Gamespy has their latest adorable attempt at relevance up, a list of the 25 most overrated games of all time. You can go look at it if you want, I'm certainly not putting a link to it here - suffice it to say, where it is obvious it is obvious, and where they attempt to be brash and iconoclastic it's just insulting. We've done a comic on it, I'll take it frame by frame it.
Panel One: Trying to understand the feature itself is a chore, because they have four separate classifications for Overrated-ness, and some games fall into more than one category. Some games are overrated by Critics, some games are not as good as earlier ones in a series, and some are both - but whether or not earlier games in a series were simply "Overrated By Critics" might be difficult to ascertain. While I do enjoy a bit of bracing mental exercise, the content on Gamespy isn't exactly a fucking brain Nautilus.
Panel Two: Years ago, when I was playing a lot of Front Line Force, I really appreciated Gamespy Arcade's buddy lists and invigorating interstitial ads. However, I think the period of time where such an application was required or even desirable has past. Server Browsers, that's one thing - a nice, lightweight affair like All Seeing Eye is still within the realm of sanity. Most browsers internal to games are acceptable, and Gamespy licensed backends are perfectly serviceable when inbuilt. But the universe where I utilize their heavily branded portal to browse for games seems very distant.
Panel Three: Everyone likes to have fun. I'm having fun right now! So I don't mind them having a little bit of fun with their list. But when you feign ignorance or discard historical perspective so you can look fancy, I don't have to tolerate your stupid ass anymore. When you deny the profound effect of Donkey Kong Country's fully rendered sprites in 1994, making the system a bulwark against the 32-bit revolution, there is no educating you. When you are seemingly unaware of the dramatic progress in both modeling and Internet play that Quake II was, and when you start to talk some shit about Final Fantasy VII - the game that absolutely pierced the mainstream and deposited the notion of gaming into a new generation - we've got nothing to discuss. You're assholes or retards, and I don't care which.
You really have to go out of your way to make me mad these days, because I'm playing the great games of today that GameSpy or its vacuous future variant will one day overrate, only to lament the fact in some empty expose - without so much as a nod to what the games meant to the period, the system, or indeed to the history of our preferred entertainment medium. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, a highly amusing marvel of affectionate production, will no doubt be relegated to whatever bin their hideous cyborg interns reserve for games they suddenly revile.
(CW)TB out.
they think i'm overemotional
