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Ocarina of Time — Best Game Ever?
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the best game yet made, according to a list compiled by readers and writers of the lauded British gaming magazine Edge. Their list of the hundred best games ever is top-heavy with Nintendo titles, a full five out of the top ten being released to a Nintendo platform. Obviously, this sort of thing can get contentious, and CNet's Crave blog spoke up quickly with a contrary opinion. "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is truly a masterpiece that should be thought of as one of the greatest games ever created. But to call it the greatest game of all time is a serious misstatement. Unlike Super Mario Bros., Ocarina of Time was released in an era where video games were booming and sales were on the rise. Simply put, everyone was playing video games, and the game was the best of its time. But no other game in history--Ocarina of Time included--was able to save an entire industry from almost guaranteed destruction the way Super Mario Bros. did, and it is for this reason that we should all give ol' Mario and Luigi credit where it's due." Let's hear it, then. What game deserves to top a list of the 100 best games ever made?
Psychonauts got in at 99? I would have pushed it into the top ten, but it's good to see that the game hasn't been completely ignored. I wonder how many people have actually played it.
How many millions of people still play Mario bros?
I do.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
By far the best game ever was Blazemonger. THousands of levels, nerve shattering graphics, nothing has even come close to matching its intensity.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
You can't say something is the "best" without defining what you think those qualities are that make something best.
Storyline? Gameplay? Graphics? Sounds? Replayability? Uniqueness?
Duke Nukem Forever will most certainly be the best game of all time
This is so friggin' obvious that even though the game is not yet complete, it should still easily have made #1. I demand a recount!
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The answer is yes. Ocarina of Time has every element that makes video gaming such a rewarding and engaging pasttime. It was revolutionary, and it is still fun to this day.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
There are a lot of sequels on the list, often coupled with the omission of the original(s). They omit both Doom and Half-Life, while charting Doom II at 78 and Half-Life 2 at 4. Honestly, that just doesn't make much sense.
Titles released by Nintendo usually do not have that super-duper-ultra virtual reality and graphics effects, like those for Playstation or X-Box, however, they are FUN. You don't need fancy and world-like effects with physics simulation to enjoy a title, you just need to be entertained by the plot and by the universe it immerses you. Nintendo is an odd company on that issue. I love their titles above all else.
I would not consider only Ocarina of Time as the masterpiece of Nintendo, but it is a hell of a game. Very fair list.
Best games of all time? E.T. and Custer's Revenge, of course!
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
...that the South Korean Air Force has an official Starcraft team.
I'd say that getting your videogame elevated to the status of stadium-worthy spectator sport is a pretty huge achievement. Blizzard's Starcraft is surely up there.
(This is complicated only by the fact that it has so many worthy competitors from the same era: Age of Empires is the first that comes to mind.)
It still doesn't compare to the number of hours spent playing Super Mario Bros. Counterstrike can't even come close to the number of children(boys AND girls), teens(men AND women) and parents(men AND women) who were drawn to SMB like a moth to a flame. In 15 years, I doubt you'll find many people who keep a computer around just to play Counterstrike or it's sequels.
Nintendo is arguably the only developer(hardware and software) to stay true to the original idea of Video Games as a source of fun instead of pimping it out to gain control of the home theater market. Sony is starting to lose it's way and Microsoft is Microsoft.
I am not a nintendo fanboy but I do respect the Old School.
What criteria are you using to measure greatness?
The Edge piece is quite clear that it is looking for games which are still worth playing now.
The Crave posting misunderstands this point and brings in an entirely different criterion.
I don't actually agree with either article (I don't remember Mario mattering that much in Britain, and I didn't like Ocarina of Time much), but the Crave piece just seems like pointless disagreement with the basis of the Edge article.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
Perhaps even more innovative and just as fun, but with wider appeal.
Metroid Prime and Mega Man 2 hit #2 and #3 on my personal list, respectively.
Deus Ex gets my vote.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
Kid: Mortal Kombat, on Sega Genesis, is the best video game ever.
Billy Madison: I disagree, it's a very good game, but i think Donkey Kong is the best game ever.
Kid: Donkey Kong sucks.
Billy Madison: You know something? YOU SUCK!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Look at who it's compiled by.
ALWAYS look at the source of any 'list', 'survey', or stats.
This is Edge, it's by far a console heavy magazine, they only really have PC there to try and make 'everyone' buy it.
No, they're not an unbiased source for this sort of list.
I far more trust the opinions of sites like http://gamespot.com/ or the like, as they have true PC sections.
I definitely have to agree with Starcraft. Despite being 10 years old, it still has a huge fanbase, especially in South Korea where it is played professionally and where some of the players make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. This very second over 24,000 people are playing Starcraft online.
CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
Here's what's going to happen to your post: You're going to get modded flaimbait or troll, and some people will respond and tell you that you're too young and you've never played Final Fantasy VI, then they'll mention the subpar translation and the rushed third disc... Then someone will mod you funny just because, and then someone overrated just because you've got points... But then a few people will come along and remember how they felt playing VII for the first time, when they first visited the Golden Saucer and found minigames as deep and fun as other *complete* PS1 games, the chill they got when they were under the sea in the submarine - stopping dead in your tracks as you saw Emerald Weapon lurking in the distance for the first time, and the epic theme you were treated to just sitting on the world map marveling at the most fantastic soundtrack Uematsu has ever written - and you'll be modded up.
No Magic Carpet.
No Dungeon Keeper.
No Theme Hospital.
No Syndicate.
No Populous.
Furthermore: No X-Com, No Ultima IV and No Fallout.
Almost all lists like this are complete pap, but you simply cannot omit 5 top-50 titles and 3 more that are easily top-10 contenders. Not when you're presenting a list like this with a straight face. I know we bag on gaming 'journalism' for being a joke, but this isn't even funny.
It's just kinda sad.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Mod parent up. Very insightful propagation of horsecock meme.
This list is one of the worst "Top 100" I've ever seen.
The flaws are many and frequent.
How could you have a top 100 list of games that completely excludes ANY Bioware or Black Isle Studios games? On top of that, there's no homage to some clear classics and pioneers of gaming, such as Zork, or Hero Quest. Only a brief mention is made for Monkey Island.
The fact that the vast majority of the games on the list were made after 2000 says a bit.
Nethack, because it used punctuation.
Half-Life is too short. Like the games it build on (Doom and Quake), it's a relatively short adventure. Impressive, yes, but short. I doubt many people spent months of actual playing time with it -- they either completed it, and spent a few hours more fooling around, or they gave up.
For finite games, I would think the original Tomb Raider has racked up way more man hours of play time, not to say anything about Super Mario, and, yes, Zelda.
For open-ended games, I can't think of many that were more addictive than Elite. And yes, that is old school. If you missed it the first time around, too bad - it won't appeal to those who think anisotropic filtering makes a difference. It's wireframes, and your imagination does all the shading much better than any graphics card can.
Anyhow, it's hard to say what the best game of all times is. Di gustibus non disputandum est, and all that. What's clearer is the Biggest Flop of all time. It has to be Daitakana.
*Art, going back to play "A Mind Forever Voyaging"...
Um, dude. Solitaire. Win 3.11 edition. Before they ruined it with fancy graphics. Back when it was pure.
A game populated (seemingly) exclusively by teenage boys with unbearably high pitched voices who use more profanity and racial epithets than a clan rally? best game ever? Clearly.
I don't know how popular this was outside the US but Elite will definitely get my vote for most game play ever per Kb of memory. The old BBC cassette version packed it all into less than 32Kb of memory via creative use of the built in random number generator. I've never yet seen a game that was so far ahead of the competition.
Great, so I spend two consecutive days at work actually doing work and I miss some sort of horsecock Slashdot inside joke? My timing blows horsecock.
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
Top 100 lists are something that are pretty open to criticism. Nobody's top 100 is the same, nor should they be. However, this particular list fails to mention an unsettlingly large number of the "obligatories" that all top 100 lists should have at least a few of. While this is evidence that the author didn't just troll other top 100 lists and cherry pick the titles he had played, it's also evidence that his gaming experience has some rather gaping holes.
:p I'll leave it to others to list off other "obligatories".
Obligatories from the RPG category:
- *Anything* from the Baldur's Gate series?
- Planescape: Torment?
- Knights of the Old Republic?
- Dragon Warrior?
From Strategy:
- Some of the Civ sequels show up, but where's the original?
- Master of Orion?
Other must-haves in any top 100:
- Tie Fighter
- Privateer, or at least *something* from the Wing Commander world?
- Grim Fandango? (The list is in dire need of more classic lucasarts adventure games)
There are plenty more, but this is the point at which I get lazy.
Isn't nitpicking top 100's fun on a slow news day?
Which is well and good for people who like those kinds of games, but some of us like games to be sophisticated simulations that give a sense of immersion as if we are actually in a new environment. Back in the 90s this used to be called Virtual Reality, or Quake :) Currently such games are often still labelled FPSs or flight sims and for that no console even now comes close to a PC.
And please don't bring out the old strawman that every FPS player is a pimply case-modding adrenaline junkie. You may as well say that everyone who drives a decent car is a boy racer.
Sure I like the odd 1992-era candyland bubblegum game from time to time and that's when I break out my console, but for my style of serious gaming let's just say I'm apparently not Nintendo's target market.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Freed from the constraint of costing money, this game obviously floats to the top.
I'm not talking about Hindenburg-esque floating, either. I'm talking panzerfausts flying straight up until they explode at the edge of the universe. I'm talking cosmic panzerfaustage tearing space & time a new asshole. I'm talking about the best fucking shit you've ever turded out your bunghole after eating spicy food and then some. A veritable big bang of gaming ferocity and artillery raining down upon gibbing newbies.
Two!
without question half-life. It was the first game to have mod tools for the fans that were freely available as well as an actual effort behind them to ENCOURAGE mod-making, it was the first to make such a business model succeed on a massive scale, and encouraged the proliferation of community involvement in games, eventually resulting in what some would call "Web 2.0".
Nothing in the history of gaming has impacted the WORLD in the way that it did, and for that reason I'll say that it was the best game ever.
You may claim that other games did it better, I might even yield to the idea that the BUILD engine with Duke 3D should have the title, or maybe even quake or quake 2, but those games didn't succeed in luring in the mod community and fostering its growth as well as Valve did with Half-Life. The mod community for Quake 2 seemed to be just a thing that popped up around the game, but Half-Life actually welcomed it in and put effort into it.
This truly was the beginning of the real internet we know today, and marked the point in history where the community surrounding a game became just as important as the game itself.
I cast my vote for Half-Life, not any Zelda game. While Ocarina of Time was exceptionally well made, and possibly flawless, it IS possible to do more. And many games have.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Nethack. I'm still playing the DOS version. :)
And I'm a female
I've played most of the other zeldas, and I've bought Link to the Past at least four times. I'm a huge Zelda fan, and I was playing Twilight Princess within 3 hours of its release...
But I can't get past the first area in Ocarina of Time. I've tried, many times. I've seen the game played through (My brother loves it + Speedruns), so I know how good it is and how great a game it is, but I cannot get over the framerate in the first scene.
I don't know how Nintendo dropped the ball on this one. A little slowdown is acceptable during a large boss battle where there's hundreds of explosions and enemies going every which way, but in THE FIRST ZONE? A zone with, let's count them, ZERO enemies? (One if you use the starfox cheat, but that's it)
It just tells me it's only going to get worse from there.
But all this "Best Game Ever!" publicity is great, really. Maybe it'll inspire Nintendo to remake the game, on the Wii...
I respond to your sigs
You mean you play a female character, right sir?
If you are to judge a game on how many hours are played, you shouldn't forget Starcraft. That game is even older.
We know you're fat, but you still don't count as an entire million of people.
With the Wii, Nintendo may be getting closer to VR than any other game system ever has. Remember VR Headsets, Force feedback controls, and all those other things that you never see around anymore? Well I for one think the Wiimote is the best progression we have towards actual VR. The fact that you can swing it like a golf club, or a tennis racket, or a baseball bat, and have it do the same thing on the screen is kind of exactly what people looking for VR have been dreaming of for a long time. It's not much of VR if you're just pushing a bunch of buttons but you happen to have a set of VR goggles.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Walk up to 100 random people on the street, and ask them if they've heard of a video game, called Counterstrike. And if they have heard of it, have they played it. Now ask the same about Mario. Seriously, I know that Counterstrike is a good game, but apart from the people who do play it, most people have never even heard of it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The Angels have the Phone Box
Mea Culpa. You're absolutely more pretentious than me! :-)
I did? I thought I was just clueless about an existing lame Slashdot inside joke. Now I'm clueless about my own lame Slashdot joke? Dammit.
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
Precisely what I was thinking. FPS enthusiasts usually come in two types: the graphics whore, and now the Drunk Frat Guy who discovered deathmatch with Halo and thinks Microsoft invented the FPS. The Trouble is, both of these are tiny niche markets, yet they dominate the direction of the industry, that is, if you listen to the hype machine and ignore who's raking in the sales and profits. I wish the gaming industry would discover the long tail theory. There's plenty of ready made markets that could support titles in the range of $1million to $5million in development costs, and they go completely ignored. If some companies would start producing really slick, well polished, 2D Adventure, RPG, and Strategy games, they would probably meet with a lot of success without much outlay.
Am I the only one who finds it funny that Duke Nukem Forever is abbreviated to 'DNF', which in racing terms means 'Did Not Finish'?
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Er, three sire.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."