Slashdot Mirror
Sonic Conquers UK's Favorite Games Poll
Thanks to GamerFeed for its report on UK videogame trade organization ELSPA's poll to find
"the 30 most popular games of the past 30 years." In somewhat of a surprise, Sonic The Hedgehog was voted most popular title of all time, and the top 5 were rounded out by Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Pac-Man, Tomb Raider and Space Invaders. Interesting votes further down the list included Elite at No.7, Championship Manager at No.23, and Shenmue at No.26.
That both GTA3's made the list, coming in at 10th and 15th, no less. One thing I did notice, is that the majority of the list is fairly recent. I'm quite disappointed that neither Thief or the original System Shock made the list, however...
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
Its a meaningless poll regardless, as are most. Its not like someones going to wake up one day and have their life turn around because a bunch of brits say sonic > *, its just a popular oppinion poll. If I think virtual valery is the best game ever, a bunch of people saying Defender Of The Crown is better won't make me change my mind. (For the record, DoC rocks. I heard they're making a new version.)
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Championship Manager I think is a game where you run a soccer team and trade players and such. You don't actually play soccer, but you watch your team play, I think.
Now I don't know what it is, maybe it's because I'm not European, but I can't imagine anybody wanted to watch a virtual soccer game for 90 minutes and not interact with it.
Vonal Declosion
22 2001 Gran Tourismo 3
23 1992 Championship Manager
Gran Tourismo? Gran Tourismo? Gran TOurismo?!?!
Nice to know they can spell the titles of the damn games properly...
Hmmm, maybe theyre on about this? Nah, maybe not.
And dont even get me started about the first Street Fighter in '88, the way they got the wrong Final Fantasy, and Manic Miner being released in 1997!?!?!... Please mod the atricle up as '-1 : Full Of Typos'!
Sega always sold better in the UK than Nintendo until the Saturn debacle.
As for Elite and Championship Manager. UK games players have never been console crazy until recently, during the 80s as Atari suicided the Home computer was doing very well in Europe.
From Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, through Atari ST and Commodore Amiga the consoles didn't really get a look in until Sega & Sonic broke through with the 16 bit Megadrive (aka Genesis).
The games don't take 90 minutes to play, more like 10 minutes. Basically it's all a matter of strategy, you're the manager, not one of the players. You decide what players to put in different positions (attacker, midfielder, defender, goalkeeper), what substitutions to make, what style of play you want, and when not playing, you buy and sell players, train them, manage club finances etc.
It's quite addictive, even for someone like me who isn't a massive football (soccer) fan.
Only a minority of people in the UK would be nostalgic for the Atari 2600 and 8bit Nintendo as they wern't as popular over here.
We also had our own games for the Spectrum, BBC and C64. Later on we had our own games for the Atari ST and Amiga.
These days we mostly get the same games as you. Games that are mostly targeted at the American markets...
This seems like a rather peculiar list to me, do they not get a lot of the games the US gets?
;)
That, and our tastes differ. What were you expecting, Madden/NFL in the top ten?
At least this list, unlike the last few "greatest games of all time" to have shown up on Slashdot, includes Elite. 3D graphics on an 8-bit micro? Now that's impressive.
They also get certain games earlier than North Americans do. For instance, rhythm games seem to be more popular there (both Rez and Space Channel 5 Part 2 were released in the UK before the US). Also, wasn't the Dreamcast version of Shenmue 2 released over there?
Given that statistic and the tendency of these lists to produce mainly recent successes, I'm surprised that CM and is so low down the list! I guess it's because a lot of people who don't typically play computer games that much play CM, and don't get included in the poll..
Sonic is no surprise at the top, though Tomb Raider seems higher than I would have expected
Keep in mind that this poll was conducted in association with ComputerAndVideoGames.com. The article describes ComputerAndVideoGames.com as "the UK's leading multi-format video games website", but it's really quite a biased magazine/site combo. I know plenty of people in the UK who prefer better games/characters than Sonic (such as Mario, Mega Man, Dizzy, Klonoa, and more), so the poll is only really representative of the readership of ComputerAndVideoGames.com...
;P
But then, what do I expect? It's an opinion poll just as meaningless as those 'Best Character' polls GameFAQs does every summer.
Elite, Lemmings, even Doom and Quake... all games one can find on the classic Acorn home computers. Elite started out on the BBC Micro and to this date is an excellent game, while the port of Lemmings from the Amiga to Archimedes was nothing less than stellar. (To this date I prefer the Acorn version)
Shame the latter pair won't run on much less than a RISC PC, but I digress...
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race