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Marge: Who wants pork chops? Homer: Sorry Marge, this gets my lowest rating ever: Seven thumbs up. — The Simpsons, Guess Who's Coming To Criticize Dinner?
A derisive term for the (supposed) inability of professional game reviewers to give any game a score under 6.0, even if they're nominally using a ten-point scale. Commonly called the 7-9 scale among game industry insiders, and generally an accusation of a lack of site's integrity(often toward mainstream outlets). The accusation is rarely leveled at the writers themselves, with the blame usually placed on a site's editors or executive meddling.
The game journalism industry, like all forms of journalism, thrives on access. Game magazines and web sites need to get a steady flow of new games, previews, and promotional materials directly from the publishers in a timely manner, or they're irrelevant. Unfortunately, the game industry has been known to use some underhanded tactics to ensure that their games receive favorable coverage, such as withholding the aforementioned materials from publications that don't give their games at least somewhat favorable reviews or using advertising agreements to sway game scores. Reports that reviewers have been bribed in order to get favorable coverage are unconfirmed, but there's no doubt that publishers' PR companies identify journalists they want to impress, and go about it unashamedly.
As such, you're unlikely to see games, even awful licensed crap, get panned too hard in for-profit publications. It's why you'll read page after page of glowing prose about The Next Big Thing (TM) only to have it drop completely off the radar once it's actually released. This has caused a minor stir within the industry, with some complaining that the lack of hard-hitting video game journalism is a major blemish, and others arguing that the next Lester Bangs doesn't exist in any medium now, and probably won't ever — no one's berating the New York Times for its lack of confrontational, in-your-face book reviews, after all — and that video games as a medium have improved enough over time that there are few truly awful video games any more — you rarely see games as soul-crushingly execrable as Bebe's Kids or Superman 64 anymore.
But be wary of video game journalism. Don't take their scores and comments at face value. Be careful about "exclusive" content — "exclusive" usually means that some wheeling and dealing has gone on behind the scenes, with agreements about coverage or minimum scores in exchange for that exclusivity.
Of course, from the journalists' perspective, you can't really blame them. Video game writers don't make all that much money, and who doesn't enjoy being wined and dined? And, of course, there's always the possibility of fan backlash if you get too negative, because Reviews Are The Gospel.
One extra possible cause for this trope is bleed-over from the grading system used in schools - if you're used to 60% (at some schools it's 70%) being failing, it's a lot easier to look at video games being scored the same way, and there's no question that the target age range for most video games is in the area of people who are used to being graded that way.
Also note that a case can be made, depending on the reviewer in question, that they only properly review above-average games, meaning the actual average could indeed be considered 50% or less.
Contrast So Okay Its Average, where being just below this scale is acknowledged to have some quality, if not a lot.
Examples:
- Exception: Amiga Power used the full range of its percentage system, to the point that Commodore executives would berate them over the phone for not toeing the party line and games company Team 17 refused to send them any more games. The magazine also ran a regular feature in which it compared its low scores to that of other magazines. According to Amiga Power, the cut-off point for most games magazines' reviews of poor (but politically important) games was 73%.
- Another exception is Destructoid
 whose loyal userbase demand as honest a review as possible (Going so far as to rate and compare the reviewers themselves in the community sections) and have a very strict review guide (linked above) as to what their review scores mean. Their reviews editor Jim Sterling is on record as feeling very strongly about the 4 point scale and is always working at bucking the trend with his reviewers.
- Edge magazine also refuses to give out a 7/10 or higher without good reason. They tend to come across as elitist as a result. Interestingly, they've only used the dread 1/10 score once - on the godawful Kabuki Warriors.
- A partial exception is NGamer, which, while falling into the Four Point Scale trap occasionally, gives a rather wide range of scores, with the reviews of the worse games particularly funny to read.
- PC Gamer is also an exception. Until recently using a 100-point system (they've since gone to a 10-point scale), they have been known to give scores as low as 3% (South Park).
- PC Gamer, Edge magazine and NGamer are produced by Future Publishing, so perhaps there's a whole publisher holding out. That said, they also do Nintendo's official magazine. Future Publishing also publishes Maximum PC, which is also usually an exception to this trope... as long as you don't mention Half Life 2. A huge, in-depth cover story on the game, followed immediately by a review in which it gets an 11 on a scale from 1-10? It almost seems like a parody of this very trope.
- As does the aforementioned PC Gamer practically having an orgasm over Quake 2. The front-page headline "THE BEST GAME EVER!" set the tone for the review.
- Not a games magazine, but Future's SF magazine SFX is more than happy to give a program it's doing a cover feature on a lousy review if it thinks it deserves it. In the days when it used a grade system, from D-minus to A-plus, it once gave something an E.
- PC Gamer's compatriot video game magazine, PC Format, a British publication, during the 1994-1996 period this troper read it, was beautifully brutal in that it used its percentile scale actively and aggressively. While some reviewers like Paul Pettingale seemed disposed to grade downward, the reviews ranged from 1-5% all the way up to 94% (the highest-rated game ever, which was the CD talky version of Sam and Max Hit The Road - and it was a sub-review!). Then again, PC Format also refused to review any game that wasn't off the shelf, refusing to do previews for cash or offer scores based on games that were different to the games the readers could actually buy themselves. Games would routinely score in the 60-70 range, including classic games like Dune 2 (which gained points when it became a budget game), with real corkers breaking the 80% range. Ah, memories.
- The now defunct N64 Magazine also handed out some brutal scores and reviews.
- Shortly before becoming discontinued, Games for Windows: The Official Magazine (previously Computer Gaming World), switched to a letter grade system like that used in schools, precisely because of this problem. This system is now used on their corresponding website, 1up.com.
- The notorious game reviewer Jeff Gerstmann (who was responsible for the Eight Point Eight trope) is widely assumed to have been fired by Gamespot for panning Kane & Lynch (a game heavily advertised on the site) with a 6.0. However, the site says he was fired for personal reasons, and considering how often he trashed other games and his bad personality, that might well be the truth. Also, he was not exactly alone among reviewers in scoring the game poorly.
- Of course, after this controversy, and his firing, Gerstmann started up Giant Bomb. Over there, Gerstmann and his crew use an X-Play-style review scale (1-5 stars, no half-stars), and they're more than willing to dish out 1 and 2 star reviews for bad games.
- GameSpot is not as prone to the four point scale as one might think. They get loads of bad games and some times are the only ones with the guts to review (sometimes with video reviews... if "review" is the right word). When you browse their reviews it takes 102 pages to reach 7 (with page 1 having the lowest scores and out of 213 pages) It does help that they review pretty much every game with physical distribution in the US.
- That makes 7 average or just below average, so it is definitely slanted towards positive scores overall.
- A non-review example of this occurs in the Guitar Hero games: You will never get less than 3 stars on anything, no matter how badly you do. It's just a question of whether you get 3,4, or 5.
- However, Rock Band averts this. As you build up to the base score, which is the score you'd get for hitting every single note if there was no combo system and no Overdrive, you go from 0 stars to 1, to 2, and finally to 3. With the combo system and Overdrive, however, getting 3 stars is still laughably easy on most songs. 4- and 5-starring songs is still just as hard (or easy, depending on the song) as it was in Guitar Hero. This all means that it's more than possible to complete songs with scores below three stars - this troper has achieved scores of one star when singing.
- It's still not possible to get 0 stars—someone tested this with the song "Polly" by Nirvana. The song literally has only eight notes in its drum part, so it's possible not to hit any of them (and, thus, not to score any points) and still pass the song. The results screen? 0 points and 1 star.
- Guitar Hero Metallica introduces a star meter somewhat similar to Rock Band's. The difference is, you still can't get less than three stars in GHM; until you have at least three stars, the star meter will "help" you fill it until you reach three, which sometimes entails, for example, automatically filling itself during sections with no notes.
- Guitar Hero sort of justifies it, because "failed a song" means "got a bad review" and so if you get less than three stars you failed. It's more like a Hand Wave than a real justification, though.
- The opposite end of the spectrum occurs for certain DDR clones. The In The Groove 2 machine at this troper's college? An "A" is somewhere around low 80%; after A+ is S-, S, S+, *, **, ***, and ***. It is very difficult to pass something on the hardest difficulty without getting above *.
- This happens to an extent with fan reviews too. If you go to any site where shows can be rated (like Anime News Network) most shows will float above 6.0. Fan reviewers do tend to be, well, fans, which would tend to skew reviews positively...
- That and they may pattern themselves after official reviews, even without meaning to.
- There's plain selection bias here; no one is forced to watch anime they remotely suspect they won't like. The some-eps rating vs the all-eps rating point spread and population ratio can be instructive.
- Exception: Some anime series with exceptionally bad Macekre dubs will still have the original version rated highly, but the dub will get low ratings.
- Fan reviews on video games also apply here. You'll find a mixtures of reviews that are all perfect scores or close to it and reviews that give the game the lowest score possible.
- And sometimes the fan reviews "cheat" to bring the score closer to their desired number. This troper once had a heated debate on IMDB with a guy who couldn't understand why giving one of The Lord Of The Rings movies 1 star—in order to drop it closer to 7 stars—was a bad thing. So in case you've been wondering why your favorite movie is only about an 8...
- Your Sinclair was willing to run the full gamut, all the way from 99% (Mercenary) to 9% (Count Duckula 2, which is so bad that even that was thought generous).
- It's not restricted to video games, either - Q Magazine has never gotten over giving five stars to the legendary Oasis train wreck Be Here Now.
- See also: New car reviews in both magazines and newspapers. Even the Yugo received lukewarm reviews from the major car magazines; these publications are truly frightened at the thought of losing advertising revenue due to giving a poor review. This is doubly-true after General Motors pulled its advertising from the Los Angeles Times after one of GM's products was panned in print.
- Car review site The Truth About Cars prides itself on averting this trope, and their brutally honest reviews has resulted in several car manufacturers barring them from attending press events or being given review cars. The most infamous example involved pissing off Subaru AND BMW after the proprietor of the site, Robert Farago, penned a review of the Subaru B9 Tribeca where he declared that the grille on said car "looks like a flying vagina." (Farago was fired from the San Francisco Chronicle, too.) Don't know why BMW was offended... Anyways, TTAC uses a five-point scale and it is quite common for cars to get 3s, 2s, or even 1s. Similarly, Middle-Eastern site Drive Arabia is honest in its reviews(although not as aggressive or hostile as TTAC can sometimes be), and they've received similar treatment from local dealers.
- The only known executive of a Detroit automaker who acknowledges TTAC's existence is Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford Motor Company. Ford also happens to be the domestic automaker that is most likely to survive the economic downturn. Think about it for a minute there...
- European motorcycle magazines seem to have a particular love for BMW motorcycles. A flat spot in the torque curve is a minus for any other marque, but the BMW is praised for having high end power. Or a test of three comparable motorcycles where the two Japanese cycles win on points in the summary, but the article still proclaims the BMW number 1. It's either Euro-chauvinism, or influence by the BMW advertising budget. It doesn't help that BMW routinely provides reviewers with bikes with all the optional extras. Reviewers will gush the entire review on the technological gew-gaws, and then mention in one sentence at the end that these are all optional and cost money. Guess what readers remember?
- Averted with X-Play, where they outright have condemned the use of a 10 point or especially the 100 point scale, as they're trying to be more general ("What's the difference between a 6.7 and a 6.3?"). They use a five point scale (no half-points) with each point being clearly defined.
1 Star- Absolute trash. Not worth any effort
2 Stars- Some recommendation but severely flawed.
3 Stars- Entertaining but nothing spectacular.
4 Stars- Good fun but maybe not for everyone.
5 Stars- Brilliant and innovative game.
- In order to stay true to this rating system, they have gone on the record as boycotting giving reviews of specific games because they didn't want to add a zero to the scale. (Such games include: Barbie Horse Adventures, a flag simulator for the PC, and the infamous Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing.)
- This is also true with computer hardware (heck, probably all electronics); never buy any product given less than an 8 on a 10 point scale.
- Parodied in the TV show The Critic. Jay is told by his boss that his job is to "rate movies on a scale from good to excellent." Jay himself in an inversion: he dislikes pretty much everything and the best score he ever gave a film was a 7 out of 10.
- Happens with some competitive sports, such as in this Troper's personal experience, martial arts tourneys. You could technically give someone less than a 7 on the 1-10 grading scale when judging, but you'd get a hell of a lot of stares and earn a reputation as a biased jerk. But nothing is stopping you aside from any sense of decency.
- This troper is not even sure it is possible to receive less than a 7 on a pro boxing scorecard, even if you caught every punch in the nose and were KO'd that round.
- A similar thing happens in competitive debating (it's like martial arts with words!). At tournaments, 75 is considered an average speech, and virtually all speaker scores fall between about 70 and 80, with 79 or 80 being a demigod level speech. I was once told that if someone simply gets up, repeats the topic of the debate, and sits down, that's about a 50.
- Game Informer also averts this, regularly giving scores of 6 or lower for bad games. They've even given a couple of 0.5s in their history.
- Good Game averts this as well, having given several crappy but technically working games (such as Lost: Via Domus or Iron Man) a grand total of three. The fact they are on a government station rather than a commercial station helps them somewhat.
- Truth In Television: the whole business can also be justified in many cases by score entropy. Here's how it goes: you independently, objectively and honestly review game A. It blows your fucking mind. You give it, say, 95%. A year later, you review game B. Game B is pretty much game A, with the awesome cranked to eleven. Or with the same awesome, but all the miscellaneous suck ironed out. Watchagonnado? You objectively have to give it 96%. Cue next year.
- This is the same concept behind why they have the Olympic favorites in events like Ice Skating do their routines last. If they did them first, and got a perfect score, but were then one-upped by an underdog, the judges can't score the underdog higher than perfect, and controversy erupts.
- A related phenomenon is noted in the Laserblast episode of MST 3 K, wherein Mike checks Leonard Maltin's Movie Rating Guide, notices the (incredibly terrible) movie they just watched got two and a half stars, and mocking how this implies that the work is equivalent to other films that Maltin gave the same score to (such as Animal House and Amadeus).
- Australian magazine PC Power Play uses the full scale, except for 100% (though they have used 10/10, when they changed from percentage to decimal a few years ago) The lowest scoring game ever was Howzat, getting 1%. And they occasionally refuse to review especially bad games such as Squad Leader and Tiberium Sun: Firestorm.
- This magazine has been heavily criticized by their readers for 2 specific game reviews in this category, giving high scores to Deus Ex: Invisible Wars, and Iron Storm, when most people would say otherwise. They do apologize for Iron Storm though.
- Independent review site Worth Playing.com is somewhere between an inversion and a following of the trope, with the typical floor being 4.0 unless the game is flat-out broken (in the sense of significant glitches). This Troper, who works for that site, has given out 1s before, because sadly, Sturgeons Law pretty much guarantees that even that base requirement is often failed.
- Lore Sjöberg played with this in giving his first and possibly only F on the Book of Ratings to Scrappy-Doo.
- Hardcore Gamer Magazine has an interesting version of this. Each game is reviewed by two staffers; the first gives the in-depth review of the game and awards a score (0.0—5.0 scale), then the second comes in with a "second opinion" score, and gives usually a one or two sentence aside about the game. The two scores are averaged out. And while it's refreshing to see the two scores differing by about half a point, the real entertainment comes from watching the second opinion offering completely derail the score of the main reviewer.
- RPGFan is notorious for this - even a game the reviewer will spend the entire piece criticizing will still get at least a 70.
- RPGamer used to score on a scale of 1-10, but ultimately dropped this in favor of a 1-5 system because of this very trend. This led to their reviews since the change actually using the entire scale, with several 1s and 2s given to games that truly tortured the staff members reviewing them. While older scores on the older scales remain unchanged, the review scoring page provides a conversion scale that has led to many games experiencing a severe drop in score when converted to their latest scale.
- The game magazine EGM makes a conscious effort to avert this, twice over: most (previously all) titles they feature is handled by three separate reviewers, and highly varying impressions are surprisingly common. More recently, they switched from a 1-10 scale to a 'grade' system (A, B, B+, etc.) for the purpose of avoiding the Four Point Scale trap entirely.
- This troper recalls seeing really bad bargain bin filler titles get rated with 2.0 and lower on the older scale.
- This other troper recalls at least one letter from the editor talking about how some company or another wouldn't give them information about their games anymore because of the bad scores they handed out.
- In Futurama, Dr Wernstrom gives Dr Farnsworth the lowest rating ever: A, minus, MINUS!
- Real Life example: Ebay ratings, as parodied here in XKCD
- Attack of the Show's Gadget Pr0n segment has never rated any reviewed item below 70%. Even a digital camera with grainy picture, difficult menus, unresponsive buttons, low battery life, insufficient storage space and inadequate low light sensitivity and is several hundreds of dollars too expensive will still get the equivalent of a B+.
- Go to TV.com. Pick a show you hate, any show. It's pretty much guaranteed that most of the ratings won't drop below 7 out of 10. In some cases, reviewers will rate an episode before it's aired, in a "I think this will be good" way.
- Sounds of Death aka S.O.D. magazine is infamous for this. In past years they would publish "reviews" of albums with copy taken straight from the record label's press releases, and in many cases will "coincidentally" run a glowing review of an album opposite a full-page ad for the same CD!
- Somethingawful.com reverses this trope by using the entire spectrum to rate games - and beyond. They rate games on five factors that can rate up to a maximum of ten, the scores adding up to a maximum perfect score of 50. They will not hesitate to rate in to the negatives for really bad games, the awful piece of garbage Thundra being hailed the worst of them with a remarkable minus fifty.
- You Tube. Unless a video is particularly bad, it will get at least four stars. Examples of the former include some Lets Play videos voted appropriately low:
- Dr. Ashen's review of Karting Grand Prix mocks this, with Ashen referring to the game as "irredeemably awful", then giving it a score of 73% "because I'm a fucking idiot."
- In an earlier review on the Gamestation, a flea-market handheld game system resembling the original Play Station, Dr. Ashen gives the system 7/10, saying that it's the lowest score one can give "before the company pulls their advertising".
- Rivals.com, a football recruiting site, ranks prospects using the standard 1-5 star scale. Then they have a vague additional ranking system that ranks players on a 4.9-6.1 scale.
- German Gaming magazine Gamestar averts this on a 100% scale. They make it clear that games below 70 percent are rarely anything special and those below 60% are often not particularly worth playing at all, but still have given ratings as low as 4%. No game has ever gotten a higher score than 94%, and the staff has said that getting 100% is flat-out impossible since it would have to be an eternally perfect game providing endless unhampered entertainment for all time.
- Zero Punctuation does not give out numerical scores for just this reason. Also Yatzee seems willing to lambaste even games that he genuinely enjoys.
- He's even said a few times he gets complaints if he gives positive reviews, like Psychonauts.
- British gaming magazine PC Zone largely averts this Trope. While they prefer to use a percentile score rather than a 1-10 scale, their reviews run the whole gamut from 7%-98% in This Troper's lifetime. Similarly, a score of 80%+ does NOT automatically gain a "Highly Recommended" award; although these often ARE given out to high scoring games, on occasion they have not been awarded to games that are technically good, but are lacking in some kind of "soul" that the reviewer (and the Second Opinion reviewer) would have liked to see present.
- Some people take video game review scores too seriously; if a game gets a 7/10 or something average, they consider the game to be not worth buying or playing. Never mind the fact that a game with an average score is by all means not unplayable, just a Your Mileage May Vary scenario.
- IGN have slapped Sonic and the Black Knight with a 3.9. This troper is calling shenanigans, considering ONM gave it an 8.0. Were they playing the same game?
- In before someone mentions their God Hand review.
- And Imagine: Party Babyz.
- And their review of Football Manager 2009. IGN gave it a ridiculously low score with a scathing review that apparently missed the entire point of the game and subsequently got taken down. IGN UK gave it 9.1.
- As it turns out, shenanigans indeed. Apparently the reviewer never actually played through the entire game, and people are calling him out for it. [1]
- This compilation of Meta Critic scores is this trope in all it's bull*bleep* glory. 70% is worth no points, 60% is -1, and anything below that is -2. It doesn't really prove consistency, for one. That is standard deviations, while this is a total of points. For another, putting negatives that high just makes the lower scorers look even worse. Talk about spin.
- Game Trailers generally has very informative and reliable reviews that coherently explain the points they try to make as the review itself is going on, but the score at the end falls squarely into this trap, the lowest score they usually give being somewhere in the 4.7 to 5.0 range. It once gave a humorous "suicide review" of Ultimate Duck Hunting presented in the form of the reviewer having killed himself over the game and his review being his suicide note, and went on about how it was bad enough to push him over the edge at every turn...and then gave it a 3.2.[2]
- Nintendo Power is usually good at averting this trope, but some of their reviews of games in popular franchises tend to be given high ratings by default. Case in point: Shadow the Hedgehog received an 8 out of 10.
- Non-video game example: Many high school competitive debate leagues. For instance, participants in the "Lincoln-Douglas" event receive a score from 0 to 30, but judges are specifically told not to score anyone lower than 20 unless a participant does little more than show up.
- Amiga Computing gave 100% to Xenon 2. A reader called them out on this, asking if they'd give a higher score to an even better game. ("Yup.") They later gave out a score of 109%, and another 100% in the same issue.
- This trope hits professional wrestling reviews hard. Virtually nobody is satisfied with any rating below four stars. Japanese wrestling reviewer Mike Campbell has gotten a reputation as a horribly biased negative critic simply because he averts this trope very hard while explaining the pros and cons of a wrestling match in meticulous detail.
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