Product Awards
During our reviews, we sometimes give a product a 1-5 rating in blue screens. We don’t do this all the time and what with some changes to our web code, we probably won’t do it much at all, but maybe we will… it’s always a mystery. If your product won one of our awards, and you are brave enough to display it on your site, literature or forehead, this is the page where you can snag the images. We have higher quality images available upon request. Anyhow, here are the ratings/awards we offer:
(1) Avoid
(2) Not Recommended (for everyone)
(3) Recommended
(4) Highly Recommended
(5) Must Have
When rating products we first try to compare the product to similar offerings (ie. adventure games to adventure games, speakers to speakers). Then we take into account how the product performs compared to its peers. Once accomplished, we then look at the product as a stand-alone product. After all of this has been completed, we then decide where it fits on our scale of greatness, or GPFaulted-ness… I guess.
Keep in mind that just because a product receives a low or high rating does not mean you should immediately avoid it or go out and buy 14 of them tomorrow: it is our opinion combined with its performance to similar products, ALL BASED ON OUR EXPERIENCE. As the saying goes, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”… so it is with our awards. That’s not to say that we aren’t right… because we are… always.
An Avoid rating means this product should never have seen the light of day, or refused to run on our test systems. Poor graphics, extremely noisy operation, pathetic instructions, missing story/characters/reason for being. . . all parts that make up an Avoid rating. To sum it up, this award is for the thing that should not be.
A Not Recommended rating isn’t necessarily bad, its just a product that does not have that wide of an appeal outside of its core audience. It could be graphics, story, content, ease (or lack thereof) of installation or a number of other reasons which make it Not Recommended. Products that have a limited scope of usefulness or are simply for decoration tend to fall in this category. It’s important to exercise caution when considering this product for purchase.
The Recommended rating is the middle of the road. Everything worked, okay. The graphics were, okay. The installation was, okay. Notice the trend? Its an okay product, nothing too positive to say, nothing too bad to talk about. It’s a product that we would buy, but just feel indifferent about it.
Highly Recommended and Must Have awards are the best of the best, or at the very least the best of the really darn good. These are the products that do almost everything or actually do everything right. Keep in mind that these awards are the equivalent of an editor’s choice award, so some bias is always present. However, if we grade a product with either of these two ratings, they are definitely worth a second thought when it comes to purchase time. We would be willing to purchase these products for ourselves… and more than likely after having reviewed them, we did!
