Tag: Pokemon

“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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Daniel Dockery’s “Monster Kids” Could be the Definitive History of Pokemon When its Released in October 2022

Even though the franchise has flourished for more than 20 years, there’s never been a definitive history written about Pokemon. Daniel Dockery, an entertainment writer who got his start at Cracked, is hoping to change that this October with the release of Monster Kids: How Pokemon Taught a Generation to Catch Them All.

In addition to delivering an electrifying portrait of Pikachu, Dockery will examine the developers behind Pokemon, the fans who grew up playing it, and the slew of imitators (including Digimon, Cardcaptors, and Yu-Gi-Oh!) that popped up in its wake:

More than just a simple journey through the history of Pokémon, Daniel Dockery offers an in-depth look at the franchise’s many branches of impact and influence. With dozens of firsthand interviews, Monster Kids covers its beginnings as a Japanese video game created to recapture one man’s love of bug-collecting as a child before diving into the decisions and conditions that would ultimately lead to that game’s global domination. With its continued growth as television shows, spin-off video games, blockbuster movies, trading cards, and toys, Pokémon is a unique and special brand that manages to continue to capture the attention and adoration of its eager fanbase 25 years after its initial release.

Monster Kids: How Pokemon Taught a Generation to Catch Them All will be released by Running Press on October 4.

UPDATE (10/22/22): Monster Kids is now available in stores, and Dockery recently shared an excerpt with Polygon about Pokemon‘s American debut to celebrate.

The Washington Post Picks Ten Titles as “The Most Influential Games of the Decade”

The calendar is nearing the end of January, but here I am sifting through yet another “Best Games of the Decade” list. This time around, the Launcher team at The Washington Post gets their time in the sun, as they chose ten games to stand tall as “The Most Influential Games of the Decade“:

Gaming is now humanity’s favorite form of entertainment, and the medium’s legacy was cemented this past decade. While the early 2000s saw video games honing their ability to tell stories and build worlds in 3-D, this last decade built off those nuts and bolts of game making and propelled the medium toward bigger ambitions like open-world design, virtual and augmented reality and an influx of new genres such as battle-royale multiplayer.

The chronological list begins with 2010’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent, continues through the middle of the decade with 2014’s Destiny, and ends with 2017’s Fortnite. In between, you’ll find a few other familiar titles, as well as a more unusual choice in King’s Candy Crush Saga:

The Washington Post’s Launcher – The Most Influential Games of the Decade

  • Amnesia: The Dark Descent
  • Candy Crush Saga
  • Dark Souls
  • Destiny
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
  • Fortnite
  • Minecraft
  • Pokemon Go
  • The Walking Dead
  • The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Apologies to all the games from 2018 and 2019 that didn’t make the cut for The Washington Post’s list.

“Ranked For Your Displeasure”: Wired UK Expects Some Disagreement With Their “Best Games of the Decade”

The 2010s were an absolutely incredible decade for video games, but as we take our first baby steps into 2020 (and new hardware from Microsoft and Sony sometime this year) some publications are still interested in looking back.

Wired UK understands the futility of trying to rank ten years worth of games, which is why they’ve used “The Best Games of the Decade, Ranked For Your Displeasure” as the title of their retrospective.

But while Wired UK’s contributors were quick to temper expectations, they ultimately made the uncontroversial choice of naming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as the best game from 2010 to 2019. Nintendo’s Pokemon Go also landed near the top of the list at #3.

Wired UK – The Best Games of the Decade, Ranked For Your Displeasure

  • 1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
  • 2. The Last of Us
  • 3. Pokemon Go
  • 4. Red Dead Redemption 2
  • 5. What Remains of Edith Finch
  • 6. FIFA 17
  • 7. Minecraft
  • 8. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
  • 9. Return of the Obra Dinn
  • 10. Dark Souls
  • 11. Spider-Man

Sony was the only other publisher to place two games on Wired UK’s list, with Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (#2) and Insomniac’s Spider-Man (#11) both making the cut.

Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 (#4), Giant Sparrow’s What Remains of Edith Finch (#5), EA Sports’s FIFA 17 (#6), Mojang’s Minecraft (#7), PUBG Corporation’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (#8), Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn (#9), and From Software’s Dark Souls (#10) made up the rest of Wired UK’s list.

You know, that’s not really a displeasing selection of titles at all.

“The 10 Best Video Games of the 2010s” Have Been Selected by Time Magazine

The editors at Time Magazine have produced several “Best Games of All Time” lists, and with New Year’s Eve fast approaching, they’ve once again turned their gaze backwards. This time, they’ve selected “The 10 Best Video Games of the 2010s,” though like most outlets, they make an exception for two very huge games from 2009:

The video game industry was already a billion dollar behemoth when it rolled into the 2010s. Over the past decade, the cultural cache of video games has grown and its profits are now greater than movies, television or music. The 2010s are when the hobby stopped being something semi-niche, and solidly took its place in the mainstream.

Those games, of course, are Mojang’s Minecraft and Riot’s League of Legends. Describing them as a “global phenomenon” and a “cultural institution,” respectively, Time’s editors argue that the rules should be bent for them as the two games were so important to what gaming became in the 2010s.

Time Magazine – The 10 Best Video Games of the 2010s

  • Dark Souls
  • Disco Elysium
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
  • Fortnite
  • Grand Theft Auto V / Grand Theft Auto Online
  • League of Legends
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
  • Minecraft
  • Pokemon Go
  • Portal 2

The remaining eight selections went to Dark Souls, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Portal 2 from 2011, Grand Theft Auto V from 2013, Pokemon Go from 2016, Fortnite and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild from 2017, and Disco Elysium from last year.

Destructoid is Talking About “The Games that Defined the Decade” This Week

Destructoid’s staff combined forces this week to deliver “The Games that Defined the Decade,” a series of essays that looked back at some of the highlights of the last ten years.

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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.

Bite-Sized Game History: Exploring the US’s Best-Selling Games from the 1990s to Now

Using data from The NPD Group’s vast archive, Mat Piscatella recently shared some historical data on the best-selling video games from the 1990s to today.

Tracking the weekend box office results has become something of a spectator sport for moviegoers of all stripes since the lists were introduced in the early 1980s. Arguing about the financial merits of Star Wars, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Titanic, and Avatar became just as important as discussing each film’s critical reception.

You won’t find this sort of organized ranking of moneymakers in the video game industry, but the closest analogue would have to be the monthly Best-Seller Lists published by The NPD Group. However, the proprietary nature of this report means that the picture will always be incomplete.

Using data from the analyst firm’s vast archive, Mat Piscatella recently tried to pull back the curtain a little bit by sharing the list of best-selling games on several legacy consoles (the Saturn, the original PlayStation, the Nintendo 64, the Game Boy Color, and the Dreamcast) and a nearly defunct handheld (the Vita). He also examined the best-selling games through September 2018 on two modern consoles (the PS4 and Xbox One) and published a list of the top-selling titles for each year from 1995 to 2017.

It’s a very interesting collection of information, and the lists provide our best window yet into what games were considered popular in the United States in the 1990s and into today.

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The World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2017 Includes Donkey Kong, Halo, Pokemon Red/Blue, and Street Fighter II

The debate has ended for another year and the induction committee from the World Video Game Hall of Fame is ready to announce their Class of 2017. Drum roll, please…

This year’s first new addition to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games’s Hall of Fame is Donkey Kong. Nintendo’s first big hit became an arcade sensation in 1980, and also introduced the world to a mustachioed plumber named Mario. On the game’s selection, ICHEG Director Jon-Paul Dyson said, “[Donkey Kong’s] overarching narrative of love and its vibrant graphics brought the game to life in a way that few other games could in the early 1980s. It captured the hearts of a generation.”

This year’s class also includes Halo: Combat Evolved, Bungie’s groundbreaking first person shooter and the game that put Microsoft’s Xbox on the map. Curator Shannon Symonds said, “[Halo] boasted one of the strongest multiplayer experiences of its time and created a legion of hardcore fans that refer to themselves as the ‘Halo Nation.’ ”

Hot off the heels of the launch of Pokemon Go, the Hall of Fame also chose to induct Pokemon Red and Blue, the first pair of games released in the far-reaching RPG franchise. The universal appeal of the franchise was a major factor in its selection, as Symonds added: “Pokemon Red and Blue launched a franchise that has taken the world by storm, vaulting many of its characters, such as Pikachu, into popular, mainstream culture. Nearly two decades after its inception and with the introduction of Pokemon Go, ‘Poke-mania’ shows little sign of fading.”

Finally, Capcom’s Street Fighter II: The World Warrior became the first one-on-one fighting game to be added to the Hall of Fame as the final member of the Class of 2017. ICHEG Assistant Director Jeremy Saucier believes that Street Fighter II’s social component fueled its popularity, adding, “This communal style of game play reinvigorated the arcade industry in the 1990s and helped give birth to a generation of fighting games.”

Congratulations to all of this year’s inductees.

The World Video Game Hall of Fame chose to deny entry to eight other finalists this year including Final Fantasy VII, Microsoft Windows Solitaire, Mortal Kombat, Myst, Portal, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, and Wii Sports. But they’ll get another shot. Nominations are already being accepted for the Class of 2018.

Meet the Finalists for the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2017

Street Fighter II: The World Warrior fought against Mortal Kombat for the hearts (and quarters) of arcade players in the early 90s. Next month, they’ll square off again as two (of the 12) finalists the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2017.

Announced this morning by The Strong’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games, this year’s finalists also include Donkey Kong, Final Fantasy VII, Halo: Combat Evolved, Myst, Pokemon Red and Blue, Portal, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Wii Sports, and Windows Solitaire.

“These 12 World Video Game Hall of Fame finalists span decades, gaming platforms, and countries of origin… but what they all have in common is their undeniable impact on the world of gaming and popular culture,” said Jon-Paul C. Dyson, the Director of The Strong’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games. “Whether it’s a pop culture icon like Donkey Kong, an innovator and true original like Portal, or a game like Wii Sports that transformed millions of living rooms into interactive zones for all ages, they’re among the most influential games of all time.”

An international advisory committee made up of journalists and scholars familiar with the history of video games will serve as advisers to the Hall of Fame’s curators during the selection of this year’s inductees. The World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2017 will be announced on Thursday, May 4, at 10:30 AM (Eastern Time).

You can learn more about all of this year’s finalists below…

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