Eight Point Eight - Television Tropes & Idioms

"A 3DFX card can play Quake in 640x480 resolution at 60 frames per second, that's a fact. Quake has 89 points' worth of game in it, that's a subjective opinion."

-Niko Nirvi, Finnish games journalist and professional critic.

The stir created in the video game community when a high-profile game receives an unexpectedly high or low score from a major reviewer, especially when it significantly differs from the general consensus. Especially jarring because professional video game reviewers tend to give out very similar scores.

Whether or not this stir is justified is up for debate. On the one hand, a reviewer shouldn't just automatically go along with the crowd, even for nigh-universally-loved games. On the other, sometimes you get the feeling that they're doing it intentionally to create controversy and attract attention. After all, professional game reviewers aren't exactly entirely trustworthy.

Sometimes you get the feeling that Eight Point Eight situations are simply the fans are making a mountain out of a molehill. It's worth noting that reviews tend to be published a day or two before the game is actually released, meaning that many people are decrying the score awarded to a game they haven't yet played themselves. Such is the behavior of a console or series fanboy. Naturally caused by the fact that many gamers believe that Reviews Are The Gospel.

Often, the score may be controversial because it adversely affects the game's overall average score on review compendium sites such as Game Rankings

and Meta Critic

. Alternatively, animosity can be generated from detractors of the game who all start to act as if the low score is the only 'correct' one, so no matter how many good reviews it got, if GameSpot says it's not that great, it's officially a rubbish game.

For the difference to be statistically significant, the score must be at least 1.4-2 points lower than the average (on a 10-point scale).

Examples:

This trope names comes from the unimaginable havoc created by Gamespot's review of The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess in November 2006, which awarded the game a great-but-not-amazing score of 8.8 out of 10. This may not seem like much, but the game was one of the most anticipated games of all-time, and near-perfect scores were expected.
- It Got Worse when the gamecube version of the game receieved an 8.9, from the same reviewer. This was in spite of the fact that the review's text recommended buying the Wii version instead if the option was available. The reviewer in question was blackballed for his opinion (or some would say logical inconsistency), and reportedly received death threats. The number "8.8" has since become an Internet fad in some gaming circles.
- Interestingly, when he later got fired, accusations started flying that he was fired for breaking the opposite rule: the Four Point Scale. See that entry for more details.
IGN's 7.9 score for Mario Kart: Double Dash led to the expression "7.9'd", another name for this trope, and is still used in the IGN community.
IGN's 7.6 score for Kingdom Hearts 2.
Gamespot's 8.7 review of Metal Gear Solid 3.
Gamespot's 8.3 review of The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Especially odd since they gave Ocarina of Time a perfect 10.
EGM's Greg Sewart giving Chrono Cross a 9.0, denying it a Platinum Award (perfect 10s). Some readers began sending in hate mail to Seward.
- Before that, EGM gave Tekken 3 three 10s and a 9.0.
- This troper was tempted to send him fan mail due to seeing Chrono Cross as an unworthy sequal to Chrono Trigger.
Inside Pulse's game reviews often fall into this category, due to their complete and utter rejection of the Four Point Scale. This has earned them a number of threatening letters from video game companies. Recently, having been caught between their ethics and the game companies, they finally stopped doing numeric ratings at all, instead having a set of clear, unambiguous adjectives to use to rate games.
It's been argued that the UK's Edge magazine makes a living out of this, with its notoriously strict scoring system. Some are lamented goofs (Doom got 7/10 because the player could not "talk to the monsters" for example), but in most cases, it's simply because the magazine hates to give out anything higher than an 8/10 score. Inverting the trope, when the magazine gives a 10/10 score, all hell breaks loose.
- They just gave Super Mario Galaxy 10/10 while giving Call of Duty 4 9/10. I can hear the COD 4 fans protesting now...
- A spate of seemingly-lenient 10/10 ratings didn't help things. Xbox 360's Halo 3: 10/10. Wii's Mario Galaxy: 10/10. PS3's MGS4: 8/10. Uh-oh.
Gamespot's 8.5 review of Metroid Prime 3. Various "problems" cited included controls that were too good, lack of multiplayer (notable for a 20 year old franchise that has almost never had a multiplayer component), and not being Halo.
- It didn't help that Gamespot had recently altered their review system, making all score multiples of .5 .
Gamespot and IGN's scores of Lair, which were 4.5 and 4.9 respectively. PS 3 fans continue to insist that all reviewers that had problems with the controls are wrong and that the reviewers were probably 'paid off' by Microsoft or Nintendo.
- Sony didn't help by insisting the former as well, to the point of even sending "clarified" manuals to show them "how" to play it right. Most people countered that if you have to go that far for people to play the game right, that's a problem in and of itself.
The magazine Game Pro gave the cult classic Xenogears an unusually low 3.5 out of 5, a score usually reserved for completely horrible games. It didn't help that the forgettable Kagero: Deception II was given a 4.5 on the other side of the page.
- Game Pro in general had a ton of these, especially when Role Playing Games were concerned. Nobody on the staff had any real appreciation for the genre, so they tended to give poor reviews that admonished the very traits of the genre. They gave Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete a 2.5, complaining that the game was a remake of an older game and making a point over how the auto-battle system is flawed. Then in what can only be interpreted as a cynical review, they gave Lunar: Eternal Blue Complete a 4 star review without really describing the game.
- This troper has a Play Station Game Guide or something from said magazine that lists Xenogears at 1.5 out of 5, as a result of an "updated" score or some other Hand Wave. Literally every RPG player he knows disagreed with the first score and positively foams at the mouth at the second.
- This troper also remembers Game Pro giving the Dreamcast port of House of the Dead 2 a low score- 2 out of 5, if I remember correctly- because the reviewer played it with a gamepad instead of a light gun. As the 4channers would say, you're doing it wrong.
Not so much lampooned as harpooned by the comedy site Something Awful. An infrequently updated section of the site called "Truth Media" publishes excessively critical and factually incorrect reviews of hyped games, films and so on. They then harvest the delicious backlash for the amusement of their readership.
Gamespot's 7.5 review of Ratchet And Clank: Tools of Destruction.
IGN's reviews of Assassin's Creed range from 6.8 (IGN UK)-7.7 (US). It would appear they're not quite pleased with the game's AI. The fans would appear to not be quite pleased with IGN.
Gamespot's 6.0 review of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn seemed to put the game in the crap pile with Gamespot's other "6" games. The argument was that it had dated graphics and was very, very hard, even compared to other Fire Emblem games. And they said that the story was crap.
- The magazine Game Informer gave the game a 7 and a 5.5 for similar reasons.
- The game was also given 76 by Australian magazine Hyper, for the same two reasons above. And it's obscene difficulty. The same magazine awarded a 85 to Super Smash Bros Brawl, contrasting with the 90+ scores it had been getting
Going back in time, Gamespot's 1996 6.4 review of the near-universally loved Mario Kart 64.
Gamespot also gave a similarly low score of 7.7 to Silent Hill 2, a game which received almost universal critical acclaim (average 8.9).
In an older version of the trope, this editor remembers a letter to PC Gamer magazine, decrying the magazine for giving Quake "only" 90% while giving Duke Nukem 3D 93%. The editors' response was pretty much mine: only 90%? It should be noted that, mathematically speaking, it used to be 8.8 (88%) was the score at which the magazine PC Gamer recommended a game without any reservations, awarding it the Editor's Choice seal. (Today, 9.0—that is, 90%—is the line.) Of course, which had longer life, Quake or Duke Nukem 3D? This Troper doesn't recall anyone making a big to-do about the DN3D world champion's control setum...if there even was one.
X-Play gave Final Fantasy: Crisis Core a 2/5, in stark contrast to the 3.5/4 range most other reviews gave it.
A Final Fantasy review site reviewed all of the different party combinations for the original Final Fantasy. However, his blatant dislike of the Black Belt made him refuse to see any good of having one, and he rated any party with a Black Belt unfairly low. In fact the all Black Belt party was rated at 0, even lower than all Black Mage or White Mage parties who simply put do not have the defensive/offensive power (respectively) to win the game. After public outcry he reluctantly gave them a better score, but after brooding he went back and gave the all Black Belt party a -9999 on a scale of 0 to 10.
IGN's 3.0 review of cult favorite beat-em-up God Hand, a rating a full five points lower than the reader average of 8.0 and a frequently brought up justification against trusting anything IGN says, ever (especially when compared to their review of Cory In The House, a game involving a secondary character from a Disney Channel show running amok through the White House, which garnered an equivalent score).
Edge Magazine rated Mario Kart Wii with a 6/10. Average on Metacritic: 84/100.
IGN's 7.6 review of No More Heroes. Different sources gave scores in the 8.5 range (Gamespot gave it 9.0, N Gamer gave it 9.4, X-Play gave it a 5 out of 5, hell even IGN AU gave it 8.9).
Even though he doesn't actually give out scores, Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw's (even more negative than usual) Zero Punctuation review of Super Smash Brothers Brawl managed to cause mass amounts of controversy as soon as it was released. The fact that he actually made a video responding to it for the first time doesn't help either.
- The situation seems to be repeating itself again in his recent review of Bionic Commando Rearmed, whereupon he insists that the remake could have been better had it not followed the original game as precisely as it did, and that nostalgia in itself is a futile emotion.
  - This may happen again with his Sonic Unleashed review, where he SAVAGELY (and I mean savagely) tore the game to pieces, moreso than any other game he reviewed before (although in the end credits there is a caption saying "Okay I guess I got a bit worked up).
IGN, again, gave a surprisingly negative score of 4.5 out of 10 for the anticipated PS 3 "Halo Killer" Haze. And there was much rejoicing, mostly from people who don't like the PS 3 very much.
Bizarrely, IGN awarded scores of 9.1 to both WWE Raw for Xbox and its sequel, way out of sync with the games' average scores of 6s and 7s.
Gamer website Eurogamer.com has a review up for the upcoming Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, in which the site gave the game an 8.0 rating. The fans decrying the review as lies, as well as being biased towards the Xbox 360 in the article's comment section (over 1700 replies and growing) were especially troubling, as many of them hadn't played the game yet at the time of review.
- Edge gave the game the same. Revealingly, the praises and criticisms in the 8/10 reviews are the same as those listed in the 10/10 and 9.5/10 reviews given elsewhere, so clearly it's just the numerical stamp of approval the fanboys are gagging for.
- This Penny Arcade comic illustrates yet another MGS 4 example.
This troper, a fan of Shoot Em Ups, has come to never, ever expect GameSpot to give more than an 8.0 on a shmup. Space Invaders Extreme, for example, has a Game Rankings rating of 84% for both versions; GameSpot gave it a 7.5. The last time they handed out at least a 9 to a shmup was to Radiant Silvergun, in 1998. Perhaps their worst shmup moment (for this troper) was giving the Dreamcast version of Giga Wing a 4.4, which is exactly 8.8 divided by 2!
The uber-anticipated Spore is receiving anywhere from 7s-9s. The average critic score, according to GameSpot is - wait for it - 8.8. This troper expects drama.
- Gamespot themselves gave it an 8.0, Drama indeed...
Game Informer seems to make a habit of doing this. Many of this troper's favorite games (which scored high with practically every other reviewer) were given very mediocre scores. An example that sticks out particularly in this troper's mind is Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, which was given a score of 6.25...and the subtitle "The Thousand-Year Bore".
- They also did this with Sonic Advance 3. GI has been getting better about this around 2006 though.
- This Troper is particularly bitter about their review of his favorite DS game, Elite Beat Agents. Metacritic average: 8.7, GI's Score: 6.75
IGN's 6.7 score for Disgaea 3 compared to the average score of 8.13 (before review) primarily for its graphics and lack of improvements. Having played the game and finding several welcome changes within the first 15 minutes of gameplay, I can say that the 2nd point might be an example of Did Notdothe Research. Controversial enough to warrant a second opinion immediately after the review.
- Their 6.5 score of Sonic Chronicles (Same average as Disgaea 3 before their review) is quickly becoming another example.
- Nippon Ichi titles regularly lose points for still using 2-D sprites for their characters. Because 3-D is really that much better and really that important.
X-Play is notorious for being biased against Mega Man. Consistently gives a considerably lower score compared to the average (average is about 1.5-2 points lower).
Most hilarious example of all time would be Old Man Murray's review of Freedom: First Resistance. Almost the entire thing is a rant about how the game "BLEW UP MY MONITOR."
"At this point, you might be wondering whether my monitor was about to die anyway. All I can say is that why don't you try using that same logic on the surviving family members of people killed in a plane crash and see how it holds up there."
"This game sucks." (Though, as the Nerd points out himself in an interview, it was a joke review, with a lot of mistaken viewers taking it seriously.)
IGN scores again with Wii Music, giving it a square 5.0 (with the average Metacritic rating somewhere in the sixties range) and igniting more heated debating about IGN's "bias", regardless of whether or not there actually is any bias to talk of.
The magazine Hyper just gave Dead Space a 6/10 and Sonic Chronicles a 4/10.
NGamer faced heavy criticism after "only" giving Super Smash Bros Brawl a score of 91%. In response they gave away a free gift of a 95% sticker to paste over the next review score you disagree with.
Gametrailers' 6.7 for Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts compared to the average 8. Though one of their criticisms was the old They Changed It Now It Sucks towards the vehicles...
When PSM was under the command of Chris Slate, they'd sometimes have a highly-anticipated game wanked over in the reviews... and come review month, it's on the cover. And it's rated lower than the game of the month (the game that scores the highest that year). Lampshaded when a guy sent a letter to them asking why they had ''Golden Eye: Rogue Agent" on the cover, and gave it a six-point-five. One of the editor's responses? "Never... EVER... trust a preview."
IGN has been getting hate-mail over their 8.8 score of the DS port for Chrono Trigger. Others are just noting the irony of the meme actually being applied to a game often heralded as one of the greatest of all time (including by IGN).
Non Video-Game example: This troper has been in the audience of a Roger Ebert lecture when a questioner asked directly why he had given Fight Club 2 stars but Booty Call 3.
A recent episode of 1Up's Retronauts discussed Chrono Cross. The review in question was positive, though it discussed the game's flaws and noted its Contested Sequel status. The webmaster of the Chrono Compendium responded with a front-page tirade (later mirrored to the forums) deriding the credibility and intelligence of the reviewers and ending with a truly epic image promoting Cross featuring "YOU ARE WRONG. SHUT UP." as a caption to a man flipping the bird.
IGN and Gamespot's reviews of Sonic Unleashed for the 360, giving it 4.5 and 3.5, respectively. They blamed the werehog levels and the hub levels for ruining the entire game. And with the Gamespot review, it was rated lower than Sonic 2006 (which got 4.0).
- In fact, Sonic fans have been going apeshit over Unleashed's scores in general, are lower than expectations. They even find it outrageous that the supposedly "inferior" Wii version is statistically superior to its HD counterparts (something this troper actually agrees with).
IGN US gave Football Manager 2009 2.0, IGN UK gave the same game 9.1. Far from simply reflecting the varying popularity of the game in different regions, the IGN US review compared the game with action football games rather than reviewing it as a management sim.
- And amazingly, the reviewer actually recommended it for management fans, while clearly hating the game and having no idea of what makes a good one in its genre.
Non-Video Game example: Carl Kimlinger's review of Death Note at Anime News Network in which he gave the thing a C+ was met with much fandom complaining and some bannings for calling the reviewer an asshole on the forums.
- Similarly, his review for Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha was a C-, and put particular (some would say unfair) emphasis on the lolicon elements of the series. Given the sheer amount of love for that series on this wiki, one can imagine the Internet Backdraft that ensued.
The now-defunct Gaming Intelligence Agency gained some infamy for completely rejecting the Four Point Scale in its review of Legend Of Dragoon, which they gave a 1 out of 5. With the reviewer specifically saying he'd have given it a score of zero if their scale allowed it. While LoD usually isn't regarded as a great game, few gamers considered it anywhere near that bad. The GIA's letter column raged with debate over the validity of the score (and the rest of the review, which was every bit as negative as the score implied) for months afterward.

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