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Someone (just to annoy me) sent me a link to MSNBC’s list of the Top 5 goriest games. There’s no qualification on their page, so one has to assume that these are teh goriest games evar!!!1! I like lists. My favorite book growing up was The Book of Lists, which was a compilation of thousands of lists: top grossing movies, most banned books, cruelest sex partners, stupidest criminals, and the like. Good lists are well thought out and are presented by someone with a degree of expertise.
When Excremento makes a list of his favorite robot characters, I know I’m going to see an interesting list. Although I agree with bloodylip that leaving out HK-47 is a mistake. And that’s how lists work. I read the list and either nod in agreement or I set my pipe down in astonishment. If the list is online, I can then comment and say, “good show,” or, “you’ve bollocksed it again.” The problem is that even bad lists work like this.
MSNBC’s list of gory games is a bad list. It’s not that it’s unoriginal, it’s just uninformed. For instance, The Punisher was noteworthy for having the worst gore censored (and do we really need copy that reads, “‘The Punisher’ is a man who has devoted his life to punishing people who do evil unto others. And he does it with pain.” Right. It’s not even that Mortal Kombat, Turok, or Soldier of Fortune weren’t included — they probably weren’t even considered. This list seems to be five randomly chosen games and it’s presented in an annoying slideshow format which just means that we end up looking at more ads.
So the other thing that’s irritating me is Marc Saltzman’s review of The Orange Box. Mr. Saltzman may have a cool headshot, but he has completely missed the point of Portal. He makes Portal sound like some tech demo MIT students would play between Dinuclear Physics and the lab for Exploded Planet Hypothesis. Any review of Portal which does not include the word “funny” or one of its synonyms is a failure. We were going to have a party for you, [insert name here], too.