Tag: Best Games Lists

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.

World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2019 Includes Super Mario Kart, Mortal Kombat, Windows Solitaire, and Colossal Cave Adventure

The World Video Game Hall of Fame has welcomed four new games into the fold, as the inductees from the Class of 2019 were announced this morning in a special ceremony. This year, three games that practically defined gaming in the 1990s lead the way, while a groundbreaking text adventure from the 1970s also made the cut.

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Zelda: A Link to the Past is #1 in Popular Mechanics’s 2019 Update to Their “100 Greatest Video Games of All Time”

Just a few months after Popular Mechanics revealed “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” (which they plan to update on a yearly basis), the publication’s editors are back with an update to their “100 Greatest Video Games of All Time” list, which was first published in 2014.

This time around, Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past earned the #1 spot, dethroning BioShock, which had to settle for #7. Link’s third adventure is actually in some familiar company, as aside from Irrational’s shooter, the majority of the Top 15 is heavily populated by a slew of games from the 1990s. Ready?

There’s Super Mario Bros. 3 (#15) from 1990, Super Mario World (#2) and Street Fighter II (#6) from 1991, Super Mario Kart (#11) from 1992, Doom (#13) from 1993, Final Fantasy VII (#4) and GoldenEye 007 (#10) from 1997, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (#12) and Metal Gear Solid (#14) from 1998.

Outside of the Top 15, Popular Mechanics is the first publication to give Epic’s Fortnite (#34) a spot on their “Best Games” list, and believe it or not, they’re also the first to include car combat classic Twisted Metal (#87).

The Video Game Canon’s Version 3.0 Update was published just a few weeks ago, but you can be sure that Popular Mechanics’s “The 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time” will be included in the next revision.

Popular Mechanics Selects “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” from 1971 to 2018

Going all the way back to 1971 and the the very dawn of commercial video games, the editors of Popular Mechanics have chosen “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born.”

Popular Mechanics’s choices range from the obvious (Pong over everything in 1972) to the debatable (Sonic the Hedgehog over Street Fighter II and Zelda: A Link to the Past in 1991) to the controversial (Donkey Kong Country over both Earthbound and Final Fantasy VI in 1994). The editors went with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for 2017, pushing Link’s latest adventure to eight total selections since its release two years ago.

“The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” is also the first “Best Games” list I’ve found to include the entirety of 2018 in its purview and the editors chose to honor Into the Breach as the best game from last year, while also selecting Deltarune, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, God of War, Celeste, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Monster Hunter: World as “Honorable Mentions.” Popular Mechanics plans to update “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” with new titles every year.

The Video Game Canon’s Version 3.0 Update has already been locked down and will be published soon, but Popular Mechanics’s “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” will be added in a further update.

Slant Magazine Updates Their List of “The 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time” for 2018

Slant Magazine recently updated their list of “The 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time” and named Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as their #1 game. The oft-ignored sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has been undergoing a bit of a reevaluation in recent years, and it’s selection by Slant is the first time it’s earned the top spot on a “Best Games” list.

In addition to old favorites, the editors at Slant gave four games their first exposure on a “Best Games” list… Platinum’s Nier: Automata (#7), Bracket’s Three Fourths Home (#73), Croteam’s The Talos Principle (#82), and Ninja Theory’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (#94).

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey have been on a perfect streak since their release in 2017, and Slate kept it alive by slotting Link’s latest adventure at #39 and Mario’s Cappy-tivating quest at #31.

Slant Magazine’s “The 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time” will be added to the Video Game Canon in a future update.

“The 200 Games You Must Play” Have Been Chosen By Australia’s Hyper Magazine

Hyper, Australia’s oldest gaming magazine, has always had a slightly skewed perspective on the industry. Earlier this year, they published their latest “Best Games” list, “The 200 Games You Must Play.”

Hyper, Australia’s oldest gaming magazine, has always had a slightly skewed perspective on the industry. Their previous stabs at “Best Games” lists in 1995 and 2013 often focused on titles that no one else was looking at. And the same is true for “The 200 Games You Must Play,” which was published earlier this year.

“The 200 Games You Must Play” is an unranked list, just like Hyper’s previous lists, so you won’t find a consensus pick for the “Best Game of All Time” from the magazine’s editors. Instead, the 203 games on the list (there were a few ties) cut across a huge spectrum of genres and decades, as well as the inclusion of almost three dozen titles that are brand new to the Video Game Canon.

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