Reviews
Every once in a while I do reviews of video games, movies or books. I try to be somewhat objective but you should keep in mind that I am not a professional reviewer. In most cases do not have a deep and cultivated knowledge of the genre I’m talking about an I’m not really qualified to give you a fully “objective” review. The only way to do that is to compare the work at hand to something similar. You essentially benchmark it against a classic or critically acclaimed work in the same area. I don’t usually do that. All my reviews are subjective and based on personal opinion. It’s heavily influenced by my tastes and various preconceived notions I might have. I do not expect you to agree with these reviews, and I do expect you to challenge me and point out weak points in the arguments I make because it makes for an interesting discussion.
As you can see from the deprecated text below, I experimented with various rating system in the past. I tried running with my own, inane brand of a rating system at some point giving all products banana points whenever they did things I liked, and taking them away whenever they did something that sucked. It was silly and inaccurate.
Then I tried to shoehorn my reviews into the hreview microformat which uses a classic 5 star rating. It did not work for me and I discontinued using it when I realized that attaching an arbitrary score to a game, movie or a book just doesn’t work.
These days I don’t do any scores. I review the item at hand, pointing it’s good sides and it’s flaws and leave the decision whether or not it is worth checking out to the reader who should always make an adjustment for my bias and my preferences. What I like is not necessarily what you like and so you may like something I completely trashed for the very same reasons I hated it.
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Every once in a while I will be doing semi-formal reviews of new games or movies here. I will try to be somewhat objective but you should keep in mind that these are my personal opinions. Remember that I’m not a professional reviewer. In most cases I’m not really qualified to accurately judge a given game, book or a movie. Furthermore I might sometimes be heavily biased. But this is not going to stop me from reviewing these products.
I’m currently trying to adopt hreview microformat for my reviews, because I’m a whore for standards. 
I’m still trying to find a way to compile posts in hreview compliant way, which is not a PITA, and doesn’t make my posts look ugly.
In the past I used the monkey scale, but I think I’m better off going with something at least semi standard here… If you want to know more about the monkey scale, please read the rest of this page.
All my reviews are posted in the
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Deprecated Review System
I usually grade reviewed products on my highly scientific Monkey scale. This scale was initially designed for games which, as everyone knows, are written by Code Monkeys. These are specially trained primates who have super-human coding skills. Big companies like to employ them, because unlike human programmers (even those in India) they do not need to be paid. Code Monkey’s work for banana’s.
I did extensive research in the Enterprise Code Monkey feeding standards, and discovered that optimal meal size for a Code Monkey is 3 bananas. When feed 3 banana’s these monkeys will produce adequate code without jarring bugs. Of course if you want something truly exceptional you will need 5, 6 or more banana’s.
Similarly, some companies try to motivate Monkey’s by withholding bananas. This is a poor tactic, and it usually results in poorly written and buggy software.
Similarly, the movie industry employs Scriptwriter Monkeys, and book publishing industry uses the famous Shakespearean Typewriter Monkeys - so my scale can be applied to various entertainment products.
In my reviews, I try to guess how many bananas did the creators feed their Monkeys to get the end product. I’m usually fairly accurate 
On a serious note, I think any kind of game or movie ratings are totally subjective. Even though I try to be objective while reviewing, my monkey scale is usually totally arbitrary, subjective and biased. But it is also silly, so I like it.
A typical monkey scale grade will look like this:
+1because I feel like it -1
This means that the monkeys were not feed and thus the final product is crappy. Please note that the final can be negative - in which case the monkeys were shown the given number of bananas, but never allowed to eat them. As one can suspect, this makes monkeys very angry and results in totally craptastic stuff being created.
There are no upper or lower bounds on this scale. It measures quality as a function of distance from the standard 3 banana meal. This illustrates the fact that no movie or game currently on the market is perfect - and thus no one really deserves a perfect score. There is always a chance that the next day I will find something that is more perfect, or more sucky. And so the grading system can be scaled to illustrate that.
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