Tag: More Best Games Lists

“The Eurogamer 100” is a List of the 100 Best Video Games to Play Right Now

Eurogamer has been doing a lot of interesting stuff this year to celebrate their 25th birthday (I hope you got the chance to try out the Theme Switcher to see what the site looked like through the years). And about six weeks ago they even attempted to capture “the best games to play in this specific moment” with “The Eurogamer 100”:

Welcome to the Eurogamer 100, a list of video games that aims to reflect their ever-changing nature. Rather than ranking games by their influence or significance, the below list is a suggestion of the very best things you can play at this moment, according to us. We’ve aimed to cover the full breadth of what modern video games can be – and in doing so were reminded, suddenly, that 100 games really isn’t very many at all – while everything on the list must be legitimately obtainable at the time of writing on current-generation hardware. And crucially, it has to currently be brilliant.

Our hope is that this list will be as useful as it is conversation-starting, be that through suggesting exceptional games that may not be on everyone’s radar already, reminding you of long-running classics that have remained timeless, or highlighting those that have found themselves with renewed energy and form.

The key element of “The Eurogamer 100” is that the games included have to be “legitimately obtainable” on “current-generation hardware” to be eligible, which helps make the list a fantastic overview of the last decade (more-or-less) of video games. You’ll find Game of the Year heavyweights (Breath of the Wild at #5, Baldur’s Gate 3 at #6, and Elden Ring at #8) sitting alongside indie darlings (Tunic at #12, Hades at #34, and Animal Well at #36), but I think the Top 3 (Tetris Effect at #1, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe at #2, and Outer Wilds at #3) really does capture what video games are about right now.

And thanks to an avalanche of re-releases and the rise of forever games, you’ll also find a few titles that debuted outside that ten-year window, including 2011’s Minecraft (#28) 1991’s Super Mario World (#72), and 2009’s League of Legends #73.

But with such a wide timeframe and such an abundance of choices (100 really isn’t a lot), the number of omissions is staggering. That includes big favorites from recent years (neither Red Dead Redemption is present), as well as one of my personal favorites that’s still available even though it’s nearing it’s 20th anniversary (that would be Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2).

But maybe that’s for a future update of “The Eurogamer 100”. Deputy Editor Chris Tapsell said that we should expect the list to be a dynamic list, and that updates will be made yearly:

Unlike most lists out there, the Eurogamer 100 isn’t a list of the greatest games of all time, but of the best games to play in this specific moment.

We’ll then come back to the list and update it once per year, adding particularly brilliant new games that might have launched, old games that have found new life, and replacing those that may have found themselves in something of a dip.

The rest of “The Eurogamer 100” can be found after the break.

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“The Resties Required Reading List” Includes the 25 Games You Need to Play to Understand the History of Games

Justin McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Chris Plante, and Russ Frushtick host The Besties, a podcast where they talk about “the best game of the week” every week.

The Besties is part of the sprawling McElroy media empire, but episodes produced solely by the non-McElroy members of the show appear as a spinoff show known as The Resties, and for the last 18 months they’ve been sporadically adding games to “The Resties Required Reading List“.

Not a Best Games list, the “Required Reading List” is a collection of titles that serve as the best introduction to the wider world of video games. Plante likes to refer to it as “a syllabus for Video Games 101” and further described the project like this…

Our goal is to curate and contextualize a “must play” list of 25 games released between 1980 to 2020. These aren’t the best games or even our favorite games. They’re the games that should be experienced by everyone who wants a fundamental appreciation of the medium. They’re the games that will give you a richer connection with every other game you play.

Plante and Frushtick split the “Required Reading List” into eight episodes, each covering a five-year span that lands somewhere between 1980 and 2020. Within these smaller chunks of time they picked two-to-four games that best represent the era and a specific corner of gaming they wanted to highlight. In the end, 28 games made it through these mini-debates before the hosts cut three titles to reach their 25-game goal. Counter-Strike (from the 2000-2004 episode), along with Hearthstone and Spelunky HD (both from the 2010-2014 episode) ultimately ended up on the chopping block.

So which games did make the grade? You’ll find all the foundational classics from the 1980s (Pac-Man, Tetris, Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda), as well as the modern games that are currently moving the needle (Fortnite, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Outer Wilds). In between there’s Doom (1993), Pokemon Red/Blue, Resident Evil 4 (2005), Minecraft, and more than a dozen others.

Wanting to argue with a Best Games list is the most natural reaction in the world, but it’s hard to quibble with any of the choices on “The Resties Required Reading List” as the games you need to play to best understand the history of games. Or, to steal a phrase from one of The Resties, the “Required Reading List” is a way of “thinking about the countless ways games inform our lives, our culture, and future creators”.

You can see all 25 games from “The Resties Required Reading List” after the break.

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Zelda: Breath of the Wild is #1 in “The 100 Greatest Games of Edge’s Lifetime”

The magazine racks at your local bookstore (or even your local Barnes & Noble) are mostly empty these days. And that’s doubly-true for game-focused publications like Nintendo Power, GamePro, and Electronic Gaming Monthly, all of which closed down more than a decade ago.

Those three (and many others) might be gone, but Edge endures. The venerable UK-based magazine launched in October of 1993, and it’s come back again and again to deliver thousands of pages of outstanding game journalism to readers in all the months since.

To celebrate its 30th anniversary, the editors at Edge did what they do best… they put together another Best Games list. But rather than reach all the way back to Pong and the beginning of the video game industry, they kept things simpler and tried to determine “The 100 Greatest Games of Edge’s Lifetime” in Edge 390.

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Lists From the Past: The First Ten Years of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Video Game Acquisitions”

Are video games art? It’s a question that has dogged players, developers, and critics for decades, and even now, it’s one without an easy answer.

This cultural dustup was at its most brutal in 2010, after film critic Roger Ebert declared that “video games can never be art” in an opinion piece on his website. It was a familiar drumbeat from Ebert, but this round of vitriol was in reaction to a TED Talk delivered by Kellee Santiago, a developer who was working on the then-upcoming Journey at thatgamecompany. While praising Santiago as “bright, confident, [and] persuasive,” everyone’s favorite film critic ultimately objected to every one of her arguments, sparking a huge backlash of counter-opinions in the gaming press.

After several months of sniping, the two warring factions reached a truce (or at the very least, a ceasefire) in July when Ebert invited everyone to “play on [his] lawn” and admitted that games could be art. It was a nice gesture, but it didn’t entirely put the question to bed, and it’s something we’re still talking about today. Want proof? Look no further than the recent HBO adaptation of The Last of Us and the argument that it contains “the greatest story that has ever been told in video games.” Many people agree… and many people absolutely do not.

But Ebert’s reaction was just a preview to the main event. So let’s jump to November 2012, when the Museum of Modern Art acquired a collection of 14 games to form the core of their Applied Design exhibit (which would open in 2013), and seemed to settle the question once and for all.

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A Few Final Fantasy XVI Developers Shared Their Favorite Final Fantasy Games

Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XVI is finally available on store shelves, and it has instantly entered the “Game of the Year” conversation, with the early reviews describing a game that takes the franchise in a bold new direction.

But how did the development team navigate the creation of this new path? And what titles rom the franchise’s 35-year history did they look to for inspiration in designing the game?

IGN recently sat down with six members of the development team, including Director Hiroshi Takai and Producer Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida, to tease out their favorite Final Fantasy games.

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An “Expert Jury” Made Some Odd Choices When Picking “20 Best Video Games of All Time” for The Times

The Times delivered its first daily edition to the people of London all the way back in 1785. The newspaper has reported on some of the biggest stories the world has ever seen in the nearly 240 years since, and they’ve given space to pieces from a very distinguished array of writers over the centuries, including Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and Albert Einstein.

But earlier this week, their editorial staff decided to wade into the debate surrounding the best video games of all time.

Jake Helm, a Culture Reporter for The Times, assembled a “jury of experts” to choose the “20 Best Video Games of All Time,” and some of the selections are a bit on the wild side.

Some of gaming’s biggest franchises (including The Legend of Zelda, Street Fighter, Resident Evil, and Final Fantasy) went unmentioned, but Sonic Adventure 2 (#20) and Far Cry 4 (#15) both made the cut. The panel also picked Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft (#16), but overlooked World of Warcraft.

All that is certainly odd, but the top half of the list features most of the big blockbusters you expect to see on a Best Games list. Doom (1993) is #6, Tetris is #4, and a combo pick of The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II is #2. Another two-for-one selection, Portal and Portal 2, teleported its way into the #1 spot.

So who was on this expert panel? That would be Charlie Brooker, former game critic and the creator of Black Mirror; Lucy Prebble, a writer on Succession; Daniel “DanTDM” Middleton, a popular YouTuber; and Helen Lewis, a writer for The Atlantic and a “self-confessed video game fan.” All of the panel’s picks can be found after the break.

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Jordan Minor’s “Video Game of the Year” Will Feature “The Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games” from 1977-2022 When it Releases in July 2023

PC Magazine’s Jordan Minor will publish his first book in 2023, and for the subject of this tome, the journalist has zeroed in one that’s very near and dear to my heart.

In Video Game of the Year, Minor will sort through thousands of titles in his quest to compile… and here comes the subtitle… A Year-By-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977.

Minor, along with a small army of contributors (including Jason Schreier, Rebekah Valentine, and others), will choose the defining game from each year and explore how they “captured the zeitgeist and left a legacy for all games that followed” through a series of essays:

Pong. The Legend of Zelda. Final Fantasy VII. Rock Band. Fortnite. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. For each of the 40 years of video game history, there is a defining game, a game that captured the zeitgeist and left a legacy for all games that followed. Through a series of entertaining, informative, and opinionated critical essays, author and tech journalist Jordan Minor investigates, in chronological order, the innovative, genre-bending, and earth-shattering games from 1977 through 2022. Minor explores development stories, critical reception, and legacy, and also looks at how gaming intersects with and eventually influences society at large while reveling in how uniquely and delightfully bizarre even the most famous games tend to be.

From portly plumbers to armor-clad space marines and the speedy rodents in between, Video Game of the Year paints individual portraits that, as a whole, give readers a stronger appreciation for the vibrant variety and long-lasting impact of this fresh, exciting, and massively popular art form. Illustrated throughout with retro-inspired imagery and featuring contributions from dozens of leading industry voices, including New York Times bestselling author Jason Schreier (Blood, Sweat, and Pixels; Kotaku), Max Scoville (IGN), Rebekah Valentine (IGN), Blessing Adeoye Jr. (Kinda Funny), and Devindra Hardawar (Engadget), this year-by-year anthology is a loving reflection on the world’s most popular art form.

Video Game of the Year will be published by Abrams in paperback and all ebook formats on July 11, 2023.

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Lists From the Past: The Library of Congress’s “Game Canon”

Henry Lowood has served as the Curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University since 1983. Thanks to this role, he’s been part of the growing field of Game Studies practically since its very beginning, and in 2006 he used his position to pitch a proposal to the Library of Congress about the importance of the academic study of games.

Partly inspired by the National Film Preservation Board’s National Film Registry and his own efforts to preserve important game-related artifacts since 1998, Lowood asked for the Library’s assistance in creating a “Game Canon,” a group of titles that would best represent the cultural and historical significance of video games. He got his wish a year later, and a committee (comprised of Lowood, his Stanford colleague Matteo Bittanti, game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky, and Joystiq’s Christopher Grant) was formed to decide on the canon’s initial composition.

After a lot of debate, the committee delivered ten recommendations for the “Game Canon,” ultimately highlighting 15 titles in total. Civilization and Civilization II were grouped together as part of this initial batch of games, as were the four games in the Warcraft series (Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and World of Warcraft). The rest of the eight selections covered a wide range of genres from the first three decades of game history, starting with 1962’s Spacewar! and moving forward through time to the aforementioned Warcraft series.

In between you’ll find 1985’s Tetris, 1989’s SimCity, 1993’s Doom, and a few other foundational games…

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The Hosts of The MinnMax Show Talk About “The Greatest Games of All Time (That Nobody Talks About)”

A quick perusal of the Video Game Canon’s Top 1000 will give you a good idea about the games that are always in the discussion for the Best Games of All Time. There’s Tetris and Resident Evil 4 and Half-Life 2 and Mario, but also your Zeldas and your Marios, and a handful of other familiar titles.

But what if you wanted to go beyond that list? What if you wanted to talk about the greatest games of all time that nobody talks about? That’s where The MinnMaxx Show comes in.

The hosts of the popular podcast recently uploaded an episode all about “The Greatest Games of All Time (That Nobody Talks About).” Each host was given the chance to pick three games that go unmentioned whenever a publication puts together a Best Games list. And at the end of the segment, they also each added a few rapid fire picks to the discussion, bringing the total to 26 titles. How’d they do? Well…

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GameSpot Serves Up Some Unexpected Choices in “The Best Current-Gen Games You Need To Play”

The Xbox Series X|S and the PS5 are steamrolling their way towards store shelves this November, and earlier this month, GameSpot became one of the first outlets to produce a retrospective of the generation we’re about to leave behind. Or are we? With cross-platform compatibility more important than ever, and the Switch still going strong, the upcoming generation will probably look a lot like our current one.

Which might explain why GameSpot’s staff made a few unexpected picks for “The Best Current-Gen Games You Need To Play.”

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