myself reading other sources of reviews more.

BTW, I thought Wind Waker was a great game. I really liked the new art design and thought it was a good fit for the Zelda universe. I think that it deserves a low 90 score.