Mini-Rants Thread

Would Space Invaders/Missile Command not take number 1? They pretty much invented the idea of video games, all Mario did was provide a nice 2d platformer, which has pretty much been discarded at this stage in favour of FPS and RTS games.
I would probably agree that Starcraft had a bigger impact on games today than Dune 2. However, it's hard to say as there have been so many RTS games focusing on many different things.
Not sure how Legend of Zelda influenced anything, unless diehard fans count in which case you could name a multitude of games.
For the reasons given in the article, I would have put Farmville ahead of WoW, pretty sure the player base is both larger and more diverse and played more frequently than WoW.
As for Halo, I don't think it did anything Unreal Tournament and Quake hadn't already done. Online gaming on the consoles was an inevitable result of the proliferation of broadband.
In short; I agree with msg, the author of that article knows little of gaming, sticking to games still in the public eye instead of investigating their roots.

 

Yeah thats what my rant was about, a shite article, he never bothered to research and has little knowledge beyond what he has played.
I would argue for Dune 2 though, it brought in all the core concepts and mechanics of modern real-time strategy games that are still used today, without Dune 2 there would be no starcraft.

Poor attempt by the trolls today, I was disappointed, I usually get much more entertainment. I'll think of something else for tomorrow.

Oh and mario made all games what they are today? Fallout 3, Dragonquest, Final Fantasy, Microsoft Flight simulator, Elder scrolls Oblivion, Grand theft auto 4, starcraft 2 are all direct results of Mario. are they? Yeah sure.

 

Well, there is the small fact that Mario (Nintendo really, but it was that successful game of course) did save the video game industry outside of Japan.

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/12/31/02

 

I had thousands of games to choose from before mario was released here, I was quite happy playing C64, Spectrum ZX and Amstrad CPC games then amiga came along too.
I dont believe for 1 second mario saved the video game industry outside of Japan, we was doing fine before it.

 

"By 1985, the flood of bad games had shrunk the game industry’s value, from three billion dollars down to just a few hundred million dollars."
Thanks to the influx of crappy and quickly made games.

 

It was just the first good console game to be released after the crash of 83, it was bound to take some credit, like FF7 is known as the game that sold the playstation. Why don't you research how many Commodore 64s were sold? I think the industry was doing just fine.

During the C64's lifetime, sales totaled between 12.5 and 17 million units, making it the best-selling single personal computer model of all time. For a substantial period of time (1983–1986), the C64 dominated the market with between 30% and 40% share and 2 million units sold per year.

 

Perhaps Nintendo just saved the industry in North America then. The crash of 1982 essentially made video games nothing but niche here, until the NES. Quality games were released during and right after the crash, but they were not being bought. It wasn't popular to own video games until the NES.

Perhaps if another company successfully sold to reluctant stores (and then to reluctant consumers). Nintendo would not be able to take the credit of saving the industry here. But they did it first.

Spoiler

 

The article isn't a very good one, but I'd agree more with the list than what msg is saying. While the core Nintendo franchises did influence a lot what came after it, I wouldn't say it's number 1. For number 1 I'd probably put something along the lines of Pacman or Space Invaders or something. I'm not a big fan of Atari games imo but I can't deny their influence on whatever came out after it, that being said, even NES games were a lot more advanced in terms of both gameplay and graphics compared to the Atari counterparts. While a game like Zelda isn't exactly new after Adventure on the Atari, it sure was a hell of a lot better in almost every way.

While Halo did advance the console shooter, it did nothing to PC shooters. I'd replace that one with Doom atleast. etc etc.

There's always subjective opinions, like Suis mentioned.

If Nintendo didn't hit it off in North America, I don't think they'd be in the position they are now.

Don't let me forget:

He meant that Mario has some large influence on gaming after it came out. Your neglect on that sentence and how you don't understand it makes me lol. I'd say it had a large influence on the NES/SNES/N64 era for platformers, as Gay brought it up.

You can also bring up the argument that the more popular the game is the more either influential it is or it'll effect more people. So while less people played, say, Dune 2, and more people played Starcraft you could say that Starcraft had more of an influence, and you wouldn't be totally wrong. In the comment section of the article they talk about the first FPS that came out, but largely Doom was the more influential one (and is often sited as such) as it was much more popular and BETTER than any of it's predecessors.

 

I'm going to stop you right the fuck here and tell you that these mean fuck all. ESPECIALLY the "best-selling PC model" thing. From what i remember the C64 was pretty much the only thing of its kind, more akin to a game console than a PC. Furthermore, there has been such a variety of computers since that time that a unification of userbases to beat that number of sales is highly improbable.

Hell, I build my own PCs.

 

I only said I disagreed with 2 games and it was a bad article, and you agree with me that it was a bad article and doom should replace halo too. Thankyou.

Wrong on every point. There was amstrad cpc, zx spectrum, apple mac, msx and some lesser known computers fighting it out for the games market too, there was more competition then there is today. And the Commodore console of the same time was called the 64GS, it just played games, the C64 did everything pc's of its time did.
Also the commodore amiga and atari st were released in 1985, the amiga was the best gaming computer until pc's started getting good towards the mid 90's.

 

This is turning into a lot more than a "mini-rant"

 

My god, this argument is pointless. These "Most Important/Influencial Game Evar" lists that place games in order of importance are doomed to failure at their inception because there isn't a linear progression of evolution in the games industry and there are so many different types of games and opinions of them. If I made a "Top 5" list of influential games, and it went like this:

5:Super Mario Bros 3
4:Space Invaders
3:Castlevania
2oke'mon Red
1:Super Mario Bros

Am I wrong? Super Mario Bros 3 is a game that improves on the original SMB in every way possible, yet it wouldn't exist if the first Mario game wasn't successful. If the first platforming Mario game on the NES wasn't successful, the NES could realistically have failed. If the NES failed, the Nintendo games that would have been created for it would not have existed. By extension, I could say that the original SMB is the most important game in the JRPG genre because it kick-started the console that was home to so many genre defining JRPGs. I'd be saying that because it seems that Mario is at the root of all the console-based games that followed; but by that logic, shouldn't something like Pong be at number 1? Pong isn't as popular as Mario, it isn't as technically brilliant or as popular today.
Space Invaders pre-dates SMB, but it wasn't the flagship for such an incredibly successful console, SMB 3 arrived when console gaming was very popular and didn't do much to revolutionise the industry in terms of new ideas; it just refined what came before it. One could argue that that's all that the original SMB did, yet it is remembered as the spark that started it all.

Individual games had mechanics that have been copied, created genres of their own, pushed boundaries of a certain aspect of gaming yet are not acknowledged because they are lost to time, are inferior to what followed them or one of many other reasons. Games that were otherwise shitty could become popular for being the first to do something and actually noticed by the majority of gamers, not because they did that thing well (FF7 gets a lot of shit from many SNES gamers for being lacklustre compared to FF6 (FF3), but without it there may not have been a decent-sized western market for JRPGs and the many great games the came after it were may not have existed).

A limited number of ordered "important/influential" [anything] is bullshit. We can't look into alternate realities to see what could have been (maybe if the NES had failed, a new console by another company would have come out with superior games; maybe the NES held back the industry). There are so many factors to take into account, so many ways in which games have advanced, so many different opinions and circumstances that no one is really right or wrong.
I don't like the original Legend of Zelda, it may have been great in its time but it hasn't aged well, but I love Ocarina of Time; OoT wouldn't exist without the original; but games that played their part in the evolution that led to OoT are more than those in the Zelda series, more than those on Nintendo consoles.



I hate the amount of attention that the royal wedding is getting, and I hate hay fever too

 

It was originally just a mini rant about how little gaming knowledge the author has and how did he get the job. You know what happens when the trolls get a sniff.



Nottingham forest are wankers, Hull would be much better in the premier league!

 

It was a crappy article. And the trolls had some points, but yeah. I can't think of an instance of one of those lists that I haven't disagreed with, they're just a cheap way to create an article; they don't require much research or knowledge and are often stretched out over multiple pages for more hits and add revenue.


I hate that every PC joypad that I've ever owned winds up with faulty shoulder triggers. The right trigger on my Cyborg Rumble is now completely f**ked, yet my years old Xbox controller (and PS2 and Gamecube controllers) are still going strong. I swear, I've been through so many PC joypads that have triggers that either stop functioning completely or don't register pressure properly that they must surely be designed to break. Also, my millionth pair of in-ear sound-isolating headphones broke recently, I've yet to own a pair that's lasted a whole year.

 

Funnily enough I was just cursing my 360 controller that I use on pc, the right stick wont centre it just goes up or down making FPS's or anything like that unplayable.

 

To be fair, I was the only one actually trolling. You are just so determined that you are the only correct one here, that if nobody acts like a sheep and goes with your opinion, you freak the fuck out and scream troll. People raised legitimate points, and you just said "fuck that, I'm right."

Of course, you always do, so it isn't too terribly surprising.

 

Oh no dude, it's because apparently Nat and I are both habitual trolls too. Any time there is an argument we just troll the guy who is obviously in the right. It's inconceivable that I could have a serious opinion about anything.

Also I'd definitely point out that Japanese games of quality hitting the market (Mario in particular) had a significant impact on the industry. They didn't SAVE the industry, sure, but they indisputably brought it far forward in the wake of the videogames crash, which was caused by floods of shitty games hitting the market. You can stick your fingers in your ears and say "la la la" all you like, but the crash was a real thing that severely damaged the Western video game development scene.

 

Yes, I agree.

This is a rants thread for people to rant in, it's clear that yourself, tehuber, Nathan Drake and Natewlie decided to capitalise on the fact that MSG voiced an opinion that yourself and the other hyenas could pick apart as one of your many ritual group-bonding circle-jerks.

That's the result of your own actions. You have the unwavering support of your merry band of pseudo-intellectual trolls and your social club on Romulation's IRC channel; but, unlike the status that this apparently grants you amongst the Romulation cool kids, this doesn't mean anything to a few of us; it certainly doesn't mean anything to me.

Also, I should have written "ad revenue" not "add revenue" in my last post.

 

Captain fuck knuckle above me is dumb. I already said I was the only one trolling. From my perspective, everybody else was just using a counterpoint against what msg was saying. You fail so miserably, it's pretty lulz-tastic. Go on, post again. You're doing an excellent job.

 

I was being serious there. Promise the rest was sarcasm.

yeah well that's just like your opinion man