2015 World Video Game Hall of Fame Finalists

Started by the_antithesis, May 02, 2015, 01:44:09 PM

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the_antithesis

This may be more local news, I don't know if anyone outside of Rochester, NY cares about the Strong National Museum of Play. But they've decided to start a video game hall of fame this year. The fifteen nominees are Angry Birds, DOOM, FIFA, The Legend of Zelda, Minecraft, The Oregon Trail, Pac-Man, Pokemon, Pong, The Sims, Sonic the Hedgehog, Space Invaders, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, and World of Warcraft.

Be sure to argue over these choices below.

Source

The Strong® welcomed six games into the inaugural class of its World Video Game Hall of Fameâ,,¢.

DOOM

Pac-Man

Pong

Super Mario Bros.

Tetris

World of Warcraft

Mike Cl

I've only played The Oregon Trail, Pac-Man, Sonic, and Tetris.  Liked tetris the best, but didn't love any of them enough to want to replay them any time soon.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?<br />Then he is not omnipotent,<br />Is he able but not willing?<br />Then whence cometh evil?<br />Is he neither able or willing?<br />Then why call him god?

aitm

Thats like naming the sports into the hall instead of the players…you mean there is NOT a handful or great video game players that all you geeks know about and worship or kill as in some TV shows would have us believe?
A humans desire to live is exceeded only by their willingness to die for another. Even god cannot equal this magnificent sacrifice. No god has the right to judge them.-first tenant of the Panotheust

GrinningYMIR

Angry birds shouldn't be there, it's not as good a game as people think

Fuck angry birds
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Green Bottle

And where is HALO, should be in there i think...

Out of the nominees the one's iv played are, Doom, Pac Man, Sonic, Space Invaders......
God doesnt exist, but if he did id tell him to ''Fuck Off''

SGOS

The only one I've played is the Simms, and I thought it was lame.

AllPurposeAtheist

Uhh..the granddaddy of all video games isn't there? They're off their pong nut..
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Mike Cl

I would think that it would make more sense to have categories and eras when selecting all-time games.  Pong should be there first, since it was the granddaddy of them all.  It was the real trailblazer.  Maybe they could do something like the Pong award for the best of each era and category.  It would be used something like this--Skyrim gets the Pong award for the best Open World game of the 2000/2010 era!  And maybe even narrow it down to platforms, as well.  I know that some games that work well on the PC don't work so well on Play Stations and the like.  Damn it guys, if you're going to do it, do it right! :))
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?<br />Then he is not omnipotent,<br />Is he able but not willing?<br />Then whence cometh evil?<br />Is he neither able or willing?<br />Then why call him god?

SGOS

Quote from: AllPurposeAtheist on May 03, 2015, 10:24:30 AM
Uhh..the granddaddy of all video games isn't there? They're off their pong nut..

I forgot that I had also played pong and doom.

SGOS

Quote from: Mike Cl on May 03, 2015, 10:36:52 AM
I would think that it would make more sense to have categories and eras when selecting all-time games.  Pong should be there first, since it was the granddaddy of them all.  It was the real trailblazer.  Maybe they could do something like the Pong award for the best of each era and category.  It would be used something like this--Skyrim gets the Pong award for the best Open World game of the 2000/2010 era!  And maybe even narrow it down to platforms, as well.  I know that some games that work well on the PC don't work so well on Play Stations and the like.  Damn it guys, if you're going to do it, do it right! :))

This thread as the potential for becoming a real slug fest.  I expect some serious flame wars, and maybe a black eye or two.

Solitary

WHAT? No Mass Effect games and many others that blow everyone of those away. Solitary
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

the_antithesis

For what it's worth, the criteria they use to select these nominations are:

• Iconic: The game is widely recognized and remembered.

• Longevity: The game is more than a passing fad.

• Geographical reach: The game meets the first two criteria across international boundaries.

• Influence: The game has influenced the design and development of other games, other forms of entertainment or popular culture and society.

Of these games, I find FIFA to be the one that sticks out. I guess they wanted more than one sports sim on the list and FIFA is more popular than Madden outside the US because fuck the US and their sissy "foot ball." Still, it seems like an odd choice even after you think about it.

I'm not sure about Oregon Trail, which only fits the criteria because of one sentence. "You have died of dysentery." For you kids who don't remember a computer lab full of Apple II's adjacent to the library in middle school, Oregon Trail was a supposedly educational game they let us play in school. There were dozens of them, but this one had legs once kids looked up "dysentery" in the dictionary and realized this was a game where you can shit yourself to death. I find that legacy a bit dubious.

I don't know about Sonic the Hedgehog. Sure, it's a well-known character, but so is Ronald McDonald. That's no reason to nominate it as an all-time best.

Quotehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYDsz1NFBJw

Pokemon... Well, I guess it fits the criteria. There were knock offs and kids everywhere were annoying about it. if I were born about ten years later, I would have been the most annoying it. But I wasn't so I know what Pokemon is.

It's Nintendo selling their unused characters.

Think about it. They had artists working all day on coming up with new things for Mario to stomp on and not all of them made the cut. So they had file cabinets full of character designs they weren't using until someone got the bright idea for using all of them. This is why Pokemon "evolve." In the design phase, they do multiple revisions of a design, changing little details. That's why not all Pokemon evolve. No revisions. And those that do evolve don't have the same number of steps. Not as many revisions for some and others. It's also why the evolved version is often not obviously bigger and better, just different. And then there's shit like Charmander where unrelated drawings are linked together by some minor detail, like a flame on the tail.



Yeah right, that first and last one are the same creature.

So Pokemon is a brilliant marketing campaign. But is it even a decent game? I don't know. I've never played it. I guess if games that may or may not be decent games so long as they meet the criteria for other reasons, fine.

Beyond that, I can't really argue with most of these choices. I mean, you could say Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga are more deserving than Pac-Man and Space Invaders, but those were follow-ups that built on the original.

I don't think breaking up by era or category was what they wanted. This is the museum that has a toy hall of fame which has inducted things as diverse as Game Boy, alphabet blocks, Slinky, Lego and a fucking cardboard box. I am not shitting you.

So, using this criteria, they have a list of inductees that includes games as diverse as Pong, Angry Birds and DOOM. I think that's a nice level playing field. If you want an all-time best list by platform, just google it. There are like a billion of such lists.

kilodelta

Quote from: the_antithesis on May 03, 2015, 12:28:20 PM

I don't think breaking up by era or category was what they wanted. This is the museum that has a toy hall of fame which has inducted things as diverse as Game Boy, alphabet blocks, Slinky, Lego and a fucking cardboard box. I am not shitting you.


I fucking hate cardboard boxes.
Faith: pretending to know things you don't know

Hydra009

For those 4 criteria, Tetris is probably one of the best.  Iconic?  Check.  Longevity?  Check.  Geographical reach?  As international as they come.  Influence?  Pretty much its own genre.

QuoteI'm not sure about Oregon Trail, which only fits the criteria because of one sentence. "You have died of dysentery." For you kids who don't remember a computer lab full of Apple II's adjacent to the library in middle school, Oregon Trail was a supposedly educational game they let us play in school. There were dozens of them, but this one had legs once kids looked up "dysentery" in the dictionary and realized this was a game where you can shit yourself to death. I find that legacy a bit dubious.
Oregon Trail was one of my favorites.  It's actually a sort of survival game.  You manage an expedition and their ever-dwindling supplies and have to make choices that affect them, like ration sizes, travel pace, deciding between routes, bartering supplies, and the famous fording the river dilemma.  You get hit with setbacks and have to make hard choices sometimes, like reducing rations or butchering an ox for food.  It's not the most amazing game ever (small team and basically no budget, the main problem of edutainment games), but it was immensely popular and for good reason.

trdsf

Quote from: the_antithesis on May 02, 2015, 01:44:09 PM
The fifteen nominees are Angry Birds, DOOM, FIFA, The Legend of Zelda, Minecraft, The Oregon Trail, Pac-Man, Pokemon, Pong, The Sims, Sonic the Hedgehog, Space Invaders, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, and World of Warcraft.
Ah, a nice even mix of "yes, that's an obvious choice" and "WTF got slipped into their Mountain Dew?".  DOOM, FIFA, Zelda, Oregon Trail, Pac-Man, Pong, Space Invaders, Super Mario Bros., Tetris and WoW all make sense, even the ones of those I hate.  Maybe Minecraft, Sonic and The Sims too.

Pokemon?  Really?  That's a marketing venture far more than it is a game.  And Angry Birds is too new to say if it's going to be more than the flavor of the moment.

Where's Bejeweled?  That's the game that really kind of invented casual browser games as we know them now.

And where's The 7th Guest?  That's the game that made the CD-ROM a required piece of hardware rather than an option, as well as introducing motion capture to gaming -- very few games can say they've changed hardware requirements like T7G can.
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