As someone who has spent a great deal of his life playing video games and also writing I've been someone who has wanted to review games for a long time. I've tried in the past but something about me makes me fundementally unsuited to be a critic, perhaps. That said my dislike for most reviewers is leading me towards tying to be one of the better ones and give if not a fair score then at least produce commentray that will help someone else decide if they ought to pick it up.
Having said that as much as I hate numeric sores people seem to go ga-ga over them so I have devloped what I am calling the ArMS-- Arbitrary Scoring System. Games are scored in five parts-- audio, video, writing, mechanics and concept. Each will be scored out of 200 and then added for a possible total score of 1,000. The 200 total points will be broken down in an arbitrary way which unfairly weights some things. This cumulative score will then be converted to a percentage, this is to ensure fariness if something simply does not apply to a game-- one could harly speak of the story or writing in a game such as HOARD by design has not real story or plot. The percentage will then be converted to letter grades. By making this as convoluted as possible I hope to open myself up to being bribed into giving positive scores in the future.
Any score below 50%-- that is 500 of 1,000 or 450 of 900 will be failing. The 50% through 59% bracket will be E, for effort. 60% through 69% will be D, 70% through 79% C, 80% through 89% B, 90% through 99% A and a perfect 100% will be an S, for super or star. Scores will then be divided into thirds with the bottom third being a minus (-) and the top third being a (+). This means that an F- would be 0% through 16¾%. Above 16¾% but not above 33⅓% would be the standard F while anything above would be an F+. It is important, I think, to know exactly how hard a game failed. For ten-based letters, that is E and above, 50% through 53% is the E-, with standard E being 54% through 56% and 57% through 59% would be an E+. The 3, 6 and 9's all work the same for every other letter execpt S which has special rules because of course it does.
There is no S-, that would just be an A+. There an S+ which begins at 150%. A game may achieve 150% by scoring more points than available in a category which is appliocable to it. By this score the best game is actually a book because it has no audio or visuals, but an easy to use interface (so 200 points for gameplay there) and if it well written can easily get 400 points in writing, but because only 400 points were available to it we are effectively giving it 600 points out of 400 which is 150% and therefore an S+. S++ extends past 150% up to 200% (which for a game scoring in all categories would mean a total of 2,000 of 1,000!). S★ rank is available above 200%, becomming S★+ at 250% up to 300%. Any rank above 300% is just silly and I refuse to be bribed into creating a new ceiling for my scores for under $500 USD.