A "Perfect" Experience?

Just looking at the number of perfect scores The Last of Us received (and of course, GTA V as well as many other titles).

Now, a 10/10 gaming experience is very subjective. For example, Fifa 2014 may be a 10/10 for someone, but another guy who hates football may score it 1/10.

All that bollocks aside, have you played a game which you believe is a pure 10/10 gaming experience? Like, bordering on absolute perfection as far as a video game is concerned? Bear in mind that if a game suffers from flaws - from your point of view - then it can't really be described as perfect. Paying £40 for a game that you spend 100 hours+ on is without doubt value for money. With that in mind, the likes of Battlefield Bad Company 2, Football Manager and several of the GTA games have certainly offered me entertainment I've been delighted to pay for over the years, but I'm not sure any of them are true 10/10 games.

Skyrim and Uncharted 2 come very close.

Operation Flashpoint was definitely a 10/10 game for me, was the perfect war sim sandbox I always dreamed of as a gamer and it was also so open and moddable, new addons, new islands, new campaigns and missions etc. Plus it provided me with a ticket out of England, a new career and a wife, so yeah definitely 10/10!

Placebo said:

Operation Flashpoint was definitely a 10/10 game for me, was the perfect war sim sandbox I always dreamed of as a gamer and it was also so open and moddable, new addons, new islands, new campaigns and missions etc. Plus it provided me with a ticket out of England, a new career and a wife, so yeah definitely 10/10!

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Wow. That sounds quite mad and interesting at the same time. Neat

For me real 10/10 games are pes 5 and pes 6 but not now, they were outstanding games when came out. But you were right, if someone hates football usually find those games not worth about the money spend on them and experience while playing them. I think that these days marketing sells even average games like blockbusters so everything is up to the people`s taste. Again pes 5 &6 for me are real 10/10 games when they were relased

Easy, Red Dead Redemption, the best game I've ever played. Just everything about it, setting, story, gameplay, feck they even added Zombies!

Nothing has come close although there's been plenty of great 9's (oh and Last of Us would be a 7 probably in my gaming ratings).


FD

For me there isn't any truly 10/10 games as I believe in the way games used to be reviewed.
6 was pretty decent, 7 was good, 8 was amazing and 9 was an absolute must buy.
In regards to current games Last of Us for me was a high 7 or 8.

Civilization 2 for me is probably the only game I would consider giving a 10/10 too, it was so far ahead of Civilization and was an absolute incredible game and had a massive amount of replay value as everytime you played the game it was different.
Knights of the Old Republic was probably another game which I would very nearly give a 10 too, it was an incredible and the story twist in the game which I actually never guessed was just a massive moment, which I have never had in another game since.
The Shenmue games are also up there in the 9's for me as that had story points which you had to do to progress, but you could actually do whatever the hell you wanted to do within the story.

In regards to football games as someone mentioned SWOS and WE 7-10 were the best games and would probably both score a 9, as at the time they were incredible and well ahead of the competition. But unfortunately at present FIFA is the best of a bad bunch as both are full of shitty bugs(some game breaking in terms of career mode on FIFA) and annoying AI which completely takes the fun out of them for me.

10/10 to me means no room for improvement, perfection... Hardly anything really lives up to this, especially when you take games that rely on complex things such as AI, physics etc. where there is always progress being made.

The only games that I think deserve a 10/10 are the ones that have a simple premise and deliver on it well... Portal 1 and 2 are fantastic games, something quite different and executed to perfection. They are the only "big" games I would give 10/10.

I think the storylines in a lot of games are very overrated, and wouldn't be so highly regarded were they in the form of a book or even a film and they chuck this in with your typical cover shooter/stealth mechanics with a few set pieces/cutscenes thrown in and everyone (and the gaming media) goes crazy for it... Not for me.

Agree with the above comments in that a true 10/10 game probably doesn't exists. It reminds me of a book I read on Italian football which discussed the Gazzetta dello Sport's player rating system. The 10 rating is "never given".

There are plenty of games that get 10/10 on value for money due to the sheer amount of happy gaming time they have given me. Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Red Dead Redemption and the GTA series, Call of Duty 3, Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix, (the original) Syndicate, PES1-5, ISS, SWOS, Gran Turismo.....I could go on.

Actually, if there is one game that gets very close to a 10 it's the very first Settlers game on the Amiga back in 1993. It was so ahead of it's time, possibly the forebear of many real-time strategy game since. I can't think of many ways to improve that games and it's the one title I would love a straight HD remake of.

I think the simpler the game the easier it could get a 10/10.
Games like Pong or tetris... but I don't seek perfection when thinking about 10/10-games.

For me they are those games that amazed me and captured my imagination for years and that I think of fondly to this day.

And there is one game that comes to mind when I think back that still fills me with awe and that is: Ico!

henrys hand said:

I think the simpler the game the easier it could get a 10/10.
Games like Pong or tetris... but I don't seek perfection when thinking about 10/10-games.

For me they are those games that amazed me and captured my imagination for years and that I think of fondly to this day.

And there is one game that comes to mind when I think back that still fills me with awe and that is: Ico!

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Agree with that. A game doesn't have to be technically perfect to be a 10/10. Sometimes it's a clever, interesting and highly memorable story that puts a game right up there (Bioshock series), or it can be a fantastic game world that really captures the atmosphere and mood of a place and era (GTA & RDR).

Battlefield: Bad Company 2's online mode is as close to a 10 as any I've played. Hundreds of hours of ferocious, attritional battles and memorable moments make it one of the best games I've ever played.

henrys hand said:

I think the simpler the game the easier it could get a 10/10.
Games like Pong or tetris...

For me they are those games that amazed me and captured my imagination for years and that I think of fondly to this day.

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Well if you go back to the first game to ever get 10/10 that I remember it was Lemmings and tbh that game was completely innovative, seriously addictive and had very few bugs and faults, so all fairness at the time probably did warrant a 10 out of 10.

The problem with games now is that innovation doesn't exist, everything is just a clone of something else. Portal is the only game that has been what I would call innovative over the past 5 years.

P.S. Jamezinho although GP was a very good racing game I believe GP2 was better, it was pretty much the same but much better graphically and enough gameplay enhancements to beat it + it had more season mods than any other F1 game to date. Shame after GP2 Geoff Crammond's games went a bit down hill.

Scutch said:

Just looking at the number of perfect scores The Last of Us received (and of course, GTA V as well as many other titles).

Now, a 10/10 gaming experience is very subjective. For example, Fifa 2014 may be a 10/10 for someone, but another guy who hates football may score it 1/10.

All that bollocks aside, have you played a game which you believe is a pure 10/10 gaming experience? Like, bordering on absolute perfection as far as a video game is concerned? Bear in mind that if a game suffers from flaws - from your point of view - then it can't really be described as perfect. Paying £40 for a game that you spend 100 hours+ on is without doubt value for money. With that in mind, the likes of Battlefield Bad Company 2, Football Manager and several of the GTA games have certainly offered me entertainment I've been delighted to pay for over the years, but I'm not sure any of them are true 10/10 games.

Skyrim and Uncharted 2 come very close.

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PES 5 and the first play-throughs of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Metal gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 3, Read Dead Redemption and The Last of Us all come pretty close to me.

bsmaff said:

Well if you go back to the first game to ever get 10/10 that I remember it was Lemmings and tbh that game was completely innovative, seriously addictive and had very few bugs and faults, so all fairness at the time probably did warrant a 10 out of 10.

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Oh god, forgot about Lemmings. Yes, the epitome of simple yet seriously addictive gameplay, and I mean seriously addictive.

bsmaff said:

The problem with games now is that innovation doesn't exist, everything is just a clone of something else. Portal is the only game that has been what I would call innovative over the past 5 years.

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That was always going to happen when gaming went mainstream. Go back a couple of decades and you had small teams of hobbyist coders creating games on a shoestring out of passion for what they do. There was little at stake so there was a freedom to innovate. Now games development is a huge, multi-million dollar business. The overheads are huge, mainly due to the complexity of developing for modern gaming platforms. With huge investment comes the need to reward shareholders, and with that, innovation (i.e. risk) goes out the window.

Indie games are where (what little) innovation can be found these days.

bsmaff said:

P.S. Jamezinho although GP was a very good racing game I believe GP2 was better, it was pretty much the same but much better graphically and enough gameplay enhancements to beat it + it had more season mods than any other F1 game to date. Shame after GP2 Geoff Crammond's games went a bit down hill.

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I didn't have a PC around that time. I soldiered on with GP1 for many years on the Amiga.

Closest to 10/10 for me was TOCA Touring Cars 2 on PS2 back in 1998. I played it for many hours and don't recall having ever felt disappointed by anything about it. I found it completely immersive and enjoyable.

Looking back now and comparing it even with certain other racing games of that time, it didn't have the most advanced physics model or the best graphics, but at the time, I wasn't aware of that, or simply didn't care.

ISS Pro Evo 2 also came out that year, and whilst I found it to be a revelation in computerised football, I remember even then being aware of niggles and annoyances.

SNES games Zelda: A Link the Past and Super Mario Kart were both close runners too.

Half life 2 has to be up there. And the fallout games. Huge love for Baldurs Gate too. Games you look back on years down the line and remember nothing but good things.

In recent memory yes, Last of Us felt like an incredible game, and an "experience" I will remember for ages. It was perfect.

Half Life 1 (PC) and Zelda OOT (N64) for completely different reasons.

Zelda - the first game I bought with my pocket money as a child. It was my first experience of Zelda and an action, adventure, puzzle type game - it had everything in it. A great adventure and story with a perfectly pitched mix of challenge and fun. I must have completed the game over 10 times. One of the first games I can still 100% complete.

Half Life 1 - the first 'perfect' FPS game I played. The graphics were incredible in the day and it still is up there as one of my favourite games of all time. Watched the recent charity speedruns event on twitch, which brought back all the nostalgia for this game. Valve games in my opinion are some of the greatest games out there, not one for me would fall below a 9/10.

I'd have to say The Last of Us was a 10/10 for me. Yes, the game was crazily linear, but within that it offered scope to be as original as you wanted in sneaking around past foes. I agree, a 10/10 game doesn't have to be perfect. For me it's a score that pits it against games that have gone before. And on that note, for me, nothing before The Last of Us has never had such an engrossing story, acting, incredible attention to detail, soundtrack, everything really.

The Last of Us head me thinking and mulling over the story and what contexts it meant long after the game had finished, and that in itself is a 10/10 for me.

Psychonauts.

Innovative, unique, interesting plot & characters and fun. Unfortunately it was a commercial failure.

Never had a perfect experience with a video game but Final Fantasy IX and Pes 5 were really close

This gen not a single game was better than 8/10 to me. Even the best one i played: Dark Souls

For me:
Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64)
Great story, a lot of sidequests which along with the main quest, provide some hours of gameplay. Plus, the open world factor.

Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES)
For the same reasons as the above, I can't believe how many hours I have spent discovering the world even after I've completed the main quests in those both Zelda games.

Perfect Dark (N64)
Goldeneye was 9/10, Perfect Dark is 10/10. Any imperfections Goldeneye had, Perfect Dark fixed them, and Goldeneye was almost perfect. Couch multiplayer still is the best.

Mass Effect 2 was pretty perfect for me. The vanguard "charge" is one of the most fun game mechanics I've ever experienced. Loved it.


Mass Effect 3 gameplay was better in some respects (liked the increased speed of combat and even more variety) but was a bit unbalanced in favor of the player and the quest elements weren't as tight or interesting as in ME2. Also, ME3's ending wasn't the greatest (seems like the writers put themselves in a corner they couldn't escape) although it certainly didn't ruin the series for me (as many on "teh internets" have raged it did for them.

Heavy Rain. Never thought in my lifetime a game would draw me in and play with my emotions like that. Superb.

Metal Gear Solid - Just amazed me when i was younger. Mind blowing.

EatonTJ said:

Mass Effect 2 was pretty perfect for me. The vanguard "charge" is one of the most fun game mechanics I've ever experienced. Loved it.


Mass Effect 3 gameplay was better in some respects (liked the increased speed of combat and even more variety) but was a bit unbalanced in favor of the player and the quest elements weren't as tight or interesting as in ME2. Also, ME3's ending wasn't the greatest (seems like the writers put themselves in a corner they couldn't escape) although it certainly didn't ruin the series for me (as many on "teh internets" have raged it did for them.

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I'm a bigger fan of ME1 personally, but I think this is one of the best series of games.

mjsmith2k said:

I'm a bigger fan of ME1 personally, but I think this is one of the best series of games.

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I enjoyed the more open and explorative nature of Mass Effect 1 for sure, but the combat in ME2/3 is some of the greatest action/arcade combat I've ever played. The story elements of ME1 were the best of the series for sure, with the meeting of Sovereign on Virmire being the highpoint.

Great, great series.

Portal, Prince of Persia : Sands of Time and Bioshock are three, off the top of my head, that I'd count as memorable experiences for me in gaming, where I was truly captivated and immersed in the game and it felt much more than just sitting in front of a TV pushing buttons on a joypad.

As abstract as the idea of scoring something out of 10 is, I have to say a couple of things about this topic. 10/10 should not be something that is never attainable. If 10/10 is impossible, all that means is that 9 is your 10, and you should call it a score out of 9. If you think 10 is essentially unattainable, your 10 is our 11. And you don't know how to round numbers up.


A 10 should not be limited to a tick-the-box exercise either. It should be something that, as a holistic sum of its parts, offers an experience that is truly absorbing, enthralling and redefines what you think games should be able to achieve. The Last Of Us was a 10 for me, in spite of the linearity or the well-trodden path they took with the gameplay, because the rest of the experience was leaps and bounds above the games we'd otherwise describe as having great storylines, acting, or presentation. The tone and deftness of touch was in line with great TV of today, which is not true of Heavy Rain (unless you consider Doctors great TV), or Mass Effect.

Complaining about linearity is like complaining that Shadow of the Colossus didn't have online deathmatch modes, or that Messi isn't a 10/10 player because he lacks an aerial presence or he doesn't score from 40 yards enough - nonlinearity is not a prerequisite for a 10/10 experience, it's just a prerequisite for a nonlinear 10/10 experience. If you cannot abide a game that is linear (as TV or film is linear, contrary to what was bafflingly said in another thread IIRC) then it's because your idea of a perfect game is not aligned with the game in question.

In the same way, I do not consider Skyrim a 10/10 experience because, together with the lack of a sense of physicality to the combat (see Dark Souls) the Nordic atmosphere was nowhere near dark or Scandinavian enough for what it should have been. The shorthand for what I'd imagined is probably Game Of Thrones as a bare minimum, merged with Vokuro by Bjork, or one of the Black Raven Magic songs Sigur Ros performed with an Icelandic poet (I'm at work so can't find the exact one just now). Instead it felt so sanitised, friendly and American. It reminded me of a video that used to do the rounds about how an iPod would have been packaged if it was made by Microsoft.

Combined with the talking heads and the tired dialog-tree format which is completely detached from actual human interaction, the absence of the sort of atmosphere the game craved took far too much away from me. The difference between TLoU and Skyrim in this regard is that Skyrim thinks it has that atmosphere (and I only wish more people could envisage the atmosphere it should have), whereas TLoU doesn't set out to be nonlinear.


To me, and to pretty much all gaming magazines/film or music critics who use scores, 10/10 game isn't something that couldn't be bettered (everything can), or that isn't missing any features. It's about how the individual components mesh to form an overall impact on you, the player, and how much enjoyment you get out of that as you take part in the game. As such, I don't think an objective 10/10 is possible - the very notion of scoring a game out of anything at all is purely subjective.

romagnoli said:

As abstract as the idea of scoring something out of 10 is, I have to say a couple of things about this topic. 10/10 should not be something that is never attainable. If 10/10 is impossible, all that means is that 9 is your 10, and you should call it a score out of 9. If you think 10 is essentially unattainable, your 10 is our 11. And you don't know how to round numbers up.

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I'd say this is exactly right. If 10 isn't attainable (i.e. perfection) then it's essentially pointless.

Personally I've had loads of 10 experiences, probably beginning with Super Mario Bros on the original NES and ending most recently with Last of Us. (I'd be tempted to begin my list with original Atari games but those seem almost too simple to be worthy of a rating scale.)

Skyrim for me is one of the most overrated games in recent memory - gorgeous and huge, yes, but there were far too many things it did poorly, like combat. That said, I could imagine how people got lost in it, and how it might be considered a 10 subjectively by some people because of their personal experiences with it.

Yeah, a perfect 10 probably won't ever exist or at the very least would be down to subjective criteria.

Each person will have their own 10s. From my own experience I think the closest I got from perfect 10s are:
Metal Gear Solid
Metal Gear Solid 3 - Snake Eater
Red Dead Redemption

Also worthy of mention are two of my other favourite franchises (GTA and Splinter Cell) but for as much as they make improvements, they seem to miss some good old elements. Especially Splinter Cell, one of the most breath taking games I've ever played, but Ubisoft always finds a way of missing the mark on something they previously had right.

here is my 10/10 list...these games are must to have in my opinion and im sure a few are still missing

- Metal Gear Solid 2-3
- ISS 2, PES 5-6
- Resident Evil 3
- Dino Crisis 1-2
- Soul Reaver serie
- Final Fantasy 8,10
- Shenmue
- Gran Turismo 2
- GTA 3
- Ultimate Mortal Kombat
- Skyrim
- Silent Hill
- Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis
- Aliens vs Predator: Extinction
- Syphon Filter
- Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation
- Last of Us
- GTA V
- Gran Turismo 5/6
- Heavy Rain
- Minecraft
- Champions of Norrath: Return To Arms
- Little Big Planet 2