... so why does GS have 10 mean a "perfect" score?
Just after noticing the ad for the "Game Of The Year" feature and watching it, I was reminded of the nature of GS reviewing, so I figured for my 1875th post (3/4 of 2500; probably sounds dumb but whatever) I'd talk about the use of "perfect" to describe games that score 10. IIRC, their own meaning for the word "perfect" is "a game that can't be improved upon in any meaningful way"
IIRC the very idea of perfection was supposed to be about the abscence of flaws, not the impossibility of fixing them, though obviously it's up to them what their definition of it is. My point is, though I've only played one of the games that's scored a 10 on this site, I don't think it fits "perfect" in either sense; I'm talking about Zelda Ocarina of Time. Last time I brought this up on this site people said I should "admit" that I "don't like" the game, but to "admit" something it has to be "true" and I'm not going to bend over backwards just because others would jump to conclusions. I like the game; I started playing it years ago yet it created its own sense of nostalgia in me, and I still have yet to play through the whole thing because I keep wanting to start from the beginning whenever I've been not playing it for long enough... and even when I haven't been playing it for months (such as when I can't bring my N64 into St. John's for a semester at MUN) so many seemingly unconnected things tend to remind me of it for whatever reason.
I just find the notion that the game "could not be improved upon" somewhat questionable. What about re-watching cutscenes? Or re-playing boss battles? Or re-doing dungeon levels from the start of how they were before you went through them before? Or even re-doing other certain parts of the game that only happen once, such as by starting from a certain point in the game? For each of those problems you have to start over from the beginning (which would seem ironic for me to complain about except for how it's on top of what I mentioned earlier) but what if they were to have a structure in which you'd have another menu branching off from the main menu that let you start play from various points in the game (provided you already reached those points in the game otherwise, that is) so that you could re-do things from a certain point onwards without having to re-do the whole thing, like with SA2B. This wouldn't alter the main game, you could still play it the same as you would otherwise, except that there would also be another option available. I'd like to think that would be an improvement.
And that's more so just an example, not a complete list, which would go into many more problems, like the inability to skip certain long dialogues of in-game text... again, I'm not inclined to try to think of all the potential room for improvement, I think there's a lot more than there seems to be. Even the reviewer for that game conceded that there were problems, such as with slowdown in a few areas "such as the water temple" (wherein I found it quite noticeable) which granted, I wouldn't know whether or not it was possible to solve without too much compromise to the graphics, but that still doesn't make it perfect. The same reviewer said immediately afterwards that the game was "In a word, perfect. To call it anything else would be a bald-faced lie." as if to imply that it would be a lie to call it a great game with some flaws.
As someone mentioned last time I brought it up, maybe he didn't mean "literally" perfect, but how could you mean a word like "perfect" figuratively? Of course, said reviewer has since been fired under suspicious circumstances, so it'd be unreasonable to expect him to answer me; that's why I'm asking it to the general community. But if it wasn't meant to be taken literally, why do they still use the word "perfect" for 10? Last time I asked someone said to mean "as perfect as you're going to get" but aside from how the idea of things being "more" or "less" perfect is questionable to begin with (IIRC, something was either perfect or not perfect) who gets to say what the closest to perfect someone is going to get would be? Wouldn't there be other alternatives that would better describe such games, such as "outstanding"? No game is perfect, so why does GS have 10 mean a "perfect" score?
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