Delfeir vs. the Backlog

Delfeir vs The Backlog General Update (Oct 2023)

Ahh, that’s what the “Publish” button is for!

I’m back.

In hindsight, starting off the latest post on the website with “We have not been idle” is kind of ironic after a hiatus lasting much of the year. C’est la vie!

The 150 Most Acclaimed Games of All Time: Updated Rankings and Project Status

We have not been idle.

Last year, I shared the early results of my friend James’ project to rigorously calculate the most acclaimed video games of all time. The original results can still be found here. We also answered a number of questions about the project in a follow up article.

At that stage the project was little more than a proof of concept, and the formula — despite already being far more sophisticated than the ones used by Metacritic, Video Game Canon, or pwnRank — still had significant weaknesses. Since then, the project has matured considerably, and all of the formula’s major weaknesses have been addressed.

This final list is no longer biased towards the most prolific publications, nor does it give undue weight to lists from less reputable sources. These issues were solved through a combination of clever weighting algorithms, and crude adjustments. Along with these improvements, a slight bias towards more recent lists has also been added to better reflect the current critical consensus.

The result is a much more authoritative representation of the most acclaimed video games of all time. It’s not just the formula that’s been updated, either: numerous data entry errors have been corrected, and more than 100 new lists have been added to the database, including the end of year lists for 2020 and 2021. The total number of lists is now more than 370.

The project will soon have its own website, but until then, enjoy this teaser: the definitive 150 most acclaimed video games of all time, as determined by games media critical consensus.

Delfeir vs The Backlog General Update (Sept 2022)

Because the least I can do for my website is write stuff for it

Given that I’ve spent much of the year not updating this website, I figured I should rectify that.

Hi! I’m alive!

It’s been another one of those years that — while mercifully not spent in lockdown — has seen very little headway in any of the things I’d like to do or the projects I’ve begun. In addition to a status update on some of those, there’s a few games in particular I’ve played this year that I would like to write about, so I’ll put a spotlight on those in a mini-Backlog Report.

IGN Review of Galactic Civilizations IV

Let’s start off with the major positive news from the year: I got hired by IGN as a freelancer to review a game! If there was any doubt to myself (or others) that I’m not any good at what I do, that helped me dispel it significantly. Paid review work for one of the biggest games media sites on the internet? Regardless of your opinion of the website, that’s a big deal, and I was certainly thrilled. It was a good little opportunity to work with some very skilled, friendly, and communicative editors over there.

The only negatives about the experience were that the game in question (Galactic Civilizations IV) itself was not particularly good, but writing about it was nonetheless interesting. If you’ve not seen it yet, you can read the review over on IGN. I also wrote the script for the video version, which is slightly different and a lot more condensed due to word limits.

There’s more I’d like to write about GalCivs 4 that I didn’t touch on in the review, honestly. But the reason I elected to omit it from the review is that it’s a heavily political deep-dive into some of the systems and writing there, both as a political reading and as a kind of “eureka!” moment on why I always felt the series failed to meet my expectations. I think there’s plenty to say there, but it’s not what IGN is really about or particularly pertinent to the rest of the overall review. Hopefully I’ll get to put it up here at some point.

The Trouble With Critiquing Endwalker

This is not a critique of Endwalker, this is just a tribute.

This is a fairly unstructured and unfiltered blog post, like some of the earlier pieces on this site. I’ve mostly used it to sort through my mental processes and just touch on a few things to whoever cares to listen. As such, it’s not been closely edited and I’ve not put the usual formatting into it. In short, there’s a wall of text ahead.

Allow me to assuage this by providing a soundtrack for your reading, courtesy of the actual best thing to come out of Endwalker.

You’re welcome.

As I said repeatedly in covering the games I liked of 2021, Endwalker was not among them. While the gameplay and mechanical changes remain as solid and enjoyable to play as ever, the core of Final Fantasy 14’s appeal has long been its quality story. As such, even the strengths of its latest expansion were increasingly hard to just simply enjoy for me, built as they are on a foundation of sand and rot. There are better games that I’ll just play for the sake of play; what makes Final Fantasy 14 (and particularly the Shadowbringers expansion) one of my all time favourites is that it transcends the sum of its parts. I fully intend to go through and do a thorough breakdown of Endwalker’s narrative flaws in an article.

This is not that article. This is an article that I am largely using to get my thoughts in order and put a voice to why this process has been such a struggle for me.

The Delfies 2021: Some Other Games I Liked This Year

You might actually find a western triple A game in here… but that’s unlikely.

If you haven’t read my Delfies 2021 Top 10 yet, you can find that here.

I found myself in the interesting place of having too many games and struggling to cut them down to a top 10 this year. At the same time, it felt like nothing in my top 10 could really compete with the top four or so from 2020, so it was harder still to make the selection. I’m ultimately satisfied with the placement of where everything ended up, but there were more games that I feel I could shine a light on. Some of them are the more mainstream triple A games that I enjoyed but ultimately washed over; some are indie games that were really charming in their own right but just couldn’t quite make the mark.

But hey, I’ve got a platform and time, so it’s only right that I spare some words for those as well.

With that sentiment in mind, I ended up ballooning this list even further. Many of these didn’t make the top 10 candidate list, and a few I’ve yet to finish at all (or they themselves are in early access, thus proving ineligible for now). Some I’ll get to in full later on, with any luck. This is more of a quantity over quality lightning round, but I’ll try to give them all a fair shake, and none of these are in any particular order.

Before we proceed, there’s a few games I also want to mention that interest me, but I’ve yet to actually start playing them properly or else they’d likely be here too. Those are: Everhood, Tales of Arise, Death’s Door, Psychonauts 2, FIST: Forged in Shadow Touch, The Forgotten City and Outer Wilds’s DLC Echoes of the Eye. I just haven’t had the chance to tackle them for more than an hour if at all yet, but they’re all in my immediate future. So now let’s cover the ones I actually did get to.

The Delfies 2021: Top 10

Objectively the only correct choices on the internet. That’s totally what this means.

2021 wasn’t a bad year for games, but it also didn’t feel like a particularly inspiring one. There wasn’t really any single game that absolutely blew me away or changed my perspectives on the hobby like 2020 did. In fact, the opposite happened: the one game that I dared to let my guard down and hype up for myself ended up disappointing me beyond what I thought possible. You will not be seeing Final Fantasy 14’s Endwalker expansion on this list; that gets its own article later on, and it’ll be far less celebratory.

Still, let’s not be a total downer on what’s meant to highlight the best of the year. Not until the end of the article, anyway. So, I’m going to split this into two articles. The one you’re reading now is what I personally consider my top 10 for the year. There’ll be a follow up article not long after to cover other games I enjoyed this year that didn’t make the cut, either because I didn’t finish them or didn’t find them quite as complete. I’ll also mention what systems I played them on specifically.

Without further ado, the Delfies of 2021!

Answering Your Questions on the Most Acclaimed Games Project

Last week, I shared a friend’s attempt to calculate the top 100 most acclaimed video games of all time. Here’s that article and accompanying list. At first people treated it as little more than a curiosity; they perused it for their own personal favourites, celebrated inclusions, lamented omissions, but ultimately moved on.

However, later on, a few wanted to know more: how it was calculated, what lists were included, what games were eligible, why Metroid: Other M wasn’t in the top 10 (OK, maybe not that one). So in order to respond to these questions—and also just to satisfy our own desire to speak in more depth about the project—James and I sat down for an informal interview.

Kris: May as well jump right into the juicy questions: How have you actually calculated all of this?

James: Yeah that seems to be by far the most common question I get. As soon as it dawns on people that the types of data that I’m using don’t exactly combine easily, they want to know how I’ve solved that. And the first thing that I want to say is that I take no credit for this method. Part of it came from pieces of information that I gleaned from Acclaimed Music, another big part came from a friend of mine who is an expert in statistics (thanks Ian!), and all I really did was fill in the gaps.

The Best Video Games of All Time, According to… Everyone?

For years now, Metacritic has served as the de facto judge for what are considered the greatest video games of all time. That is because ranking the greatest games of all time is a tricky process; so tricky that it’s beyond the capacities of any individual, or indeed any one publication. Metacritic recognises this and, instead of publishing its own reviews, aggregates reviews by other publications and assigns a score based on a weighted average.

So why doesn’t Metacritic’s list of best games resemble the kinds of all time lists published elsewhere?

Part of the reason is because Metacritic doesn’t take these lists into account. Anywhere. At all. Metacritic looks only at scored reviews, meaning that an important data point is missing when they do their calculations. There are also inherent problems with scored reviews if you assume that they are directly comparable to each other without context. A game might score 80 on one website and 4/5 on another, yet both carry wholly different weights and comparisons in their own publication.

My friend James and I have discussed this repeatedly, and how a better system would involve lists as well as scored reviews. We knew that such disparate data could be combined in an elegant and fair way because we’d seen it done before (see AcclaimedMusic.net), but no one had ever attempted it for video games (at least not to our knowledge). So partly to rectify this problem — and also partly as a lockdown project — James made it happen.

The following list was made by collating almost 250 end of year lists, best of decade lists, and all time lists from a wide variety of publications. The project is still in its infancy, so this is not the final list. You can expect the places to shift around significantly as more data is added. Ultimately, we were just keen to get this first set of results out for people to see and discuss.

So on that note: Here are the top 100 best games of all time, according to as many lists as we could find at present.

Star Wars Visions Review — No Substance, But So Much Style

Love, Death, and Droids

Star Wars Visions is a real mixed bag to me. In a way, that’s to be expected with an animated anthology series. It’s a collection of isolated vignettes by a variety of different animation studios; some episodes are always going to be better than others. For example, I’m going to recommend World Record or Detective Story over the rest of The Animatrix. But as a whole, I’d still recommend watching the whole of The Animatrix. For Visions, I’m torn between cherry picking and saying that it’s worth watching the entirety.

On my basis (and bias) as a writer, I’m going to lean towards watching individual episodes. For a Star Wars fan that’s interested in seeing a new take on the universe or expansion of lore concepts, I’m absolutely going to say skip most of the episodes. There’s little to no substance here for any of that, and writing was definitely not a priority over the animation, visual style, and sound. It’s easily better to watch maybe three of the episodes and then skip the rest.

With that in mind, the fact that I am so torn should help the next statement resound strongly: The art and animation alone really is good enough to consider recommending the whole series.

Even the most dull and uninspired of these vignettes is done with striking visual flair and a frequently unique style. The most tonally nonsense and un-Star Wars episode (and I am thinking of a specific one here) will still be so flashy and over the top that I can’t help but revel in it. Star Wars Visions is a visual treat, and for those with any real interest in art and animation? That’s enough to recommend it in a heartbeat. For everyone else, your mileage will vary strongly on the individual offerings.

Since there’s nine radically different episodes, I’m going to do my usual Battle Report style write-up for each of them individually. I’ll include the episode name and number so you can choose whether or not it sounds like something you’ll want to check out. I also watched this in a group with a couple of friends, so I’ll note a couple of dissenting opinions and comments when relevant.

Backlog Battle Report (May-July 2021)

Who needs in-depth coverage when you can have a lightning round?!

Writing’s been slow again, compounded by the usual suspects but also by a keyboard malfunction. This necessitated a new one: a Logitech G512 with brown tactile switches since I enjoy blasting people over Discord with my fast typing. Nothing special, but it does the job and it’s holding up so far. The malfunction happened while I was about halfway through writing this, though! That stalled me even further, but it also let me add new games to the list in the interim. If some of these entries seem like they were written separately, that’s why.

I’m still in between a bunch of articles and projects, but still have plenty of games played and things to talk about in general. Some of these will get a full piece eventually, should I manage to actually pull something together that I’m satisfied with. But until then, here’s what I’ve been playing for the last while.

The usual drill: two or three paragraphs tops (Future Delfeir here just to laugh at that statement…), focused more on quantity and general impressions than anything too detailed. It’s also not a completely exhaustive list, but mostly just the highlights and things that are worth talking about. Trust me, I won’t be short of things to talk about… this one clocks in at about six thousand words, so be warned. ‘ere we go!

Subnautica: Below Zero (PC)

I had to double check when I started writing this that I hadn’t talked about this one already here. Shows how much time has passed, I suppose. Either way, the Subnautica spinoff/sequel came out of Early Access a couple months back. I really enjoyed the original, so I was quick to “dive back in” to this one, hurr hurr. Regardless, it didn’t disappoint, and it was a good time all around. There’s still something about these two games and their alien environments that really stand out amidst the crowd of other survival games out there.

Below Zero is a shorter affair than its predecessor, and I wrapped it up in maybe half the time. It can be described as condensed in both good and bad ways. I don’t think there’s quite as many interesting or varied biomes to explore or materials to find. However, the technology progression and story pacing is much smoother, so Below Zero just seemed to flow better in general. I enjoyed the story better overall too, so there’s that. It’s an easy recommend for anyone who finds the concept intriguing, no matter your familiarity with the first.