Reworked Scoring System

And here we have the very first news post for the RetroKitty reviews blog! 🎉

The main thing I have to announce in this post is a rework of the scoring system!

The original scoring system used on this site is a six-point system, where each of the six categories — Graphics & Aesthetic, Gameplay & Controls, Sound & Music, Difficulty & Pacing, Charm & Vibes, and Replay Value — were run through a weighted average to return a score between a possible 1.0 and 10.0.

I was working roughly off the modern review scale, which is where a score of 7 is considered to be “average” or “okay”, but I didn’t have a strict definition for the rest of the numbers, so there was a little inconsistent variation, especially with some of my older reviews. It also put me in somewhat of a bind when it comes to being objective or subjective — my aim was to be as objective as possible, but it’s hard not to include at least a little subjective feeling into the scores.

My hands felt a little tied — and in addition to this, I was never terribly happy with Replay Value as one of the six points. I feel like any game has replay value if you enjoy it enough, and these days, people playing retro games are either playing roms on emulators, or playing their collection of physical games. Either way, the older game-review style of having “value for money”, “longevity” or “replay value” as a score-affecting value is largely moot.

So I’ve reworked the system — Replay Value has been replaced with Reviewer’s Tilt, which while weighed much less in the averages than the other scores, still lets me inject a subjective bias into the reviews, and influence their final score without having to break objectivity on the other scoring points. I’ve also written a more static definition for each rating number, which you can read about here.

I’ve updated every review so far with this updated scoring system, and tweaked a few numbers along the way that I felt weren’t quite right — and, of course, all new reviews going forward will be using the new scoring system.

Review Post Scheduling

The other change is that I’m going to be scheduling the posting of reviews a little differently, rather than just throwing them onto the site as soon as they’re written.

I’d like to be able to post fairly regularly — perhaps one or two reviews per week — and so I’m planning on building up a bit of a backlog of reviews, in order to cover times when I’m either busy doing other things, not in the mood to write reviews at the time, or simply busy with a game I haven’t finished yet.

New posts are announced on my Bluesky and Mastodon, or you can check the #retrokitty hashtag (on Bluesky or Mastodon). There’s also an RSS feed on the site if you’re feeling oldschool, or you can just check the front page to see the latest reviews!

Anyway, that’s it for my first site news post! I hope you enjoy the site! :3