What’s the score?

If you’ve browsed the reviews section this morning, you might notice we’re in the process of updating the mark of each and every game to a nice, shiny out-of-ten system.

When we surveyed our loyal readership the other week, it was clear that while you were happy with the majority of the website, you’d grown tired of the percentage scoring system.  In fact, not a single vote was registered in favour of keeping it.

A few people fancied an out-of-five system, but mainly, the results were split between those who wanted no score at all, and those who’d prefer an out-of-ten system.

For a whole multitude of reasons, which are too boring to go into here, we’ve opted for the latter.  But we’ve also drawn up a whole new scoring guidelines document, an abridged version of which you can see by clicking the ‘About our reviews’ link on the sidebar, or the ‘What does this score mean?’ link on each review.

Our hope is to try to disperse the great big bulk of games that, in the old system, sat in the 60 and 80 per cent region.  We want to make sure we’re using the whole scale here, rather than falling into the trap of relying too heavily on the high end.  In the new system, anything above a five is a decent game, and worth checking out of you like the look of it.

We’re still going through and changing the marks on the archives page, and we’ll continue to make a few tweaks as and when over the coming days.  We hope you’re happy with the new system.  If not… well, tough, basically.  This is as democratic as we’re ever likely to get.