Sep 2021 – Delfeir vs. the Backlog

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 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.

Month: Sep 2021

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