So, looking up at that list, my first thought is that there are a pile of sequels and remakes up there.
Of course, remakes, reboots, and sequels are the staple of most entertainment industries. We moan about video games slipping into that mode these days, and movies having been there for a while, but frankly it is the way of things. Go look up how many movie adaptations there have been of The Wizard of Oz. Video games just haven’t been around long enough for us to get used to remakes, but even Shakespeare was ripping off plots and retelling old stories 400 some odd years ago, so we had all better get used to it I suppose. Your grand kids will be playing Wasteland 8 or some such I bet.
After that, I have to admit that I have only played two of the games on the list (Guild Wars 2 and Diablo III), and I only bought one of them (Diablo III), and since I got that one through subscribing to World of Warcraft for a year (annoying pain point unnecessarily referenced just because I hold a grudge), you could make the case that I did not even buy that.
And then, finally, I start to wonder if these are really the best games of 2012. I probably watch too much Zero Punctuation (for example, Halo 4 review) and play too few such games to be able to make my own determination.
Oh, and it sucks to be the Wii about now, with one game on the list. But even Nintendo says they have moved on from the Wii, having no more titles in the queue for it. Screw you, little white box of joy, we’re on to bigger and better things!
So, the usual wrap up. The list, legitimate ranking or crass attempt to get sales out of the titles with the highest margins?
Apropos of nothing, I was looking for the theme from Doctor Who in my iTunes library, so typed “theme” into the search box.
I have had an iPod and iTunes for quite a while now, having picked one up once they made iTunes available for Windows. That was something like 9 years ago. I have collected quite a bit of music since then. (But I have only needed two iPods, my original 3rd generation iPod and a 3rd generation Nano that replaced it.)
Just the search term “theme” brought up 73 results. And iTunes can sort them by how many times I have listened to them. So my top ten themes are:
Theme of the Universe – EVE Online sound track
Firefly Main Theme – From the show Firefly
Woke Up This Morning (Soprano’s Theme) – From The Sopranos
Doctor Who Theme – The enduring music from Doctor Who
Peter Gunn Theme – From the Blues Brothers sound track
The Theme from Route 66 – From Route 66
Kamp Krusty Theme Song – From The Simpsons
For Pete’s Sake (Closing Theme) – From The Monkees
The Itchy & Scratcy & Poochie Show Theme – From The Simpsons
The James Bond Theme – From like 23 movies, alright?
All told I have 5601 tracks in iTunes, for a total of 13.4 days of play time, end to end. And that does not include podcasts (919 items, 34 days) or audio books (610 items, 167 days).
The most played track is actually a tie between The Son of Flynn from the TRON: Legacy sound tack and Below the Asteroids from the EVE Online sound track. The most played theme that doesn’t actually have the word “theme” in it is Greeback Boogie, which is the theme from Suits.
And in all of that, I actually have the Doctor Who theme not once, but twice. But I apparently only listen to one of them.
Honestly, there are too many good games on that list for me to call out.
Hunt the Wumpus! I played freakin’ Hunt the Wumpus back in the day!
Okay, I’ll stop.
There are games on the list that I am not a big fan of. But the only one I am dubious of is Leisure Suit Larry. I always felt that people liked the idea of that game much more than they liked the game itself. I think it is there by legend alone. But that might just be me.
So how is this list? Is this a better list than last week’s list?
It almost makes me wish I didn’t cancel my Time subscription last week. Almost.
Actually, the whole list is pretty controversial to me and seems pretty heavily weighted towards more recent games. I would argue about whether Civilization V should be on the list relative to past versions. (I prefer Civ II still, and I know there are Civ IV partisans out there.) And should both Torchlight AND Torchlight II make the list? And both StarCraft AND StarCraft II? Really?
On the MMORPG front, Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Star Wars the Old Republic and, of course, EVE Online make the cut. No EverQuest and no Guild Wars 2 though.
And LEGO Star Wars III but not LEGO Star Wars – The Original Trilogy? Heresy!
Ah well, such lists are pretty much designed to stir up controversy. How do you pick 10, 20, or even 50 “bests” out of such a huge body of work without leaving something out?
Again this month I was contacted by somebody at Wikio… though somebody different… and asked if I would like to post the early version of the gaming blog rankings.
Let’s hear it for consistency… or constancy… or something.
Anyway, here is the September list.
(Actually, they call it the October list, because they publish it in October, but it is based on data collected in September. So I find September to be a more accurate description.)
It looks like it is going to be a pretty static list month after month.
I couldn’t be bothered to actually compare the two lists to see if anybody changed positions. That would take more effort than I am willing to invest.
I did notice was that The Koalition, who held the bottom spot last month, was replaced by Virtual World News this month. My condolences to The Koalition.
Oh, and the GayGamer got in behind Tobold. I’m sure there is deeper meaning in that.
So what do you think of this list? Should I continue posting it every month, if I continue to make the top 30? They only invite you to preview it if you are on the list.
Oh, and WoW Insider changed their name to WoW.com like a year ago. Get with the times.
Wikio.com (not to be confused with Wikia.com) is… well… a “Social Networking News” site, to quote the masthead.
They appear to be a blog aggregator of some sort ala Digg or the recently departed DailyRadar sites. Owned by Yahoo at least at some point, Wikio plies the RSS feeds, reports stories, tracks traffic, and allows you to vote on articles. And they make lists.
If I appear to be uncertain of my topic so far, it is because I had not heard of Wikio.com until this week when I got a note from somebody representing them telling me that my site had made their top blogs list for the month and would I like a sneak preview of the list. This preview offered on the condition that I publish the list as a post here.
I have a long establish love of lists, so I agreed.
Of course, one of my first questions was, “How are these rankings compiled?”
The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. Our algorithm accords a greater value to links from blogs placed higher up in the ranking.
A blog linking another blog is only counted once a month i.e. if blog A links to blog B 10 times in a given month, it is only counted as having linked to that blog once that month. The weight of any link decreases over time. Also, if a blog always links to the same blog, the weight of these links is decreased.
Only links found in RSS feeds are counted. Blogrolls are not taken into account.
Our rankings are updated on a monthly basis and also include Top Blogs for several categories: Technology, Politics, etc. New categories will be added on a regular basis.
So links in posts drive the list, but links from highly ranked sites add more weight. Simple enough I suppose, at least as long as I don’t have to code it.
Unlike the dearly departed DailyRadar sites, Wikio does not break out video game topics. DailyRadar had MMO Blips for just MMO related sites, and even WoW Blips for just WoW related posts. But for Wikio, the video games list is for any video game related site.
And there are a lot of them out there.
So it seemed rather unlikely to me that this site would make any list that limited itself to a number of entries or say, three digits or less.
I did not, however, count on the power of small sample size and incestuous inter-linking!
Enough rambling… most of you have probably skipped past all this anyway… to the list!
There we go! 30 sites on the list and I made it to 29!
In your face Koalition!
I am not sure what this list actually means.
There are a few of serious gaming sites, like Kotaku, Joystiq, and GameSetWatch.
There are a couple of bigger commercial MMO focused sites, like Massively and WoW Insider. (They changed their name to WoW.com about a year ago, let’s keep up people!)
There is Penny Arcade, a force unto itself.
There are a couple of million+ page views per year blogs, like Tobold and Broken Toys.
And then there is me, down there at 29th place, and I have no idea how I crashed the party.
Wikio.com offers the usual ranking badge for your side bar (you can put your URL in to see where you stand), with a supplemental badge if you rank in one of their sub-categories. For the main badge I am somewhere down around 3,100st place and I do not qualify for the gaming category despite being on the above list. But the FAQ says that they only update the list once a month.
I’ll have to keep an eye on this site to see what all this really means. And maybe soon I will qualify for that video games ranking badge.
That, in and of itself, is not controversial in my mind. LOTRO is a good game built on the hugely popular Middle-earth lore, Turbine has been dedicated to improving the game over time, and it has a loyal user base.
But, of course, the prospect of a list was too much to resist. I like a good list… and love a bad list even more so some days, so I decided to see where other games fell.
Here are the top 33, which represent all of the games ranked 8.0 or better out of a scale of 1 to 10.
Lord of the Rings Online 8.38
Atlantica Online 8.30
EVE Online 8.29
Fallen Earth 8.28
EverQuest II 8.26
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes 8.25
Guild Wars8.23
Ryzom 8.23
Warhammer Online 8.23
Dark Age of Camelot 8.22
Guild Wars Factions 8.22
Final Fantasy XI 8.22
Guild Wars Nightfall 8.21
Perfect World 8.20
City of Villains 8.20
City of Heroes 8.20
The Chronicles of Spellborn 8.20
Champions Online 8.16
Ultima Online 8.15
Runes of Magic 8.13
Lineage 2 8.09
Requiem: Bloodymare 8.08
Anarchy Online 8.08
EverQuest 8.08
PlanetSide 8.07
Asheron’s Call 8.07
Sword of the New World 8.06
World of Warcraft 8.06
Dungeons & Dragons Online 8.04
Dekaron 8.02
Battleground Europe 8.02
ROSE Online 8.01
Cabal 8.00
That is an… interesting list.
When you consider that the difference we’re talking about here, the gap between a rating of 8.0 and a rating of 8.38, is about the same as the difference between a B and a B-, you can assume that these games are all enjoyed by groups of players who each think about as highly of their game of choice.
These games are all equal to their users in some very abstract sense.
Yes, I know we’re looking at an epic mis-use of statistics with bad, and probably inadequate, samples, self-selecting respondents, no weight given to number of respondents, no range of responses shown, and no indication of the gap, if any, between professional reviews and these player reviews. So you have to take that in stride when you look at this.
Now when any one of us goes over that list, I’m sure we all see something on there that makes us go, “No way.”
For example, I see Requiem: Bloodymare on that list and frown slightly. I played the game for a bit and never mentioned it, thinking that was exactly how much coverage it deserved. But somebody likes it. Several somebodies in fact, enough to get it an 8.08 score on this list, putting it ever so slightly ahead of World of Warcraft.
I’m probably less surprised by the games that made it to 8.0 or greater than those that did not. Wizard 101, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and Aion fell just shy of the 8.0 mark, while Darkfall, with an ever vocal community, was way down the list with a score of 7.09. No doubt a forum post will fix that. (“Go vote for us!” posts are perfectly acceptable in my opinion.)
How about your favorite game? Did it score above 8.0?
