Sunday, November 29, 2009

Closing Out the Zeros

We're coming towards the end of another decade, and as the year draws to a close we realize that we still have no clue how to refer to this decade.  Lame.  Also, people are making all kinds of lists for the best and worst of the decade.  While I will be posting a "Best and Worst" list for 2009 near the end of the year, I have no intention of doing one for the decade.  That takes more thinking than I'm willing to do right now.  Plus, I can barely remember what came out this decade.  If I tried making a "Best Movie" or "Best TV Show" list, I'd go insane.  Well, actually, those would probably be "Return of the King" and "Firefly", but beyond that I'd go nuts.  And that's especially true for video games.

It's been an incredible decade for gaming.  The technology has improved by such incredible strides, that if you looked at the release list for 2000 and compared it with today, you would be hard pressed to believe they happened in the same decade.  How do you rank anything when you are dealing with such a contrast?  Do you go with the superior graphics of today, or the pioneering games that made such thing possible?  Can you remove yourself from the present and look solely at the context of the year each game was released, or do you look at its mark across history?  I'm not sure I can make those decisions.  But that isn't stopping other people from trying.

Can you honestly say Modern Warfare is more important than Half Life 2?  That Nathan Drake is a better character than Solid Snake (well, yes you can, but ignore that for the moment)?  Why do we even need to rank these things?  Personally, I don't feel that we need to.  There have been some awesome games released in the last ten years.  There have also been some terrible ones.  I predict more of the same moving into the tens (See?  The next decade is going to be lame too.).