Listosaurus Rex

Pretty much every major video game site or blog put together big “best-of” lists for the last major console as the next generation of games started to come out.  The most interesting of these was the Gamecube lists, for a few reasons.  First of all, it had the fewest cross-platform games, making the lists the most insular.  Next, the Gamecube games continue to live on because of the backward compatibility and ‘Cube controller compatibility of the Wii.  Finally, Nintendo has always had the most obsessive, hardcore fans, the type of fans who will compulsively rank and debate their favorites because they love them so much.

I found a few lists I liked across the net and decided to assemble them into one ultimate, comprehensive top ten list.  There was a suprising amount of consitency, though nearly every list had its unique picks not seen on the other lists.  With some number crunching and weighting in a spreadsheet, I was able to come upon a final order for the games.

Without further ado, the lists, and my tabulation of the concensus Top 10 Greatest Gamecube games.

List #1:  IGN

1. Metroid Prime
2. Resident Evil 4
3. Super Smash Bros. Melee
4. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
5. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
6. Pikmin 2
7. F Zero GX
8. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
9. Super Mario Sunshine
10. Wave Race: Blue Storm

I love IGN’s writing and I think their picks are pretty solid.  Few argue with the greatness of the first five, and they put up good cases for the greatness of the second five.  I think number ten is a little bit of a surprise, especially since Double Dash didn’t make the top ten.  Overall, though, this is excellently done and quite enjoyable.  I recommend you give it a read and see what games they picked for numbers 11-25, as it’s a Top 25 list in actuality.

List #2: Gamespot

1. Metroid Prime
2. Resident Evil 4
3. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
4. Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron 2
5. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
6. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
7. Pikmin 2
8. Viewtiful Joe
9. Freedom Fighters
10. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4

Gamespot is great because they provide a wealth of information for each game.  Unlike IGN’s list, it’s a systematic organization of highest review scores.  From what I’ve read, other games were more memorable and left a more lasting impact than Tony Hawk 4 or Freedom Fighters.  Still, the list is comprehensive and provides a gateway to more information.  The list also goes on and ranks every game released for the ‘Cube, certainly a useful resource for Wii and Cube owners looking good games they might have missed.

List #3: metacritic

1. Metroid Prime
2. Resident Evil 4
3. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
4. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
5. The Legend of Zelda: Collector’s Edition
6.  Madden NFL 2004
7. Soul Calibur II
8. Viewtiful Joe
9. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
10. SSX 3

The site metacritic.com doesn’t write its own reivews.  Rather, it culls reviews from various other sites and given a score out of 100.  As much as I love most of these picks, I think simple critical praise at the time of release shouldn’t be the barometer for how great a game is.  Some games are great at the time, but are quickly topped.  Others simply fade from memory.

The best and most memorable games stick with you and leave a longer-lasting impact.  That’s something that can’t completely be judged during the first few days you play it.  Case in point: Madden 2004 being in the top ten of best reviewed games.  Most agree it’s good, but few people argue that it’s one of the system’s ten best games (though I did enjoy it thoroughly, personally).  However, metacritic’s still an interesting list to look at, and points you in the direction of various reviews from across the net.

List #4: GameSpy

1. Resident Evil 4
2. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
3. Metroid Prime
4. Super Smash Bros. Melee
5. Soul Calibur II
6. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
7. Beyond Good and Evil
8. Mario Kart: Double Dash!!
9. Viewtiful Joe
10. Super Mario Sunshine

GameSpy’s list is my favorite out of the lists I looked at, not just because I like the picks the best, but because the writing is so effective.  If you look at any of these lists, look at this one.

List #5: Kombo

1. Metroid Prime
2. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
3. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
4. Super Smash Bros. Melee
5. Resident Evil 4
6. Super Mario Sunshine
7. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
8. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
9. Pikmin 2
10. Viewtiful Joe

Kombo is not as established and respected as some of the other sites on this list, but this is one of my favorites of the lists I’ve looked at.  The picks are good, the writing is concise, effusive, and informative, and the site looks great.  A very pleasant read.

List #6: About.com

1. Beyond Good and Evil
2. Tales of Symphonia
3. Resident Evil 4
4. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Colletor’s Disc
5. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
6. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
7. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
8. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
9. Animal Crossing
10. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

I’m generally not a big fan of the mega-blog About.com, but since it’s so widely read and recognized I decided to include it in this tally.  The writing is too brief, and some of the picks are a bit oddball, but I’m digging the inclusion of Animal Crossing and Tales of Symphonia.  Not digging the omission of Double Dash, Metroid Prime 1, and Melee.

THE CONCENSUS:

After tallying the results, assigning number values to different spots on different lists, doing some number crunching, and some swapping based on average placement and frequency of selection, I present to you the comprehensive Top 10 Greatest Gamecube Games according to the Internet.

1. Metroid Prime

2. Resident Evil 4
3. Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
4. Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess
5. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
6. Super Smash Bros. Melee
7. Pikmin 2
8. Viewtiful Joe
9. Super Mario Sunshine
10. Beyond Good and Evil

I weighted About.com’s list less than the others, so Metroid Prime edged out RE4.  Since it seemed like only half of the lists had considered Twilight Priness, as it was such a late addition, I doubled it’s value, and it placed neatly behind Wind Waker, giving them number three and four.   Super Smash did not place in all of the lists, but placed very highly in the ones it did.  Eternal Darkness only barely beat it in my number crunching.   Next came Pikmin 2, followed by a toss-up for eighth, ninth, and tenth.  I decided to rank the three contenders — Mario Sunshine, Viewtiful Joe, and Beyond Good and Evil — by how many top ten lists they had made.

There you go!  What were your favorite games for the Gamecube?  Leave a comment and share!

Here’s a review of everything I looked at in handy table format:

Roger Ebert is absolutely my favorite movie critic. I don’t always agree with him (for example: he gave The Usual Suspects only one and a half stars) but I always like the thoughtful analysis. “Roger Ebert loves movies more, and better, than almost any critic” says famous director Martin Scorsese, and from my limited observation of movie criticism, I’d have to agree. He has a warm heart and an open mind towards movies, never afraid to learn something new from them or about them, never afraid to be pleasantly surprised or unfortunately disappointed. He gives a lot of four star reviews, but I think that such an esteemed critic, such an experienced viewer, is able to see beauty in so many movies is a great thing. Most people lose appreciation for an art when it becomes a career, when they spend too much time with it, when they develop familiarity. Not Roger. He remains passionate and joyous towards the art of cinema.

It’s just a little bit overdue, as he released it a few weeks ago, but here is his list of his top ten favorite movies from 2007:

1. Juno
2. No Country For Old Men
3. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
4. Atonement
5. The Kite Runner
6. Away From Her
7. Across The Universe
8. La Vie En Rose
9. The Great Debaters
10. Into the Wild

Of these I have sadly only seen three. I’m working on it, though. A few are coming to the cheap local theater I usher at, so I’ll get to see them for free.

Movies are an art, and as such, Ebert tends to go with the movies that move him the most, as opposed to those that have the tightest scripts, highest technical achievement, and the most critical praise. We see some of this with Juno, a romantic dramedy, at number one, and oft-maligned Kite Runner and Across the Universe earning spots on the list.

He provides solid reasoning for each of his picks. I think the list is worth a look.

What movies did you enjoy in 2007?

What inventions have most swayed human history, are “most consequential to who we are today?”  A columnist for the MSN Encarta encyclopedia named Tamim Ansary has compiled a list of his ten picks, backed with some pretty solid reasoning.  Of course, you’ll probably disagree with him, he notes, but isn’t that the point of any top ten list?  To start a good argument?

Here are his picks:

1. The mechanical clock
2. The toilet and modern plumbing
3. The printing press
4. Immunization and antibiotics
5. The telephone
6. The electrical grid
7. The automobile
8. The television
9. The computer
10. Something new

By “something new” he means some invention whose effects are only starting to be understood and ripple through society.  He tosses out birth control, the Internet, and virtual reality as possible picks here.

I agree, with exceptions.  I would have tossed television out and included the gun.  Meanwhile, I would have placed the electrical grid higher, as our instant, easy access to electricity drives so much of how we spend our time nowadays.  However, the list is arranged generally chronologically, so I’m not sure he means for the ten to be ranked.

Overall, his reasoning is pretty solid, though.  It really makes you think how different our lives are from the people who lived a thousand years ago.  Can you imagine not having any of these things?

Check out his original list if you want to read more.

ESPN recently put together a list of the greatest seasons of all time for individuals in college football history. Here is their top ten:

1. 1988 Barry Sanders, Oklahoma State
2. 1924 Red Grange, Illinois
3. 1963 Roger Staubach, Navy
4. 1976 Tony Dorsett, Pittsburgh
5. 2005 Vince Young, Texas
6. 1968 Al Worley, Washington
7. 1980 Herschel Walker, Georgia
8. 1984 Doug Flutie, Boston College
9. 1980 Hugh Green, Pittsburgh
10. 1948 Doak Walker, SMU

When it comes to college football, I’m not much of a stat hound or history buff, so I don’t have particularly strong reactions here. The one thing that surprised to see Vince Young so high. That was a great season for him, but top five all time high? Eh. Better than defensive back Al Worley’s astronomical interception-record setting season that they discuss for slot six? Not sure I buy it.

For me, it’s impossible to see Doug Flutie 1984 without thinking of The Hail Mary, and sure enough, it’s mentioned. Talk about a great ending to a football game.

If you want to read the writer’s reasoning for each pick, check out the site.

Modern cinema was born in 1927, rock and roll in the early 1950’s, video games in the late 1970’s. Each of these artistic mediums are presented in scopes that can easily be perceived. scrutinized, and contained. Thus, they are topics which it’s pretty easy to construct a list around. It’s reasonable for a film critic to have seen most major pieces of film, for rock aficiando to understand the importance of both Chuck Berry and The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and for modern gaming magazine editors to know that Geometry Wars is just a souped version of Robotron 2084.

Other artistic mediums do not have this condition. Even art museum curators with doctorates in art history can only have a small grasp at the significance of each member of the wide spectrum of visual art over the past dozen-plus millennia. Likewise, literature professors at Oxford can only guess the importance of something like the Ramayana compared to something like Huckleberry Finn or something by Faulkner. It’s not any insult to those experts when I make those statements, but rather a statement about the broad, multi-era history of the mediums. You can’t fully grasp the immediate power of art unless you are around in the era it is produced, it’s just not possible.

All of that being said, there are a few novels and books that are widely praised as some of the Best Ever. Anna Karenina, Lolita, In Search of Lost Time, etc. These are the books that middle school English teachers effuse about with a hint of romance in their voice, the books that deans of prestigious liberal arts display on their fireplace mantle, and famous authors cite as their inspirations for getting into the literature business.

If literature scholars are allowed to have favorites like those, which they are, why can’t they have second-favorites? Third-favorites? How about, all the way down to tenth-favorites? And just like that, a top ten list is constructed, as vulgar and suppressive to the vast scope of literature as that seems.

J. Peder Zane has talked to 125 famous authors, convinced them to construct Top Ten favorite pieces of literature lists, and combined the lists into one ultimate, authoritative ranking of the Top Ten greatest pieces of literature, according to writers worldwide. He released his findings in a book that can be bought on Amazon.

Without further ado, here are the ten greatest books of all time. I feel ridiculous just saying that.

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Nothing Earth-shattering or blasphemous there. In fact, I think it’s about as safe a top ten as you could have. How many have you read? I am totally embarrassed by my number, so I won’t tell you what it is. But here’s a hint: you can count it on three fingers.

Props to Leo Tolstoy for nabbing two of the top three slots on this uber-selective list.

For more commentary on this list and this book, check out this great article from Time magazine. Columnist Lev Grossman shares my hesitation in listifying literature (”There’s something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together”) and provides some interesting insight.

Maybe some boring, rainy day, I’ll buy this book from Borders just so I can remind myself how little classic literature I’ve actually read. In the mean time, I’ll stick with my Dave Barry booger jokes, thank you very much.