Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="Fussbett"]I didn't do a top video game list back when you egged me on about it because my top list is boring and unsurprising and not noteworthy aside from the addition of Dead Rising, which I already mentioned. It's not even worth a post, and Action Button has already written thousands of words (literally thousands) on most of these games in <i>their</i> top games list. So let's get the dumb list out of the way. 1) TETRIS 2) X-COM 3) JAGGED ALLIANCE 2 4) OUT OF THIS WORLD / ANOTHER WORLD 5) DEAD RISING More interesting than my clinical list of obviously amazing games (I can write a defense of Dead Rising in a later post) is a discussion of what makes a BEST GAMES OF ALL TIME list instead of a MY FAVOURITE GAMES list. Here are some things that don't make a game the best ever: How long you played it, how much you loved it when you were 12, how extensible it is, how hard(core) it is, and finally, how impressive it was <i>for the time period</i>. These are all personal experiences and certainly contribute to why <i>you</i> loved a game, but in a discussion about the best qualities in video games, these are unimportant. These games are far more fun to talk about though, and believe me <a href="http://www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?action=viewPost&pid=31815">I'm all over that</a>. Furthermore, and this one may be a controversial opinion but I'm going to go there goddammit, groundbreaking doesn't automatically make a game great. If another game comes along and does everything better than the groundbreaker, how is it not better? This rule should come as a relief to everyone because it means that the best games of all time are not Computer Space, Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Wolfenstein3D forever. I wanted to put Super Mario Bros or even Super Mario 3 on there as I loved those games to death when they came out, I respect every pixel of their design, they're both clever as fuck, and at the time they were Tsar Bomba explosions of popularity, bringing girls and parents into video games. However this is when I came up with another rule of a BEST VIDEOGAMES list: You have to love playing it today. How can I call SMB better than a million other games if I don't want to play it right now or maybe ever again? I do struggle with this rule because it's susceptible to the negative influence of other games, meaning that I may not want to play SMB right now because I'm sick of platform games in general. They've been done to death. This could also be a reason for not having any FPS games on my list, despite it being one of my favourite genres. The FPS competition is wide and deep and continually topping itself. But perhaps this makes my rule about today's enjoyment even truer -- if the game is truly so much better than its peers, competitors should be unable to dilute the greatness. It's a great test of a great game, how untarnished by competition it remains. Any new puzzle game reinforces the perfection of Tetris and every video game forum has posts of people wondering why no one can make a good X-Com clone (except someone kinda did and it's called Jagged Alliance 2 and it's on my list!). I don't consider competitive multiplayer games to be part of this discussion at all because they rely on so much outside of the initial design of the game: your competition day to day, your skill level, the community, and ongoing developer support. Those are less interesting discussions too, as they just boil down to "the game you were good at so you spent a lot of time on" or "the game people played in your dorm". Mine would be Street Fighter 2, BadLands, Quake 2, Quake 3, Counter-Strike, Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, Virtua Fighter 3, Tekken 3, and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fy5UGhsrGA" target="office tournaments" title="office tournaments">Winning Eleven 4</a>. I've spent hours on these games that dwarf my top five list but none of them are HMM YES HAND TO CHIN. So my questions to you "people" are: Why does Zork I get on your list if Zork II is better? Are there not a hundred games better than Doom right now? Nurses are like bosses? Who do you think you're impressing with the DROD cred? Are the classic characters all that makes Street Fighter Alpha 2 better than Street Fighter 3? I expect your revised lists on my desk in the morning. Except for Mischief Maker who apparently does agree with my philosophy on the matter, although his taste sucks a bit.[/quote]