Announcement: New Review Scale

Attention readers: I’d like to interrupt your regularly scheduled “hitting F5 on GameCola.net to check for any new articles” for an Important GameCola Announcement.

You might’ve read in our “Mid-Boss” column recently that GameCola’s planning to revamp its review rating scale. Planning is no longer the operative word—you can control-F that and switch it to “doing” in all cases. (Be sure to grammar-check that before hitting send, though.)

As of…very soon, GameCola will be dropping the review ratings system we’ve been using since our inception in 2002 for a newer, slimmer, more reader- and writer-friendly scale. We’ll be eliminating our individual category ratings entirely—you know, like “Audio,” “Replay Value,” and “Novelty.” They’ll be completely gone. Instead, we’ll be providing only one, overall, easily-digestible, out-of-10 rating. A score of 5 will, of course, still be average. 0 will still mean “worthless,” and 10 will still be “perfect”; the only difference is the elimination of the individual categories. (And the elimination of decimals. Here at GameCola, our new motto is going to be “fuck decimals.”)

The reasons for this are many (Zach Rich kept yelling at me about our old system), and the benefits are varied (Zach Rich won’t yell at me anymore), and I think you’ll be pleased with the results—the results being that you’ll have a system that’s easier to understand and that allows for a greater consistency in how our writers rate games.

Also:  We are so gonna get on Metacritic now.