For the next week and a half, my girlfriend and I are staying at my brother’s and sister-in-law’s house so that we can watch their fifteen month old daughter while they are out of the country. Last night was our first night here, and living in someone else’s home is quite odd. The strangest thing, beyond caring for a child, is the difference in beds. Our bed back home a soft queen with a fluffy comforter and extra padding both above and below the mattress. The bed is here is a firm king, with heavy yet thin blankets. It’s the kind of bed you see late night on television in between infomercials trying to sell you knives that can cut through a military boot in one quick slice. You can drop a bowling ball inches away from ten brimming wine glasses on its surface with no fears of spillage. It’s like being on another planet. A bed is a very intimate thing; it supports your rest every single night. You entrust it with your body during your most unprotected hours. The strange thing is, I think I dig it. Laying in it before actually closing my eyes, even now as I type this, it feels all wrong, not at all comfortable, but when I pulled up the blankets snug around me, and positioned myself for sleep. it was great. So that’s where my mind is at right now, and my body for that matter.

Game reviews have been a hot subject of debate as of late. Arguments over how effective or fair a ten point system is have been tossed around by a lot of people. Some reviewers have moved to a scale similar to that of our school system, giving grades from F through A+. The drive behind this is mostly the question, what deserves a perfect ten? A ten is too tethered to the idea of perfect, and no one has the balls to label something free of error. Admittedly, nothing probably deserves that title. This unwillingness skews the whole scale. A nine point seven becomes just about the highest a game will get, so something that could get an eight, will now get something like a seven point seven, which looks a lot worse the lower you go. An A+ on the other hand signifies the highest percentile of greatness, but does not necessarily mean perfect. Anything equal or above a ninety-eight can receive an A+. It’s more forgiving by being less precise. It gives a better idea of the quality of the game. A hard number stands out too much, and I think robs a lot of games from the attention hey deserve. I think the letter grades is a better scale, but I also appreciate undefined reviews. Reviews that list pros and cons, or say if you liked blank then you will like this.

I think an important factor in a review is to judge a game based on what it is really trying to do. Reviewing Army of Two while playing the game by yourself seems unfair to me. It is obviously meant to played with a friend, and should be reviewed as such. That’s like playing World of Warcraft in a server all by yourself, or a fighting game against nothing but CPUs. Judging Super Smash Brothers Brawl should focus on the multiplayer brawling, not the single player campaign. I think reviews should be honest and detail things like that, but not let it overshadow what’s really going on.

Let’s go microwave.

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