Tag: Tetris

“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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Puzzle Games Have Always Had Personality… Featuring Threes, Dr. Mario, Peggle, Tetris, and a Lot More

Wordle jumpstarted a new wave of addictive puzzle games after it was released to almost universal praise in 2020. Players found competition and comradery in those green and yellow squares during the COVID pandemic, and this little bit of personality continues to fuel the game’s popularity today.

But puzzle games have always had personality, and on the second anniversary of Wordle‘s acquisition by The New York Times, I decided to look back on an article I wrote for Warp Zoned in 2014 that argued exactly that. A lightly edited and updated version of that article has been reprinted here.

As video games begin to resemble film and television productions more and more with each passing generation, it’s interesting to observe that puzzle games continue to remain a vibrant genre.

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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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A Teenager “Beat” Tetris for the NES After Clearing 1,511 Lines

I’ll bet you thought it was impossible to “beat” Tetris on the NES… but that’s because your name isn’t Willis “Blue Scuti” Gibson.

Last month, the Tetris prodigy quite literally broke the game, clearing 1,511 lines before reaching the game’s never-before-seen kill screen. Blue Scuti is just 13 years old, and he’s part of a growing group of young players who have taken over the ranks of pro Tetris.

Blue Scuti and his peers are able to rack up such impressive line totals thanks to a strategy known as rolling. In rolling, the controller is pressed flat against your leg with your thumb hovering over the D-Pad. By tapping the back of the controller with your other hand, you can apply just enough pressure to the D-Pad to make pieces move across the screen (and where you want them to go to clear lines) at even the fastest levels.

While my own personal best of 214 lines is pretty decent for an amateur, Ars Technica explained how the pros are able to use rolling to push beyond the human limits found in a normal game of Tetris:

What makes Blue Scuti’s achievement even more incredible (as noted in some excellent YouTube summaries of the scene) is that, until just a few years ago, the Tetris community at large assumed it was functionally impossible for a human to get much past 290 lines. The road to the first NES Tetris kill screen highlights the surprisingly robust competitive scene that still surrounds the classic game and just how much that competitive community has been able to collectively improve in a relatively short time.

The whole world has come together to congratulate Blue Scuti, including Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, and Henk Rogers, the developer who brought the game to the rest of the world in 1988. A surprise appearance from both men during Blue Scuti’s interview with NBC News gave the young player quite a shock.

Shortly after the new year, two other Tetris players also managed to reach the kill screen: Justin “Fractal161” Yu and Andy “P1xelAndy” Artiaga. Both regularly compete with Blue Scuti in tournaments around the country.

Blue Scuti’s record-setting playthrough was recently shared by Classic Tetris World Championship, and it’s been embedded above. He dedicated this accomplishment to his father, Adam Gibson, who passed away on December 14.

Tetris, Resident Evil 4, and Breath of the Wild Go 1-2-3 in the 2023 Update to the Video Game Canon’s Top 1000

It’s arriving a little later than usual, but the 2023 Update to the Video Game Canon (Version 7.0) is now available.

Four brand new Best Games lists are now included in the calculation, as well as a handful of older lists (including one from 1985). The four newly-published lists come from British GQ (“The 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time, Ranked by Experts“), Digital Trends (“The 50 Best Video Games of All Time“), Sports Illustrated/GLHF (“The Best 100 Games of All Time, Ranked“), and USA Today’s For the Win/GLHF (“The 100 Best Video Games of All Time“). Those last two lists appeared about six months apart, and though they share a similar pool of GLHF contributors, they’re fairly different.

Reaching back to 2016, I also added Gamereactor’s “Top 100 All Time Best Games” to the dataset, as well as “The Greatest Games: The 93 Best Computer Games of All Time,” a guidebook to the best games of all time by Dan Gutman and Shay Addams that was published by Compute! Books in 1985. It is, by far, the oldest list within the Video Game Canon, and a fascinating time capsule into what the conversation around games was like almost four decades ago (more than 60 games are unique to this list).

Finally, the Class of 2022 from the “Shacknews Hall of Fame” was added to the Video Game Canon as the site’s editors and contributors continued to expand their massive exploration of everything that’s great about video games.

So how did all of these additions affect the ranking of the Video Game Canon? As in most years, there were a lot of little changes and some very big swings in the standings.

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Over 1000 Games Have Been Ranked by Hardcore Gaming 101’s “The Top 47,858 Games of All Time” Podcast

The folks behind Hardcore Gaming 101’s “The Top 47,858 Games of All Time” podcast have been ranking their favorite games for nearly seven years, and while they haven’t reached their goal just yet, they hit a major milestone last month when they added the 1,000th game to their list.

The visually-impressive Vectorman, a side-scroller from Sega that debuted during the waning days of the Genesis, was the subject of the landmark episode, and the podcast’s hosts ranked it at #385 (just ahead of BioShock and just behind Wasteland).

“The Top 47,858 Games of All Time” features a dynamically-ordered list, and each new episode of the podcast adds at least one more game to the overall ranking. Unfortunately, Vectorman hasn’t been able to hold onto its position in the weeks since, and as of today, the game has fallen to #403 (where it’s still just ahead of BioShock and just behind Wasteland). You can visit Hardcore Gaming 101 to see where your favorite game is currently ranked.

Tetris currently holds the #1 spot, and you’ll find some interesting choices in the rest of the Top Ten (including NetHack at #2, Nier: Automata at #4, and Katamari Damacy at #7). There’s also a lot of Mario near the upper reaches of the list (including Super Mario Bros. at #3, Super Mario 64 at #6, and Super Mario Bros. 3 at #9), but things get pretty wild pretty fast (Minesweeper at #76!), and Mirage’s infamous Rise of the Robots sits at the very bottom at #1023.

Congratulations to everyone at “The Top 47,858 Games of All Time” podcast on this accomplishment. Just 46,835 games to go!

The 2022 Update to the Video Game Canon’s Top 1000 is Here

This article refers to an older Version of the Video Game Canon. View the Top 1000 to see the most recent changes to the list.

The 2022 Update (Version 6.0) to the Video Game Canon is here… and it’s more or less a maintenance update.

I was able to add a handful of newly-published lists from 2021 (including Games Radar, IGN, and Shacknews), as well as a GamesTM list from 2018, but little changed about my ranking of gaming’s top tier. With these additions, the Video Game Canon is now comprised of 70 Best Video Games of All Time lists that were published between 1995 and 2021.

The Video Game Canon’s scoring system, known as the C-Score, has remained the same for the 2022 Update. This formula ranks each game against the rest of the field by adding together a title’s Average Ranking across all lists with the complementary percentage of its Appearance Frequency.

For a good example, look at Tetris, which yet again landed in the #1 spot on the Video Game Canon. The puzzle game has an Average Ranking of 17.63 across all lists and, because only four publications chose to exclude it over the years, a staggering Appearance Frequency of 94.29%. Plugging those numbers into the formula gives us a C-Score of 23.34, considerably lower than any other game.

But nearly every other title in the Top 10 was shuffled around, though nothing else managed to break into the absolute top tier of the Video Game Canon. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, A Link to the Past, and Super Mario 64 all moved up slightly, while Red Dead Redemption and Ocarina of Time dipped. And after flipping places in 2021, Half-Life 2 and Resident Evil 4 flipped back in 2022. Capcom’s survival horror masterpiece slid back into the #3 slot, while Valve’s shooter sequel reclaimed the #2 ranking…

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2021 Update to the Video Game Canon Shakes Up the Top 1000 in a Big Way (But Tetris is Still #1)

This article refers to an older Version of the Video Game Canon. View the Top 1000 to see the most recent changes to the list.

Version 5.0 of the Video Game Canon is now available. Aggregating the critical consensus from 66 Best Video Games of All Time lists published between 1995 and 2020, this updated and expanded edition of the Video Game Canon has grown to include a total of 1,396 games.

Seven lists were added to the dataset in 2021, including recent lists published by GamingBible and Hardcore Gaming 101. Several legacy lists that weren’t part of previous calculations were also collected for the first time, including lists from Flux Magazine (1995), Hyper (1999), GamePro (2007), The Irish Times (2013), and Power Unlimited (2015).

As in years past, each game was ranked against the rest of the field using the C-Score, a formula that adds together each game’s Average Ranking and the complementary percentage of its Appearance Frequency across all lists. To give recent titles a chance to build their reputation, a game must also be at least three years old (and released on or before December 31, 2017) to be eligible for inclusion. So a game with a lower C-Score will rank higher on the Video Game Canon.

With these rules established, there was one game that was far ahead of the pack… Tetris (just as it’s been for the last four iterations of the Video Game Canon). Alexey Pajitnov’s puzzler reached the zenith of Version 5.0 of the Video Game Canon thanks to its extremely low Average Ranking (18.09) and extremely high Appearance Frequency (93.94%). Those components give it a C-Score of 24.15, which is well below the average C-Score of 195 and almost 12 points better than the runner-up.

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Familiar Favorites Top the 2020 Update to Video Game Canon’s Top 1,000

This article refers to an older Version of the Video Game Canon. View the Top 1000 to see the most recent changes to the list.

The latest update to the Video Game Canon, Version 4.0, has arrived!

The Video Game Canon now includes a total of 1,232 games, which were pulled from 59 Best Video Games of All Time lists published between 1995 and 2020. Each game was ranked against the rest of the field using the C-Score, a formula that takes into account a game’s Average Ranking and the complementary percentage of its Appearance Frequency across all lists.

Finally, games released after December 31, 2016 were excluded from the ranking because of their newness.

Three brand new lists were added to Version 4.0 of the Video Game Canon, including “The 100 Best Video Games in History” from GQ Spain, a “Top 100 Video Games of All Time” ranking from Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, and a massive look back at “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” from Popular Mechanics. Alongside these new additions, updates to IGN’s “Top 100 Video Games of All Time,” Popular Mechanics’s “The 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time,” and Slant Magazine’s “The 100 Best Video Games of All Time” were also added to the calculation. Thanks to reader CriticalCid for providing research assistance with some of these new lists.

But even with all this new data, there was surprisingly very little movement near the top of the Video Game Canon, and the Top 3 was once again represented by Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris (#1), Valve’s Half-Life 2, and Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 (#3). There was some slight shuffling in the rest of the Top 10, but no new titles were able to crack the highest tier. Nintendo’s classic quartet of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (#4), Super Mario 64 (#5), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (#6), and Super Metroid (#10) all hung around, as did Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (#7), Irrational’s BioShock (#8), and Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption (#9).

Things get more interesting as you move further down the Top 100, especially for the 2015 and 2016 releases that now qualify for inclusion in the Video Game Canon.

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