Mark commented last week that Final Fantasy Adventure was in his top ten favourite games ever. It got me thinking... What would be my top ten? What criteria could I even use?
I looked up the definition of favourite and it wasn't a lot of help. "(prenominal) most liked; preferred above all others" Should an all-time favourite game be a game that to this day remains a favourite game? Should it mean a game that was at some point at the top? Clearly the whole thing is going to be subjective but I don't want to just pull things out of a hat. Is it based on time spent? Times completed? Can a game that was a lot of fun but has practically no replay value count? I really liked the Professor Layton game I played, for example, but I'm not going to play it again. On the other side of that coin... I play Freecell every now and then. Does that make it awesome? I mentioned that I thought Secret of Mana was one of the best games all-time... But I actually have little desire to play it again. Should that lower it on the favourite-game-o-meter compared to something like Actraiser which I'd probably plug in and play right now if I owned it? What about innovation? I thought Portal was really cool! But I've only spent a few hours playing it. Compare that with the time spent on World of Warcraft...
I think what I want to do is go over each generation of video games and think about what games I preferred above all others at that time. A game may not have aged well, but it can still have a place as an all-time favourite. And then come up with some way to rank them after I've identified them all. The biggest problem I foresee is identifying all the potential candidates so taking some time and methodically going over things in small time periods should help with that problem.
There was a blog or music store or something (I really can't remember what) that used to list a "favourite song of all time for today." A kind of recognition that you can't actually identify your favourite of all time.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, while I can't possibly set out any criteria to make a selection, and I could never come up with a definitive top ten list, the one game I'm sure would be on it is Final Fantasy Tactics. I just recently got it for my iPod (you can do that!) and I'm playing it obsessively.
I think approaching it by eras is a great idea, though, or maybe even by platforms. Favourite games for Atari, Commodore 64, XT processor PCs, NES, Gameboy, SNES, 386 processor PCs, Bulletin Boards, Playstation, Gamecube, Playstation 2, Contemporary-ish PCs (kind of blur together for me), and Web Browsers. That would help contextualize your love of games to allow comparisons.