When talking about the best games of all time people generally mention Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario 64, Halo 3, The Last of Us, Nier Automata, etc. , but dismiss other great games.
What games do you think are unfairly forgotten from this conversation?
Personally I think the original Dead Rising, Fable: The Lost Chapters, Dragon’s Dogma: The Dark Arisen and Lunar: Eternal Blue should be talked as some of the best games of all time. They’re such great and unique games!
One title that comes to mind is Anachronox. A western rpg with a really good story, interesting characters (one of your companions is an entire planet shrinked down to human size), fun humor and a cliffhanger that never got resolved.
I really wish they made a part 2 but I know it will never happen.
It was a mix of both, the battle system was definitely like a JRPG that’s true.
Come to think of it, I’m not an expert on JRPG’s, so maybe it is? :) What else defines a JRPG?
Definitions will vary from person to person, and plenty of games in each camp will represent some but not all of their defining characteristics, but you’ll see some common themes. Historically, I’ve also preferred western RPGs by a wide margin, so that might color some of my definitions below. Also, both of these branches in RPGs had the same starting reference of D&D, and then a multi-decade game of whisper down the lane led to them diverging more and more.
Western RPGs:
character creation, choosing from classes that you’ll often see represented by other NPCs
allocating attribute points, both at character creation and as you level up, that govern other things about your character
generally flatter power progression (you might do hundreds more damage at the end of the game than you do at the beginning, but not hundreds of thousands more damage)
in attempts to recreate the tabletop experience, will often times allow for outside-the-box solutions to problems besides combat as well as choices that affect the world state
JRPGs:
usually a finite cast of characters that level up more or less only in one way, but you might have a secondary system for them to customize with equipment beyond weapons and armor
combat usually doesn’t involve positioning on something like a tactical map but rather a line of combatants on each side of the screen
magic and abilities are more often limited by a magic points resource instead of a rest system
dialogue with NPCs tends to be more limited in choices, telling a more linear narrative
I’ll be honest, trying to differentiate these two with a list of bullet points was harder than I thought it would be to articulate. I’m almost more inclined to just say “I know it when I see it”, haha. But for some points of reference, I’d say Baldur’s Gate 3, Pillars of Eternity, and The Witcher 3 are western RPGs; Final Fantasy VII, Persona 5, and Pokemon are JRPGs; Sea of Stars is a JRPG that isn’t made by a Japanese developer; and while also an action game, Dark Souls is closer to being a western RPG than a JRPG.
I think of it as a branching development becoming different design sensibilities. CRPGs influenced the game Dragon Quest, but JRPGS after DQ were influenced specifically by DQ and the games inspired from it such as the original Final Fantasy. CRPGS, MUDS, Dnd games, and Ultima became the basis for the Western sensibility which initially developed separately from the Dragon Quest branch (although there is still some crossover). This being the case, nowadays each region can make either Western RPGS or JRPGS because we all have pretty easy access to a lot of each others’ games and developers can make the games they prefer to make influenced by what they like regardless of its origin.
Undertale is a JRPG from the West. The maker of the game began making Rom hacks for Earthbound, a JRPG, and used the skills they learned doing that do create their own game. Dragon Quest>Earthbound>Undertale is pure JRPG. Other examples I can think of are messier, but that’s kind of the point.
Great, unique, iconic, still fun to play. Its biggest achievement: I have brought a lot of people into the hobby by making them play this as their first video game and there wasn’t a single one not having fun. Tower defense is as a whole an underrated genre if we talk about the best games of all time. It also is a game that offers achievements that add a lot to the gameplay by challenging you to change your tactics.
They of course had to make the second one mobile only and on top ruin it with microtransactions. :( Greed is why we can’t have nice things.
Always ready to bump my favorite game of all time, but honestly I feel this is quite a popular opinion (compared to some of the games in OP’s list that are really overlooked on these discussions of best games ever).
But still, what an incredible experience, the OST for outer Wilds was my fourth most listened to on last year’s Spotify Wrapped :)
For the people who do find out about it and it hooks them enough sure, it’s not really forgotten or underrated. But I still think it’s kinda obscure / not well known?
Yeah, it may not be as popular as Mario or Zelda, but I wouldn’t say it’s “unfairly forgotten”. People who have played the game tend to be pretty vocal about it. And justifiably so, I’ve never had a comparable experience in another game. I wish I could forget about it and play it again.
I started playing the Outer Worlds thinking I had simply misheard the name Outer Wilds and found myself very confused but still kept trudging on. Thank you for bringing some sanity into my life; Wilds seems like the game I wanted to play the whole time, not Worlds. I’ll see how chaotic I can fuck out Worlds before I ditch it for Wilds.
Basically everything old. There’s such massive recency bias in game discussions. It’s very much an explicit marketing strategy to promote the new thing as more everything but somehow it’s infected almost all discussions.
Sure ok, playing an old game requires a bit more investment and effort than watching an old film or even reading an old book but mostly it’s just about lack of familiarity. Especially outside of fps style games where I’ll admit prior to halo 1 things were pretty all over the shop many older games are still approachable.
Coupled with the general dismissal of strategy and simulation genres (which were comparatively bigger in the past) and many things get forgotten outside of cult classic status.
If I’m rattling down a list of my favorite games ever, they’re heavily concentrated in the last decade, with a couple of stragglers from earlier than that. I don’t think that’s recency bias; I think developers have just, in general, gotten better at honing in on what people like, especially in the age of rapid patching. There’s plenty of negative that comes along with this too, but for every game like Diablo IV that patches out builds because they were too much fun and impacted their live service retention rate, there are plenty of games coming out of early access after learning what worked and didn’t work with their players, much more rapidly than the old days of iterating on yearly sequels.
Old is relative though. Age doesn’t hit movies or books nearly as hard as it does to games and gameplay mechanics, and where exactly that acceptable limit happens to be differ for each individual - with no doubt a large correlation based on your age.
It’s just really hard to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone who didn’t grow up with them and doesn’t have the appreciation and nostalgia of those times. Heck, back when I was a kid with my PSX, anything on the NES felt like an ancient unplayable relic.
Idk, it’s pretty difficult to get my peers to check out black and white film, let alone silent, and yet most enjoy what they see.
I came to gaming after the NES (although I was alive at the time) and have recently been emulating games and have been surprised by how good some are.
There are still modern games that expect you to read a manual before playing, there are still modern games where it takes about 2 hours to learn the UI. There are older games with 3 page manuals and simple controls too.
You’ve got to remember you’re not immune to marketing tactics either. Like part of the resistance to checking out older stuff has been placed in us all by gaming companies training us to interpret stuff like low framerate as bad, or controls that aren’t fluid as bad.
Best game doesn’t necessarily mean most enjoyable now, or even an enjoyable experience at all. Some of the greatest art is difficult, unpleasant, and challenging. Some of the greatest video games are those that set trends, or do something unique despite rough edges, or are even straight up hostile to their player.
When it comes to arcade racers people seem to either forget or just don’t know about trackmania games. They aren’t perfect by any means but id certainly consider them among the best
Trackmania Nations has to be the peak of the series. One aspect that amazes me is that it works equally well with every input method out there. I’ve played this with a keyboard, joystick, gamepad and even steering wheel (although admittedly one without force feedback).
Battlefield 1942. Vehicle combat, area-control mechanics, “realistic” shooter gameplay (before that term became an obscene word), and class-based team mechanics had all been invented before, but the way it brought them together and the degree to which it polished them to arrive at something fun as hell was nothing less than revolutionary at the time. It was so groundbreaking that (for better or worse) it basically spawned the “AAA WW2 game” genre that then lasted for decades.
Then, the sequels were so consistently mediocre that the original was more or less erased from history.
Master of Magic. I know strategy isn’t everyone’s thing and turn based isn’t either and high fantasy isn’t usually strategy staple, but it’s damn near perfect in execution. There are some minor nitpicks, but the game is definitely a 9/10*s. None of the spiritual successors have ever been so well executed. They always fall flat somewhere.
The best games of all time are: Go, Soccer, Chess, Poker, Tetris… they’ve stood the proof of time over and over again (respectively: 4000, 2300, 1400, 200, 40 years).
A honorable mention should go to Doom, as in the “can it run Doom?” meme, but it’s anyone’s guess whether it will stand for another 30 years.
All the likes of Zelda, Mario, Halo, Pokemon, etc. are going to get forgotten as soon as the last generation playing the last re-release as a kid, grows out of time to play it actively, and as servers for the multiplayer versions get shut down.
Chess and Go are so old, I’m surprised that the best players in the world don’t already know every possible move to the point that the games are decided after both players make a single move.
They have an exponential number of valid positions, that happen to surpass human abilities to abstract, memorize, and predict.
Chess is estimated to have 10⁴⁰ valid moves, which means not even everyone playing chess throughout all of history, have explored all of them. Like, a billion people playing 1 distinct move a second for 1400 years, would only reach about 10²⁰ moves.
They still can be trained, meaning one person can be way better than another… but a computer trained even more, can be even better… and yet the games surpass even current computers abilities to explore the full possibility space. Maybe quantum computers will be able to do that.
Fun fact, mostly unrelated but something in your message reminded me: I once played against a guy at a Go club, and we had an enjoyable game but he beat me. He wanted to talk to me about the game afterwards, and he started replaying the game for me from memory so he could make commentary. He replayed a pretty decent chunk of the beginning; I honestly don’t remember but I think around the first 25-30 moves of the game.
I later learned he was the visiting Go person who was just stopping by the club for social reasons but could demolish anyone. He was incredibly kind and polite.
Yeah, back in chess club at school, we also got a visit from the local (future) GM as a treat on one of the last days. He took us at something like 15 simultaneous games at once… and beat us all.
Go is slightly different; it only has one piece type, the rules are much simpler than chess, the board is much larger but with 8-fold symmetry, so the first 20-30 moves are likely to fall into some “basic” patterns in some of the octants. By comparison, the patterns in chess get hard to manage after just 10 moves, while Go pros may plan even 100 moves ahead. Where Go gets really complex, is when the patterns start meeting, and the complexity tends towards the 10¹⁷⁰ possible moves, way more than the 10⁴⁰ practical ones in chess.
All the likes of Zelda, Mario, Halo, Pokemon, etc. are going to get forgotten
I disagree. The reason being that video games and gaming of this caliber are completely unheard of in all of human history. We’ve come further in gaming tech over the last couple decades than the grand majority of all humans that have ever existed could even dream.
That being said, as long as emulation exists, there will be fans of big ips. The problem with saying “it’ll get forgotten as soon as the last person stops playing” is that the specific circumstance of modern gaming is unprecedented. People are still out there emulating games that came out in the 80’s. There’s really no rule saying this kind of technology won’t last hundreds or thousands of years like more classical games do.
Don’t get me wrong, I also like TotK and BG3 and just replayed Outer Worlds (Fallout in spaaaace) and love me some “mainstream” games. But I think people unfairly exclude many genres when making these sorts of lists. E.g.: The Sims, Civ5, Minecraft, Pokemon, and many others that sold like hotcakes and have been extremely good games.
Personally, I’m always biased towards 4X, RTS, and similar, and find it strange they’re always overlooked. Europa Universalis 4 is ten years old and still getting DLC and updates – how many people must have played that game over ten years for the studio to justify that continued investment?
Strategy games are never featured outside maybe a grudging nod to StarCraft or Warcraft 3. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a list that mentions a 4X, a sim, or a non-Blizzard RTS. The closest you’ll usually see is someone listing Black & White.
Game journalists have to bounce between games as a job, so it sort of makes sense that the majority of them go for linear, shorter RPGs, and thus over-fixate on them.
I think the actual reason is that they only have a limited presence on consoles, which is what the majority of the English-speaking discourse on games is focused on. The genre also fizzled out in the early 2000s, which doesn’t help.
IMO, it’s hard to claim best game of all time unless it ages well, and not just some unique gimmick the game provided at the time.
Ie, I don’t like Tetris but for sure it is one of the best game of all time.
However, if what you mean is good games that somewhat get outshined by others or lacks media attentions, then I agree. There are plenty of other games, and I think people would have bias toward their favorite genre/type.
“Best” and “most important” are also two very different things.
Like tetris, pong, doom and some other trail blazers might not be the kind of long-term engaging many people would think of when coming up with best games. But their impact and long term effects on the tech, the market or design of games is impossible to ignore.
that’s why I argue you can’t put “best” and “all time” together. If the title says “best game of their time but got snubbed by medias” then I might have a couple of my own to provide as example.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Okami featured in one of these lists. Just to be sure I looked up some of Polygon’s and even in their Top 500, its not there, which is kinda depressing?
I’m not a fan of Zelda games - or most Nintendo games - but I do love when people take inspiration from them and make their own thing - Tchia, Darksiders, Oceanhorn, Tunic, and Ittle Dew all come to mind just as Zelda ‘clones’ - and I think there’s no higher example of that than Okami, a game that takes its inspiration and surpasses it in every way. The graphics were at the time mindblowing(frankly, still are), with its japanese classic art style cel shading, the soundtrack is phenomenal and Amaterasu has an excellent mobility, zipping across battlefields or simply open areas with easy and fluidity. The paintbrush is a stellar tool, both to use in puzzles and in combat, and the game boasts a charming cast of characters and engaging story. Probably the saddest tidbit about it is that it was also Clover’s farewell game, after its previous, unfairly lambasted, gem God Hand and two attempts at the beat’em up Viewtiful Joe series.
Nowadays the Zelda series has gotten a whole different kickstart with its open-world entries, burying these inspirations even further, but I still believe Okami easily stands atop most entries of that series, and on its own as well.
Okami is “Zelda-like” in its kind of medieval fantasy, action-adventure presentation, and in the way towns and NPCs feel, and perhaps in some of its bosses, but really it’s not all that much like a Zelda game. Okami is an quite standard all-ages real-time-battles RPG, whereas Zelda usually have no RPG mechanics - usually Zelda enemies are defeated in just one or two hits, with little or no stats, points or inventory. Zelda games usually have a lot of focus on puzzles and dungeons, or dungeon-like outdoor areas, whereas Okami has no puzzles. On the other hand Okami is obviously very steeped in (often silly or humorous) Japanese folklore, whereas Zelda is very much less wacky and often a little more emotional and dramatic, and has its own bespoke theming.
I liked Okami but I felt it was paced really quite slowly, and the battles/enemies were a little too RPG-like for my taste, as in taking quite a lot of real time for even weak enemies. I felt it lacked the mechanical polish that Zelda usually does: I felt generally the movement was a little slow and difficult (except in very open areas) and most disappointing of all was the frankly poor recognition of what brush move I’m drawing.
Okami has a fair amount of puzzles, they’re just mostly smaller to show the wider range of mechanics. Get ball into cup, bring vines to location, memorize dots on a page Simon says style. They’re ultimately not too different from a puzzle you might encounter in something like A Link to the Past, or Breath of the Wild. Not difficult enough to be integral but enough to test your understanding of the game mechanics and later reward you for wit. Some of them also become very important for boss battles or speeding up fights with enemies.
Personally I never had an issue with brush move recognition, but I played both the PS2 and Wii versions and use a Steam Controller for PC which is the closest to the Wii’s. Of all of them, analog sticks are probably the slowest, but keyboard control is pretty clunky for movement since it was intended for controllers. Combat on the Wii was something else entirely, it was genuinely meant for that I think as it has the blended analog stick + high speed but accurate input. For today, mouse input is very good as a very light trackball but so-so for a regular mouse - so the Steam Controller (or Deck these days) is a really good medium, or maybe the PS5 controller if you can use its middle touch thing somehow.
I’d say the only complaint I could make about the game is its pacing of the story. In terms of gameplay however, you take it at the pace you want to take it at. Don’t want to fight? Avoid the scrolls. But fighting can be so fast, over in just a few inputs. Only a couple seconds so sometimes the winning battle screens themselves feel like they take longer (but they can be skipped). The isometric style during the battle rewards spacing and the byproduct is the difference in how the movement feels - it also plays into Capcom’s general affinity for artificial difficulty, something like restrictions on camera movements and animation delays for Resident Evil and Monster Hunter. It’s asking how creative can you get in this situation with these limitations?
I think the best analogy for battles with this in mind is to imagine each moment you freeze as the perfect image captured by an artist, but that can only happen when the demons are visible to the human (after Ammy stuns them). With that in mind you stun all the enemies then finish them in one fell swoop!
The game does have some pacing issues in the early game that could have been fixed by allowing to speed up if not skip cutscenes, but otherwise overall I think it nails the widening world adventure game for encouraging the player to really engage with the game engine and their wits to progress forward. I also think the early pacing does a lot for some of the revealing acts of the game, if it was fast and punchy the whole time then later elements like the events of the Ghost Ship of Heaven’s Gate would be less impactful than they are. The stakes start out low as you familiarize yourself and they ramp up as you hit act 2. From there it’s actually pretty easy to skip a lot of side missions as it streamlines you from there, unlike the early game where it can be harder to tell which quests main and side missions. Much like Twilight Princess where in the mid-late game it’s really encouraging you to continue forward but if you take some time to explore you get experiences you’d have missed - although granted Okami is a little less forgiving with the gifts, with the 99 beads being the prelude to korok seeds I swear…
Anyway lol, tl;Dr I agree about the pacing although I think it’s intentionally self indulgent on the story and the payoff is worth it and while the RPG elements you mentioned for battles are accurate, I would say that the speed and movement are more about spacing and timing. If you know the weak spot and the finisher, then each monster can be dealt with in 2 strokes, and placed well that can be the end of the fight right there.
Also not trying to discount your experience, just adding my perspective :)
Toribash is quite possibly the best competitive fighting game I have ever played due to it’s unique method of controlling your actions. It’s almost entirely unheard of tho.
Toribash is an indie classic. It was mentioned fairly often among indie fans around the time of Cave Story’s rise. But back then there weren’t so many indie fans.
It’s kinda insane how much people dismiss “System Shock.” It’s a serious bedrock of a title, so much of what we take as a given of games was really pioneered by LookingGlass. I think a big chunk of that was due to the gameplay not really holding up to modern times, but hopefully now that Nightdive’s remaster is out, more people can experience it and realize just how much of the game holds up.
Probably a close second is the original “Half-Life”, in terms of really cementing the story-based first person shooter, but I don’t think anyone is going to call Half-Life snubbed.
I loved the first level of System Shock, now that it’s been modernized. Then I got to the second level, and resources were no longer scarce, and it didn’t appear to be shaking up the formula from level to level, so now it feels like Doom with an inventory system rather than the games that took inspiration from System Shock.
Half-Life is still pretty great, but as far as organically teaching the player, it’s far behind even its own sequel. There are a lot of cheap deaths that you just have to save scum your way through. My go-to example is that when Half-Life 1 introduces a sniper enemy, you see a hole in the wall that could look like a sniper’s nest if I told you that they existed in the game and if you squint at it a little bit, so you just get shot in the back. In Half-Life 2, you emerge from Ravenholm, and a combine sniper with a laser sight is clearly trained on some escaping zombies, so that you know that snipers in sniper’s nests are now a thing you’ll have to contend with, and you get to observe it safely once before dealing with them in the game. That kind of thing. 90s PC games seemed to be worse at this than their successors and console games at the time.
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One title that comes to mind is Anachronox. A western rpg with a really good story, interesting characters (one of your companions is an entire planet shrinked down to human size), fun humor and a cliffhanger that never got resolved.
I really wish they made a part 2 but I know it will never happen.
It’s an RPG made in the west, but I’ve always heard that it was notable for being a JRPG.
It was a mix of both, the battle system was definitely like a JRPG that’s true.
Come to think of it, I’m not an expert on JRPG’s, so maybe it is? :) What else defines a JRPG?
Definitions will vary from person to person, and plenty of games in each camp will represent some but not all of their defining characteristics, but you’ll see some common themes. Historically, I’ve also preferred western RPGs by a wide margin, so that might color some of my definitions below. Also, both of these branches in RPGs had the same starting reference of D&D, and then a multi-decade game of whisper down the lane led to them diverging more and more.
Western RPGs:
JRPGs:
I’ll be honest, trying to differentiate these two with a list of bullet points was harder than I thought it would be to articulate. I’m almost more inclined to just say “I know it when I see it”, haha. But for some points of reference, I’d say Baldur’s Gate 3, Pillars of Eternity, and The Witcher 3 are western RPGs; Final Fantasy VII, Persona 5, and Pokemon are JRPGs; Sea of Stars is a JRPG that isn’t made by a Japanese developer; and while also an action game, Dark Souls is closer to being a western RPG than a JRPG.
I think of it as a branching development becoming different design sensibilities. CRPGs influenced the game Dragon Quest, but JRPGS after DQ were influenced specifically by DQ and the games inspired from it such as the original Final Fantasy. CRPGS, MUDS, Dnd games, and Ultima became the basis for the Western sensibility which initially developed separately from the Dragon Quest branch (although there is still some crossover). This being the case, nowadays each region can make either Western RPGS or JRPGS because we all have pretty easy access to a lot of each others’ games and developers can make the games they prefer to make influenced by what they like regardless of its origin.
Undertale is a JRPG from the West. The maker of the game began making Rom hacks for Earthbound, a JRPG, and used the skills they learned doing that do create their own game. Dragon Quest>Earthbound>Undertale is pure JRPG. Other examples I can think of are messier, but that’s kind of the point.
When you put it like that I suppose Anachronox is definitely more of a JRPG. Either way, it’s a really good game :)
Thank you for your thorough explanation!
Plants vs Zombies on PC.
Great, unique, iconic, still fun to play. Its biggest achievement: I have brought a lot of people into the hobby by making them play this as their first video game and there wasn’t a single one not having fun. Tower defense is as a whole an underrated genre if we talk about the best games of all time. It also is a game that offers achievements that add a lot to the gameplay by challenging you to change your tactics.
They of course had to make the second one mobile only and on top ruin it with microtransactions. :( Greed is why we can’t have nice things.
It just occurred to me that Death Really (1995) would deserve to be talked about as well, it’s just an incredible little game.
Where are my Outer Wilds boys at?
Not a boy but I’m fucking HERE for Outer Wilds. And TUNIC, in the same vein.
Always ready to bump my favorite game of all time, but honestly I feel this is quite a popular opinion (compared to some of the games in OP’s list that are really overlooked on these discussions of best games ever).
But still, what an incredible experience, the OST for outer Wilds was my fourth most listened to on last year’s Spotify Wrapped :)
Thanks for reminding me!
I’m not sure how this compares to Spotify but I still feel pretty good about this one
For the people who do find out about it and it hooks them enough sure, it’s not really forgotten or underrated. But I still think it’s kinda obscure / not well known?
Yeah, it may not be as popular as Mario or Zelda, but I wouldn’t say it’s “unfairly forgotten”. People who have played the game tend to be pretty vocal about it. And justifiably so, I’ve never had a comparable experience in another game. I wish I could forget about it and play it again.
I started playing the Outer Worlds thinking I had simply misheard the name Outer Wilds and found myself very confused but still kept trudging on. Thank you for bringing some sanity into my life; Wilds seems like the game I wanted to play the whole time, not Worlds. I’ll see how chaotic I can fuck out Worlds before I ditch it for Wilds.
Basically everything old. There’s such massive recency bias in game discussions. It’s very much an explicit marketing strategy to promote the new thing as more everything but somehow it’s infected almost all discussions.
Sure ok, playing an old game requires a bit more investment and effort than watching an old film or even reading an old book but mostly it’s just about lack of familiarity. Especially outside of fps style games where I’ll admit prior to halo 1 things were pretty all over the shop many older games are still approachable.
Coupled with the general dismissal of strategy and simulation genres (which were comparatively bigger in the past) and many things get forgotten outside of cult classic status.
If I’m rattling down a list of my favorite games ever, they’re heavily concentrated in the last decade, with a couple of stragglers from earlier than that. I don’t think that’s recency bias; I think developers have just, in general, gotten better at honing in on what people like, especially in the age of rapid patching. There’s plenty of negative that comes along with this too, but for every game like Diablo IV that patches out builds because they were too much fun and impacted their live service retention rate, there are plenty of games coming out of early access after learning what worked and didn’t work with their players, much more rapidly than the old days of iterating on yearly sequels.
Old is relative though. Age doesn’t hit movies or books nearly as hard as it does to games and gameplay mechanics, and where exactly that acceptable limit happens to be differ for each individual - with no doubt a large correlation based on your age.
It’s just really hard to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone who didn’t grow up with them and doesn’t have the appreciation and nostalgia of those times. Heck, back when I was a kid with my PSX, anything on the NES felt like an ancient unplayable relic.
Idk, it’s pretty difficult to get my peers to check out black and white film, let alone silent, and yet most enjoy what they see.
I came to gaming after the NES (although I was alive at the time) and have recently been emulating games and have been surprised by how good some are.
There are still modern games that expect you to read a manual before playing, there are still modern games where it takes about 2 hours to learn the UI. There are older games with 3 page manuals and simple controls too.
You’ve got to remember you’re not immune to marketing tactics either. Like part of the resistance to checking out older stuff has been placed in us all by gaming companies training us to interpret stuff like low framerate as bad, or controls that aren’t fluid as bad.
Best game doesn’t necessarily mean most enjoyable now, or even an enjoyable experience at all. Some of the greatest art is difficult, unpleasant, and challenging. Some of the greatest video games are those that set trends, or do something unique despite rough edges, or are even straight up hostile to their player.
When it comes to arcade racers people seem to either forget or just don’t know about trackmania games. They aren’t perfect by any means but id certainly consider them among the best
Trackmania Nations has to be the peak of the series. One aspect that amazes me is that it works equally well with every input method out there. I’ve played this with a keyboard, joystick, gamepad and even steering wheel (although admittedly one without force feedback).
Portal, Minecraft, Stardew Valley are just some you haven’t mentioned.
SDV hardly gets snubbed as one of the best games of all time. It’s constantly in the top sellers. I say this as a loving fan.
Battlefield 1942. Vehicle combat, area-control mechanics, “realistic” shooter gameplay (before that term became an obscene word), and class-based team mechanics had all been invented before, but the way it brought them together and the degree to which it polished them to arrive at something fun as hell was nothing less than revolutionary at the time. It was so groundbreaking that (for better or worse) it basically spawned the “AAA WW2 game” genre that then lasted for decades.
Then, the sequels were so consistently mediocre that the original was more or less erased from history.
I will not have you slander Battlefield Vietnam like this. I spent countless hours on a “heliwars” server after school as a kid.
Master of Magic. I know strategy isn’t everyone’s thing and turn based isn’t either and high fantasy isn’t usually strategy staple, but it’s damn near perfect in execution. There are some minor nitpicks, but the game is definitely a 9/10*s. None of the spiritual successors have ever been so well executed. They always fall flat somewhere.
The best games of all time are: Go, Soccer, Chess, Poker, Tetris… they’ve stood the proof of time over and over again (respectively: 4000, 2300, 1400, 200, 40 years).
A honorable mention should go to Doom, as in the “can it run Doom?” meme, but it’s anyone’s guess whether it will stand for another 30 years.
All the likes of Zelda, Mario, Halo, Pokemon, etc. are going to get forgotten as soon as the last generation playing the last re-release as a kid, grows out of time to play it actively, and as servers for the multiplayer versions get shut down.
Doom will last at least until people born in the 80s die
Chess and Go are so old, I’m surprised that the best players in the world don’t already know every possible move to the point that the games are decided after both players make a single move.
They have an exponential number of valid positions, that happen to surpass human abilities to abstract, memorize, and predict.
Chess is estimated to have 10⁴⁰ valid moves, which means not even everyone playing chess throughout all of history, have explored all of them. Like, a billion people playing 1 distinct move a second for 1400 years, would only reach about 10²⁰ moves.
They still can be trained, meaning one person can be way better than another… but a computer trained even more, can be even better… and yet the games surpass even current computers abilities to explore the full possibility space. Maybe quantum computers will be able to do that.
Fun fact, mostly unrelated but something in your message reminded me: I once played against a guy at a Go club, and we had an enjoyable game but he beat me. He wanted to talk to me about the game afterwards, and he started replaying the game for me from memory so he could make commentary. He replayed a pretty decent chunk of the beginning; I honestly don’t remember but I think around the first 25-30 moves of the game.
I later learned he was the visiting Go person who was just stopping by the club for social reasons but could demolish anyone. He was incredibly kind and polite.
Yeah, back in chess club at school, we also got a visit from the local (future) GM as a treat on one of the last days. He took us at something like 15 simultaneous games at once… and beat us all.
Go is slightly different; it only has one piece type, the rules are much simpler than chess, the board is much larger but with 8-fold symmetry, so the first 20-30 moves are likely to fall into some “basic” patterns in some of the octants. By comparison, the patterns in chess get hard to manage after just 10 moves, while Go pros may plan even 100 moves ahead. Where Go gets really complex, is when the patterns start meeting, and the complexity tends towards the 10¹⁷⁰ possible moves, way more than the 10⁴⁰ practical ones in chess.
I disagree. The reason being that video games and gaming of this caliber are completely unheard of in all of human history. We’ve come further in gaming tech over the last couple decades than the grand majority of all humans that have ever existed could even dream.
That being said, as long as emulation exists, there will be fans of big ips. The problem with saying “it’ll get forgotten as soon as the last person stops playing” is that the specific circumstance of modern gaming is unprecedented. People are still out there emulating games that came out in the 80’s. There’s really no rule saying this kind of technology won’t last hundreds or thousands of years like more classical games do.
Don’t get me wrong, I also like TotK and BG3 and just replayed Outer Worlds (Fallout in spaaaace) and love me some “mainstream” games. But I think people unfairly exclude many genres when making these sorts of lists. E.g.: The Sims, Civ5, Minecraft, Pokemon, and many others that sold like hotcakes and have been extremely good games.
Personally, I’m always biased towards 4X, RTS, and similar, and find it strange they’re always overlooked. Europa Universalis 4 is ten years old and still getting DLC and updates – how many people must have played that game over ten years for the studio to justify that continued investment?
It’s hard to understate the effect Minecraft has had on me.
It got me into programming and modding games. It is such a treasure to me.
Sins of a Solar Empire is one of my all time favorites.
Strategy games are never featured outside maybe a grudging nod to StarCraft or Warcraft 3. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a list that mentions a 4X, a sim, or a non-Blizzard RTS. The closest you’ll usually see is someone listing Black & White.
Game journalists have to bounce between games as a job, so it sort of makes sense that the majority of them go for linear, shorter RPGs, and thus over-fixate on them.
I think the actual reason is that they only have a limited presence on consoles, which is what the majority of the English-speaking discourse on games is focused on. The genre also fizzled out in the early 2000s, which doesn’t help.
Even on PC-focused publications like PCG, this same trend holds true.
And RTS may have fizzled out, but strategy did not. XCOM2, Stellaris, Crusader Kings, etc, all big recent-ish games.
IMO, it’s hard to claim best game of all time unless it ages well, and not just some unique gimmick the game provided at the time.
Ie, I don’t like Tetris but for sure it is one of the best game of all time.
However, if what you mean is good games that somewhat get outshined by others or lacks media attentions, then I agree. There are plenty of other games, and I think people would have bias toward their favorite genre/type.
“Best” and “most important” are also two very different things. Like tetris, pong, doom and some other trail blazers might not be the kind of long-term engaging many people would think of when coming up with best games. But their impact and long term effects on the tech, the market or design of games is impossible to ignore.
that’s why I argue you can’t put “best” and “all time” together. If the title says “best game of their time but got snubbed by medias” then I might have a couple of my own to provide as example.
Yeah exactly, I agree
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Okami featured in one of these lists. Just to be sure I looked up some of Polygon’s and even in their Top 500, its not there, which is kinda depressing?
I’m not a fan of Zelda games - or most Nintendo games - but I do love when people take inspiration from them and make their own thing - Tchia, Darksiders, Oceanhorn, Tunic, and Ittle Dew all come to mind just as Zelda ‘clones’ - and I think there’s no higher example of that than Okami, a game that takes its inspiration and surpasses it in every way. The graphics were at the time mindblowing(frankly, still are), with its japanese classic art style cel shading, the soundtrack is phenomenal and Amaterasu has an excellent mobility, zipping across battlefields or simply open areas with easy and fluidity. The paintbrush is a stellar tool, both to use in puzzles and in combat, and the game boasts a charming cast of characters and engaging story. Probably the saddest tidbit about it is that it was also Clover’s farewell game, after its previous, unfairly lambasted, gem God Hand and two attempts at the beat’em up Viewtiful Joe series.
Nowadays the Zelda series has gotten a whole different kickstart with its open-world entries, burying these inspirations even further, but I still believe Okami easily stands atop most entries of that series, and on its own as well.
Okami is “Zelda-like” in its kind of medieval fantasy, action-adventure presentation, and in the way towns and NPCs feel, and perhaps in some of its bosses, but really it’s not all that much like a Zelda game. Okami is an quite standard all-ages real-time-battles RPG, whereas Zelda usually have no RPG mechanics - usually Zelda enemies are defeated in just one or two hits, with little or no stats, points or inventory. Zelda games usually have a lot of focus on puzzles and dungeons, or dungeon-like outdoor areas, whereas Okami has no puzzles. On the other hand Okami is obviously very steeped in (often silly or humorous) Japanese folklore, whereas Zelda is very much less wacky and often a little more emotional and dramatic, and has its own bespoke theming.
I liked Okami but I felt it was paced really quite slowly, and the battles/enemies were a little too RPG-like for my taste, as in taking quite a lot of real time for even weak enemies. I felt it lacked the mechanical polish that Zelda usually does: I felt generally the movement was a little slow and difficult (except in very open areas) and most disappointing of all was the frankly poor recognition of what brush move I’m drawing.
Okami has a fair amount of puzzles, they’re just mostly smaller to show the wider range of mechanics. Get ball into cup, bring vines to location, memorize dots on a page Simon says style. They’re ultimately not too different from a puzzle you might encounter in something like A Link to the Past, or Breath of the Wild. Not difficult enough to be integral but enough to test your understanding of the game mechanics and later reward you for wit. Some of them also become very important for boss battles or speeding up fights with enemies.
Personally I never had an issue with brush move recognition, but I played both the PS2 and Wii versions and use a Steam Controller for PC which is the closest to the Wii’s. Of all of them, analog sticks are probably the slowest, but keyboard control is pretty clunky for movement since it was intended for controllers. Combat on the Wii was something else entirely, it was genuinely meant for that I think as it has the blended analog stick + high speed but accurate input. For today, mouse input is very good as a very light trackball but so-so for a regular mouse - so the Steam Controller (or Deck these days) is a really good medium, or maybe the PS5 controller if you can use its middle touch thing somehow.
I’d say the only complaint I could make about the game is its pacing of the story. In terms of gameplay however, you take it at the pace you want to take it at. Don’t want to fight? Avoid the scrolls. But fighting can be so fast, over in just a few inputs. Only a couple seconds so sometimes the winning battle screens themselves feel like they take longer (but they can be skipped). The isometric style during the battle rewards spacing and the byproduct is the difference in how the movement feels - it also plays into Capcom’s general affinity for artificial difficulty, something like restrictions on camera movements and animation delays for Resident Evil and Monster Hunter. It’s asking how creative can you get in this situation with these limitations?
I think the best analogy for battles with this in mind is to imagine each moment you freeze as the perfect image captured by an artist, but that can only happen when the demons are visible to the human (after Ammy stuns them). With that in mind you stun all the enemies then finish them in one fell swoop!
The game does have some pacing issues in the early game that could have been fixed by allowing to speed up if not skip cutscenes, but otherwise overall I think it nails the widening world adventure game for encouraging the player to really engage with the game engine and their wits to progress forward. I also think the early pacing does a lot for some of the revealing acts of the game, if it was fast and punchy the whole time then later elements like the events of the Ghost Ship of Heaven’s Gate would be less impactful than they are. The stakes start out low as you familiarize yourself and they ramp up as you hit act 2. From there it’s actually pretty easy to skip a lot of side missions as it streamlines you from there, unlike the early game where it can be harder to tell which quests main and side missions. Much like Twilight Princess where in the mid-late game it’s really encouraging you to continue forward but if you take some time to explore you get experiences you’d have missed - although granted Okami is a little less forgiving with the gifts, with the 99 beads being the prelude to korok seeds I swear…
Anyway lol, tl;Dr I agree about the pacing although I think it’s intentionally self indulgent on the story and the payoff is worth it and while the RPG elements you mentioned for battles are accurate, I would say that the speed and movement are more about spacing and timing. If you know the weak spot and the finisher, then each monster can be dealt with in 2 strokes, and placed well that can be the end of the fight right there.
Also not trying to discount your experience, just adding my perspective :)
Toribash is quite possibly the best competitive fighting game I have ever played due to it’s unique method of controlling your actions. It’s almost entirely unheard of tho.
Toribash is an indie classic. It was mentioned fairly often among indie fans around the time of Cave Story’s rise. But back then there weren’t so many indie fans.
It’s kinda insane how much people dismiss “System Shock.” It’s a serious bedrock of a title, so much of what we take as a given of games was really pioneered by LookingGlass. I think a big chunk of that was due to the gameplay not really holding up to modern times, but hopefully now that Nightdive’s remaster is out, more people can experience it and realize just how much of the game holds up.
Probably a close second is the original “Half-Life”, in terms of really cementing the story-based first person shooter, but I don’t think anyone is going to call Half-Life snubbed.
I loved the first level of System Shock, now that it’s been modernized. Then I got to the second level, and resources were no longer scarce, and it didn’t appear to be shaking up the formula from level to level, so now it feels like Doom with an inventory system rather than the games that took inspiration from System Shock.
Half-Life is still pretty great, but as far as organically teaching the player, it’s far behind even its own sequel. There are a lot of cheap deaths that you just have to save scum your way through. My go-to example is that when Half-Life 1 introduces a sniper enemy, you see a hole in the wall that could look like a sniper’s nest if I told you that they existed in the game and if you squint at it a little bit, so you just get shot in the back. In Half-Life 2, you emerge from Ravenholm, and a combine sniper with a laser sight is clearly trained on some escaping zombies, so that you know that snipers in sniper’s nests are now a thing you’ll have to contend with, and you get to observe it safely once before dealing with them in the game. That kind of thing. 90s PC games seemed to be worse at this than their successors and console games at the time.