As you’ve noticed, I use a 4-star scale to review games. This is a conscious decision… I could use a 5-point scale, or a 10-point scale, or letter grades, or Terror-color-levels, but I choose to use 4 stars, with half-star increments. I started this way because that’s how the paper I wrote for in college operated, and I quickly became accustomed to and comfortable with the prospect of having exactly 9 scores I can possibly give. Of those, I believe I’ve used 7. I’ve never given 4-stars, and I’ve never given .5-star. (Before you ask, yes, I’ve given a game a zero. It was MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch for the PS2.)

The 4-star scale is a beautiful thing. Why? Because video game sites don’t use it. It is the domain of film. It has not been subjected to the years of point-nudging that has caused the acceptable range of scores to fall between 6.0 and 10. (Penny Arcade’s newspost for today shares my concern for this statistical skew.)

Look through your city’s independent news-and-entertainment-weekly and you’ll see the film reviews as a mass of 2/4s. This is proper. Average films are aaaaaaaaverage. Average films do not get an automatic 7/10 just because that’s how the ratings are skewed. That being said, an “average” film that receives a 2/4 is still probably a worthwhile film to see, especially if you like the actors/topic material/director/shininess. Would you play a game that got a 5/10 on GameSpot/IGN/what-have-you?

I will give games 2-star ratings. This doesn’t mean that I find it abysmal, nor does it mean that something’s broken and irreparable. It just means that it’s an average game. It’s your I-Ninja, your La Pucelle Tactics, your Megaman ZX Advent (though I haven’t written the whole review up yet). These are respectable games, but they’re not -superlative- games. They don’t deserve a 7/10, because they’re not 2 whatevers better than average. They are the average. There are better games, and there are worse games; there are far better games, and there are far worse games.

Under the current regime, who’s to say the difference between a 2/10 and a 3/10? When you only have 9 scores you can possibly give out, each one has to mean something. Each one represents a distinct stratus of quality. What’s the difference between 1.5-stars and 1-star? I’d say it’s about the difference between Ontamarama and P.N.03. The former was a moderately fun and kinda unique music/rhythm game that suffered from a lackluster tracklist and absolute dearth of multiplayer; the latter was a hip, stylized 3rd-person shooter with a passable plot and decent graphics but horribly clunky controls and counterintuitive camera, which really hurt when you’re relying on stealth.

Further, since there are only 9 possible scores, the reader will have to investigate the text of the review (where actual points can be made) rather than going off of a number in a box. Why did this game get a 2.5-star review? What was good and bad about it that it should be adjudicated a half-star better than average? Is it the controls? The plot? How were the graphics?

Anymore, the discourse among gaming reviews has been that even a game that gets a 6/10 is “bad.” How bad? Watch the Jeff Gerstmann video-review of Kane and Lynch over on Youtube (as Gamespot have kinda dumped it from their site). A 6/10. Skewed like lamb shishkabob, yo.