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[jfritzyb]

Originally Posted by red_avatar

A game such as Fallout 3 gets much higher rankings and votes than its older turn based brothers Fallout 1 & 2. Yet almost every RPG player worth his or her salt, will proclaim the older two games to be far superior in many ways. Myself, I can appreciate both approaches but as far as turn based RPGs are concerned, you can't do much better than Fallout 1&2 and they truly are great games so why do they fail to show up in most top 100 lists? The answer is simple: because this is a popularity contest, and this means popular genres will always bully the less popular ones in submission.

Flight simulators, turn based games, tycoon games, adventure games, etc. these are all genres which contain some incredibly gems that rarely make the big news. Just like democracy is heavily flawed because it's all about popularity above qualities, so is any ranking of games based on votes made by the public. Even on Abandonia, the public score is completely pointless. The biggest gems receive 3.5/5 and the mediocre crap receives ... 3.5/5.

Saying that Fallout 3 gets higher ratings "due to a popularity contest", is a mischaracterization. People who design these games also do polls with their people and on the net (no different then Abandonia does with the games hosted on-site). One must also take into account the possibility that not everyone votes or rates a game so while the numbers can be wrong, it is possible to obtain a working knowledge as to which game is more liked by "most" people as opposed to what game was disliked by "most" people. Concerning Fallout 3, what makes it unique is that it successfully blends 3D with an amazing storyline (something that does not happen very often with a lot of 3D-based games, possibly due to the fact that everything is done on the computer and therefore the video game project can finish more quickly and therefore, the deadlines would be quicker to meet).

It is also stated that "almost RPG player worth their salt will agree that Fallout 1-2 is far superior [to other turn-based RPG's]..." I challenge this assumption as Fallout 1-2 is not the only "superior" turn-based RPG game out there. If I'm not mistaken, Final Fantasy is a turn-based RPG as well and has a totally awesome plot, graphics, the works AND if I'm not mistaken, it's still pretty popular even today! However, putting Final Fantasy aside, there are other really good turn-based rpg's that are out there and to say that Fallout 1 and 2 are the only good ones worth playing is most certainly a stretch.