I still have contacts at Clock Draper Spudgun. One of them was so incensed by the blindspots in this recent Top 100 that he decided to go a bit Edward Snowden. Beyond the break is a leaked early draft of my alma mater’s next eyebrow-elevating listicle.
“Being a Sainsbury’s shopper means having access to thousands of different items of tempting nosh. This only makes it harder to choose what to buy/eat, which is where our Top 100 comes in. We have surveyed the full range of foods available in Sainsbury’s to put together a list of essential eatables for 2024. Note that we have paid no mind to what was important, influential, or healthy; we only care about grub that is great to eat today. The result is 100 foods of the finest quality.”
I initially thought you were maybe holding a bit of a grudge with this entry, Tim, but then I looked at the actual list. Wow. It’s remarkably awful, especially if you sort by genre and look at simulations.
To me it looks like someone just made a list pulling out random games in random order from steam charts. By a glancing look at it I fail to se any rhyme or reason behind the choices.
A couple of days ago I used Google to search Rock Paper Grauniad {left-wing broadsheet newspaper that developed a reputation for misspellings, nominally The Guardian} for Tim Stone articles that might mention an obscure game I thought he covered. The tag-line returned is:
“Tim Stone: A vereran {sic} PC games journalist, Tim has been covering simulation, strategy and management games in print and online for over 30 years.”
I presume this means that, unlike the rest of us in middle age, Tim has increased HP and increased health regeneration, while also doing increased damage.
PS. Sainsburys should be ashamed: only one beer on the list (Guinness Original at 28)!
Well, the list is shitty, but inevitably all such lists are, even more so when they are constructed by a committee, which was always the RPS way. I mean, even back when Tim was part of them, those lists were not even close to a list I would make.
But honestly, I don’t see a point. IMHO the only lists that make sense are those that would gather the best little talked about games from the current year. There is such a freakishly huge number of games getting published nowadays, I am constantly finding real gems that I have never heard about, and I’m sure there must be a lot more out there.
But then again, Minecraft at number 1… I checked and they are writing about it almost every day. Must be getting a lot of clicks for relatively little effort. That explains it.
I’m less surprised that the turn based strategy genre is represented by whole 3 games, 2 of which are RPGs and the last one also story heavy.