Contrary to the games I have been writing about, I do not only own an Xbox 360. You might be surprised to learn that I bought a Wii the day the Wii launched, and recently decided to sell my Wii, due to various reasons (game tastes changing, nothing but Nintendo games for the platform, the Wiimote losing it’s novelty). After selling my Wii, I promptly went to Gamestop and bought a PS3. Yes, I know some may scoff at that decision (I would have a few months ago also), but Blu-Ray is the defacto next generation movie format (and it looks amazing, by the way), the PSN is not as bad as some make it seem to be (though updating the PS3’s firmware takes wayyyy too long, and I would like to see the PSN updated more than once a week, similar to how Xbox Live works), and there are enough good games on the market for the PS3 to tide you over until the heavy hitters launch.

Read my actual point after the break.

This brings me to my topic for this post. On Kotaku today, they posted up a review for Metal Gear Solid 4, arguably the biggest exclusive that the PS3 will have this year (for my money, the best game coming to the PS3 will be LittleBigPlanet, will Resistance 2 coming in a close second, but I have also never played a Metal Gear Solid game through to completion before). The title of their post? “So Far, The Lowest MGS4 Review Score”. Now right there, I have a problem. I have always been one to completely ignore review scores when making game purchases. If one looked exclusively at a game’s review scores to decide upon a purchase, they would never buy an Xbox Live Arcade game(the review scoring style for those games, and most downloadable games, tends to be broken)! I honestly don’t understand why a game’s score matters to ANYONE. For the most part, there is no unification whatsoever across game review scores, as two reviewers from two different gaming publications could say the exact same thing about a game, and find a way to validate two completely different scores. What is the difference between a 9.5 and a 9.9? the both round up to 10 as far as I am concerned, so why have those stupid middleground numbers at all?

I understand why scores exist. They provide a way to compare different games. Crackdown got an 8.something from IGN. GTA IV got a 10! GTA IV must be the better game! It’s funny that I chose those two games, because Crackdown still stands as one of my favorite Xbox 360 games, yet I’m already totally over GTA IV. Impressive? Yes. But I enjoyed my time with Crackdown far more than I enjoyed my time with GTA IV, mostly because I’m not a sucker for more realistic game worlds. That’s a different story altogether though.

This really is a rant, because most of this post has been a ton of rambing, but the point I am trying to make is this: A game could be the best thing since sliced bread, and it could get a score of 8, simply because a reviewer decided that an 8 was appropriate. Does that make the game any better or worse than a game that is a 9? Maybe, if you have the same opinions as the reviewer. But for the most part, different people will take away different things from the same game. This is the main reason why non-blockbuster games (i.e. not GTA IV, Halo 3, MGS4, etc) NEED to offer gamers a chance to try a game out before making a purchase decision. I couldn’t be more ecstatic to have a chance to try out EndWar next month. Why? Well, it will keep me from possibly making a bad decision. Without a chance to try it out, I might not buy it, even though I could potentially love the game, just because I don’t have a ton of money to spend on games this coming year. Same thing goes for games like Fracture, Too Human, Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Blots, etc.

My message, in a nutshell: I feel that games need to push themselves away from a dependence on the press to convey a game’s quality, and put that decision into the hands of the consumer. Game demos should be a standard requirement for all games, in order for us all to be able to make a more informed decision on our purchases.