Now, I know yall love games and everything, but not every game is a 5 star game and virtually every single game listed here is 5 stars. I'm not saying that the content of the reviews is worthless, just the rating itself.

IMO, ratings should be dealt out like in school where 69 and below is a failure to meet even the lowest gameplay standards, 70-79 is average , 80-89 is an excellent game, 90-99 is a classic, 100 is a game that was made by God. Or so. Needless to say 99.99% of all games would be in between 70 and 89.

Anyway, I'm not trying to troll or criticize anyone for being a fanboi, I mean, I am too, but the 5 star system has been rendered worthless because people don't want to rate any game that makes their list of top 1000 games of all time anything but a 5 star rating.

Nostalgia's a bitch.

Everyone has an opinion......

That's ironic. The very notion that "70-79 is average" is excacly why nearly every review is 5 stars!

But it is relly a fact that in schools in the US "69 and below is a failure"? If so that explains a lot...

teehee... 69.

There really shouldn't be a 5 star game unless its a universal classic ...having said that no game is perfect...

I don't think many people rate (by 'rate' I mean 'do a critical review of game in an insightfull manner') games they don't have or don't like.
Gogers are lovers, Goglodytes eat troglodytes and Lizard poisons Spock.

Edit : oh and for the sake of saving time for 'some other guy' : Welcome on the forum and did you buy Sacrifice ?

Actually in the school system that makes sense.

If you have 100 math problems, if you get less than 70 of them right, you've failed that math test. same with anything else, if you get less than 70% of the available 'points' on a test or in a class, you fail it. It shows that you have not really gained a proper understanding of the material being taught and you need to try again. There's no reason that someone who does not otherwise have a learning issue should not be able to get at least 80% of questions right on a test, so long as all those questions have been covered in the material they were being taught.

Video games can use such a system, too, if we were to want to do so.. however in that instance I would say that a star system is not the right option..
If we were to create such a scale with video games, then the answer would not be to say 50% is 'average', but instead to make a series of 'tests' for video games and score them based off those tests.. which would take faaaar too much work.

Perhaps game ratings here are a bit like music ratings on Amazon. Anyone that bothers to rate must have been moved to do so by actually liking it. I find looking at the number of ratings can be helpful. If 10 people rave about something it's probably not as good as something 1000 people raved about.

I do think we may have a lower dud rate than some vendors.

I once got "[CENSORED]ditions" on the Bethesda forums for trying to write "69 editions". I took me some minutes to realize that the filthy minds of the perverted, but yet so morally superior censors, had put into their censorship software anything that could be read as "69ed".

It's not just on this site - I've seen it everywhere that involves a rating system. People are funny about how they measure ratings. I've seen people leave 5/5 star reviews for movies and leave a review that says the movie is "decent" or "watchable." I've also seen reviews of people leaving fairly high praise for a movie and only giving it 3/5 stars. Perhaps in the end it all kind of balances out, but on a site like this, reviews are going to be particularly high because of the nostalgia.

Personally, I only care about reviews on the extreme ends of the spectrum. If a movie or a game is rated anywhere in the middle, then I think it's best just to try it out for yourself. You could love it or hate it or find it mediocre like the majority of the reviewers. But if you come across a movie or a game that is rated very low out of a sizable number of reviews, then it's probably safe bet that the product isn't going to be worth your time. There's only so much time available and there are lots of potential movies to watch or games to play, so I don't even give the low rated ones a chance. There is the chance that you could miss out on something you'd really enjoy by doing that, but It's a way to help manage an over-sized list of games/movies to play/watch.

Consider this site for example, where reviews are fairly inflated overall. Anything on this site rated below 3 stars is probably pretty terrible. It's actually pretty safe to make the cut-off 3.5, because that's already a low rating on GoG. My cut-off for Netflix is 3 stars. My roommate on the other hand pushes that all the way down to 2 stars, but he likes the horror genre a lot (a genre I don't particularly enjoy) which contains a lot of cheesy, terrible, low budget films.

And in France, an average test is 25% easy things, half normal difficulty things, 25% hard things ... and sometimes 'out of the box' bonus things => if you're above average you're considered ok. Matter of cultural perspective. But I understand that 69 is internationnaly funny :D

Heh, that is some difference compared to Norway.
Here the scale goes (or at least did when I went to high school) from 0 to 6, with 2 or less being a failure. Yeah, I don't particularly trust reviews of people who only played the game 10-20 years ago. The reviews should be based on a fresh playthrough, IMO.
If people want to be nostalgic, write about the game in its sub-forum instead.

This system bears more weight in my opinion depending on the field of study. For example, someone who just gets by with the bare minimum passing grade in a physics degree program is going to have a much more difficult time finding a job in that field then someone who's just getting a business degree. Math is something where your accuracy and understanding of the material is going to matter a lot more than whether or not you just memorized some facts (dates, names, etc.) in a book and had to regurgitate them for a test. I would image the medical field is also highly competitive with GPA's. Who wants to visit a doctor for a liver transplant that only learned 70% of the material required or only put in 70% effort?

Well, the way the system works here is that you need really good grades for the advanced (and not so advanced) studies. You won't get far in academia, medicine or science with just "3"s.