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Lost Pages of Taborea: Siege war top 50
One of the fascinating aspects of an MMO is its ability to spark creativity. With so much to do in these large virtual worlds, it's almost inevitable that players will create wikis, fan sites, addons and anything else they can dream up. Runes of Magic is no different, and its siege war has given way to the creation of Siege War Top 50. The fan-made website aggregates siege war scores from all guilds on North American servers and spits it out in various lists. It has been consistently popular on the RoM forums for many weeks now and is a testament to how popular siege war is. Let's take a look at this site and see what makes it tick. Along the way, I share commentary about the site and siege war in general, and you'll get to see which guilds are in the top bracket out of all the North American servers.
Game Developer Research lists 'Top 50 Developers' of 2009
Game Developer magazine (and its brainy Game Developer Research division) recently published its second annual enumerated accolades for the fine folks who make the games that you crudely jam into your home entertainment consoles -- or, in layman's terms, the "Top 50 Developers 2009" report. The rankings are based on how many games a studio created, the sales for those games, and their metacritic ratings. Quality of box art and amount of 'tude possessed by the games' protagonists, however, were not taken into consideration.The results are utterly shocking -- for the second year in a row, Nintendo took top honors, with fellow money-printing organization Blizzard taking second place. Ubisoft Montreal skyrocketed from 12th place in the '08 report to third place in the most recent rankings. Regardless of your fanboyism for a certain developer, we think we can all agree -- in such a financially (and employmentmentally) challenging time, we're just glad to hear there's at least 50 game developers that haven't been forced to shut down.The full list is posted after the jump.[Thanks, Braz!]
Guinness pours out its Top 50 Games of All Time
We wish we could write off Guinness World Records' newly published list of the all-time top 50 "console" games as a simple case of tapping one too many kegs that night. But then, the business of profiting from others' frivolous "records" was sold by the stout brewers some years ago and is today operated by the Jim Pattison Group, purveyor of the other bizarre events publication, Ripley's Believe It or Not!. Of course, a top 50 games list, while always subjective, doesn't have to be "bizarre" by nature -- this one just is.While the list (published in full after the break) appears to start off innocently, if not entirely incorrect with "Super Mario Kart," followed by "Tetris," and then "Grand Theft Auto" in third, an adjoining explanation (in the press release) reveals -- with inaccuracy and contradiction -- that the first three selections actually represent franchises, and not single games: "As the best-selling racing game on the N64 (more than 9 million units sold), Super Mario Kart is also the best-selling racer on the SNES (8 million units), the GameCube (nearly 7 million units) and the DS (10 million units) ... In second place, the world's most ported video game, Tetris, is available on at least 59 different gaming platforms ... Third runner up, Grand Theft Auto holds the record for the most controversial series of games." Oddly, GTA is represented two more times on the list by San Andreas (#16) and Vice City (#39). As for the remainder of the list, we are not given instructions for interpreting entries that could also be representative of entire series or just single titles (Halo, Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid, etc.), though, there are plenty of games that are singled out from their respective franchises, as well (Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil 4, Final Fantasy XII, etc.). But, that's the beauty of an annual records book -- there's always room in next year's edition to rewrite the list!
The winner of the Mark Jacobs Award for Corporate Community Achievement is...
Yes, you didn't blink when you read the title. Of course, the award was made by Alex Litel of "Bell, Game, and Candle" at GameSetWatch and it's meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but it really shows how connected Jacobs is with all of the Warhammer Online hype.Litel's article showcases the many press release quotes that just make you tilt your head in confusion and wonder why exactly someone wrote that for marketing purposes. Quotes such as Cliffy B calling the original Gears of War "...just a tease, an appetizer to Gears of War characters and new style of gameplay" just to ramp up marketing for Gears of War 2.Litel inserted the Mark Jacobs award because he thought it would be unfair to include Mark Jacob's quotes in with the other quotes he gathered. With all of the passion Mark puts behind his marketing promises, including Jacobs's quotes would turn the article into a countdown of Mark Jacobs moments. So, the quotes were left out, but the spirit of Jacobs remained alive and well.If you want to see all 50 quotes, and which quote got the coveted award, head on over to GameSetWatch and check out Litel's article. We certainly got a few chuckles out of it.
Guild Wars named in Top 50 games list
Over at 411mania.com, the staff there are working on each of their own lists compiling the top 50 games of all time. In this most current edition, The Checkpoint's John Curry gives us his own list. To our delight, Guild Wars is on this list, although almost right smack dab in the middle. To be fair though, it is the only MMO listed among a mountain of single-player and console games. In fact, the honor for Guild Wars seems more prestigious once you see just how "of all time" this list actually gets. Oregon Trail ftw!Granted, this list is a personal opinion, put forth by one man, but we found it entertaining nonetheless. What may be even more entertaining though is the mountain of comments following his post. As with any opinion piece, those making comments love to not only tell him his opinion is wrong, but spread their own opinions everywhere. It makes for an interesting read.
Top 50 handheld games of the century
Next Gen has painstakingly gone through NPD sales data to give you the best selling handheld games of all time (in the US). They went through the number of units sold, and two PSP games made their way to this elite list of heavy-hitting games. Sure, the rest of the list is dominated by DS and Game Boy games, but Sony has done what the Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket, n-Gage, etc. have failed to do: make a portable that can survive against the Nintendo goliath. The two games that represented the PSP should come as no surprise: 48. Madden NFL 06(est. sales of 590,000) 16. Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories(est. sales of 980,000) Make sure you read through Next Gen's report to see the entire list.[Via DS Fanboy]
