Tag: Nier

Eurogamer Asked Developers and Journalists to Help Curate the “Top 10 Games of the Generation”

Eurogamer’s staff and contributors did a lot of looking back in 2019. The site’s video team traveled to PAX East last Spring to host a debate to determine “The Best Games of the Last 20 Years.” And just before the end of the year, more than 15 contributors highlighted a variety of unconventional titles as the “Games of the Decade” in a series of personal essays.

With the launch of the PS5 and Xbox Series X looming, it was time to produce another list. But this time Eurogamer turned things over to an outside panel of developers and journalists to help them pick “The Top 10 Games of the Generation.”

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Slant Magazine Highlights the Games That Point the Way Forward in “The 100 Best Video Games of the 2010s”

Slant Magazine has published a list of the “100 Greatest Video Games of All Time” twice in recent years, and both times they’ve included 2010’s Red Dead Redemption as the highest-ranked game from the previous decade (#4 in 2014 and #2 in 2018). But the publication’s editors went in a different direction for “The 100 Best Video Games of the 2010s,” awarding the #1 spot to Yoko Taro’s Nier: Automata instead.

Rockstar’s western would have to settle for the #8 spot in Slant’s reevaluation of the decade.

For the remainder of the list, Slant’s staff looked to “the games that point the way forward” as they chose to focus on how much the game industry has changed in the last ten years:

This was the decade that saw tiny studios, lone creators, and crazy concepts reign supreme. This was the decade that saw every platform become a viable place for ideas to sprout and bloom. The limits of the medium are seemingly bound only by the human imagination, and at every level, regardless of the horsepower needed, it now feels like anything is possible.

So which other games from the past does Slant think can give us a glimpse at the future? The Top Ten includes a few obvious picks (Mass Effect 2 at #4 and God of War at #5) while also veering off the road less traveled (Outer Wilds at #7 and Superhot at #9).

Further down the list, which is available below, you’ll find titles as varied as PT (#41), Tales From the Borderlands (#51), Gorogoa (#90), and 91 others.

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Wired Goes Their Own Way With “The Decade’s 10 Most Influential Videogames”

“The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.”

Whether you attribute this quote to George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde, it turned out to be fairly accurate when comparing “The Best Games of the Decade” lists created by Wired and Wired UK. The publications could only agree on three games… Mojang’s Minecraft, From Software’s Dark Souls, and Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Instead, Wired’s “The Decade’s 10 Most Influential Videogames” hit upon some rather obscure indies in the bottom half of their Top Ten (including Thirty Flights of Loving, Pathologic 2, and Cibele), before locking on to some more mainstream titles (including the aforementioned trio) in the Top Five:

Wired – The Decade’s 10 Most Influential Videogames

  • 1. Fortnite
  • 2. Minecraft
  • 3. Dark Souls
  • 4. Gone Home
  • 5. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
  • 6. PT
  • 7. Nier
  • 8. Cibele
  • 9. Pathologic 2
  • 10. Thirty Flights of Loving

In between, the outlet delivered a nice little note about Hideo Kojima’s PT, the legendary Silent Hills demo that never got the chance to become a full game, as well as Fulbright’s Gone Home, and Square Enix’s Nier.

But it was Epic’s Fortnite that landed at #1 on Wired’s list, with Julie Muncy praising the battle royale as “one of the only games of the decade to truly infiltrate broader pop culture.”

GQ Looks Backs at the 2010s in “The 17 Best Games That Shaped the Decade”

Just before the end of the year, the editors at GQ got together and published a look back at some of the “most important and best games” of the last decade. Here’s how they decided on which games to include:

Some of the best games we’ve ever seen came out in the past decade, but the 2010s were also the most turbulent, transformative, and revealing years for video games. Game development costs skyrocketed to new, unsustainable heights. Some games became never-ending, always online, services that you pay for in subscriptions. As advancements were made in public health care, indie game development flourished, and then regressed accordingly as it was dismantled. Games also reached beyond what was previously thought possible, delivering beautifully detailed worlds, touching and intimate narratives, and shared cultural experiences unlike any others. Here, according to the GQ staff, are the most important and best games of the decade.

“The 17 Best Games That Shaped the Decade” zigzagged it’s way through many of the titles that reshaped the game industry over the last ten years, as well as two that originally launched in Early Access in the previous decade (Derek Yu’s Spelunky and Mojang’s Minecraft). But which other games made the cut?

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