@Death_Strandicoot you are good at puns – what would be a good title for a game-ranking thread? feel free to start one and i can move these posts since the conversation is (happily) turning into an off-shoot.
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I can go into detail about my opinion that “The Top 10 X of all time” or “The Mt Rushmore of Y” are bad and evil, but that “Ranking of all Z” is inherently good. to keep it on topic…
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I think that any attempt to (personally) rate games/movies/etc numerically is futile. Why give a game three stars when I know I’ll see that score a month from now and think “what was I thinking? I should’ve given it a 3.5” and then a month after that I’ll see the score again and change it back to a 3? I’m simply too fickle and perfectionistic to settle on a number like that.
Also I don’t want to be called out by my own scores. Oh you thought that that beloved masterpiece that didn’t fully click with you was worth three stars out of five? Sounds like it’s just as good as Link’s Crossbow Training!
That being said, I like reading other people’s numerical scores. More numbers are better. Everyone should have to do it the Pitchfork way where it’s “out of 10” but really out of 100. Everyone should have to agonize over the decision to give a game a 6.3 or a 6.4.
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this site is awesome btw
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I can’t remember if I’ve shared this here before but here are my top 366 video games roughly in order. I haven’t revisited this in a while so I don’t know if I stand by everything.
Also posting my patented Backloggd ranking system:
5: That one gif of Andrei Tarkovsky saying “poetic cinema”. I could easily spend ten minutes talking about how cool this game is.
4: Oh yeah, this one’s a banger. Strongly recommend.
3: Standard Good Video Game. You can skip this one if you’re busy with other stuff.
2: I see what the developer was going for but I didn’t vibe with this (and/or I barely remember anything about it).
1: The 2014 reboot of Thief (also Bubsy)
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I guess I will elaborate since there is a whole thread now
-2 is detrimental
I can’t really think of examples. I’d honestly just reserve this to something offensive or polarizing entries. maybe TLOU2 if you only look at the Druckerman’s politics and intention behind it and none of the genuinely great stuff in there. or like the FIFA games that are rated all ages and have gross microtransactions? most gacha could go here really. maybe misleading mobile games?
-1 is stinky bad.
I’d put the predatory but inoffensive stuff here. Animal Crossing New Horizons type thing. no micro transactions but it’s just getting you to play the game every single day so it becomes your personality. I’d honestly put most roguelikes that really try to implant them in your brain here.
0 is boring.
nothing to say. most ubisoft slop or call of duty or whatever.
what else is there to say.
1 is good
probably most first party games go here? I’m not a huge fan of the story driven cinematic dad games but like God of War(2018) and Super Mario Wonder or something. like good but also a bit focus tested. good products but meaningless works of art if that tracks?
2 is noteworthy, transcendental, interesting, whatever.
insert credit 7/10s.
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so 7/10s get a 2 on this scale but 10/10s get a 1
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yes its balanced you see the vision
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Thanks, I always thought the CGA second palette was under utilised
I do plan to resurrect it at some point. I have promised it to my 4 regular readers, and one confirmed non-accidental ‘celebrity’ follower. But that requires effort that I don’t have currently.
I did fix the bug in the underlying software that made the ranking graph take 20 minutes to load at least.
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so true bestie
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To be fair I feel that I’m pretty decisive when it comes to this but in writing that long post up there, I now want to go back and readjust some things
Very disappointed to see a game with a name as good as Fuck Quest be ranked so low
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I’ll be slightly on topic when I say I don’t mind 5 point systems with a decimal because there’s a lot more relative space between integers, but I really don’t like 10 points with decimals. That’s a 100 point system! If you review something 8 and then slap a .2 at the end. That just tells me you’re unwilling to commit to an actual score. I know this is kind of silly but if you’re going to boil something down to a number from 1 to 10, I think you should be very deliberate with that number and let the rest of the review elaborate.
Thank you for giving me a platform to finally voice this silly thought.
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I only played it in the first place because it’s the lowest scored DOS game on Mobygames. Accurately so apparently.
It does appear to be one of, if not the first, fan made AGI games in existence though.
It was my policy to omit outright porn games in today’s Steam front page sense. But, much like Astrotit above it, it’s hard to imagine it being used for that purpose.
This does represent a failure of the system’s design though. Which was partly inspired by a comment on an early HG101 Top47k games podcast episode, where they talk about wanting to avoid “zones” in the list entirely comprised of one type/genre of game.
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this was the lightning round for Ep 185 of the show
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I mostly rank things based totally on vibes—I can see on Backlogged that I have more 5s than anything else followed closesly by 3s and then by 4s, so I’d say a 5 is basically a “hell yeah I loved it; fully engrossed me let’s rock” and a 3 is more or less a shrug like “yeah ok; I sure did play this” with a 4 being in the middle between those
A 4 is Sky Target, a 3 is SD Gundam Battle Alliance and a 5 is Auto Crusher Palladium
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Me and a buddy have film club where we rate the movies we watch and we’ve adopted a modified version of a normal grade system.
7 - excellent. A great performance with few or insignificant issues.
6 - great. A great performance, but with slight issues.
5 - good. A good performance, but with its share of issues.
4 - average. A middling performance with significant issues.
3 - acceptable. A passing grade, with only a minimal performance.
2 - unacceptable. A non passing grad with beyond minimal performance.
1 - bad. A non passing grade with a complete acceptable performance.
Ten years of using this has made me unable to comprehend any other form of rating. I’ll internally calculate what a 1-10 score would be comparable with on this scale instead.
It has a few strengths:
- Anything from 5-7 is generally recommended, 3-4 being bad but without merit and 1-2 being bad.
- There’s no “perfect score”. A 7 is just that it’s good enough that whatever flaws there is aren’t worth talking about.
- Fewer dead categories than a traditional 1-10, but enough to delineate how good or bad something is.
- It’s compatible with the Bologna-standards (for all you european edu-heads out there), with 7 = A and 1 = F.
Examples:
7 - Chrono Trigger. Great and tightly designed game with very few detractions. An easy recommend.
5 - Strange Journey. Great dungeon crawler with a distinct appeal, but with significant elements that can lead to frustration. Recommended to the tight person.
3 - Age of Decadence. The bones of a good game is here, but it just doesn’t come together, with a lot of bad moments that sour the experience.
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If I had to develop a numerical ranking systems that truly captures how I think about books, games, movies, etc., the score would have to be in the one dimensional complex projective space P(C).
A complex number x in C is of the form x = a + bi. That is, it has a real part a and an imaginary part b. In my ranking system, a would measure how many interesting or original ideas there are in the work and b would measure how competently it executes on those ideas. Note that a and b are both allowed to be negative (similar to @onnuhhhh 's system). When we consider P(C), the projectivization of C, we add an additional point at infinity (∞). This is for works that transcend the ranking system.
We now need to select two works to calibrate the system. For games, I’d pick SMB1 as the origin (i.e., it has a score of 0). I then assign Sonic 1 a score of 1 - 1i, as I think it has lot more interesting things going on in it, but it’s not as well executed.
We can now assign scores to other games:
Sonic 2: 1
SMB Lost Levels: 1.5
SMB3: 0.5 + 2i
Donkey Kong Country: i
Katamari Damacy: 1 - 0.5i
We 
Katamari: 1.5 + 2i
Yume Nikki: ∞
Yume 2kki: 3 - i
Omori: -3 - i
Note that a score of ∞ doesn’t mean that a game is better than all other games (if it were, then by the same logic it would also be worse than all other games). It simply means that it’s outside of the ranking system. It can only happen once, and it’s impossible imagine it being slightly better or slightly worse – it just is.
It’s also possible to extend this ranking system to multiple dimensions (e.g., gameplay, graphics, music, story), but I’ll leave that for another post…
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