Thanks, Jenny.

We didn't miss the point - we took it a step or two forward. We discussed the necessity of it.

@Mad, oldbroad: i don't want to come across arrogant, but your posts
miss the point again. Its not about agreeing or disagreeing with
a grade. Its not about your thought-process reagrding grades/reviews etc.
Its just [blip] more likely, easier and faster to find 4-5 great games
you will really like by concentrating on a set of 30 A/A- graded games
(AND reading their reviews) rather than
staring at a list of 400 game names, starting to read with letter 'A'.
Yes, you will miss certain good games. And yes, you will not agree with every grade.
And yes, grades have a lot of flaws. So what? That is not the point.

@Jenny: Ok, if its too much work, i understand that.

Ok, the matter is settled, i will not post about it anymore.
At least there is this other annual game list to look at.

Well, if the point was that it is an easy thing to do, I guess Jenny100 took care of that.

Also, you make it sound like any grade less than A- is not worth bothering to look at.

This horse is dead, and I don't want to beat it myself. It is easy to see how time-consuming it would be to retroactively insert a "Grade" to the review titles already existing. And the hope that anyone would agree to start including a Grade in the title when posting of new reviews has been squelched as well by the decision that future game reviews will no longer include a Grade within the text of the review itself. So that, as they say, is that.

Still, you can't help noting that most web sites dealing with game reviews (GameSpot, PC Gamer, etc) do "Grade" the games they review, usually on a scale of 1 to 10 or 1 to 100, or some other measure of comparability. Although a Grade is not the only input I would seek (I read the full review), ranking is a useful tool in the coarse sense of sorting out the good ones from the chaff.

Game Boomers has always been different from other sites and it's what makes it charming and unique. If you want main stream, there are other choices available. We aren't trying to be like the others and it's not a competition.

And please note that we are not missing the point. We are an educated bunch here with lots of talents and we are fully capable of understanding what is being said. We just decided it wasn't what we saw fit for our website. Period. End of story. Have a happy day!

Here !! Here !!

I too like the fact that Gameboomers does its own thing.

I find the lists very helpful, particularly when someone whose taste is similar rates a game highly. It is a good starting point as i suppose the grades might be.

However, it is surprising how much our tastes diverge. There's one game I thought was dreadful in almost every respect but it has almost universal acclaim and earned an A+ from our reviewer. Can you guess what it is?

Thank you, Ana!

There aren't many games that got an A+ grade.
So far I've found these:

The Longest Journey
Syberia 1
Syberia 2
Myst III: Exile
Riven

I would guess the game you thought was "dreadful" was one of the Syberia games. I know some players don't enjoy first person puzzlers, but you did say "almost universal acclaim" so that suggests either The Longest Journey or Syberia.

Scratches got an A+ too.

Oh. I didn't realise the grading narrowed it down that much. Yes Jenny 100, it was The Longest Journey.

Games reviewing is a subjective art. No matter what the "professionals" say about their objectivity, their experience, their personal and cultural biases always have an impact upon the games they like or dislike.

The only almost objective measure of a game is the sales. But then, without the right promotion, to the right market, the greatest gem of a game won't get seen by the right people, and so the sales won't match either.

So, this is just a long way of saying, I'm not surprised some people loved The Longest Journey (I am one of them), and likewise I'm not surprised some people loathed it, and still further people were left entirely without a strong reaction either way. It is a fine example of it's genre of story-heavy, dialog-heavy, fantasy adventure, but it's not for everyone. But then, Pandora's Box is a fine example of it's genre of story-light (but not absent), (mostly) short puzzle games in a polished wrapper, but it's not for everyone either.