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Idle Thumbs Asks: What Is the Best Video Game of All Time?

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I've been thinking about 'video gamey' video games recently in the context of why I enjoy Bayonetta 2 so much. Despite the cutscenes and the ludicrous comic book angles, it's only interested in being a game. It's not an interactive Escher sketch or digital choose-your-own-adventure storybook or a horror film or a simulator. Most of its features reference video games rather than other media. It's the same with Mario.

I really need to play Minecraft. And Spelunky.

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I'll just swerve this conversation and say Tetris, which i think is a puzzle game design with a timeless quality that has the potential to endure far into the future, but is a game that, despite its simple mechanics and because of its mechanics, could only exist as a video game.

On the other hand, if we just want to talk about our most loved games, the (long) answer i gave in that thread Zeus linked back to is probably still accurately reflective of how i feel now.

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Spelunky is the best game to expand the playing audience.

Depression Quest is the best cultural ambassador for video games.

Half-Life is my subjectively best video game.

I've been thinking about 'video gamey' video games recently in the context of why I enjoy Bayonetta 2 so much. Despite the cutscenes and the ludicrous comic book angles, it's only interested in being a game. It's not an interactive Escher sketch or digital choose-your-own-adventure storybook or a horror film or a simulator. Most of its features reference video games rather than other media. It's the same with Mario.

Games like Mario are games for everyone. They bring people together. They're inviting. They're like VW Beetles. Yeah, it's a purpose built thing, but it's made to exist alongside the rest of your life.

Games like Bayonetta, I think, come from the same place as ludicrous hyper cars like the Paganni Zonda. They aspire to simply be the best at one thing and aggressively reject the idea that it should need to accommodate any other consideration.

You'll never even look cool when (or if) you are able to find the limits they are able to reach; you just look like a crazy person.

As a result, they are loud and stupid looking and seem totally insane and pointless to anyone not prepared to meet them on their own terms.

But, if you are prepared and if you're not worried about looking like a crazy person, they are fucking great.

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I've been thinking about 'video gamey' video games recently in the context of why I enjoy Bayonetta 2 so much. Despite the cutscenes and the ludicrous comic book angles, it's only interested in being a game. It's not an interactive Escher sketch or digital choose-your-own-adventure storybook or a horror film or a simulator. Most of its features reference video games rather than other media. It's the same with Mario.

 

I like "video gamey" games, but I wonder about their long-term value and usefulness. I'm all for creators working within a given medium trying to play to its strengths, but some of the most "video gamey" games can just come across as culturally insular. Other mediums have been experimenting with techniques and ideas from other mediums for as long as there have been a bunch of ways to make art. 

 

That isn't to say gamey games are bad, or that works need to reference something with more cultural capital to be worthwhile. I just think that games being influenced by Escher, or horror films, may not be the worst thing. It seems like a natural part of the process of media convergence. 

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Is this downloadable? Soundcloud always bury the button under three layers of stuff and I can't find it for this one!

 

EDIT: ok, seems it would normally be next to share, so that article is lying and this is UNDOWNLOADABLE

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...you guys. It's Deus Ex. Deus Ex is the best game.

I could probably get on board with this train of thought.

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...you guys. It's Deus Ex. Deus Ex is the best game.

 

If it's not right at the top for me, it's definitely close to it.  

 

I have a nauseatingly difficult time rationalizing my favourite game of all time.  The problem for me is that I have several titles that are so heavily laden with nostalgia and fond memories that it could be any one of them at any point.  In the end, I typically boil it down to Super Metroid, but I feel super compelled to also recognize Zelda: Link to the Past and Illusion of Gaia, the latter of which is incredibly flawed but still captures such a strong youthfully innocent feeling for me.  

 

I almost prefer to do a top five by decade, because Deus Ex does things so differently than Super Metroid or Link to the Past or Yoshi's Island or Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory or Spec Ops: The Line that it's tough to compare them.  

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Guys, you have to look back to the golden era of arcades to answer this question. For all their fancy graphics and procedural generations, do any of the modern classics have the soul and meaning of Pac-Man or a Donkey Kong? Are they easy to play, hard to master, and challenge our very understanding of the world around us?  Do they welcome the intellectual curiosity of both the uneducated masses and the most enlightened academics?

 

The Pac-Man's insatiable hunger for the dots and Power Pills that fill the corridors of his maze-worlds suggests weighty parallels, such as the ravenous hunger for More Life that Darwin saw in all species, any one of which would overpopulate and overrun the earth if not for the predatory ghosts of natural selection. Also, we are reminded of Marx's "need of a constantly expanding market" that "chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe" (Communist Manifesto) with the "vocation to approach, by quantitative increase, as near as possible to absolute wealth" (Capital), casting the Pac-Man in the role of corporate antihero in a utopian fantasy where the agents protesting his unfettered domination of the maze-world actually defeat him in the end. Obvious metaphors, lurking just beneath the surface of the game.

 

Can mastery of them bring about an existential crisis, a questioning of the very fabric of reality:

 

The problem with Donkey Kong: You can never fix what has been broken. You can never make the crooked girders go straight. On August 20, 2000, when Tim Sczerby scored 879,200 points on Donkey Kong (thought to be the highest score theoretically possible), the game killed him off on Level 22 without explanation or apology, and he still did not make the crooked girders go straight. And you can never maintain your grasp on Pauline. When you succeed in reaching the top of the screen and climb the platform to free her from the Monkey God's prison, he takes her away, and on the Rivets screen, even after you send him plummeting to the ground level headfirst, the reunion with Pauline doesn't last. Why?

Because she is not a girl at all. She is the idea of a girl, pretending to be a girl, distorting impressionable Mario's reality with the old bait and switch, and inasmuch as the Monkey God is also a distorter of the straight and real, she and the ape are in cahoots. Even more: The ape is a part of the girl, and the girl is a part of the ape. They are facets of the same deception - which is to say, the fallen world, the one we live in.

 

Forced to pick between the two, obviously Donkey Kong is the best game ever.

These are excerpts from the delightful book Lucky Wander Boy, which I cannot recommend enough for video game fans.

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...you guys. It's Deus Ex. Deus Ex is the best game.

I don't know what to make of it anymore. Since such large parts of it have aged so poorly I feel weird saying it's the best, even though I still love it. Also, as much as I like the writing, it sometimes feels like they just dropped a bunch of philosophical concepts in there at random. Of course the out of nowhere philosophy hour is one of the endearing parts of the game, but it never uses it to say much of anything. Take one of my favourite conversations in the game:

It's thematially relevant, but it's tucked away like a secret and never explicitly touched on again (as far as I remember anyway).

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Sure, but you could say all of that, and much more, about Dwarf Fortress. Or EvE Online. But DF didn't blow up the way that Minecraft did. After a time, the only distinguishable thing that Minecraft let you do is build structures- at which point you're not doing something unique to games at all, you're literally just playing lego with free pieces.

 

I think that is really underselling what Minecraft is about. What makes Minecraft great to me is that all of the systems it employs come together to basically create a human progress simulator. Sure you can just play in creative mode and treat it like a set of Legos and in that case, sure I guess I would agree that it really isn't much more than a digital set of Legos.

 

But try playing on hard difficulty in survival mode and the experience is entirely different. There may not be any explicit, well defined goals (unless you go after the various achievements, in which case, yes there are actually explicit goals) but I found that the only goal you really need is to try to survive, and to work towards making it easier to survive. With these as my only real 'goals' in the game, I ended up dumping somewhere north of 1000 hours over a couple of years.

 

Starting out, it was just building a simple shelter, a source of food, and some basic means to protect myself. But as time went on I found that other smaller goals just organically came up all over the place. Maybe I needed certain materials to upgrade my shelter or my food production and so I would set off on an adventure to find a biome that had those materials or delve into a cave to find some rare minerals or abandoned mines with chests containing items that couldn't be found anywhere else. Then, after some time I might realize that I need a secondary base in this location to facilitate and streamline the process of gathering and storing these materials. Then, as more time goes on, I realize that having a minecart track linking my two bases would make it a lot easier to get from base A to base B and to transport entire chests full of material between the two. Then, somewhere in this whole process, I might find something amazing in a nearby biome and get completely sidetracked by my own curiosity, which would then present another set of mini-goals. Then, I might decide that one of my buildings gets blown up too much by creepers and it would be better if it was a self-repairing building (because that is way cooler than just building a boring ass fence around it) so I would device a redstone circuit to automatically push new cobblestone blocks into place whenever portions of the building are destroyed. At this point, surviving is hardly even an issue any more but I continue to press on and make progress because somehow, my brain has told me that those are worthwhile and interesting goals. And they have been. So much so that I still can't think of a single game that has had nearly the impact on me that Minecraft has.

 

When you step back and look at the bigger picture, all of this came from the simple goal to survive and I think that is a pretty awesome representation of the human experience. In fact, I don't think any game even comes close to scratching the surface when it comes to representing the evolution and progress of humanity from a vulnerable species just trying to survive to the lords we are today.

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Is this downloadable? Soundcloud always bury the button under three layers of stuff and I can't find it for this one!

 

EDIT: ok, seems it would normally be next to share, so that article is lying and this is UNDOWNLOADABLE

 

It is indeed lying, but I used this site to make it downloadable without much trouble.

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Listen to the episode, and it will all make sense.

No, I just mean, I really hate that Napoleon-Dynamite-Drew-This aesthetic that some artists use. But it was still a great listen.

 

Is this downloadable? Soundcloud always bury the button under three layers of stuff and I can't find it for this one!

 

EDIT: ok, seems it would normally be next to share, so that article is lying and this is UNDOWNLOADABLE

If you use Firefox, get the plugin Download Helper and you can get any Mp3 off of Soundcloud.

 

My favorite game is probably Beyond Good and Evil, even though I've only played it about four times through now. It's such a smooth gameplay experience that is intensely enjoyable every time.

 

Otherwise, it's probably Full Throttle or Grim Fandango. Probably Full Throttle more than Grim just because it's shorter and I've finished it too many times to count before I got too old to replay games on the regular and had responsibilities and things. Plus I like the isolated feeling of road trip type scenarios. Grim's the better game though.

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*Snip*

It's equally amazing and depressing to me that many of Deus Ex's most exaggerated and paranoid fantasies ended up being so incredibly prescient.

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If you use Firefox, get the plugin Download Helper and you can get any Mp3 off of Soundcloud.

 

Sweet, thanks. I use Firefox so infrequently that I still have the old weird grey and brown splurgey favicon for my Idle Thumbs bookmark!

 

EDIT: nope, doesn't work. Have you got a link to make sure I've got the right plug-in, please? There are a load called that... nm got it!

 

EDIT 2: oops, missed Gwardinen's post somehow - thanks also, Gward!

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I like "video gamey" games, but I wonder about their long-term value and usefulness. I'm all for creators working within a given medium trying to play to its strengths, but some of the most "video gamey" games can just come across as culturally insular. Other mediums have been experimenting with techniques and ideas from other mediums for as long as there have been a bunch of ways to make art. 

 

That isn't to say gamey games are bad, or that works need to reference something with more cultural capital to be worthwhile. I just think that games being influenced by Escher, or horror films, may not be the worst thing. It seems like a natural part of the process of media convergence. 

 

They're definitely not the worst thing, or a negative at all - sorry if it sounded like I was suggesting so. However, when so many games are X meets Y in Z, it's surprising when you can't do that. Bayonetta is...well, Bayonetta. There are obviously streaks of DMC and Sega in its DNA but I like that its identity doesn't rely on intertextual references. It's refreshingly unpretentious in a climate of knowing nods and winks and irony and zombies. Long-term value and usefulness depends on definitions. The 'use' of a Mario game probably isn't to provoke profound thought on the human condition, though they do bring people together in community to share experiences and time. That sounds pretty useful. Journey does that in a less explicit manner, but is Journey more culturally significant or important than Mario?

 

*fart noise* 

 

Ha, I don't know. It's interesting to think about how media interact and how cultural cachet travels in very strict routes. Novels can become great films (eg. The Godfather), but not the other way round. Historically films have made very poor games, though this is slowly changing. Print art (is that a term?) is plundered my films and games alike. Games and films have fed very well into sculpture and on canvas, though 'high' art shuns pretty much everything else.

 

Anyway, my audience expansion game would be Rock Band.

 

My cultural ambassador game would probably be Portal.

 

And my subjective best game is still Banjo-Kazooie.

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That's a pretty good way to do it.

Audience expansion: Binding of Isaac.

Cultural ambassador: Gone Home

Subjective best: I dunno, something by Nintendo.

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A couple times per decade I have encountered games that awed me and made me fall in love with this medium again. I would argue for any of these:

- Super Mario Bros

- Resident Evil 4

- Halo: CE

- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

- Fallout 3

- Just Cause

- Two Worlds II

I feel like everyone has a version of this list, right?

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While I don't feel I'm qualified to pick the best game...I will say that my favorite game is probably either

 

DOOM (though the pic is of DOOM2, which I prefer for multiplayer but for single player DOOM1 is better)

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or

 

A Link to the Past

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After that it becomes really hard to make any sort of list of favorites in any real order because I love so many games for so many different reasons.  The two above are just the games that probably had the biggest impact on me and that I regularly go back to.

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Not my all time best, but I full heartedly believe Eve Online is probably the best game ever created in regards to;

- How it has stood the test of time at 10 years old and looking better than most current releases.  Its so damn beautiful.  Remember this is a game thats older than WoW.

- The achievement of having a full economy in the game that is fully powered by the players.  Open to manipulation and and backroom shenanigans to the point where playing the market is almost a full game in itself.

- The constant iteration keeping it fresh and every expansion being free so as to never segregate the player base.  My 10 year old toon has the same opportunity as someone who just subbed for a month.

- The skill system where its completely free of traditional levels.  Yes my toon may be able to fly many more ships at a high level than someone new but if that new player focuses on one ship they can pilot it pretty much as well as I can after only a short time. Even a week old player can be of use in a fleet. Compared to a WoW where a Lv1 has no value at all to a Lv 80.  Heck, even a Lv70 has no value to a Lv80.

- The meta game.  There is no game that has even a fraction of the Eve metagame.  You could actually write books on all the amazing schemes people have pulled off.

- The scale.  The first time you come across a titan and see how it dwarfs your battleship you will gasp.  Even more so than the Colossus or Sathanas in Freespace 2.

- The players.  The craftiness, the cunning, the love, the hate, the camaraderie and over all the passion.  Its magical. 

 

That trailer makes me properly emotional.  Like what a normal person would feel towards a child but more genuine.  I just wish everyone could experience it at its best rather than being put off by the harsh new player experience.

 

To put it in terms that folk understand.  Eve is space Dota.  Its real hard to get over your first few hours in the game.  You will get punched repeatedly and be expected to like it.  Then, for the select few who survive the gauntlet, something special opens up and no matter if you want to join a 10 thousand man alliance or just a small 5 man corp or even solo the options are huge and everything you do has an effect on other players even if you never PVP.

 

What CCP have managed to create should never have happened.  So much should have went wrong and brought it to its knees yet it hasn't.  They have made a lot of missteps such as Dust 514 but dang those guys deserve a whole lot of credit for working real hard and keeping it relevant.  Updates are coming even faster than ever now with the last 4-5 months having almost as many changes as the previous 1-2 years.

 

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(that is actually a screen from about 4 years and multiple graphic upgrades ago, I just love it its so pretty :) )

 

 

 

My personal fav would probably be Doom though ;)  Ive played it to completion on just about every format its ever been released on.

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Personal or general consensus of video gamers in general?

 

Because my personal Goat would be Splinter cell chaos theory but I know the masses wouldn't agree. 

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Personal or general consensus of video gamers in general?

 

Because my personal Goat would be Splinter cell chaos theory but I know the masses wouldn't agree. 

Though not my #1, it's easily one of the best of the 2000s and it's the absolute pinnacle of the stealth genre, in my opinion. Everything in that game just clicked so well.

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Yup, chaos theory wins the title for best stealth game in my opinion. I don't think best game though, because it can't stand up to the greats in terms of narrative.

I see Link to the Past mentioned. I'm having a hard time with that game, it doesn't seem to stand up to today's standards, unlike Super Metroid which still feels like a great game. I played LttP about 6 months after ALBW, and the modern improvements just felt so necessary.

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