Scoring and Discussion

So, this is a game review site. It will be updated on a weekly basis, every Sunday evening with a discussion of whatever games I've played this week. It's not an objective review site, it's purely my opinion, biases and all.

The "scores" which I'll use to rank games are relatively arbitrary, and more of a gut feeling than anything else. They're made up of two parts. The first, a letter grade A-F, is a measure of the game's "innovative" quality. The second, a number grade which will use the whole spectrum from 0 to 100, is a measure of how well the idea was executed.

For some basic reference:

• Ico: A/100
• Drake of the 99 Dragons: C/04
• Call of Duty 4: B/100
• Final Fantasy X: C/30
• Super Mario Galaxy: B/90
• Bioshock: A/90
• Assassin's Creed: A/85
• MySims: A/12
  

Some of my favorite games:

• Ico
• Grim Fandango
• Half Life
• Rez
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
• Rock Band
  

Some of my least favorite games:

• Final Fantasy X
• Most sports games
• Most jRPGs

Basic biases:

• I absolutely adore Xbox Live. I think it's the best thing to happen to games in decades.
• I'm not a huge fan of the Wii. Though it obviously has potential, its going to be a while before people really understand the limitations of motion control, and make another game that's as successful as Wii Sports.
• I've been actively irritated by how Sony's handled themselves the last two generations of hardware. Every piece of Sony game equipment I've ever bought has failed.
• I loved the Dreamcast. This may account in some respect for my anti-Sony bias.
• Despite my anti-Sony bias, many of my favorite games in the last generation were on the PS2, so credit goes where credit is due.

Not every update will be a review of a single game. It may simply be me talking about whatever suits my fancy, game-wise, but I'll make a concerted effort to actually update regularly, and keep the posts at least marginally interesting. If there isn't a review, it'll be something game design related, most likely.

For the record, I work for a game company. I won't be discussing the game I'm working on, for obvious reasons, and when I talk about design stuff, I'm not going to be talking about work-related design, which means there may be weird holes in subjects I'll talk about, but there you go.

I have a personal blog, which does not reside here. If you came here looking for that, please send me an e-mail. If for some reason, you don't know my e-mail address, post some way for me to get in touch with you, and I'll make sure the connection is re-established.

Now... let's see how this goes.