Tag: Best Games Lists

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is #1 in IGN’s 2021 Update to Their “Top 100 Games of All Time”

Just a few months after hosting a “Best Video Game of All Time Bracket” for their readers, IGN is back with the latest update to their staff-curated “Top 100 Games of All Time” list.

Games in our top 100 have to measure up to a few key metrics: how great a game it was when it launched, how fun it is to still play today, and how much the game reflects the best in its class. While past versions of this list have put a big emphasis on a game’s impact and influence, we’ve essentially taken that out of the equation. Many games that left a mark and inspired future developers may not stand the test of time and be all that fun to play right now. Or, quite simply, they may have been surpassed by other games.

With all of that said, IGN’s list reflects the current staff’s 100 best games of all time – a collection of games that continue to captivate us with their stories, wow us with their revelatory approach to game design, and set the standards for the rest of the industry.

This year’s update is the seventh iteration of the list, which was first published all the way back in 2003. That group of editors and staff writers chose Super Mario Bros. for as the greatest game of all time. Mario’s first super-sized adventure is still hanging around the upper reaches of IGN’s list (it’s at #21), but a different Nintendo-published title claimed the top spot in 2021.

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Shacknews Launches the Shacknews Hall of Fame With a Massive Inaugural Class

GameSpot and IGN changed the video game media landscape after they debuted in 1996, but did you know there’s another site celebrating a quarter-century on the journalistic front lines this year?

Shacknews began life as a Quake fansite before growing into a full-service news portal and file directory in the early 2000s. The site was briefly owned by GameFly a decade ago and is best-known today as the destination for David L. Craddock’s fantastic Long Reads series. I’m guessing this newfound focus on game history served the editorial team well when they launched the Shacknews Hall of Fame last week.

Honoring not just games, the Shacknews Hall of Fame also exists to shine a spotlight on the creators, platforms, technology, and publications that built the game industry into what it is today:

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Games Radar Extends Their “Ultimate Game of All Time” Shortlist to “The 50 Best Games of All Time”

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the launch of Computer Space (and the dawn of the commercial game industry), this year’s edition of the Golden Joystick Awards included a special category for the “Ultimate Game of All Time.” Forced to choose from a shortlist of 20 groundbreaking games, the public overwhelmingly voted for From Software’s Dark Souls.

But the editors at Games Radar, the popular online publication that administers the Golden Joystick Awards, weren’t content to stop there. They extended the shortlist to a full 50 games and published “The 50 Best Games of All Time” last week.

You’ll find most of the classic classics (including Tetris, Pac-Man, and Street Fighter II) in the shortlist for the “Ultimate Game of All Time” competition, so there was a lot of room for new classics such as God of War (#26), Hades (#43), and Animal Crossing: New Horizons (#50) in the supplemental list. The listmakers also picked up the slack where the shortlist fell a little… well… short, and made sure to include perennially-popular games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (#21), BioShock (#22), Resident Evil 4 (#24) in the early part of the 21-50 range.

Games Radar’s “The 50 Best Games of All Time” will be included in the next update to the Video Game Canon sometime in 2022.

Long-Defunct Flux Magazine Picked “The Top 100 Video Games” All the Way Back in 1995

With the 2021 Update to the Video Game Canon just around the corner, I thought it would fun to look at one of the historical lists I plan to add to the calculation in Version 5.0… Flux Magazine’s “The Top 100 Video Games” from 1995.

Proudly featuring the tagline “The most dangerous video game & comic ‘zine” along the top of each issue, Flux Magazine launched in 1994 as a more adult alternative to GamePro and Wizard. The magazine folded a year later after publishing just seven issues, though not before creating one of the first Best Games lists to cover the full spectrum of games available at the time (arcade cabinets, consoles, PC platforms, and handhelds).

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The Four Inductees from the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2021 Have Been Announced

There usually isn’t a theme associated with the World Video Game Hall of Fame‘s annual induction ceremony, but a desire to explore new destinations seems to be at the core of each of this year’s selections. We’ll probably never know if this is just a coincidence or a reaction to last year’s pandemic-related lockdowns, but it’s certainly something to think about it.

On that note, fresh off the success of last year’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the first member of the Class of 2021 is Nintendo’s Animal Crossing, a game where players move to a new town and meet a wide variety of colorful characters as they build their home. Likewise, the 2020 launch of the newest edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator probably helped the original 1982 release succeed in its bid for Hall of Fame immortality.

The Class of 2021 also includes Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, an “edutainment” classic where players follow the clues and chase a master thief across the globe. And finally, Blizzard’s StarCraft was inducted this year after it sent players hurtling across the galaxy for an RTS space opera that also rewrote the rules for esports.

Historians and curators from the World Video Game Hall of Fame shared their own thoughts about what made each of these games special in a short video, which can be found after the break.

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GamingBible’s Editors Select “The Greatest Video Games of All Time” to Celebrate the Site’s Relaunch

GamingBible opened the doors to their redesigned website last month, but this rollout didn’t just consist of a new coat of pixels on their digital digs. The British outlet also published “The Greatest Video Games of All Time,” their first-ever Best Games list.

Starting out with Codemasters’s Dirt Rally at #100, GamingBible’s editors tapped ten titles with their first appearance on a Best Games list, including Soma (#96), TimeSplitters: Future Perfect (#95), Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 (#83), Total War: Warhammer II (#81), RuneScape (#62), Oxenfree (#56), and 2017’s Prey (#40).

A pair of gems from 2020, Supergiant’s Hades (#48) and Moon’s Ori and the Will of the Wisps (#75), made an instant impact on players and wasted no time in qualifying for a Best Games list.

While GamingBible dug up a few forgotten favorites for their list, the Top Ten looks very familiar, including The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at #1. Link’s newest mainline adventure was followed by CD Projekt’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (#2), Valve’s Portal 2 (#3), Mojang’s Minecraft (#4), Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (#5), Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V (#6), Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (#7), Nintendo’s Super Mario Galaxy (#8) and Super Mario Bros. 3 (#9), and Bungie’s Halo 3 (#10).

GamingBible’s “The Greatest Video Games of All Time” will be included in the next update to the Video Game Canon, which will be published later this year.

World Video Game Hall of Fame Welcomes its Class of 2020: Minecraft, Bejeweled, Centipede, and King’s Quest

After selling more than 200 million copies over the last decade, it’s hard to remember a time when Minecraft wasn’t nearly synonymous with the entire medium of video games. And though it was only available in an unfinished state from 2009 to 2011, it seemed to emerge from Mojang’s offices as a fully-formed phenomenon even in its earliest days.

So as players continued to flock to its Lego-like world in droves, it was a bit of a shock when the game was denied entry into the World Video Game Hall of Fame three separate times. Shortlisted as a finalist in 2015, 2016, and 2018, the title was passed over again and again and again. But Minecraft’s creative sandbox become too big to ignore this year, and it has finally been enshrined among gaming’s greats.

In a stunning upset, three unlikely candidates also garnered enough support from the Hall of Fame’s Selection Advisory Committee to join the Class of 2020. A genre-defining match-3 puzzler from PopCap (Bejeweled), a classic coin-op from Atari (Centipede), and one of earliest adventure titles from Sierra (King’s Quest) won out over more popular titles such as NBA Jam, GoldenEye 007, and Guitar Hero.

While this year’s class might look a little surprising, historians working at the Hall of Fame’s parent organizations, the Strong Museum and the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, helped put their importance into perspective.

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Zelda: Majora’s Mask is at the Top of Slant Magazine’s 2020 Update to Their “100 Best Video Games of All Time”

Slant Magazine recently published a new update to their list of “The 100 Best Video Games of All Time,” and it looks like not much has changed since 2018.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, the quirky and somewhat-polarizing sidequel to Ocarina of Time, took the top spot once again. While Link’s adventure in Termina doesn’t usually rank that high on other “Best Games” lists, Slant’s reshuffled Top Ten includes a lot of the usual big hitters… Final Fantasy VI (at #2), Super Mario Bros. 3 (at #3), Tetris (at #5), Metroid Prime (at #7), and Resident Evil 4 (at #8).

Old standbys may populate the top of the list, but Slant also elevated several more recent titles above the fray. A handful of titles were even added to a “Best Games” list for the first time… IO Interactive’s Hitman 2 (#97), Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn (#53), Mobius Digital’s Outer Wilds (#37), and ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium (#32).

Slant Magazine’s latest rendition of “The 100 Best Video Games of All Time” will be included in the Video Game Canon’s upcoming Version 4.0 update.

Untitled Goose Game is Popular Mechanics’s “Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” for 2019

Popular Mechanics has has added a handful of titles from 2019 to their ongoing collection, “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born.”

House House’s Untitled Goose Game was picked by Popular Mechanics’s editors as the best game of 2019, both for its “havoc-causing” stealth elements and its “wholesomeness”:

There were lots and lots of great games for 2019, but none had quite the reaction (and the wholesomeness) of Untitled Goose Game. The objective to be the most havoc-causing goose in existence, and it generates so much joy its almost hard to fathom. It just goes to show that sometimes a year’s best game doesn’t need giant budgets and super crisp graphics. It just needs a goose with a bad temper.

From Software’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Kojima Productions’s Death Stranding, and Electronic Arts’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order were all given “Honorable Mention” status, along with a pair of Nintendo-produced titles for the Switch (Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Pokemon Sword and Shield).

Popular Mechanics’s “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” will be added to the Video Game Canon in the Version 4.0 update, which should be ready to go in 2020.

IGN Updates Their “Top 100 Video Games of All Time” List for 2019

It’s been roughly 18 months since IGN last revised its “Top 100 Video Games of All Time” list, but the popular publication has just issued a new update that welcomes a huge number of new games into the club.

That said, it might feel a little familiar at the top, as Super Mario World is once again ranked at #1, which is a holdover from their 2018 list. Thankfully, a closer examination of the rest of the list was produced by IGN themselves in the companion article, “Why We Made the Changes We Made.”

There we discover that Capcom’s remake of Resident Evil 2 (#81) from earlier this year is the most recent game to be added to the list. It was joined by 14 other new additions, including Sony Santa Monica’s 2018 reboot of God of War (#29), Left 4 Dead 2 (#45), Rise of the Tomb Raider (#55), Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (#61), Red Dead Redemption 2 (#62), Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (#68), Fable II (#76), Fortnite (#77), Monster Hunter: World (#82), Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 (#83), Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (#95), Dishonored (#97), Divinity: Original Sin II (#98), and Borderlands 2 (#99).

This newfound variety was possible thanks to the removal of multiple games from the Mario and Zelda franchises, though several other games were also removed from last year’s Top 100 to make room. Among the games getting the boot were Team Fortress 2, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Fallout 3, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Galaga, Grim Fandango, Banjo Kazooie, and The Oregon Trail.

IGN’s 2019 update to their “Top 100 Video Games of All Time” list will be added to the Video Game Canon in Version 4.0.