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Title Fight For Best All-Time Game Scheduled
Decaffeinated Jedi writes "Title Fight: The Ultimate Gaming Grudge -- a tournament in which gamers can vote to determine the greatest game of all time -- is underway at GameSpy. The rules for the tournament are simple: '64 games enter, one game leaves.' Polls are now open for the qualifying round, allowing gamers to choose titles from a wide range of genres that will eventually comprise approximately half of the 64-game final bracket. Qualifying will last until February 22, and first-round voting will begin on February 23." This is somewhat reminiscent of the GameFAQs Character Battle tournaments, but featuring entire games, not just videogame characters - predictions for the finalists and overall winner are welcome.
I mean really, just go look at the qualifying 'fights'. Among prominent losers:
X-COM: UFO Defense Nethack The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past
and so on.
Well? Isn't that the game all slashdotters are playing? :)
Whaaa? Nethack is lumped in with Infocom games and Adventure...
And since Gamespy skews towards newer gamers against Nintendo, my guess is on a GTA3 victory.
As for Nethack under text adventures, well, it doesn't have any graphics?
That or Gamespy is stupid.
Probably the latter.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
How can you group fighting games, RPG, sports, action and everything else in between with one pool of good games.
Not to mention the different age groups.
The initial qualifying polls seem to show a certain limiting view already. How this claim to be anywhere close to a good measure of "greatest videogame of all time"?
Granted I do realize this isn't at all serious, but having such odd catagorizations for the initial polls seems odd. We have such wonderfully unrelated qualifying polls such as "8-bit / 16-bit platformers" versus "Mario series" and "Mario Kart series". They want to know which "Pokemon series" game we love the most (or possibly hate the most, or have even seen). Who said anything about "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series" games being some of the best games of all time?
Strange....
I don't see a category that Morrowind would fall under. Granted, it's a new(er) game, but without a doubt one of the most open ended, longest, replayable and fun RPGs I've ever played.
--trb
Because there are more and more gamers as each year goes by, the winner is extremely likely to be one of the more recent games to come out, just due to the population explosion.
You can bet 8-bit games won't win this one, while something like Grand Theft Auto has a huge audience to vote for it (even if only a relatively small percent actually vote).
- Jodiamonds
spacesims: missing freespace 2
I also couldn't find descent, the best game ever
Honestly, it would have been difficult to do a worse job on the qualifying crap. How can you take a single Final Fantasy on one hand, then use the other to decide between Diablo and its own sequel? How is it that only one among the Marios or Zeldas will progress, while an Age of Empires or GTA3/VC is guaranteed qualification? How can you put Chrono Trigger, River City Ransom, and Perfect Dark in the "potpurri" category?
And considering it was mentioned on the front article page, where the hell is Starcraft?
Glog!
I bet if you took a poll of the best movies of all time of the moviegoers in the United States today, you would find very few instances of films released before 1990. You would find very few art-house releases. You would find very few releases without a lot of blood and / or action. In fact, you would probably find that if you did that movie poll on GameSpy, The Matrix would come out #1.
Why? Because it was popular.
No gamer who has played the genius that was Gunstar Heroes walked away without being impressed, yet the game sold relatively poorly. Now look where it is... losing to duck tales. Castlevania IV was revolutionary for its time, yet it is losing badly to Opera of Tragedy, a clear Super Metroid clone. Dracula X hardly registers on the scale, despite being a truly superior game overall, yet never having had a proper US release.
Pitting Perfect Dark against River City Ransom is like putting Bettie Davis as she is today on a stage and having her mocked by the Star Search talent of the moment for her wrinkles and her frail old body. Clearly River City Ransom didn't hold up very well to the rigors of aging, but in its day it could walk off with any player it introduced itself to. And it deserved to, too.
Many great games aren't on this list at all, yet were truly worthy contenders for their time. Gargoyle's Quest? Strider? Smash TV? Sega's Heavyweight Boxing? Teleroboxer? Einhander? Herizogs Wei? Rocket Knight Adventures? EWJ? Lunar? 7th Guest? Out of this World? Little Nemo? Skate or Die? Puzzlefighter? Tetris MUST be on there somewhere, but I have yet to find it. Castlevania 2 is obviously only under consideration because of Nepotism, but where then is Castlevania 64?
Obviously this poll is an unofficial popularity contest, and an unfortunately limited one at that. Why not just take every game in their index that got higher than a 7.5, and weed them out over the weeks to a true victor using a random distribution system rather than fixed competitors, with players given the option of "never played that." Only the games with the highest percentage of choices would advance, and the cycle would repeat.
That would be fair. This? This is going to be a popularity contest, with the prom queen coming out on top.
The ______ Agenda
*wavy dream sequence lines*
Tim: "Hey, Bob, would you think Casablanca would be better under Romance or Drama?"
Bob: "Casawhatta? Why're you wasting poll space with that?"
Tim: "It's a good movie, Bob."
Bob: "But it doesn't have any special effects or hot babes."
Tim: "Ingrid Bergman has her charms."
Bob: "But she ain't got DD ya-yas, does she?"
Tim: "...I hate you, Bob."
Bob: "Shut up and get back to work on the Best Evil Dead Movie category."
GTA3 and Vice city were Really Good games. Just because you may think that an 8-bit game is better back in the day doesn't mean that nothing will ever supercede it.
I can see this same logic applied to FPS games back when Half-Life came out: "Well, just because half-life came out this year it's going to get all the awards while Wolf3D is really a good game as well." Yeah! No shit newer games may get awards...could it be possible that they are...better?!?!