Well, first, you don't have to be great at a game in order to find it to only be good. As it happens, I am on the list of players who have beaten I Wanna Be the Guy and hold 65% of achievements in Super Meat Boy, so I think we can put the "learn to play" arguments to rest, even if they were valid--which they aren't.
More specifically, this is the problem with the 7-10 scale used by most review sites. You've noticed that Cubed3 doesn't score on a 7-10 scale; we use the full 10. A 6 is well above average and certainly good--120% better than average. Nor are games reviewed simply by the contexts of their own genres; the score "6" is not to say "compared to other run-and-shoot, this is a good game" but says "compared to the wide array of tens of thousands of games that exist and comprehensively set 5 as average, this game is above the middle of the crop." The bottom line is that the game I played was not released in the early 90s; it was released this year, and thus must be judged against the standards of contemporary games, and not merely those around for its initial release. It's generally wrong to hold older games up to modern standards, but when they're re-released at a cost, that maxim no longer applies, because being re-released is the equivalent of stepping into the ring with all other contemporary games. In the 90s, absolutely the original release would have been worthy of a better score. With the Mega Man X series behind us, though? Absolutely not. It's still a good game. The question isn't whether it's fantastic against its early 90s peers but whether it's fantastic against its 2015 peers. If your opinion holds differently, that's perfectly fine; it's a great big world out there. In fact, we actively try to supplement facts about a given game with our opinions, because otherwise you end up with a dry, boring review that is more akin to a technical specificaions document than an actual review.
I'll leave you with this:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EightPointEight
And this;
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FourPointScale
One of the guests also quoted the old standard for 6/10. The updated version is:
Missing out on the Cubed3 awards, a 6/10 may seem one to avoid but there is some hope for games awarded with this score. Passable but flawed, it works but just doesn't perform enough to be a must have in the genre. It'll bring some enjoyment, but the disadvantages could flip the scales to headache inducing or just simple boredom. This game might not be worth purchasing at full price, but is still one to consider for a rental or at a discount.
I'm pretty sure this review was posted/scored around the time the change was occurring, but the actual
score isn't the important part of a review. Many, many sites have expressed a desire to move away from giving scores entirely specifically for this reason: people fixate far too much on the score. The fact is: I was bored a solid 80% of the time I was playing
3D Gunstar Heroes. "It's boring" doesn't make very good content for a review, so I instead looked into the reasons
why I found it boring. The above review is the result. Considering I just completed a re-play of
Mega Man 2, Mega Man 3, and
Castlevania, without once being bored, it says quite a lot about the style of
3D Gunstar Heroes and whether its simplistic systems were truly good for their time or not. Honestly, even judging the game exclusively against early 90s standards wouldn't affect my score very much; the game is fairly boring. There are lots of vague, esoteric reasons for this--the level designs are all virtually identical, there is nothing to actually look forward to by playing the game. But, again, this doesn't make good review content, because they rapidly spiral into word counts in the thousands, since the statement "there is nothing to look forward to" requires a
ton of explanation regarding story and gameplay mechanics--and there's no reason to get into any of that when the gameplay has clear and specific flaws.
( Edited 10.10.2015 04:56 by Anema86 )Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like?