A ten out of ten is not a score, it is a statement

We pretend the scale is linear while using only its top third.

They fixed it later is not an argument about what happened

No Man's Sky launched in August 2016, a regulator cleared it of misleading advertising, and the players were still right.

Nostalgia is a bad argument but a good question

"It used to be better" is almost always false. What sits behind it is a real observation.

We have forgotten how to write about hardware without numbers

Measurements have crowded out the description of how something feels.

The one case where a failure was admitted rather than patched

Square Enix dropped Final Fantasy XIV in 2010, switched off the subscription, destroyed the game world in front of its players, and built it again.

The hours were sold as part of the product

In autumn 2018 Dan Houser mentioned hundred-hour weeks in a pre-release interview for Red Dead Redemption 2. He mentioned them with pride.

A remake should preserve systems, not images

Capcom remade Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 back to back, on one engine, with much the same team. The difference in the results is instructive.

Celeste settled the easy-mode argument with a single settings screen

Assist Mode was first called Cheat Mode. The renaming mattered more than the feature.

The button says buy, but it means something else

On 31 March 2024 Ubisoft switched off The Crew's servers, and in April revoked licences from the people who had bought it. A campaign of over a million signatures grew from that.

Early access works when it is an instrument, not a till

Larian kept one act of Baldur's Gate 3 in early access for three years — and rewrote the companions because players disliked them.

The reviews were honest. They were just about a different version

December 2020: the press received Cyberpunk 2077 on PC only, and was forbidden to record its own footage. The rest followed by itself.

The rating board looked at the picture, not the system

Balatro was given an 18 rating for depicting playing cards. Games that contain an actual wager do not get that.

The six out of ten that cost a man his job

In November 2007 GameSpot fired Jeff Gerstmann. The problem was not the score. It was what sat on the same page.