The Sunday Times: The Games of the Decade

In today’s Sunday Times magazine, a feature article was written on the best games of the decade. The cover might have been a bit misleading seeing as it read “10 Best of the Decade” when in fact it should be noted that it’s 10 (as in ten years) – Best of the decade. Some might have thought that it was the ten best games of the decade, but there were a number of titles mentioned by Matthew Vice, a writer who often contributes on NAG’s website, mainly reviews of games.

Now the article was long, and I had enough trouble trying to scan the cover seeing as it’s bigger than my damn scanner, so I don’t know about scanning the pages.

I will say that mentions for games of the decade included went as follows:

2000

Silent Hill, Phantasy Star Online, The Sims, American McGee’s Alice

2001

Devil May Cry,Max Payne, Halo: Combat Evolved, Ico

2002

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, The Elder Scrolls III, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Walker, Battlefield 1942

2003

Soul Calibur II, Prince of Persia, Call of Duty, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

2004

World of Warcraft, Half-Life 2

2005

Guitar Hero

2006

Gears of War, Dead Rising

2007

Assassin’s Creed,Overlord, Mass Effect, Final Fantasy XII, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

2008

No More Heroes, Little Big Planet, Mirror’s Edge, Dead Space

2009

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Red Faction: Guerilla, Scribblenauts

More Hot Picks:

2000? Thief II: The Metal Age?

2001

Black and White, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

2002

Resident Evil (GC remake), Ratchet and Clank, Metroid Prime

2003

Jak II, Zone of the Enders 2: The Second Runner

2004

Fable 2, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Katamari Damacy (No Doom 3?)

2005

Resident Evil 4, Timesplitters: Future Perfect (No F.E.A.R.?)

2006

Okami

2007

Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Mass Effect (mentioned twice), (No STALKER?)

2008

Race Driver: Grid, Far Cry 2

Guitar Hero, BioShock, and Modern Warfare 2 were highlighted as being some of the most ground-breaking or best of the best games of the last ten years.

As you can see, there may have been a few omissions, but then again that’s the fun about lists and articles like this. It’s all down to each person’s opinion. I’ll be honest: there are a lot of games in the article that I don’t care about, and there’s some games that weren’t mentioned at all that I enjoyed.

In addition to all this, the Nintendo Wii was considered the most innovative piece of hardware from the “noughties” (I hate that term).

The Sunday Times: The Games of the Decade

Sunday Times Picks the Top 20 Video Games of 2009

Over the past year or two I’ve noticed that the Sunday Times magazine has become more “with it” as regards video games and its culture, with initially one game or two game reviews making it in there. Now however, for the past two weeks running just before Christmas, video games have been featured on the cover – something that was rarely done before, unless it was something majorly hyped, like Halo 3 or perhaps Modern Warfare 2, more recently. The covers were a couple of rubbish collages of all different multimedia images, with no real recognizable faces, except for something out of Watchmen, but still.

So, for the past couple of weeks, the Sunday Times has listed their top 20 of each multimedia category – video games, movies, and music…and gadgets in case it wasn’t masculine enough. The first ten (20-11) were featured last weekend, and this weekend the rest (10-1) were featured. Yes, Modern Warfare 2 is on the list, but wait… it’s not number 1 - which means it’s more legitimate than you think!

Sunday Times Top 20 Video Games of 2009:

20. WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2010
19. Metroid Prime Trilogy
18. The Beatles: Rockband
17.Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City
16. Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition
15. Mad World
14. Tekken 6
13. Red Faction: Guerrilla
12. Overlord 2
11. Borderlands
10. Fifa 10
9. Wolfenstein
8. Tiger Woods Wii
7. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
6. Forza Motorsport 3
5. Assassin’s Creed 2
4. InFamous
3. DJ Hero
2. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
1. Batman: Arkham Asylum

Quite a good list. I’m glad that Wolfenstein got on there somewhere in the top 10. It wasn’t that bad. I’m also glad about Fallout 3 GOTY, although I would have put it higher, seeing as I’m playing it right now and enjoying it. Red Faction Guerrilla, Borderlands, Modern Warfare 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, and of course the game everyone raved about: Batman Arkham Asylum, all featured on the list. I had a feeling that Arkham Asylum would be high on the list – Pippa on The Verge certainly talks fondly of it.

If you want to know who to thank, or crucify, for the list, it’s Yusuf Laher, Matthew Vice, and Walt Pretorius – they composed the video game list. If you’ve ever read NAG magazine, you should recognize these names – particularly the infamous Walt “Shryke” Pretorius that we’ve known of for years. And here I was thinking it was probably some bunch of mainstream casual gamers, but not a wholly terrible effort. At least they covered most consoles.

Games that you might like that didn’t make the list would be Left 4 Dead 2, Resident Evil 5, Star Wars The Force Unleashed: Ultimate Sith Edition (which some say sucked anyway), X-Men and Origins: Wolverine Uncaged Edition, Prototype (basically the main competitor for InFamous – which did make the list), F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, The Sims 3, and probably some more as well. I think the only real oversight for a lot of people would be Left 4 Dead 2, seeing as that was featured on almost every other “best of list” for 2009 out there, but it all comes down to opinion. If I made a list, it would be different, but I wouldn’t even know how to go about making one.

Sunday Times Picks the Top 20 Video Games of 2009

Sunday Times: 40 Years of the Internet, and Doom Mentioned

This past weekend, there was a main feature in the Sunday Times magazine, claiming that sometime in 2009 is the fortieth anniversary of the world wide web, even though this is likely widely disputed, and events did happen before 1969 that led to this wonderful invention called the Internet coming into our homes. By the way, the writers mentioned, and I guess I should too even though I know this, that the World Wide Web and the Internet aren’t the same thing.

Anyway, I think there was one bit along the time-line of the internet, spanning from 1822 to the present, which featured about 19 main events, that caught my attention, and that was “Doom” at number 11.

The Sunday Times writes:

“Not only one of the greatest and scariest games ever made, Doom was arguably the internet’s first killer application. id Software’s bloody and brilliant (and hugely controversial) “first-person shooter” was released via shareware over the internet- meaning that the first seven of the game’s 28 levels could be downloaded free. It is estimated that those seven levels were installed on more than 10 million computers within two years. As well as being the first must-have game that could be downloaded from the internet, it was a fantastic advert for what networked gaming could be. It could be played by up to four people via a local area network or a modem, and introduced the tern “deathmatch” into the language.”

I thought there were more than 7 levels in the shareware episode of Doom (There are 9; 10 in the Xbox version. And there are 27 levels in the full version of Doom; 36 in Ultimate Doom), but anyway. What can you expect?

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http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_%28video_game%29

Sunday Times: 40 Years of the Internet, and Doom Mentioned