So. Edge has just published its Top 100 Games Of All Time list. (SIT BACK DOWN, child. You will not be finding any rank-related bitching here. This is a place of calm. Shoo.) Unsurprisingly, said list has caused a bit of a ruckus on the fragile planet that is The Internet, where the atmosphere is 97% vitriol and all the extinct species died of having wrong opinions.
Top 100 lists are very rarely one person toiling away for months on his/her ultimate games of all time. They are even more rarely based on questions like "has it aged well?" and "does it match up to Dark Souls?". They are very likely to be based on a number of people sort of deciding what their favourite games are as a group, and because we're all humans, we tend to think of games we played recently and games we grew up on and not a lot in between.
Remember how games are fun? So, too, are lists. We like lists. Entire websites have been more out of humanity's love of seeing the mundane categorised and ranked and turned into quizzes (naming no names, but one notable example rhymes with shmuzzpeed). So sometimes, when we get bored, or it's the end of the year, or it's a slow news week, or because we want to, we organise all the things we like into a definitive order.
Once my friends and I, aged about 14 and bored in science class, decided to make the definitive ranked list of all the boys we knew. The list was based on things I can't remember, but let's imagine it was something like Snugglability, Fashion Sense, Hair Fluffiness and Lip Softness, like a really creepy RPG character creator.
Edge loves turnips
Even with the amount of care and attention we put in - by which I mean going around my group of friends and making them fill out a survey (school can be really boring, guys) - people disagreed with the end result. "Steve's hair is SO a 10/10," they'd say. "Marcus's lips are softer than a pillow full of marshmallows and baby ducks," they'd add, and then we'd all be like "No way, you kissed Marcus" and they'd be like "No, what, shut up". What I'm saying here is that randy teenage girls are basically analogous to NeoGAF.
So it's strange seeing people get furious about a list of games made by a few people. Sure, some people make these lists to rile others so that people will buy their magazines JUST TO BURN THEM ANGRILY ON A FIRE OF HATRED. But Edge isn't doing that, and most people aren't doing that, because what they're trying to do is just share with you how much they like games.
So your favourite Harvest Moon didn't get on there? That's okay! Put it on your own list, and maybe tell the nice people at Edge that they should check it out too, because maybe next year it'll be in their top 10. Edge love turnips. FACT.
Getting angry about games is as silly as getting angry about Marcus being snubbed for the lip softness prize. Marcus probably doesn't care, the people who like Marcus' Vaseline-coated smoochers don't care. And at the end of the day, it doesn't change how soft his lips are, anyway. This is all an analogy for games, you see.
Who cares if Edge think Dark Souls has the softest lips of all? You go out there, and you smooch all the games you want to. How are you supposed to know whose lips you like best if you don't?
