Seeing the ‘rise’of the next-gen consoles the past years and keeping my distance of that culture for some time, I had been wondering if they had left their mark as their propagators had unwittingly desired. In other words, have these ‘revolutionary’ machines had any impact on the gaming timeline?
An obvious way of looking into this matter is using the ever growing, ever popular source of game polls. Many professional online sites have an more or less interactive chart, such as
IGN.com (even allowing a peek into an
older poll), and
Gamespot . Even Amazon
made a list, although it might be based on sales. Naturally, someone took (and still takes) the time to compile all this data and more
on his website, which even resulted in a rather remarkable top X table based the number of on references
and appointing points in a linear fashion.
All these sources keep in mind all the newest, nicest, ‘funnest’ games on the market, including titles such as Halo 2, God of War 2, Metal Gear Solid 3, Resident Evil 4 etc. All of them next-gen or as-good-as-it-gets games. Yet if we look at most top-10 lists, the newest console is the Nintendo-64, of which Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the main culprit. We are almost 10 years in the future, yet StarCraft is still accounted to be the most influential RTS ever made (although I might be a bit realy on that, not having player C&C 3 yet). The best RPG’s are either Final Fantasy II or Baldur’s Gate, the first FPS we find is generally DOOM (the first one), followed by Goldeneye. Where are games like Gears of War?
Two reasons come to mind. First of all, two of the three next-gen consoles have chosen graphics above all else. Not that gameplay has lost attention, but it is no longer the prime directive. A game that looks good, looks good in commercials, and thus will sell better.
Secondly, we should consider that 20+ year olds dominate most of these lists, having the gaming experience to have played games on the NES, SNES and on the pre-pentium PC. Ten years ago the (console) gaming market was mainly dominated by youngsters. They never stopped playing and are the now the self-proclaimed veterans.
Still, with the ever growing fondness of interactive sites, such as Youtube, Del.ico.us, etc. you would expect that the pre-pubescent scum that haunt the many forums on
the Internets, would have left their mark somewhere in the list. Who knows, perhaps ten years from now, their might be a nostalgic person proclaiming Animal Crossing as oldskool…
