It’s time, I think, for some more constructive criticism. Oh yes it is.

Here I come with a head full of hope, over the hill and down the slope.

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The thing that got me to thinking this month, chums, was playing the mighty and long-awaited Perfect Dark on N64.

(American import copy, natch. Despite the game being developed here in the UK, we still have almost a month to wait for our version.)

Is it good? Is it better than Goldeneye? Is it worth the wait? I don’t think I’m giving too many surprises away when I say this:

It’s the best game ever.

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The fact of the matter is that Perfect Dark has a one-player game that’s better than Goldeneye’s, PLUS a multi-player deathmatch game that makes Quake 3 Arena look like the sorry, limp, formulaic out-of-date half-designed tripe that it is.

The graphics are gorgeous, the level settings are inspired, the enemy AI is superb, and the selection of weapons is simply glorious.

You’d imagine, then, that a game this great would be easy to give a score to.

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But that just shows what you know. Because Perfect Dark is the final conclusive proof of what a bunch of useless stupid muppets games journalists are.

For years and years now, we’ve all had to suffer magazines almost never marking any game below 70%.

"But everyone knows 70% is a rubbish score", they whine, "So why should we make unnecessary trouble for ourselves with the game publishers by giving things lower marks than that?"

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And the reason is this: If you give rubbish games 70%, then you have to give mediocre games 80%, you have to give reasonable games 90%, you have to give good games 95% and you have to give great games 98%.

And where does that leave you to go when an unbelievably fantastic game comes around?

I’ll tell you where it leaves you – it leaves you giving a game like Perfect Dark just 8% more than utter toss like South Park Rally, that’s where.

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That particular example came from N64 Magazine, but everyone else is in the same boat. They’ve spent so many years giving soft marks to useless games that they’ve only got room to score Perfect Dark 6% higher than drivel like WWF Wrestlemania 2000, 3% higher than the pointless F1 Grand Prix, or 1% higher than the snorefest that was Turok 2. (And just 13% higher than the utterly atrocious Chef’s Luv Shack.)

The truth, of course, is that Perfect Dark isn’t just in another league to those games. It’s on another planet.

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So finally, beyond all doubt, we can see that magazines have so devalued the whole concept of marking games with numbers that it’s time to look for an entire new way of doing things.

(I’ve always liked the idea of simply scoring games either 0 or 1 (don’t buy it/do buy it), but that’s not going to happen, because mags don’t have the nerve to upset half of their advertisers every month.)

But apart from numbers, what else is there that we could use?

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Well, we could score games in colours, from black to white (but that might be seen as racist). Or we could mark them in animals, where good games get cute animals like kittens, and bad games get horrible animals like lizards.

We could use famous paintings, so that the "score" for a strange but good game would be something by Picasso (from one of his weird periods where everything was made of cubes, maybe), whereas a game that was just a big mess would be a Jackson Pollock. But that wouldn’t work either, because art is subjective.

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We could score games using incredibly complex mathematical equations, which would be so difficult to work out that people would just read the words of the review instead. (Wishful thinking.)

Or we could mark every game by saying "It’s exactly between Game X and Game Y". But then, people might not have played the other games in question.