Hijinks Rating: A tutorial.

With the advent of Hijinks Reviews we’re adopting a 0-5 rating scale; whole numbers only, so no 2.5 or 4.999999785 reviews. As of this moment I have no plans to officially review anything but software available for the iPod Touch/iPhone. I may give you a rundown of a particular game I’m enjoying elsewhere, but I won’t be throwing a rating on it. The logic behind this decision is that judging a game made by one or two people on their own dime with the same scale as one made by a hundred people employed by a large game developer just isn’t fair.

This isn’t to say that I’m going to cut any slack for mistakes and flaws I come across in these ‘indie’ games. Check out my review of iDope if you don’t believe me. My goal is to provide some kind of reference to folks who want to discern the good from the bad, and even though it’s a fairly new platform of development, there’s a lot of material to cover. If you have a particular game or app you’d like to see critiqued, let us know in the comments.

Hit the jump for a rundown of exactly what those little blue guys mean to our rating scale.

5 out of 5. It doesn’t get any better then this. At least for free software on a touch screen.

4 out of 5. The cream of the crop. Great games and apps with minimal flaws in concept, design and execution.

3 out of 5. An average piece of software. If you can look over some problems and have a niche that needs filled, this just might work for you.

2 out of 5. The scale of quality has shifted to the negative. What might have been a good idea just didn’t quite translate into a good finished product.

1 out of 5. Not worth your time. It started out bad and ended bad, with a bunch of bad thrown in the middle.

0 out of 5. Utter crap. Worthless, pointless, and/or stupid. It takes a lot of effort to make a piece of software this bad. Download it only for the sake of morbid curiosity.