You Should Play More 6/10 Games | The Kurt Locker

Seeing a game receive a six out of a ten can be an immediate ‘no thank you’ for a lot of people. But Kurt thinks that bad games, even the most aggressively mediocre ones, can be great games in their own right.

In this week’s episode of The Kurt Locker, Kurt unpacks the phenomena of review scores and asks why so many of us run for cover when a game receives a six. To break this down, Kurt examines GameSpot’s number review score scale and tries to give clarity that six, not even five, means the game is “bad”. 

In the process, Kurt realized that a lot of games he loves fall in the six out of the ten category. Games like Wanted: Dead, Gungrave G.O.R.E., Flower, Sun, and Rain, and many others. For Kurt, a six teeters on a certain kind of threshold. It's not quite good, but not bad either. It could be bad in some places, but not unplayable. It could also be great in other places, just not amazing – it may even have a whisper of innovation. 

Further reading: In Defense of the 6.0 by Tom McShea: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/in-defense-of-the-60/1100-6349597/
Playlist to The Kurt Locker: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpg6WLs8kxGNL5FL6lNys2rK-3lajF_F8

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
01:16 - The review score phenomena 
02:42 - How GameSpot’s review scale works
04:00 - The curious case of Wanted: Dead
06:15 - In defense of the 6/10
08:52 - Read bad books
10:00 - Conclusion

#gaming #wanteddead #thekurtlocker #gamespot