how we rank games
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in the course of writing out our thoughts about games, we've found that we very often mentally categorise each game into the same handful of ranks, based on how we would recommend the game to others. as we were putting together this site, we decided it would be useful to mark each post with a ranking that summarizes our overall feelings about the game to help contextualise the rest of the post.
of course, any sort of numeric rating just wouldn't do -- countless words have already been devoted in other corners of the internet to complaining about the uselessness of game ratings and the resulting misconceptions that gamers tend to make whenever they see a number in a review. so, we wanted to devise a system of our own that would feel intuitive and familiar to readers, while being far enough away from 'the norm' to avoid implying anything beyond our own parameters.
to that end, we decided to invoke the ever-popular idea of "tier lists": structured enough to depict an obvious hierarchy yet vague enough to naturally allow different interpretations of what each rank represents. perfect! ^-^
every post we write about a game will include one of the following tier ratings:
{S} - a prestigious tier reserved only for our most favorite games!! usually this means that the game emotionally resonated very strongly with us, or that it did something especially unique or memorable. occasionally, a game might earn an S rank simply by being very incredibly well-made and polished, even if it wasn't distinctly memorable for any particular reason
{A} - we would recommend this game to anyone who usually enjoys the genre. these games did a lot of things very well, and did very few things poorly, but didn't quite make a really strong impression on us
{B} - the obligatory indicator of "mid". we still enjoyed the game... you know, probably. but for any number of reasons it didn't impress us very much. we might still recommend it though, to the right person in the right situation. sometimes this rank also includes games that might have been {A}, except that for unclear reasons we never bothered to finish our playthru
{C} - it's just not very good... or rather, (because art is subjective and all that) we didn't like it very much. if we have enough to say about a game to make a post for it, but it's in this rank, it's surely almost all negative comments lol :^)
{D} - bad bad bad. you won't find any games listed with this rank on this site, because we didn't play it long enough to count it as "played". but we included the rank here for the sake of completeness, and because stopping at C looked funny...