With New Super Mario Bros, it lacks a giant world or pipe world, and the visual style for all of them is quite different. Nintendo is pretty good about making their old games available, so not really buried; also that emulation is quite easy and has more options than ever
I thought it was just supposed to be a cheeky title based on the Unabomber quote.
This is exactly the type of bollocks that needs calling out.
FF7 was influential, and it had potential (its system was an evolution and generalization of FF5's class based menu customization system), but IMO it was a let down in almost all of its other aspects (especially encounter design after FF5 and to a lesser extent 6).
Those games are definitely influential. Dark Souls alone has had enough impact in gaming to create its own genre of copy-cats.
Indeed. With the rest of your post you seem to (understandably) struggle with the phrase "meaningful content".
From what I can see, outside of games that test your perseverance and mental adaptability to make progress, the only other value comes from discussing them with other people, or with multiplayer, playing in a social setting. As well as the very very few of them contain stories of value.
Even in its own series, though, Diablo II was far more influential than Diablo 3. Games like Path of Exile and Titan Quest were inspired by Diablo II, not Diablo 3, and whatever influence the Diablo series has had on the rest of gaming with regards to item stat systems definitely came mainly from II. So picking Diablo 3 indicates that the journalist involved is either retarded or on the take (or both, which is most likely for a journalist).
Top 10 Most Influential RPGs for people who never touched RPGs
The point is not so much they influenced ARPGs, as they segmented the always-online game as a service stuff. Not to mention the paying for cosmetic and other irrelevant crap inside a game. In this sense Blizzard is one of the biggest influences in gaming, just not a good one.
Not even close, the Koreans were years ahead of anything Diablo 3 had put in terms of scummy monetization or cosmetics and terms like "Korean MMO" or "Korean monetization" been a go-to when talking about shit monetization. WoW had way more influence on always online part, but even that was not that influential as it already came to a genre where that was requirement to even function. Bnet is a kind of a precursor to always online and I would say it had bigger influence than anything Blizzard has ever created after 2005.
He doesn't in any way deny that Herzog Zwei was an inspiration tho
Is not about who did it first, is about who had more impact. And thinking that WoW was not the genre defining "game service" in which every other one based their model is denying reality. They might be a shadow now, but a few years back every time you said "MMO" people only thought of WoW. They had a massive cultural impact and even got their own South Park episode dedicated. Whether some other guys took after them later or tested the waters before isn't relevant.
Yes, naturally games that create genres are going to have more historical influence than entries 5-30 years later. On the tree of which ones rely on others for existing in the first place, and which ones don't. Also the further back the wider the scope of things that are influenced.
He's obviously responding to HZ being brought up - on his own initiative he cites the other games and wants to emphasize the Mac interface.
