since they’ve been acquired by Condé Nast, Ars has been almost thoroughly enshittified, this list (and almost everything else they publish nowadays) was created to appease their corporate overlords.
You know I was just thinking the other day about how badly Ars Technica needs to put out an article of their top video games because if anyone is an expert or can provide valuable ideas to the gaming industry it has to be the absolute garbage nearly tabloid and usually written by AI that never qualifies as real journalism from Ars Technica. I’m not sure if their goal has been to be the complete asses of tech news but they hands down take the cake and then providing this great list only solidifies them into the echos of history that literally no one will ever remember once they go bankrupt and no one cares to archive any piece of their trash of a site.
They used to be good but have greatly enshittified since being acquired by Condé Nast. I’ve been an Ars reader for almost 15 years, until last year. I don’t even bother going there anymore.
well, TIL. I thought it was more recent than that. Their quality has been steadily decreasing for quite some time, and I always blamed that acquisition.
I honestly don’t know anyone who has enjoyed Civ VII and my sample group is made up of people that really love strategy games. It’s such a mess compared to past entries in the series. I am surprised to see it in a top 20.
Civ 7 was a fucking disaster that is DOA due to the unoptimized code, shotty UI implementation, and extremely egregious monetization compared to previous installments
Honestly this list reads like the person who picked the games doesn’t actually play games and just listed the most popular/ most talked about games, but to make it not that obvious they asked that one “weird” person groupchat they were invited to once that is full of actual gamers to provide like 3 games for the list lol
I do feel like even if they skipped Clair Obscur because of recent controversies, the author should have addressed it. I think it’s certainly deserving of being in the list, so saying nothing kinda seems contrarian at best.
I played Clair Obscur, liked it, and it’s in my top 10 for the year out of about 18 games. But man, the reception of that game in the Game Awards and such is wildly out of sync with what I thought of it, and it makes perfect sense to me that it wouldn’t end up in an outlet’s top 20.
It has some really strong moments and a very powerful ending that means it leaves a very strong lasting impression in a lot of people. Also the music really carries it. I still think it’s a good game, but I was definitely a victim of this too and have found that my esteem of it has fallen a little bit as the “dust has settled” so to speak.
It’s still a great game, and I’d recommend people playing it but I don’t think I’d rank it as highly on my all-time list now as I would have when I sat and watched the credits roll the first time.
So all the big names plus a tohou style arknoid and a geometry wars meets robotron type deal.
I personally wasn’t awwed by avowed like some others were. But putting assassin’s creed at number one seems, well lazy. I kinda get why they didn’t include Claire obscura, given the recent backlash, but it was at least a better game than assassin’s creed. And ghosts of yontei being in the middle? Yeah, sorry ars. Gunna hard disagree with ya.
(I know you’re not the author, I’m just screaming into the ether )
That makes no sense. Both of those are just arcade twin-stick shooters, and Sektori is no more Robotron than Geometry Wars was. Also, while Sektori very obviously draws a lot on Geometry Wars, it’s an amazingly good arcade twin-stick that improves so much on what GW did, and really deserves recognition. It’s niche, but it’s genuinely a top game in that niche, and I mean best in ten years top game.
Glad to see Tribes get a mention. I spent a hell of a lot of time in that game. learning how to ski was mini game in itself. It was a great feeling when you mailed it When you nailed it.
2000 was the direct successor to NT4 and was specifically targeting the business market. It was available in Pro, Server, Adv Server, and Datacenter editions. I would not call it a consumer Windows OS.
That‘s interesting because I remember our home computer ran on it for a while. I guess that was only because my father was friends with a PC shop owner who knew about it.
ME was basically 98 but much less stable, so a lot of people grabbed a copy of 2000 one way or another to run it at home. XP came out in 2001, bringing an end to DOS based kernels in the Microsoft lineup.
Windows was built on IBM compatible MS-DOS, not regular DOS. The term “DOS” was so ubiquitous with IBM compatibility specifically, that it almost exclusively referred to MS-DOS, and not any other variant. Windows 95 does not run on top of Atari DOS, for example, and therefore trying to run any Windows 95 application in Atari DOS would not be possible.
Software natively compiled for Windows 95 will not usually run in any other variant of DOS than MS-DOS, and in some cases, even MS-DOS itself.
Quake II released in 1997 natively for Windows 95, but was not compatible with other DOS based operating systems at the time. Over the years, fans have tried to “backport” it to other variants of DOS, most notably Q2DOS. But its original PC release does not natively support any OS other than Windows 95. Many games of this era are like this, and a game released in this era usually said it was compatible with “Windows 95/98/ME,” not “DOS.”
I distinctly remember running most, if not all, of my games on Windows 2000 (not ME). I mean, yeah, NT 4 was pretty hopeless for gaming, but 2000 was better.
I never encountered a single Windows 9x game that wouldn’t run on Windows 2000 Pro. It was my primary OS in 2003 or so, having moved from Windows 98 SE.
I definitely own Diablo and I definitely used Win2K, but I didn’t go out of my way to buy a weird special version of it. This leads me to believe the normal Windows 95 version would work on NT as well.
So he couldn’t have been younger than 15 at the game’s release (and could have been as old as 25).
That being said, that game came out a quarter-century ago, and there are people in the workforce who won’t have been born when it was released. Can’t just assume any more.
I think they have the knowledge, but write only about what brings views.
From how often they write about Elon Musk, you’d think they are his promotion department.
Like a Stadium for games? That’s a really cool idea, I mean they already have the streaming tech, they only have to get their business model right. Easy, right?
It's basically an infinite money glitch! All Google has to do is make sure not to have the project run by the guy who botched the Xbox 360 launch and it'll be unstoppable!
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