Stars, the little nuggets of gold that decide the fate of any self respecting video game.
The five star rating is a relic brought to gaming by T.V. and movies when games first appeared on consoles. When games were reviewed in magazines they didn't know how to deal with them and so slapped on the same rating system as their counterparts in other film and T.V. This is the crux of the problem, I go to the cinema and read a review - I read it - I don't look at the star rating or it's thumbs up, I look at all the little letters and work out for myself how good it is. If I look at a game though, It's all about the stars, games live and die on stars, no review could tell you if you like a certain type of RPG; I love Skyrim however Borderlands not so much but they're both RPG's and they both get the same number of celestial bodies. No review could summarize every mechanical detail, every dialogue choice, every tiny little easter egg and compact it into two stars.
Yeah two stars!
Lets be honest a terrible game no matter how badly designed it is, it will get at least three stars, but why? Well we haven't really defined those lower values have we? Three stars is average but when everyone counts poor games and average games as three stars condemning a game to anything lower is a more serious matter, games that any self respecting reviewer would actually look at are going to be at least average so again we see the same problem at the other end of the scale; is a poor average game the same as an average poor game.
To help you get your head around that lets look at Fallout:New Vegas and the G.I. Joe: The rise of Cobra game. Now Fallout Three was an amazing if glitchy game, fetching around about four or five stars, New Vegas being the slower younger brother of the Fallout family got three stars normally, G.I. Joe on the other hand is piss-poor shovelware and it's not even the kind of crap aimed at kids it's a 16+, but if we measured it on the five star scale It would get a two or three star rating, meaning it is only slightly worse than New Vegas. See the problem here? Average is a relative thing. Ask a poor guy and a rich guy their "average" meal and you'll be shocked to find that they don't quite match up.
Now I'm not saying that reviewers are wrong or bad at their jobs, read any decent reviewers article and they will have a general idea of what the games like and how good of a game is, but they have to squeeze every genre and game mechanic into the same system. I don't have an answer for this problem, the rating out of ten is marginally better but not much and peer review-the like or dislike system-is usually clogged up with fans and internet trolls. Hopefully something new will turn up but until then please for the love of games, read the damned article and decide for yourself.
