GameFAQs' Best Game Ever competition

[Queen Octavia]

So http://www.gamefaqs.com is holding a competition where the best game ever is to be determined through popular opinion. In this thread indicate which of the games in the poll there you think is #1, which one you think will end up winning and which one you voted for every day (Assuming you vote - I sure do!).

My favorite: Lufia 2
My predicted winner: Final Fantasy 7

My daily votes:

Tetris, Oregon Trail, Duck Hunt, Dragon Warrior 3

Sidenote: Holy smokes is the 1998-2000 bracket ever strong! Look at those contenders... FF7, Ocarina of Time, Pokemon RGY, Halflife, Starcraft....

[Dracos]

I doubt anyone will agree with my favorite, but it is definetly Atelier Iris 2. I also predict FF7 will win, which I think would be a good choice, and I voted for Megaman 2, which I have never played, assuming that it is similar to ones I have. Maybe I should have gone for Oregon Trail, though...

[Queen Octavia]

Atelier Iris 2 didn't even make it into the options ;p.

Megaman 2 is classic, I would have voted for it but I figured it would advance anyways so I gave oregon trail a sympathy vote.

[Dracos]

You know, I think Starcraft might have a chance to beat FF7 in the '98-00 bracket. And Atelier Iris 2 is awesome, I don't care what anyone says!

[Queen Octavia]

Starcraft and FF7 will both advance along with Half-Life and Zelda:OoT. Then they will fight each other and FF7 and Zelda will advance.

However, OoT is in serious trouble, because Majora's mask is on the other side of its bracket, with very weak competition. It is likely that Majora's mask and OoT will both make their way into the finals, and they could then both be knocked out due to vote splitting.

The game that probably deserves to win is WoW, but I'm not sure if the WoW junkies will find time to stop raiding and vote for it ^^

[Dracos]

I am horribly offended by your sugestion that WoW deserves to win anything ever...

[Queen Octavia]

How can you not acknowledge its fantastic success?

It's the Super Mario Bros of the new millennium.

[Dracos]

If you're talking about the significance of a game, which isn't what the contest is supposed to be about, then for the MMO category then WoW is important, but no more important than Everquest, the first really successful MMO, or Ultima Online, the rist real MMO. WoW is just another step in that progression.

If you're talking about number of sales, it is not even the best selling PC game with both 'The Sims" and 'The Sims 2' selling more copies. 16 and 13 million respectively, compared to 11.5 million for WoW. Starcraft sold almost as many copies as WoW as well, at 11 million. If you include console games then it's beaten by Nintendogs (21.67 million), Wii Play (20.91 million), Pokemon RGB (20.08 Million), Super Mario Brothers 3 (18 million), New Super Mario Brothers (17.63 million), Brain Age (16.82 million), Pokemon Diamond and Pearl (16.48 million), Gran Turismo 3 (14.89 million), Pokemon Gold and Silver (14.51 million), Wii Fit (14.01 million), Super Mario Land (14 million), Mario Kart DS (13.79 million), Mario Kart Wii (13.67 million), Brain Age 2 (13.27 million), Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire (13 million), Grand Theft Auto (12 million), Pokemon Fire Red/Leaf Green (11.82 million), and close is Super Mario 64 (11 million).

Of course,if you just want to talk about good modern games, I honestly think there are many better options. MGS 4 comes to mind, for example. I would also point out all of the Disgaeas. How about Gears of War 1 and 2? There's no shortage of good games, these days. I cannot conceive of any scale where WoW could be considered the gretest game ever.

[Queen Octavia]

I cannot conceive of any scale where WoW could be considered the gretest game ever.

Dollars, as in revenue. WoW has sold the most copies of any game because people buy it every month. How can you count people buying an expansion to the sims as 2 copies sold, and not someone renewing their WoW account? Ludicrous.

[Dracos]

Do you have any figures to back that up? Brain age, for example, was made on an approximately 10k budget and sold 16.82 million coppies. WoW had huge production costs, and continues to have very significant expenses as a result of the need for constant new content, in-game customer support, the cost of running servers, ect.

Further, how is the profitability of a game to the company that made it an appropriate method of determining how good a game is? Sales figures at least represent how many people thought it was good enough to buy, but profitability has at least as much to do with the buisness model which has nothing to do with the game's quality.

[Dracos]

And I didn't count the expansions for the Sims just like I didn't count the expansions for WoW. This is because sales figures are only really a useful measure of how good a game is, in my opinion, if you use them to tell you how many people thought they were worth buying.

[Queen Octavia]

Okay, first off, I said revenue not profit. IE I don't care how much the game cost to produce - only how much money schmuck consumers were willing to pay for it. Blizzard has stated that the "X million subscribers" they advertise in those omnipresent ads are active paid subsciptions, as opposed to inactive or trial accounts. That is one hell of a lot of revenue.

But the even better measure of a game is time people have wasted playing said game, divided by the time the game has been around. Yet another ranking scheme where the mindless WoW-zombies propel it to the top of the heap.

I don't think calling WoW a progression in the line of MMOs does it justice. Its success is much greater than that.

On a sidenote, I really wonder what the release of Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 will do to WoW's player base. I think blizzard will actually lose revenue by releasing these games, lol.

In any event, LUFIA 2 FOREVAR!

I am so casting over 20 votes for Lufia 2 whenever it is on the GameFAQ poll. Gwhahaha@internet democracy.

[Dracos]

Well, I'll just leave it at "I don't think revenue or profit is a decent measure," especially since neither of us want WoW to win, anyway.

[Queen Octavia]

Have I mentioned that I have a cat named Lufia?

[Mitera Nikkou]

Eh. I don't get how their poll stuff works. I couldn't even find what all of the 128 games were. Bogus. Especially since those same 128 games, in being "the best games ever", is itself relative to however they were narrowed down.

Popularity, revenue (and/or versus cost) and units sold are all silly ways to measure a game's greatness. It's all about the experience. Unfortunately, to make it easier to gauge individual experience, opinion polls turn into popularity contests. Which is akin to putting up a poll (for both men and women) to vote on what kind of breast size they like most. And yet every breast functions the same.

Personally, while I like a lot of games, I'm hoping that Final Fantasy Tactics will do better than Final Fantasy 7. Well, if it's even there. (Also, in my opinion, I think Final Fantasy 7 tends to win many popularity polls because it's been around for a while, with a large fan base, and a lot of people reflexively consider it the best even if they do have a conflicting opinion. Which tends to be due to a hive-mind mentality: if they think that a lot of other people are thinking it, to the point where it's likely to seem more fact than opinion, then they should think the same thing.)