All Articles: PS2

The Video Game Canon’s 2020 Update is Here

The Video Game Canon is a statistical meta-ranking of dozens of “Best Video Games of All Time” lists that began in 2017 with Version 1.0, and the ranking has been updated several times since then. Which game is #1? There’s only one way to find out…

The latest update to the Video Game Canon, Version 4.0, has arrived!

The Video Game Canon now includes a total of 1,232 games, which were pulled from 59 “Best Video Games of All Time” lists published between 1995 and 2020. Each game was ranked against the rest of the field using the C-Score, a formula that takes into account a game’s “Average Ranking” and the complementary percentage of its “Appearance Frequency” across all lists.

Finally, games released after December 31, 2016 were excluded from the ranking because of their newness.

Three brand new lists were added to Version 4.0 of the Video Game Canon, including “The 100 Best Video Games in History” from GQ Spain, a “Top 100 Video Games of All Time” ranking from Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, and a massive look back at “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” from Popular Mechanics. Alongside these new additions, updates to IGN‘s “Top 100 Video Games of All Time,” Popular Mechanics‘s “The 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time,” and Slant Magazine‘s “The 100 Best Video Games of All Time” were also added to the calculation. Thanks to reader CriticalCid for providing research assistance with some of these new lists.

But even with all this new data, there was surprisingly very little movement near the top of the Video Game Canon, and the Top 3 was once again represented by Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris (#1), Valve’s Half-Life 2, and Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 (#3). There was some slight shuffling in the rest of the Top 10, but no new titles were able to crack the highest tier. Nintendo’s classic quartet of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (#4), Super Mario 64 (#5), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (#6), and Super Metroid (#10) all hung around, as did Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (#7), Irrational’s BioShock (#8), and Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption (#9).

Things get more interesting as you move further down the Top 100, especially for the 2015 and 2016 releases that now qualify for inclusion in the Video Game Canon.

Visit VideoGameCanon.com to learn more about this year’s update to the big list and to explore the rest of the Top 1000.

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PlayStation 2: 150 million served

With all the fanboy fighting over the “console war” of the current generation of systems, it’s easy to forget how utterly dominant the PlayStation 2 was from 2000-2006. And Sony’s second console is still racking up sales at an astonishing rate.

According to sales figures released today by Sony Computer Entertainment, Sony has sold 150 million PS2 systems to retailers as of January 31, 2011. Even more astonishingly, the console has survived for over almost 11 years, it made its Japanese debut in March of 2000.

A few other amazing numbers of note include the 10,828 PS2 games released across the world (which is comprised of over 2,000 unique titles) and the 1.52 billion copies (yes, billion with a B) those games have sold.

Say what you will about the relative success of the PSP and PS3, but the PS2 will go down in history as one of the greatest consoles of all time.

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Can you dig these WWE All-Stars trailers?

OOOOOOOHHHHH YYYEEEEAAAAAHHHHHH!

THQ is taking the WWE to the arcade this March (March 29 to be exact) with WWE All-Stars, a wildly over-the-top wrestling game that brings together two generations of the WWE’s finest.

Check out the game’s debut trailer above and hit the jump for a special message from “Macho Man” Randy Savage on why he’s the greatest superstar in the PS3, Wii, Xbox 360, PS2 and PSP game. At 58, the former Slim Jim spokesman is still more awesome than any wrestler working today. (more…)

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