Welcome to GAB's new website

It's long overdue, but I finally put together a website for GAB About Games, in preparation for the upcoming PS1 and N64 GAB projects. Besides the fact that I can now post topics without having to break the list of ratings up into a million pieces, there's a few other benefits to this:

- If you can't or don't want to post on Gamefaqs, you can post your ratings here instead.
- You can now check the updated SRs list at any time.
- Similarly, if there's an error in the ratings for a game, I can fix it immediately.

I will keep posting the topics on Gamefaqs, so you shouldn't feel that you have to post here. You can use whichever site you prefer.

The site itself is still under construction. I'll probably continue to make changes to it over the next little while, but you can start complaining that you don't like how it looks now because I'm probably not going to be changing that substantially any time soon.

GAB History and FAQ

About the GAB system itself:

Why does GAB only allow 3 possible grades? That's too few!

GAB's system was developed as an answer to this age-old question in the reviewing world:

"What does it represent to say that something deserves 6/10?"

You could ask a dozen different people and probably get a dozen different responses. Everyone has a different idea of what the points on the 10-point scale represent and what a given thing would have to be to attain them, which creates an obvious problem if we try to aggregate scores together from multiple people. If one person thinks 6/10 means "above average" while another thinks it means "mediocre", taking the average of their scores would be meaningless. Review aggregators like Metacritic attempt to normalize the scale using fancy equations that take a reviewers other scores into account, but besides being far too much work for a project like this it still doesn't really yield good results.

The most obvious way to solve this problem is to come up with a scale that everyone agrees upon. Many sites have attempted to use a two-scale system, usually "thumbs up" and "thumbs down", but there's a common complaint that some things kind of fall in the middle between the two. I think the most ideal number of grades is actually three. Pretty much everyone has a clear concept of what it means for something to be good, average, or bad. If we try to add a fourth rating (let's call it "great"), then we immediately get into the same arguments about "where does good end and great begin?" that we were trying to avoid in the first place. Three ratings is fast and effective, but still gives you enough flexibility to express your thoughts without feeling like there's certain things you just can't grade appropriately. Does it blur our minor differences in quality and favour safe things that most people like over bolder things that some love and some don't? Sure. But for now it's the best we've got.

If it still bothers you that you can't differentiate between the best of the best and those that are simply good, just ask yourself this. Between two things that you would consider good, would you recommend trying just one of them, or both? There is a time and place to discuss which things are truly the best of the best, but the fact that you would probably recommend both to a new person suggests that the difference is largely academic. At GAB, the goal is not necessarily to determine the best games of all time, but to find unknown good games and create a general recommendation list for new players. For that goal, I think this system works the best.


Why do we only get 10 SRs? We should be able to give as many as we want!

If SRs were unlimited, they would fundamentally become a fourth grade, which we were trying to avoid. I think the current system does give you some ability to draw attention to games you think are really special without compromising the integrity of the rating system. Also, I think it's an interesting challenge to create a list of only 10 recommendations out of hundreds of choices. It forces you to think more critically about what it is that you value in a game.

How to participate in GAB:

Can anyone participate in GAB?

GAB About Games is open to everyone, I don't curate or approve the responses in any way, my goal is to get as many responses as possible, because I think that helps us get a more accurate perspective. The only restrictions are that you should have played the game in question and that you only vote once per topic.

How do I participate in GAB?

Each GAB topic will have a list of games to rate. While the voting period for the topic is open, simply post your ratings for the games, either on this site or in the associated Gamefaqs topic, in a format similar to this:

Super Mario Bros - G (SR)
Excitebike - G
Donkey Kong - A
Ice Climber - A
Clu Clu Land - A
Urban Champion - B

Then, when the voting period expires, I'll collect all the votes and add the scores to the list.

Do I have to rate all 6 games?

No, you can (and should) only rate the ones you've played and feel comfortable giving a rating to. Of course, this might be none of them, there's not any sort of quota you have to fill to remain part of GAB or anything like that.

Do I have to explain why I gave a game a specific rating?

No, but I encourage it. If you like a game, explaining why you like it can cause other people to want to try it. If you don't like a game, explaining why not might help other people to see your point of view. In general, I think it also just keeps people more engaged in the process, which helps, we've got a lot of games to get through.

Can I still rate a game after the topic closes?

No. I recognize that this is less than ideal, but at current there's just no feasible way to achieve this, it's a lot of work to maintain the lists as it is. You can, however, still assign SRs to games that were rated in the past, just post in another topic that you want to do that and name the game you want to give an SR to.

Can I give an SR to a game we haven't done yet?

Generally I don't allow this, but I might consider changing this policy in the future. I do feel like having to stick around to give out SRs keeps people coming back, but for a system that takes as long to do as PS1 this might not be reasonable.

How long should I play a game to rate it?

There's no universal answer to this one. The answer I'd give is "long enough that you feel confident in your rating", but obviously that could vary by game and it's subjective.

I've played a game that we're rating, but not on the system in question, can I still rate it?

Ideally, it would be best to play the game on the system in question, because sometimes there can be differences between versions that can significantly affect the gameplay experience, but if you're fairly confident that the version you've played is very similar it's probably good enough.

Other questions:

How are ratings calculated and how do I read them?

After a topic closes, I'll tally up the ratings everyone gave and assign the game a final score using the following formula (G + A / 2) / N, where G is the number of G votes, A is the number of A votes, and N is the total number of votes. So if we had the game below, which got the following votes

Sample Game - GGAB

For this game, G = 2, A = 1, and N = 4. Plugging this into the formula, we get a score of (2 + 1 / 2) / 4 = 62.5%, which gets rounded to 63%. So this game's score would read as:

Sample Game - 63% {4}

The number in the brackets shows the total number of votes. By the way, those ratings also make this as a squiggle bracket game, more on that later.

What does the squiggle bracket mean?

The squiggle bracket is a comparatively new feature in GAB, which is intended to help add a little more detail to the ratings list. Consider the following two games, with the listed ratings

Sample Game 1 - AAAAAA
Sample Game 2 - GAABBG

These games would both get a score of 50% (6) by the formula above, yet the opinion on them is quite different. Everyone agrees that Game 1 is just average, but there are some people who quite like Game 2 and some people who quite dislike it. The squiggle bracket exists to help differentiate these two scenarios. Specifically, the criteria for getting a squiggle bracket is that each of the three grades must make up at least 20% of the total number of votes. In the latter case, there are 6 votes, and each rating has 2 votes, so 2 / 6 = 33%, so it gets the squiggle bracket. Note that the squiggle bracket has only been in place since the PS1 GAB and later.

When will we rate game X?

At some point. I have a master list of games to rate, so the game you want to rate is probably on the list somewhere, but I try to space out the games by both genre and popularity so we don't burn through the games everyone loves right away and get stuck with dregs for years on end. If the topics are nearing the end and we haven't done a game you think should be rated, it's possible I may have missed it somehow, in which case you could suggest it just to make sure I have it on the list.

How do you rate every game?

I set aside some time each week to play any games I haven't played yet and give my thoughts on them. I feel this is important, because for some very obscure games, there's a good chance that no one may have played them already. I don't confirm or deny that I rig the game choices to some degree so that we don't get several games that I know will take very long to rate in the same week.

This game isn't in English, how can I play it?

When choosing the list of games to rate, I try to pick those that I believe can be played by those with little to no knowledge of Japanese (or any other language besides english). Some of these games are simple action games, where text is not involved in the gameplay. Others may be games for which a fan-translation or translation guide exists. Do note though that I sometimes get it wrong and a game may have a larger localization barrier than I thought. If you really want to play a game but can't figure it out, just post about it, I can probably help you, I've written guides for Japanese games in the past.