I saw a review recently, and it annoyed me enough to burn a Frontpage:
"To the people who voted below an 8: Do you understand the programming it takes to make a game of this scale? Of course this game has glitches! EVERY GREAT GAME DOES! I mean look at Halo, Gears of War, COD series, those games are the best right now and they have alot of glitches in them! So lay off him for the small glitches in the game! This is a programming master piece!"
Really? So every game no matter how bad automatically deserves an 8/10? Just for being a game? *Really?* By that logic I suppose every game should get at least a 4.0. After all, they're hard to make. That means it's okay if the game isn't fun or isn't playable, it's still at least 80% perfect.
No. I'm sorry. I review stuff all the time. There are games which deserve an 8, and there are games which deserve a 6. Hell, I've MADE some games that deserve a 6. And guess what? They get 1's and they get 10's and they get all kinds of numbers in between.
Yes, the game was just as hard to program as a good game would have been. No, that doesn't mean I should get the same score as someone who made a good game.
(Speaking specifically of Witching Hour and Linear Assault, here. That other game doesn't count. It was a freak situation, and the voting criteria were unusual at the time when it got most of its hits.)
Everyone's taste is different, and everyone's gameplay experience is going to be different. If I make a game, and one guy can blast away at the same stupid enemy over and over again for 20 minutes and not get bored because he LIKES that sort of thing, and another guy takes one look at the game and goes "Oh god it's just the same thing over and over again" and quits, and the first guy gives it an 8/10 and the second guy gives it a 2/10, guess what? THAT'S FINE.
This is friggin' Newgrounds! We don't give out Gold Stars for participation here!
The only number that matters is the game's final score. And YES, I'm aware that everyone just gives out 5's and 0's just to increase the weight of their vote by a marginal amount, but that DOESN'T MATTER, because lots of people voting 0's and 5's leads to everything from blams to high 4's. (Nothing ever gets a pure 5.0, because guess what? NOTHING'S EVER PERFECT.)
As of right now, the highest-scoring submission EVER on newgrounds has a score of 4.39. If that were an average of review scores-- of impulsive people reviewing with either a 1 or a 10 instead of a 1 or a 5, it'd probably look like 8.78.
That's a little over 8 and a half. In other words, 8 is the HIGH end of the scale. Not the low end.
I don't know where you got the idea that everyone deserves 8/10. If everyone starts counting at 8, and your submission GETS an 8, then guess what? You really got a zero out of two. Congratulations. Enjoy your 8.
I think the content of a review is more important than the big shiny number next to it, anyway, but that's another rant for another day.
That's right, shitbags! It's your old pal WarpZone! I'm the asshole who gave your Newgrounds creation 2 stars all those years ago. I'm the one who said your animation was choppy, your voice acting was wooden, and your title screen UX was confusing. I'm the guy who painstakingly categorized your creation's faults into Graphics, Sound, etc, years after this stopped being a thing. My last News post on Newgrounds was literally me calling out an entire generation of flash game devs for not using object pooling. You thought I was gone. You hoped I was dead. But I'm back! And I'm developing a standalone indie game. Which I have conveniently put on RoastMyGame for all of you to harrass and disparage.
