How about ratings on games in the rarity guide?

[Room 34]

I'd like to suggest a new component to the rarity guide: RATINGS!

 

I think it would be fairly easy to set up a means for people to submit a rating (i.e. 1 to 5 stars) for games, and show the average rating on each game's page in the archive. This would be similar to how Amazon.com has customer ratings on products they sell. (You could require people to be logged in to submit a rating, and store the ratings submitted by each user, to prevent people from "spamming" the ratings with multiple submissions.)

 

Just a thought... but I think it would be fun to see what AA users think are the great games and which ones suck, and it would help in situations like what I'm in now, debating whether to buy a particular game, having never played it before.

[sku_u]

If there's a way to do this, it is an awesome idea. People could get a better idea about how other AtariAge members feel about different games. Maybe something similar to the setup in the AA store could be applied to the rarity lists, or would it use up too much space?

[Room 34]

I think if you just set up a database table that stored the user ID, the game ID, and an integer 1 to 5 for their rating on each game they assess, it shouldn't be too big.

[Pitfall Harry]

How about 0 to 5? I really don't think I could bring myself to award Skeet Shoot so much as a single star.

 

 

Ben

[MegaManFan]

Some games really do deserve a 0, although I suspect if you hated it that strongly 1 would still be sufficient (it works well enough on IMDB, their bottom 100 stays fairly consistant). A 1 to 10 scale might be better actually, as it gives people the freedom to spread out their feelings a little more instead of lumping things together. It might be hard to discern just how much difference there is between Space Invaders (which would get a good score off nostalgia) and Space Inv. Arcade if a lot of people rate one 3 and the other 4, and they both average 3.5. If a lot of people rate one a 5 and the other an 8 though, the difference will be much more clear.

[Pitfall Harry]

Some games really do deserve a 0, although I suspect if you hated it that strongly 1 would still be sufficient

 

No, there's something to be said about 0. There's a delicious condemning quality about it, which you simply cannot achieve with a 1 on a 1 - 10 scale. A 1 could be taken to mean "it's got 10% of the makings of a good game." But when a game carries the stigma of zero, as Skeet Shoot so richly deserves, then there can be no mistaking the power of the mighty 0. The game reeks. It's so bad that it's not even 1/10 of a percent of the way to be considered good. Label-less cartridges with dead ROMs are more fun than Skeet Shoot will ever be. The game is NOT a 1 on a 1 - 10 scale. It's a dead-solid zero.

 

A 1 to 10 scale might be better actually, as it gives people the freedom to spread out their feelings a little more instead of lumping things together.  It might be hard to discern just how much difference there is between Space Invaders (which would get a good score off nostalgia) and Space Inv. Arcade if a lot of people rate one 3 and the other 4, and they both average 3.5.  If a lot of people rate one a 5 and the other an 8 though, the difference will be much more clear.

 

I honestly don't think many people can refine their opinions well enough to merit the use of a 1 - 10 scale. Even if some can, I don't think many readers could have so precise a measure of confidence in an opinion as subjective as gameplay worthiness. It is for these reasons movie and book rating guides seldom use anything more precise than a 0 - 5 scale. Precision on a 1 - 10 scale simply isn't there, and forcing the scale to be 1 - 10 merely makes things overly complex for the sake of furthering an illusion.

 

 

Ben

[Room 34]

I like the 0 to 5 scale suggestion. It's like the star ratings in the Rolling Stone Record Guide (which I used to scour obsessively in high school).

 

In most cases, albums were limited to the 1-to-5-star range, but albums that were REALLY bad got a BOMB... equivalent to the 0 Ben proposes.

[MegaManFan]

The thing about Rolling Stone and the like is that 1 to 5 is an illusion. Since they give things "half stars" all the time, that's really a 1 to 10 scale whether you know it or not.

[Room 34]

Yeah, screw the half stars.

 

I'd say that in here, people should only be able to rate games in whole-star increments. It'd be fine, though, if the average that showed on the game pages was done in half-star increments. (That is, again, how it works on Amazon.com...)

[Thomas Jentzsch]

It should be easy to (re)use the existing Links rating system (1..10) for this. You "just" have to add an extra games sections and link to all games from there.