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[Dasleah]

Duke Nukem is pretty much overhyped, I hate to say it  There was this nice comic, I think penny arcade or xkcd, that pointed out that the only really memorable thing about it might have been the strippers.

It didnt give us ANYTHING that other games havent given us before. Apart from strippers, and really immature mentality altogether, that was really well received by the average gamer demographic back then (mostly adolescent males, not geeky, beardy scientists anymore).

But strictly speaking, Duke Nukem 3D wasnt all that special.

edit; altough I have to admit, it was the first game in which I saw my avatar in a mirror. I think one of the first things I tried was to load up the level editor and place two mirrors in front of each other, which made the game crash, or something 

Well, Duke Nukem 3D was one of the first 3D games that actually allowed for room-over-room, making true 3D environments possible (everything else before that was a portal / teleport hack) But I didn't nominate it as a great game because of the technology (which is a stupid reason to think a game is great anyway) It's because Duke was the first real character in games. Every other protagonist up to that point had been silent and bland characters who only had a physical appearance to make something stand out on the front of the box. And then bam, outta nowhere, you have this one-liner spouting hard-smoking sexist badass who actually has personality.

Hell, Duke's 13 years old, and he still has more personality that most FPS protagonists these days. Master Chief, anyone?

It's not designed to be single player.  The flaws that make it a bad single player experience were expressly designed into to make it a better multiplayer one.

It's pay for play, so the power structure is designed as much as possible around power level equalling time played and factoring out twitch skill (which would alienate more high level players than it would attract)

It's social, so they intentionally create synergies necessary to succeed.

It's persistant, so players aren't allowed to actually change the game world.

It's impressively well suited to do exactly what it does.

+1. WoW isn't the best game, but it sure as hell deserves a top 10 spot. No other game has had such a huge cultural or social impact before, and love or loathe the mechanics, you have to respect what it's achieved.

[Sowelu]

Hey, Duke had its share of portal hacks.  I believe that every 'water' area was actually a separate room that you portal to when you go through the water surface, right?

True 3d is indeed cool, I'm just not entirely convinced how 'true' that 3d really was.  Hmm.

[Puck]

It's because Duke was the first real character in games.

ummm what?

What about guybrush, just to name ONE?

[Tormy]

Hey, Duke had its share of portal hacks.  I believe that every 'water' area was actually a separate room that you portal to when you go through the water surface, right?

Yeah, correct. It wasn't "real" 3D.

+1. WoW isn't the best game, but it sure as hell deserves a top 10 spot. No other game has had such a huge cultural or social impact before, and love or loathe the mechanics, you have to respect what it's achieved.

I absolutely agree. It's the most popular game of all time. That's respectable. Actually Blizzard is amazing, they know how to create extremely popular games. Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft, WoW....They are the number 1. game dev. company, that is for sure.

[Puck]

WoW sold so many copies/has so many subscribers because it appeals to the "outsiders" mostly.
I still remember how I first was happy when gaming started to move from obscurity to mainstream, but oh boy, do I regret it now...

I really really want people to enjoy their games, I'm happy they can like wow, but then it strikes me, again, how this influences us all.

I've been playing videogames since approximately 1985, I tried to get earlier games on different platforms for my collection too (I still have some 70ties TV-Games) and of course I tried WoW. How people can play this without feeling mindnumbingly bored is TOTALLY beyond me. You've seen all the game can offer in such a short amount of time (because the patterns are so freaking obvious), and there is so little you can do.

If I think back to ultima online, even after they split the world into trammel and felucca, that was a game in which you could actually do stuff. Other than pointless grinding, that is.

Or something else is Guild Wars. I don't know how the game is today, but back then, when wow was new, GW was new, too. The games, albeit pretty different in their design, got compared pretty often. All the things that get advertised as the stuff thats the actual interesting stuff in wow... well, GW did it better.

The little 8 skill restriction that your characters have, those actually made the game interesting. Also it took you only a day to build a proper character that could do everything in game.

[dreiche2]

Also think Duke wasn't proper 3D. I think people call it 2.5D. Basically a lot of hacks to make it seem fully 3D in some cases.

And about WoW, well the problem is that "top games" can mean different things. If you talk about impact or financial success, well then WoW is surely one of the top games...

[Yanlin]

On the topic of 3D, no game is truly 3D. The image you see before you is a 2D image.

[Alexhans]

At least divide them by genres and epochs. 

Pong is amazing but you can't compare it with Civilization III, wrong genre different time.

[Puck]

lemme quickly complete the post i made above, i started it at work and had to finish it prematurely
I'm not pointing out all those details about me because i want to sound like some authoroton, but rather because i want to say im actually predestined to like games as long as they have SOMETHING to offer.

and if we say wow is a "top" game because of commercial success.... well, videogames are art, i already said that and i stand by that, and commercial success is meaningless in art. Or is anybody truly going to tell me britney spears is a great musician?!?

and about true 3d: if we push it EVERY game is true 3d, since no image can exist outside of time.

[codezero]

I don't even consider it as a game, but as a distraction whilst you chat to your mates. So that link to me only list 99 games. The reason chess (where you can chat) isn't the most popular is because it's more than just a distraction, it requires actual thinking. WoW is set only to be dumbed down or perish to an even more vapid 'game'.

[dreiche2]

On the topic of 3D, no game is truly 3D. The image you see before you is a 2D image.

By that logic, the world isn't 3D either, because what you perceive comes from a flat image on your retina.

But seriously, there are distinct differences in how games are implemented, and there is a distinct difference in between how say Duke 3D was implemented and how Quake was implemented. Not much to argue here. In Quake you could put anything above anything else, whereas in Duke and Doom everything was simulated just on a 2D plane, just the viewpoint seemed to be 3D.

You can see it right away in the first level of Doom 2. At the end there is an elevator (just a raising platform). When you're on top of it and want to jump off and there is an enemy at the bottom, it blocks you as if the enemy was level with you. Boy how often did I mistakenly try to jump over that enemy somewhere below my feet... stupid Imps 

As for the list, well IMO "top" is even less 'defined' than say "best". And yes, a list of the "top" musicians of the last 20 years would probably consider commercial success, too. Or not, I mean it's really just a matter of explaining how the list really is meant, "top" by itself is just too vague...

I'm not saying that commercial success equates quality or being "great", I'm just saying that a "top" list could be in terms of both or many other things...

And just to say, I don't think that "WoW" is "great" either 

[Granite26]

saying that 'commercially successful' isn't the same as 'great' is just ya'll saying other people are dumb.

[Alexhans]

saying that 'commercially successful' isn't the same as 'great' is just ya'll saying other people are dumb.

Aye! Daikatana and others...

[Virtz]

But seriously, there are distinct differences in how games are implemented, and there is a distinct difference in between how say Duke 3D was implemented and how Quake was implemented. Not much to argue here. In Quake you could put anything above anything else, whereas in Duke and Doom everything was simulated just on a 2D plane, just the viewpoint seemed to be 3D.

You can see it right away in the first level of Doom 2. At the end there is an elevator (just a raising platform). When you're on top of it and want to jump off and there is an enemy at the bottom, it blocks you as if the enemy was level with you. Boy how often did I mistakenly try to jump over that enemy somewhere below my feet... stupid Imps 

I'm pretty sure at least Duke 3D operated in 3D. I recall there being bridges (meaning platforms above walkable areas), which would probably be pretty fucked if enemies below it could block you above. The jetpack would be pretty screwed as well.

saying that 'commercially successful' isn't the same as 'great' is just ya'll saying other people are dumb.

If game quality is proportional to commercial success, then The Sims and The Sims 2 are apparently both (separately) better games than WoW ("best PC gaems evar", in fact).

[Granite26]

saying that 'commercially successful' isn't the same as 'great' is just ya'll saying other people are dumb.

If game quality is proportional to commercial success, then The Sims and The Sims 2 are apparently both (separately) better games than WoW ("best PC gaems evar", in fact).

Debateable (Has Sims made more sales, or just sold more original boxes?)

Also, the correlation isn't necessarily strict.