Crubcast | Transcript: #62 Debating the list of best games ever

#62 Debating the list of best games ever

July 26, 2024 / 01:13:03/E62

What is the definitive best video game of all time?

My name's Kevin, we're going to answer that today.

Here on the Crubcast, I'm here with three of my fellow co-Crubbers.

And by answer that, I should say, we're not going to answer that at all.

But we're going to talk about a list that Em found and sent to me that I thought was really cool.

We're here with Sean.

Hi, Sean.

Hi, it's me, Sean.

How's it going?

We're here with Brody, who is on screen.

You know what, I'm not even going to describe it for anyone who's not in the YouTube feed.

The audio listeners, he's a talking banana.

That's all you need.

Hi, Brody.

Hello.

And we're here with our host master general, Nico.

Hi, Nico.

What's up, gamers?

Yes, it is I, the host master general.

And today, what we have here is a list that M found, M, our other co-crubber, who's not on this particular episode, from a user on Reddit named IlmeniAVG, titled, I aggregated more than 700 greatest games lists.

Here are the results.

So it is our task to go over this list and give the crub take, give our lens on all of this, right?

Not all of them.

There are top 100 definitively.

I think we'll go through a handful, probably maybe top 50 at most, and just kind of run through them quickly.

Talk about what we think, where they're placed.

A lot of them are gonna make sense from the lens of how games critics have responded to things over the years in terms of what's won the most Game of the Year awards, that sort of thing.

Right, yeah.

Sean and Brody both briefly looked at this list.

I looked at it even a little less briefly than they did.

And I think Nico then parsed over it to lead us to where we are today.

I looked for the Souls games.

That makes very, very much sense.

But yeah, so basically what this list ends up being, and we will post it in the show notes, in the YouTube description if you're watching on YouTube.

But this person took data from a bunch of different game reviewers, it seems like, aggregated them based on a couple different metrics.

They weighted the publications according to their age.

So they accounted for recency bias in that way.

There's a bunch of other information about the metrics that they use.

It's a proper data analysis, which I thought was the most interesting part about it.

It wasn't just, we did a ranking of the rankings.

It seems like they actually used stats in numbers.

Or at least made some assumptions, right?

It's not necessarily full-on statistics.

I mean, there are a lot of those later on in this list, later on in this post, rather.

I don't know that we're going to get to those.

But more so, they have a method behind it.

They have a thought process going into it, which is what I really like about it.

So, meanwhile, I just want to ridicule it.

Yeah, Sean just wants to ridicule it.

I would absolutely love if they did all of that stats stuff completely legit, and then they just put their favorite game as number one.

Like, it's just like, beautiful Joe.

Bubsy.

Yeah, Bubsy 3D is a beautiful Joe.

There was a post I saw, Brody, on Twitter that someone randomly posted.

It was one of those engagement farm accounts that was like, here are some of the best four GameCube games that define the system of all time.

And it was like four Capcom games.

What were the gods?

I was scared.

Was one of them beautiful Joe?

Beautiful Joe was one of them.

I did a control F for Bubsy, and luckily he's not on the list.

God.

I hope Custom Robo is on there.

So neither is beautiful Joe.

What you said before the show that you were gonna do, Nico, was that you were gonna read through 10, and then we'll kind of react to 10, and then we'll go on from there until we're bored.

That's how I'm thinking of it, right?

Like, I think we can go just groups of 10, be like, okay, yeah, how does this fit for...

Yeah.

Do we wanna start, we're gonna start at the top?

Actually, you know what?

On the fly, I'm gonna go with what you said, Nico.

We'll go from middle out.

So go from 50 to 41.

Yeah.

Middle out makes so much more sense.

I'm ready.

Yeah, and also we can appease the Silicon Valley fans of the pod.

After 50, I had noticed when I did look through it, a lot of that is where it gets a little shakier, because you don't see a lot of top 100 lists, you know?

So I think that's why you start seeing it kind of like get a little iffy.

Not in terms of like the games don't deserve to be there, just in terms of the 50 are kind of like, yeah, they're kind of consensus probably.

Yeah, that makes more sense, because like typically you don't see a lot of people like here's a top 100 games of 2023.

You don't see that.

You see, here's 10 games I liked from this year.

Congrats.

Like my video.

So Niko, what are 50 to 41?

Yeah, I will say this.

I will always read it in ascending order.

So I will always go from less to more popular.

Yeah.

Or like less to more good.

Yeah, so 50 to 41.

Number 50, Diablo II, number 49, Super Mario Odyssey, 48, Starcraft, 47, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, 46, Hades, 45, Super Mario Kart, 44, Baldur's Gate III, 43, Metal Gear Solid III, Snake Eater, 42, Red Dead Redemption II, and 41, Silent Hill II.

I'm not gonna lie, you lost me at somewhere through some of those, because I heard Baldur's Gate III at like 47, 45.

You know, let me just snap a screenshot of these and send them in our...

Yeah, post that screenshot for us to look at really quick here.

Yeah.

Baldur's Gate is an interesting one to be there because it's like, okay, how many top 100 lists did this show up on?

Because it's so recent.

Which makes sense.

Yeah.

But like, in the sense of he's aggregating like a bunch of them from across time, if Baldur's Gate is rated so highly, like across like two or three of them, does that outweigh all of the decades of other lists?

It's an interesting issue.

Yeah, that's why like I'm looking at this, like anything like pre 2020, I think has more cadence.

Like, Hades being here, I love Hades, don't get me wrong, but I'm like, how much is that recency bias?

You know, and actually I misspoke earlier.

It's not, I don't think it's to account for recency bias.

I think it's to account for like older games being out longer and therefore having more reviews.

Like legacy bias almost.

Right.

Yeah, because otherwise like Tears of the Kingdom and oh, I'm looking, I should probably look at the screenshot, not at the list.

Spoilers.

Well, otherwise games like, where is it?

There's one newer one on here in this part of the list, whatever.

Oh, it's Baldur's Gate 3.

Baldur's Gate 3 wouldn't have made it onto this, like this high in the list if it were not like normalized for like recency, essentially.

Yeah, I don't.

It's weird because like, don't get me wrong, I love that game.

I've put in like 70 hours and I'm still in act one for crying out loud and played with multiple people and I love it.

But like, how can you rank it in like the top 100?

I don't know.

Then again, this person probably has like a bunch of like mathematics stuff.

I just don't know if I'd put it in top 50 of all time.

It's, go ahead, Brady, go ahead.

Oh, I was going to say like, it's the kind of thing where like, looking at it from a stats perspective, I'm like, how did it get there?

But from a personal perspective, I absolutely think that top 50 is very reasonable for Baldur.

Oh yeah, yeah.

From what I've heard.

I mean, it is up there as one of the most consensus game of the year awards of all time.

And that's up against Tears of the Kingdom.

That's insane.

The thing that throws me off is, is Hades above Mario Odyssey?

That's the one where I started thinking, is there, not recency bias, because Hades is really good.

Is there like a, is there a lockdown bias?

Because that was a lockdown game.

You know, that was, that was, you know, mid 2020, I want to say.

That was, yeah.

Well, when we get to number one, and it's Animal Crossing New Horizons.

And then Doom Eternal's number two.

Gosh, yeah.

No way.

Watch, Doom Eternal's gonna be in, it's, gosh.

I haven't looked.

I have not looked to see.

There has to be a Doom game in the top 50, though.

There has to be.

I just haven't looked to see if like, if the specific one that I had trouble with is on the list.

Doom Eternal, baby.

Doom Eternal.

I do want to read through them again, 50 through 41, just for people who are in the audio realm that don't have any lists pulled up.

50 was Diablo 3, 49 was Mario Odyssey, 48 was StarCraft 1, 47 was Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic, 46 was Hades, 45 was Super Mario Kart.

I'm gonna pause there.

What?

Yeah, good call pausing.

Super Nintendo.

Yeah, like the original Mario Kart.

No.

There had to be a bunch of top 100s from the power and stuff that he was referencing.

It's that, and it's like pre N64.

This is just the NES, the SNES, the Sega systems at the time, like the Genesis, the Master System, the Game Gear, et cetera.

Anyway, Mario Kart, that's the real outlier.

The rest of these, I all understand.

Yeah, I'll be honest, I actually completely missed out on that one because I'm like, oh, Baldur's Gate 3, I played that game.

And then when you said Super Mario Kart, it just went over my head.

And Baldur's Gate is 44.

So it's right above it.

Then Metal Gear Solid 3 at 43, which makes sense because I think one and two tend to get more respect a lot of the time.

Two and one.

Oh really, because I, Good.

Three is like the darling.

As far as I can tell within the fandom.

Three and one.

I think two gets a lot of critical love, is a lot of it for me.

Two gets a lot of critical love where it gets critiqued more by fans.

Three, I think maybe, like three gets a lot of love.

Obviously, it's why it's getting remade.

Right.

But I don't think it gets like greatest games of all time love in the same way that I've seen one and two a lot of the time.

You know?

I was just to say two, I remember when it came out, like a lot of people like panned that game because of how it was structured and it got a lot of like flat because of it.

And that's why I'm like, I wonder if that also comes into play because like it was not well received originally.

And then it kind of grew on people.

But I remember like the internet hated how it started.

Yeah.

Starting to think we should have gone in groups of 20.

So 43 was Metal Gear Solid 3, 42 is Red Dead 2.

That makes sense for it because that game gets a ton of love.

It's one of the highest selling games of all time.

A lot of people will, and I would agree with them, push back on that one.

But that game got a lot of love.

And then 41 is Sight of Hell 2.

Sorry, Sean, go ahead.

No, I was just gonna say, I also really love Red Dead Redemption 2.

So like I'm one of the ones that's like, yeah, no, I can see that.

Like I will never go back and play it again, but I did love the story for what it was.

It got me for the time that it did.

And it's just that looking back, I got a lot more annoyed with the GTA isms of its mechanics.

Cause it got very casualified, even more so than Red Dead 1 already was.

And I'm not a gatekeeper.

That's fine.

But that's not what I go to.

If you're going to make a game that's partially a Wild West sim and then partially the easiest shooting mechanics of all time.

Yeah.

You mean hit L2 and it will auto aim to the most immediate thing.

And even in like Red Dead 1, that was kind of how they did it.

But in 1, it was you hold the trigger down to aim and then you'd flick the stick up and get like a cool pistol headshot.

Like it felt good because it felt like you're like a gunslinger.

You're, you know.

One also didn't weigh you down with a bunch of like, okay, you can only have two guns at once and you got to go back to your horse if you want more.

That's true.

You got to loot every single item with the complete animation that it gives you.

I got obliterated last time.

I last time I talked about Red Dead 2.

So, I'm forbidden.

The braving mechanic is bad.

Yeah, well, I still believe that for the record.

I still believe that.

If it was intrusive, I would agree, but it's not intrusive at all.

Yeah, and also like, I didn't be there.

There are a lot of intrusive mechanics that do waste.

Yeah, just that's not one of them.

I don't know what I would call bathing one of them.

Yeah.

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So yeah, Nico, what are numbers 40 through 31?

Numbers 40 through 31.

Number 40 is Journey.

That makes sense.

Number 39 is Metroid Prime.

38, Deus Ex.

37 is Half-Life.

36 is Minecraft.

Let's go, let's go!

Sorry, 35 is Halo Combat Evolved.

34 is Bloodborne.

Let's go, Bloodborne.

Best game of all time.

Should be number one.

33, Uncharted 2 Amongst Thieves.

32, Castlevania Symphony of the Night.

And 31, Super Mario Bros.

Maybe we should have started at 40.

This feels like, these are all like kind of consensus-y at a point.

Like these are all in the top 40.

Yeah, these feel like top 40 games.

Journey feels a little strange to me.

Journey is because of when it came out and what it was, because it was one of the earliest artsy indie games in the debate of our video games art.

That was one of the games that came out at that exact time.

And it had that shared mechanic of, they didn't tell you this at first, but there were other characters that would kind of go around the world and they would help you by chirping.

You couldn't talk to players.

It was all non-verbal communication with other, what you thought were NPCs.

And then you find out at the end are actually other players in real time that just happened to zap into your world.

So you do non-verbal co-op.

And that game was just right place, right time, right situation to get so much praise.

Also, 2012 sucked for gaming.

So people latched on for one good...

I have a sly four thieves in time.

Came out in February 2013.

Wait, really?

Yep, two months before The Last of Us.

Wait, what about...

I'm thinking of the wrong year then.

PlayStation All-Stars came out that year.

I was going to say Metal Gear Revengeance.

But that would have also been 2013.

Yeah, that would have been 2013 the whole time.

It was sly and then Metal Gear and then The Last of Us.

Gosh.

Also Bioshock in there somewhere.

So is Halo Combat Evolved Halo 1?

Yes.

That was really...

That was the system seller.

Yeah.

Yeah, of course.

That's one of the games that along with GTA, those two literally changed how games were made from that point on.

It's interesting because like, that's one of those games where do you put it as one of the greatest games of all time?

I think so, but it's more about impact than it is about the game itself at that point, because...

Yeah.

I mean, Halo 1 is also timeless to be clear, but it's also unbalanced as shit multiplayer.

Right.

The Halo 1 pistol, you know.

Looking through, it's one of those like...

Yeah, it's definitely one of those like, put down like the cornerstone for gaming.

It's kind of like how I'd view Super Mario 64, if it ends up being up there.

It's one of those like, yeah, that was like one of the cornerstones where, yeah, there's probably better games, but like, if that happens, we'll talk about it.

The one that I'm kind of surprised about is just Minecraft being where it is.

I thought it'd be like top 20, I'll be honest.

Yeah, Minecraft and Bloodborne, honestly, should be top 20.

But personally, I mean, you know, there are, spoiler alert, there are other Souls games that surpass Bloodborne on this list.

And I...

Well, so what I was going to say is Bloodborne only makes sense to me to be here if there aren't other Souls.

That's kind of what I'm saying.

I'm like, it should be the top.

I also understand that Dark Souls is probably...

Well, Dark Souls should...

Like, I get, I understand.

I get why, yeah.

I think you'll be disappointed.

Oh.

The thing that gets me is Metroid Prime at 39, because that game, I feel like maybe it's in recent years had more of a resurgence than it did in the first handful of years of its lifespan, because that is up there, usually in the top 15, top 20, a lot of people say, and I would put it very high.

I think it might be because not as many people played it.

The ones that played it love it, but it didn't have as much of a landscape as other games might have.

And these are lists, though, because Symphony of the Night is right there, and that did a lot worse than Prime did.

Also, I like that I'm like, yeah, Bloodborne should be higher, as if this isn't like a procedurally, not procedurally, a list generated by a formula, basically.

Like, if we're looking at sales, like yes, the Gamecube underperformed, that's not, there's no debate about that.

But we're looking at Symphony of the Night above it because of the legacy of helping kickstart the modern, you know, Metroidvania genre.

Because it's that and it's Super Metroid.

They're not back to back.

Super Metroid was what, 94?

This is 97 for Symphony of the Night.

But those two did properly kickstart the modern iteration of the genre that no one then did for several years besides either of those two.

And Symphony of the Night is not an indie darling, but it's a critical darling, you know, in that it didn't sell all that well, even on a platform with many, many more games than Metroid, than the GameCube, rather.

Many more sales than the GameCube, I should say, sorry.

So it's kind of like an Okami.

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

It's kind of an Okami, yeah.

Yeah, it's unclear.

A lot of these lists may have put Metroid Prime there in name, but for The Weaver, there's no saying that it's specifically the GameCube.

I would assume it's the GameCube version, but even if we're adding in the extra sales, I think a lot of it is just that there are so many must include games on these lists from the mid 2000s that if you're going to say, well, Metroid Prime is better than Halo, no, it's not, but it is.

It's better than Halo for what it's trying to do in terms of being a Metroidvania.

But Halo is the shooter.

It is the shooter.

Also, I really want to send Minecraft being above Half-Life and Deus Ex to Trav.

Oh, that is really funny, actually.

I want to get his response to that.

That's great.

I should go and play the original Deus Ex at some point.

I love Mankind Divided and Human Revolution.

I have a feeling that the original is not quite the same, but if those are anything to go by, then so.

Yeah, I was also going to say Uncharted at 33 is really high, given how people have kind of fallen on that game because of Naughty Dog fatigue.

Yeah, but that game deserves to be up there, because 2 is like the cinematic game.

Yeah, you know, 2 is so good.

Like 2 holds up.

It gets bullet spongy at the end, but it holds up.

I love that.

Well, OK, it gets bullet spongy, but they at least took the time to like headcanon retcon that and say that like that's Drake getting quote unquote lucky.

No I meant mechanically, like there are there's a lot of enemies near the end of the game that just take a lot more damage.

I do like the comment on the the main characters of bullet sponge.

I mean, I don't know why I would have gone immediately to enemies.

Yeah, I know that makes sense.

I was going to say no notes on Mario 3 being 31.

I'm kind of surprised it's as low as it is, but world will probably be above it.

So which I can agree with that.

Yeah.

Shall we see what's above it?

Yeah, let's jump ahead from 30 through 21.

30 through 21, number 30, Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare.

Makes sense.

29, Dark Souls.

Let's go.

28, GoldenEye 007.

27, Chrono Trigger.

26, Red Dead Redemption.

25, Grand Theft Auto V.

24, Street Fighter 2.

23, Elden Ring.

22, God of War and 21, Portal.

You'll notice that I did not pog out for Elden Ring.

It's not that I don't like the game.

2018 God of War.

Sorry.

My bad.

22, God of War 2018 and 21 is Portal.

You'll notice that I did not pog out for Elden Ring, and that's not because I don't like the game.

I just think it's like the worst Souls game that I have played.

And I'm opposite.

Right, and I know what most people would agree, and I think that's why it would be so high on this list, is because so many people put it as they're like, number one, number one, number one.

And with the recency thing as well, it's like, yeah, it makes sense that it's this high.

But man, when it comes to Souls games, it is the most exhausting one by quite a wide margin.

I think that a lot of that might just be down to how you play Souls games.

I was going to say with the recency bias in mind, I'm impressed because Tears of the Kingdom for reference was in the 50 range.

Like when we looked at the list, it's 57 looking here.

But I'm surprised that...

I guess I'm not surprised that that one's so low while Elden Ring is where it is, because Breath of the Wild does exist.

But I'm surprised that both games being, and this is not a critique, derivative of Breath of the Wild, I'm surprised that Elden Ring pushed so much higher up.

And it might just simply be because, A, Dark Souls games tend to be critic darlings as well, and B, Elden Ring reached a much, much wider audience because of how insane of a scale it was.

That is absolutely true.

I can see that.

That does bury the lead of Goldeneye being here entirely because of Memories.

That is a nostalgia pick.

Yes.

But that's it.

But Impact is also weird because we're talking about Prime being on the GameCube.

Everyone had a friend who had an N64 and there were N64 college parties about it.

But this is more a statement of what era a lot of mid 2000s gaming journalists were.

In college for, then it is the game.

Because if the gaming magazines hadn't developed to then the gaming site era that a lot of people latched on to that turned into the influencer era we're in now, if that had happened a few years later, it's Halo 1 because that game is infinitely better.

Thousand percent.

So it's what makes GoldenEye such an interesting one because again, we're talking sales.

The N64 didn't perform much better than the GameCube, and GoldenEye is one of the N64 games that is quintessential.

Yeah.

It's not a great game, it's just that it's a great N64 game in that moment with friends.

So if Elden Ring is recency bias, is GoldenEye latency bias?

I would say legacy bias, I would say, yeah.

Yeah, legacy.

I think it is not one of the 100 best games, but I think it's one of the...

it's in the top 100 most important games, if that makes any sense, like for what it did back then, yeah.

But like, is it one of the best games of all time?

No, no, no.

It did do a lot of good things, don't get me wrong, but like it just is...

I'm glad to see Red Dead Redemption 1 be higher than 2.

Yes, I agree with you on that, because its impact is much bigger for the era than Red Dead 2's could be for its era because of what that game did story-wise.

And it was also in an era of Rockstar delivering critical banger after critical banger.

That's not to say that GTA V wasn't one, but GTA V is kind of a shell of what it was in terms of hype when it launched, because it's the biggest game of all time.

That sounds weird to say, I know, but it's the kind of thing where it's a live service game, at this point, if you think about it.

It's a completely different game than it was.

People are combining V and online together a lot of the time when they're putting it there.

Also, V is much lower on this list.

V is a better game to play.

V is a better GTA experience.

For as long as slippery car controls and being, you know, mid 2000s video game brown and, you know, whatever.

I found GTA V to be more playable than V, but I was also late to the party on V, which I think makes sense.

A lot to do.

V was more playable until they made it so that you had to buy it again on every console.

Yeah.

I remember that.

I like GTA Online.

Like that.

That is why I bought GTA V.

Could not tell you anything about the story.

I don't remember anything about it.

But what is upsetting me?

We kind of passed over is Chrono Trigger is below Red Dead Redemption.

Oh, that too.

Yeah.

That's kind of an L.

At the same time, Chrono Trigger is above COD 4.

That's impressive.

Yeah.

Because COD 4 is a legacy pick, too, because it's about impact.

Like a lot of these lists are not about the best games.

They're about impact, because the best games are usually going to be the more recent ones, just as a point of order.

Or even like the whole thing where it's like the, you know, COD 4 is Modern Warfare 1, proof of concept, and then Modern Warfare 2 took that, ran with it, and became what that is.

Right.

Four changed everything.

Instantly.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

What were you going to say, Niko?

I was going to say that, like, I'm surprised it's not Modern Warfare 2, because that game, I think, had it sort of the bigger, like, boom, you know?

I think that game was more of a staple than it's been.

So Modern Warfare 2 came out the same year as Uncharted 2, keep in mind.

Modern Warfare 1 came out, you know, a few weeks before Halo, I believe, maybe after.

And so you have the old style of shooter, and then you have everything that came after Call of Duty 4, because of how it paved the way for the entirety of how the genre currently is and how it developed.

I guess that tracks, like, that's why it would be so high on so many, like, gaming lists.

They also nuked a whole city.

Like No Russian is one thing, but No Russian moved a lot of people into that's too far from our territory.

Yeah.

You think so?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

You can look at a news article from the era like nuking was already controversial.

Oh, not like not like people who would have played the game otherwise, like, yeah, but like one is like kind of no matter what, one of them is there's a huge impact here.

One of them is we are making a point, but there also is some shock horror to it.

Yeah, yeah, that's also how GTA did it, because GTA used to be we have controversies in our games because we're pushing the boundary and then it became we are trying to push the boundary to get bad headlines because it makes our game look like the bad boy.

Both series had that.

That's what the boys is doing right now.

Like the boys is stealing its controversy from gaming.

Gosh, God.

Street Fighter 2 is interesting because no one likes actual I mean, people like Street Fighter 2 actual, but it should be like Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo because that's the best version of that game.

They're usually all lumped together, but they are technically different games.

It's worth throwing out.

I would argue that that is all of them lumped together.

It probably is for the sake of.

How else do you like?

Because I will say like, assuming this person scraped all of this from like web articles, which it seems like they did, that would have taken so much time to clean all of this.

Well, no, it's just also that I've seen a lot of these lists where people put Street Fighter 2, and it's just Street Fighter 2.

They then say there were expansions and sequels that came out.

But because 2 is the one that effectively started the fighting game genre in earnest.

Yeah, that's the one that's the best.

But it's not.

That's a legacy pick again.

Yeah, it's like a cornerstone, essentially.

And to remind our viewers and listeners, I will remind us here, this is an aggregation of a bunch of top 100 or 50 or maybe 1000 game lists where someone put it all together and figured out what all of them together said is the highest, most acclaimed, best game of all time.

Not necessarily our lists or a list that any of us have any input on.

This is just what somebody did, and we found the post and we thought it was cool.

Right.

We are simply commentating.

I wrote it.

I wrote it for this podcast.

We're lying to you.

We are simply the messengers.

Yeah, God of War being on here is interesting to me.

God of War 2018.

Yeah, I understand why it's there.

It's a little lukewarm.

Well, but as opposed to God of War, as opposed to like the original God of War.

Well, no one.

Here's the thing.

More people played God of War PS4 than the entirety of the Greek saga combined.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

It's a PS4 game by default.

Like Sony gamers didn't buy games from Sony for a long time.

There wasn't a built in platform trust that was there.

The Last of Us is what got it rallied the wagons, as it were.

Oh, gosh.

That and like the entire Xbox ecosystem went over to PS4 during that period too.

So you have a bunch of new players that know who Kratos...

Because Kratos, within a few weeks of releasing, and I said this in the God of War video that I made, became a parody of himself in pop culture.

He was instantly a parody of himself.

So everyone knew who Kratos was.

So you take the building ecosystem of PlayStation over-the-shoulder third-person games that started before The Last of Us, but The Last of Us is really what kicked it into gear in terms of critical reception and sales.

Uncharted before that, of course.

But The Last of Us is what got people, that got Xbox players, like Brody said, to look and be like, that I want.

Uncharted was one thing.

That is different.

And so it was to the point that people critiqued God of War before it came out and after since then, for just being The Last of Us, but with Kratos.

Like that's the critique, is that it's dude and child figure on a coming of age journey of acceptance and trust.

Like they are both that.

But is that more taking from The Last of Us explicitly, or is that one like Barlog, Corey Barlog, the director and writer of a lot of The God of War games, but the director of two and four had said, like, I wrote to with my dad.

And it was a story about the failures of in that Greek ecosystem, like the weird toxic masculinity that comes from you are always destined to kill your father in the Greek mythos.

Zeus killed his dad, Kronos, Kronos killed his dad, Uranus.

Kratos killed his dad, Zeus.

Yeah, now Kratos has a son.

So there's that intrigue right there.

There's the Can you break the cycle?

Sean, I'm cutting you off, I'm sorry.

I was just saying, also, like the Norse mythology that goes along with it.

Everyone knows that Kratos is supposed to be like this killer.

But now it's like it felt like I thought Kratos trailer.

I thought Kratos was fictional.

Yeah, well, there is a god known as Kratos, technically, but at the same time, it's like Norse mythology.

Like a lot of people are into Norse mythology.

And then like Kratos is not in the Norse pantheon.

No, Kratos is a Greek god.

In terms of he also is a he's also a Greek god, but it's a different Kratos.

In kayfabe, there is a god named Kratos that exists in the Greek.

I wonder if like a hundred years from now or like after some kind of fall of civilization when people are picking back up the pieces like Kratos, PlayStation will become a right part of the figure in Greek mythology.

In Greek, yeah.

He already is a Greek god.

And Ezio, I mean, and Ezio will turn up as a figure in like Italian history.

Renaissance era.

There's also a lot of other stuff that goes in like the story of God of War, because it's also about like redemption.

Is redemption even possible for somebody who's done so many terrible things?

And so like seeing it just like Zabir Mino, oh, it's a dad and his son, the dad's angry.

There's so much more to it that I want to yell about.

But like then we're just going to sit here for like 20 minutes and listen to me.

I love that game for the record.

Like, I absolutely think it should be here.

But like, I just, it's just so recent.

Like we haven't.

So with the theming that Kevin explained, I'm just imagining like Kratos, because there's no way that they could tell the sex of the baby before it like came into the world, right?

Because they didn't have that technology.

So I'm just imagining the moment like Atreus shoots out the pussy and Kratos sees it's a boy and he's like, crap, just knows.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's funny.

I was going to say, putting whatever that was aside.

No, I saw what Brody was going for.

So there's all of that and there's the idea of we see this angry character that is a gaming icon and he's now changing and has to deal with this new thing.

And there's that element.

The thing that a lot of people that get upset about God of War 4 forget about is that a thousand years passed between 3 and 4.

He had a thousand years to be angry and sieve and hide in the wilderness after he wiped out essentially all of Greece.

Yeah, right.

Which is why I really like Ragnarok, because it really goes through that journey.

But that yeah, yeah.

Ragnarok would have been recency bias, but like God of War 4 has all of that.

And then also it is also was at the time one of the more accessible Souls style gameplay experiences because it has souls, their combat actions.

Yeah, third person action like it's like a third person action beat them up parentheses swung weapon.

Yeah, and yeah, it does.

Like I agree.

Like the gameplay is the I'm forgetting about the gameplay.

I'm forgetting about how good the gameplay is, because I think that feels pretty like really also justifies it.

Yeah, but like I don't know that the Brody, you said size matters was a game you really liked earlier.

You don't count.

Yeah, that's sort of what I'm like.

That's that's sort of coloring.

I don't I don't want to gloss over portal as well, because I don't have a lot to say about it.

It deserves to be here.

I just wanted I want to highlight that it was here.

Yeah, I'm just going to say that I hope portal to shows up higher because if portal to show higher than portal one, that's it.

They should both be relatively high.

Do we want to there's no doubt.

Do we want to jump from 20 to 11?

You go.

I would like to.

But also, I want to know why portal is so important.

Is it just because of the portals and like computer like rendering with computer power or like mainly so by default it gets points?

Yeah, that seems we say that we talk.

We say that yet.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's got the Nintendo tax, but it's valve.

Yeah, no, it doesn't happen anymore.

Really good puzzle game, really good bite sized puzzle game.

One of the first games to really be like that, you know, we're not going to be a $60 game, sorts of sales.

Like obviously other valve stuff had been that before, but that's really one of the ones where they're like, we're not trying to charge you $60.

And this is in a digital ecosystem as I mean, Steam didn't quite exist as a sales front yet.

It did.

But there weren't sales like summer sale or anything.

I'm pretty confident in saying that without Portal, you don't get Talos Principle, you don't get The Witness, you don't get Outer Wilds.

Like there are so many of that style of puzzle game.

God, that's why I asked.

That is why I asked was Rift Apart, because I knew that like the portals were a big thing.

And there's like a meta story, and Portal has a lot of memes that derive from it, like everything Valve.

Again, there's the Valve text that kind of comes from that.

Yeah, it's in the era of when Valve was representative of like PC gaming master race.

And so you had all those people making memes for that game and like TF2, all that.

I see.

Well, fellas, it's time to move on to the top 20.

Are we ready?

The trigger should be there.

Let's do it.

Top 20, number 20.

Metal Gear Solid, number 19, World of Warcraft 2004.

Number 18, Portal 2.

Yeah, there it is.

Number 17, number 17, Doom 1993.

That's number 16.

Was Doom not?

Yeah, Doom was 1993.

I'm sorry.

My brain was thinking 91 for some reason.

I was like, wait, hold on.

That's wrong.

But that's correct.

I'm sorry.

I said the year in case it was a sequel.

No, I know.

I just, my brain was thinking that Doom was two years before it was.

Right, right.

Then it's Final Fantasy VII.

VII, makes sense.

Shadow of the Colossus is number 15.

2005 Shadow of the Colossus.

I don't know if that's the remake or not.

They're the identical games.

Yeah, same thing.

I see.

Number 14, Super Mario World.

Number 13, Super Metroid.

Number 12, Mass Effect 2.

And number 11, A Link to the Past.

Before we dig super into it, I want to highlight how goddamn impressive it is that Mass Effect 2 is number 12 on the most acclaimed aggregated list of highest rated game lists of all time, despite 3 also now being out.

Like, that's how good 2 is, that what happens after doesn't matter.

Yeah, well, I mean, 2 was always one of those games where people raved about it.

It deserves it, but it's so impressive because they farted out the landing, and it doesn't matter in terms of 2 still being acclaimed to that degree, not just in its era, but years later that it's still that high in terms of whatever lists came after 2010.

We're not talking only the last 13 years of lists, give or take.

In terms of when Mass Effect 2 came out, to today, the fact that it's 12 above super goddamn Metroid, which has had 30 years.

I think this is the first group of 10 that I haven't played a single one.

I've played quite a few.

I am okay.

This is the first group of 10 that we've referenced in this podcast that I haven't at least played one of them.

You haven't played Final Fantasy VII?

I played the remake, but this is not...

Yeah, we're the same wavelength.

It's a different game.

I would argue that VII Remake would not be lumped in with VII.

No, not at all.

I am happy that Metal Gear Solid is here, but the biggest thing to me right now is that Shadow of the Colossus is top 15.

It is such a critical darling.

It is, but like above Final Fantasy VII?

Deserved.

I almost wonder if VII and VII split a lot of votes in people's minds because people didn't want to put VII and VII so close to each other, so they would put one a lot lower than the other on their lists.

I could see that for VII and X.

There's preemptive politics that comes into a lot of these lists because you have to then plan.

You have to shadow box around the people you know are going to complain about your list.

You know, and that does taint it a little bit.

So well, yeah, because if you didn't do that, there would probably be a bunch of lists where the top ten are the same Zelda or Mario game or something.

You would get that.

So I also have about linked to the past favorite Zelda game.

So it being it being a I thought I'd be in the top ten just by virtue of being the 2D Zelda, you know.

Yeah, I mean, link between worlds is better, but that's OK.

We'll fight on that later.

Yeah, I don't I don't have much to say about about number 20 to number 11.

To be honest, I mean, if you did, I'd be concerned.

Yeah.

I have anything to say.

Let me talk about these games.

I don't I haven't played.

I haven't played World of Warcraft, but it's interesting to see it there if only because I mean, World of Warcraft is definitely one that World of Warcraft 2004 did not get number 19.

World of Warcraft throughout the years, it was out.

Got number 19.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I tried to play when World of Warcraft was popular when we were in like middle school.

I tried to play it.

I had like a little laptop and I was like, Mom, Dad, can I have World of Warcraft to play with my friends?

And they were like, yeah, absolutely.

And they got it for me.

And then I tried to install it on the computer and it didn't work.

Or if you'd be like, I tried to install it, and then I installed RuneScape instead and said no.

Dude, it's straight up.

It's funny you say that, Sean.

It isn't, oh gosh, it isn't top ten.

Check under your chair.

Oh my god, boxed copy of RuneScape.

I would love that.

Have a stream mask.

I didn't have internet in my home until I was like 12 or 13.

But my grandma at her house, she had internet, but it was dial up internet.

So I remember trying to connect to RuneScape, which I had never played on dial up internet and playing it at the lowest resolution.

That sounds so awful.

Not even understanding anything I was doing, just because my buddy at school told me it was so good.

I'm going to get you on woodcutting for the next three hours.

It's just funny because the people that I knew who were playing RuneScape in, you know, at that, RuneScape, World of Warcraft at that time, have not touched a video game since.

That had a Sims effect for a lot of people, where that was the one game that got them in.

They only have played NBA 2K and maybe FIFA.

There's another phenomenon.

There's another type of WoW player, Niko, and it's people who have moved on to Final Fantasy XIV.

The critically acclaimed Final Fantasy XIV online.

Free up to level whatever.

Free up to level 60.

Played Dawnbringer.

So shout out Portal 2 as well, because Portal 2 just slightly above Portal 1.

But it speaks to those games that they were both aggregated together so close to one another, because that means that they were also put close to one another, which means they got away from the Final Fantasy VI vs VII type of debate.

And I mean, top 20, top 20 all time is no joke.

Yeah, two is up there.

Portal 2 deserved it.

I've never played 2, but 2 always gets that love.

So I know that I would...

I didn't love 1 when I played it, but I was also like a lot younger.

So I beat it.

It wasn't that hard.

I was poor at the time, so I spent like $5 on it on Xbox, and I was like, wait, that's it?

I played Portal 1 after playing Portal 2, and the problem with that is that Portal 2 adds like genuinely so many mechanics, not a lot of mechanics, but enough that Portal 2 is like a pitch perfect puzzle game, and Portal 1 feels kind of bare bones in comparison when you go back.

Yeah.

I'll say the other thing about this list is that we're starting to get into the Nintendo Pilled section.

That's not a critique of it.

It's more a commentary on, again, where the gaming space was when a lot of the gaming critics and gaming media came up.

This is not like...

Because Sega did have an iffier quality around that time.

They had great games, but they didn't have the games.

And so it's an interesting thing.

You see a lot of critique nowadays of, again, the saminess of PlayStation and how other games are highly rated.

And it's interesting because all that has changed was that they finally found that groove where they get the popular and also critical darling games together.

They found their Nintendo juice.

It's just not in the same way that 90s Nintendo juice was.

I'm not saying one is better or worse.

It's more it's interesting that a lot of the Nintendo gamers that did grow up and then entered college, got into media, became gaming influencers to be broad about it.

A lot of those folks would have also been in college around the PS1 era.

But because, and I'm speaking from the Sony perspective because I've done so many deep dives on the back history of early Sony, that it hits me as an interesting thing that I want to imagine the world where Sony wasn't just winging it for the first essentially 15 years of its existence as PlayStation.

Because if they had a sort of more unified brand identity early on, instead of being where Nintendo kids grow up to be, which is just replacing what Sega was, imagine what the landscape of gaming coverage would currently look like now, is essentially what I'm saying.

It would be really interesting to see that alternate world because...

Right.

It's like if Sega had kept it up.

Luckily, the top ten is not too Nintendo-pilled.

I'm excited to see the top ten.

I'm actually kind of surprised Sonic didn't make it in the top fifty just on Legacy alone.

That's because it's going to be number one, baby.

If it's in the top ten, I will piss my pants.

I kid you not.

Sonic's always been worn critically.

There's one Sonic entry on here, and would anyone like to guess the number?

It's in the top ten.

Would anyone like to guess the number of the Sonic?

It is not in the top fifty.

It's Sonic 2.

Seventy-five, Sean, guess?

I'm going to guess...

I'm going to guess 88.

John got it.

It's 88.

It's 88, 1991.

That's a legacy thing.

That's just saying the whole Sonic series.

Sonic's always weird because, and I'll be brief about this, it's always a weird one because a lot of Sonic's early identity was based off of being the anti-Mario that by default it was always going to be compared to Mario.

And so even when it succeeds, because it wasn't always as pick up and play as a Mario, it always got that kind of ding against it for a lot of people.

But it being Sonic 1 is one million percent.

Just some of these might have been the greatest, like when they say greatest, again, most important.

Sonic 1 is one of the most important games of all time.

Sonic 2 is one of the best sequels of all time, so it's a better game in every way.

I will say my snub, there is one snub, if you guys would like to list honorable mentions before we get into top 10.

I haven't even looked at what...

I want to see what the top 10 are before we do honorable mentions first.

Right, my snub is Ghost of Tsushima, which is not on this list at all.

And I think that game...

I don't think it's one of the greatest games of all time.

I think it's a very, very good game that I really love, but it doesn't do anything especially new.

It just kind of does stuff in a cool way.

I don't know.

I like the map system.

I like the no map system, look at the world, but they do it right.

I do too, but we haven't seen that develop in terms of a mechanic that is actually going to be used versus a gimmick for just that series.

Yeah, that's...

Like, gaming has to adopt a lot of that for it to be up there.

I guess that's a good point.

I just think that game was snubbed, to be honest with you.

But that said, top ten, are we ready, fellas?

Let's do it.

Number ten, Skyrim.

Number nine, Bioshock.

Number eight, Resident Evil 4.

Number seven, Super Mario 64.

Number six, Witcher 3, Wild Hunt.

Number five, Ocarina of Time.

Number four is Half-Life 2.

Number three is Tetris.

Respect, respect.

Hail to the king, baby.

Number three, I love Tetris being number three.

I love Tetris being number three.

Because would you guys like to guess numbers two and one?

It's Last of Us and Zelda.

It is absolutely Last of Us and Zelda.

I looked at it a week ago, I'm not looking at it yet, but I already knew, it's those two.

Yeah, it's Last of Us and Breath of the Wild is number one, which honestly makes sense to me.

Makes sense, it's disappointing, but it makes sense.

It's disappointing, but it makes sense.

Yeah, I feel like if it's going to be Breath of the Wild at the top, it should just be Breath of the Wild at the top.

So I don't have a, I don't know, I don't have a, there's no...

So let's run through these and kind of talk about each of them.

There might be less to be said about a lot of them.

Skyrim, I understand why it's there.

I've never been fond of Skyrim, but I've also never gotten far in it, because it's, I'm, I don't know.

That was the point at which Bethesda started to lose me with how it changed its RPG mechanics.

Whereas I, yeah, and I love that.

And that's fair.

Like if I played that first, that would be the defining thing.

But like I had already played Oblivion and Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

So when Skyrim came out and was like performing so well, I was also, you know, in high school, so I'm like, why is this would do it so well?

It's booby dog shit.

Gosh.

Yeah, Skyrim was the second, like in terms of like, I played New Vegas first, bounced off of it because of, no, no, Infamous was the was the Taco Bell Beans.

I just bounced off New Vegas because I was as into it.

And then I came back to it and I was like, this is amazing.

And I would say that that's probably my snub on this list.

The fact that maybe it's on the list, but the fact that it's not higher than Fallout 3 is insane.

But beyond that, Skyrim was my second one.

Yeah, Skyrim was my second one.

I understand because I never beat the game, but I played a hell of a lot of it.

And that's why Starfield is the way that it is.

Yeah.

They were like, you don't need to beat the story because it doesn't matter.

You can just make a new character and start over with the same character by beating the game.

Gosh.

Bioshock makes sense.

It's entirely a legacy pick.

It's entirely because of the plot twist.

That game's got some interesting gameplay in that the game just wasn't working during playtests until a few months before release when they added the big arrow telling you exactly where to go.

And gamers don't like having their hands held.

Don't forget.

But that's an exception.

Yeah.

Bioshock is in an interesting relationship.

Bioshock, for a lot of people that played it, it holds a similar place as the first Metal Gear Solid because for a lot of people, it's either the first Metal Gear Solid or it's Bioshock.

One of these games told people that video games could have serious stories.

Yep.

That's it.

That's why they're up.

RE4 makes total sense, being where it is.

It's one of the defining third-person action games of all time.

Yeah.

Nothing to say about that.

Along with God of War, part of the reason the QTE exists the way that it does, more so God of War than Resident Evil, but they're like 1A and 1...

Makes sense.

Something I noticed about Capcom games, Resident Evil specifically, with the QTEs, because I was in an arcade recently playing one of those random shooting games.

Those games for years, for decades, have had QTEs, and Resident Evil is literally just an arcade experience on a console.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah, to some extent.

Interesting way to put that.

Honestly, I might have to revisit the OG with that in mind.

The OG is not quite the same.

I'm more talking about the more recent.

Well, not seven and eight.

More like four, five, six.

The action.

That's what I mean.

The OG for not like for remake.

For remake, it's pretty similar in that regard still.

They didn't change.

They may change stuff in for remake, but it's not enough.

It's not enough.

It's enough to piss certain people off and enough that other people won't notice it.

It's a weird one.

Considering playing it.

I bought it.

I have it.

I'm probably going to play it.

I bought it.

I'm considering playing it.

I'm considering.

That's how we know we've turned our boy into a gamer.

I bought it because I got it for a good price.

And then I was like, okay.

And it was, to be fair, I think it was the last video game I purchased.

Like, I have not bought another video game after having bought that.

But I just give all my time to Pokemon cards and Helldivers nowadays.

It is what it is, man.

Super Mario 64 is a GoldenEye situation.

64 GoldenEye, I agree.

And so I think it holds up much better, though.

Yeah, I think I think if you didn't start with it, I understand why people don't click with it as well.

It holds up infinitely better than GoldenEye does.

And also where one helped kickstart the idea of the multiplayer shooter as a genre, which already existed with Quake.

It was just that on console where one started that.

The other started 3D gaming as we know it.

Yeah, it would have been Croc.

That's true.

My boy still behind me on screen that I forgot that I had him on my little picture frame.

Occam's razor.

Witcher 3 makes sense because that game was another perfect storm of grassroots love for it.

And very similar in that it's another Skyrim in a lot of ways, where a lot of people latched on to it because of its relative accessibility.

Not to say it doesn't have depth, but there's a reason that people don't talk about The Witcher 1 ever and 2 pretty much at all anymore.

It's like people had played 2, but not many.

3 is the one.

And so that makes sense.

Ocarina at number 5, I mean, again, modernized the action game concept.

Understood.

It also does hold up.

You know, it's a little shakier because a lot of the Zelda games for a long time were just like target on them and wait and then hit them when they open up.

You know, it makes sense.

Just like Half-Life 2, I can't say much about it because I've still not subjected myself to the Half-Life games.

Not for any reason, just haven't yet.

But of course, it's number 4.

Everyone says it's number 4 for a good reason.

Tetris.

Duh.

It's Tetris.

Yeah, it's Tetris.

It's Tetris.

I just think it's so funny that it's number 3.

I don't have a ton to say about The Last of Us because we already kind of talked about it.

Brody, if you have anything you want to add to that earlier discussion, by all means.

Well, it's just these first two or these top two are interesting if only because they're almost diametrically opposed games.

Like, number 1 is up there because of gameplay and number 2 is up there because of story.

Yeah, interesting.

I have vowed to play Last of Us this coming Halloween season, so perhaps I'll be able to weigh in a little bit more after that, but it looks like a very good game.

I feel like I've had enough of it explained to me that I understand its impact.

It is absolutely a fantastic story.

It is a half good third person shooter and a half good stealth game, and it does neither one really well.

Yeah, no, I agree, 100%.

Even down to its inventory, when you're trying to switch guns, that's straight up ripped off from Resident Evil 4 10, 15 years prior.

It's from Jack, from Jack 3, the D-pad switching.

I mean, to be fair, Jack 3 was 2004.

F***.

I swear, Jar.

No, that one's warranted.

I could have said something else.

It is, but it's still a swear jar.

I could have said something else, but man, that one deserved a hard bleep.

Yeah, Last of Us, there's not much you can say about it.

People are going to disagree, but it's one of those games where it changed how games are perceived.

And again, it's another one that came out right at that tail end of the our games, really art debate, where it definitively shut everybody up and said, stop debating this.

You are an idiot.

Yeah, I appreciate the Last of Us.

Yeah, a lot.

I don't think it should be number two, but I really appreciate it.

So the thing I'll say is very similar to what I'll say about Breath of the Wild.

In that, in how Last of Us was the pillar point at which Sony's audience was redefined.

They found the thing that they were going to build their MCU style audience around.

That's what the Last of Us did.

So it helped kickstart Sony into that PS4 generation and give them the success that they found after really struggling during the PS3 era to find it, even if they were doing well numbers wise in terms of console sales, while still struggling to actually get people to buy their games properly, because most of their games just weren't getting bought.

Like part of the reason Sony doesn't make weird games anymore, because no one really bought them to begin with.

In the same way that Last of Us did that for Sony, Breath of the Wild, is that for modern Nintendo?

Like, what world are we in if Breath of the Wild doesn't succeed?

Because the Switch, maybe DOA, like even if they perform better, simply due to the fact that they've now unified their, you know, their Wii U and 3DS markets into one core, even if...

Yeah, I mean, assuming Mario Odyssey still comes out, like some people...

Yeah, but we're talking, like they launched a console in March, which was not something that you saw done frequently, if ever before, and it worked, and it got them ready for the holiday with Odyssey then ready afterwards to kickstart the holiday for the system and get that on pace to be maybe not the highest selling console of all time.

It depends on how this current year goes and whether they stop producing them immediately when the Switch 2 is announced.

It's probably going to be number one, but it's going to be close because the PS2 is just insane and the Switch has slowed down after its big COVID bump.

But every Nintendo game afterwards followed in some way the idea of Zelda perfecting the pick up and play just one more chip strategy for them.

Not that the game was particularly new in a lot of what it did, but it did it in a way that felt so satisfying that it redefined what Zelda is.

Like there is Zelda before Breath of the Wild and those fans are really angry, they don't get a lot of that anymore.

And then there is, it's like how God of War.

Breath of the Wild performed better than nearly every other Zelda prior than it.

It performed about as well as them combined.

Like I think if you look at all of Zelda's sales prior, it's like 40 million and Breath of the Wild is like 35 million.

Yeah, it's like really high up there.

Like it's insane.

I do love Breath of the Wild.

I think it's fantastic if I'm literally just putting myself in the position of, you know, remembering what it was to play that game for the first time.

I could see it breaking my top 20.

There's no game I'd rather play for the first time than that one.

Like maybe Tears now, because Tears was like playing Breath of the Wild again for the first time.

I would rather, if I'm going to say that for Tears, I'm going to say without having had played Breath.

That's fair.

What it did for me, where it clicked even more so, it got you to fatigue point, I know.

Yeah.

Yeah, which is totally fair.

I think having the six years actually worked in its favor after so many months of me being like, you know, I don't know that it's going to do it again.

I don't know that they're going to get me the same way.

And it turns out that spending six years on what was supposed to be a one year turnaround worked.

Good for them.

Yeah, I have no further thoughts.

I got my diatribe out.

Me neither.

The only thing I can say is no Kingdom Hearts bad list.

Well, does it matter?

Maybe you should play it.

If you had played it, you could have put it on this list.

Obviously, number one should be Spyro 2 Ripto's Rage.

It's Gateway to Glimmer, you fraud.

What does it even mean?

It's Jack Renegade, except it's not.

It's just Jack.

So this part of the show went a little longer than I think we thought it would, but it came to a really good discussion.

So I think we will talk a little bit about genre in the post show.

No, but in the post show, for our live viewers at twitch.tv/crubunderscoreofficial, you can tune in live every Tuesday around 6:30 p.m.

Eastern.

We have an exclusive pre and post show.

If you are a Crubscriber in some way, either on YouTube or on Patreon, you can also get the VODs of those uploaded to YouTube as well.

But we'll talk a little bit about genre in the post show, and then we will save that as a proper topic for coming week soon, because that's something that I think we do want to talk about.

And there's some interesting thoughts to share about that in a more dedicated setting that can be a proper discussion rather than just lumped in at the end here.

Which does bring us to our Patreon slash Crubscriber question of the week.

Again, for as little as $2 a month on the Patreon, you can join and ask us any number of questions you want that we will answer live on air, either in one of these segments or in a dedicated Q&A.

We always need more questions, so feel free to join us over on the Patreon for as little as $2, or for a few bucks more, you can get some extra content as well.

This is from ChefKilo, who asks, if you recall back when YouTube launched YouTube Premium, they had a bunch of shows with popular YouTubers on them, ranging from sitcoms to experimental shows.

What show would the Crubcast be if it got its own YouTube Premium show?

Whose line is it anyway?

Silent Library.

All of my college films directed by Nico.

True, yeah, actually all of those.

I also think we'd be the show where you have to guess what object is chocolate, and by biting it using only your mouth, you have to find...

Only if the...

So it's which object is chocolate, and then if it's not chocolate, it's like acid.

Yeah.

Right.

Although Sean's answer was right.

I forget what Sean said, but he was correct.

He was lying.

Yeah, Sean was correct.

I was thinking something in the vein of like a Who's Line adjacent game show with improv elements, like any modern game show.

We did our version of The Price is Right at one point.

The rate is great.

On a previous episode of the Crubcast, we're going to absolutely do that again at some point.

We did baggage.

We've done a lot of game shows already here.

We did improv baggage, which is actually very fun.

Yeah, improv baggage is one we'll come back to.

I think we would be the game show network because we've also come very close to doing Crub Family Feud.

We've done similar family feuds over for the charity events at the charity room that we do.

Some of us do every year adjacent to the Crub family, but we'll do one with Crub inevitably once we get all eight of us in a room together.

But yeah, my vote is game show network.

Game show network.

If we had a YouTube premium thing, people would subscribe to see our paid content.

I think it would literally just be what we put on Patreon.

Honestly, it'd be patreon.com/crub.

We have a lot of out there content.

Yeah, we really do experiment a lot more on the Patreon, I will say.

Yeah, like that's also where we do like practice tests for a lot of the stuff we then later want to do in a public episode setting where we really mess around and figure it out.

Well, folks, I don't know about the three of you guys, but I am absolutely ready to call this pod.

Are you going to have more softshell crab?

I ran out.

I ate all of it.

Are you going to go kill a softshell crab and then eat them raw?

I could.

I could do that.

Dude, it's funny, right?

And I'll end the episode on this note, which is that if I see a spider, I get scared.

If I see a crab, I think delicious.

I really hope, Kevin, that you cut it after if I see a spider, I get scared.

He didn't.

And I gave him the pause because I thought you would.

I'll leave it on this note.

If I see a spider, I get scared.

No, I was going to let him fumble for a little bit to see what he got to at the end.

What I was going to say is let us know in the comments or in the review that you leave or somewhere on social media, on the Discord, what your opinion is about this aggregated list, what you think got snubbed.

There are some snubs.

Someone on the Twitch chat had asked about Cave Story.

Cave Story wasn't anywhere on the list in the top 100, which is like one of the grandfathers of the modern indie genres or indie landscape, I should say, not genres.

Rest in peace, Shovel Knight.

Yeah, I mean, Shovel Knight is the father, not the grandfather.

But yeah, let us know what you thought.

There's a lot of interesting discussion to be had here about how these lists are made and how they're aggregated in this sense.

And as we said, the list itself and the post will be in the show notes.

Big credit to the user that went through all that effort.

Username is IlmeniAVG.

So shout out to them for putting all that effort together.

Hopefully they didn't make it up because that would be really funny.

But they did a good job.

It would be really funny.

They did a good job if they did.