Shareefruck
Registered User
I'm not arguing that objective reasons for why you feel a certain way about how valuable something is shouldn't be given, I just don't think that things like reach, popularity, impact, and influence should be considerations in this assessment.Tetris is probably the most elegant design ever made in video game history: it's clean, everybody gets it, everyone can get good at it and being really good at it is very demanding and skill intensive. It scores very high on every conceivable metric imaginable outside of production values (although there is a VR Tetris now).
As far as the rest is concerned, I brought it up because it was a poll that was ran in 2014. If it's going to be a poll, not just a topic of discussion, I think we should strive for neutral metrics to evaluate games on. Of course we'll never "truly get there" and that's fine, but there needs to be somewhat of an effort towards it or else it's just all relative "well my best experience is this and yours is that... So where do we go from here?"
That is why I always try to distinguish what I prefer to what I think is the best.
I agree about the greatness of Tetris. Its simplicity is inspired/brilliant, its mechanics are deceptively deep and still interesting today, while also being perfectly designed in such a way that is capable of appealing to and being intuitive to anyone. I would actually take exception to the production values comment. Actual production values/fidelity shouldn't matter as much as timeless aesthetics, and the version in its heyday was aesthetically perfect (more-so than fancier future updates).
To me, none of its greatness has anything to do with it happening to have made a cultural impact and managing to successfully reach that audience/level of widespread appreciation (something that can be influenced by a million other factors that don't really matter or factor into how good a game is), deserved as it may be.
On a standard that ignores impact/cultural significance, I don't see why JRPGs as a whole, or Chrono Trigger as a whole (which scores really high on everything it's trying to do as well), couldn't be considered right up there.
I tend to think of "best" as a subjective impression/perception of an objective value. I agree that a lot of it is guesswork, but I think that subjectivity gets us closer to an accurate/meaningful answer than ignoring subjectivity or factoring in objectively quantifiable but irrelevant things like historical impact.
I don't know exactly what you mean by neutral metrics, but I would disagree with the idea of placing a penalty on a game focusing on qualities that are more subjectively appreciated and difficult to pinpoint/dependent on the person (like charm/personality). Which is what essentially happens when objectively quantifiable things are given more weight and treated like they're more relevant.
That said, if you're not saying anything like that (that's why I was fishing for clarification), and you're just saying that Chrono Trigger shouldn't be considered the best game because games like Tetris and Mario 3 are better (not more historically significant, just more incredible and rewarding efforts), I can agree with that, as opposed to my initial impression. There aren't that many games I have ahead of Chrono Trigger (certainly not enough that it would a joke to consider it for best all time), but Tetris and Super Mario Bros. 3 would be easily among them.
PS: This might be just me, but honestly, the thing that makes me think that things are good is the same thing that puts them in my favorites. I've never related to this need to separate the two ideas, personally. What I like about videogames are the things that I think make them good and have objective value that I can appreciate. The only thing I see that's separate from those two ideas (and create "guilty pleasures" or whatever) are compulsion and accessibility, and neither of those things make me "like" "prefer" or "favorite" something.
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