Each week throws off several new video game lists ranging from the humorous to the trivial. What's better? A list of those. Here's a roundup of the rundowns out there.
•Fifteen Classic Game Console Design Mistakes [Technologizer] Many of these fixate on poor controller design, even the good ole lovable Duke from the original Xbox. The Virtual Boy owns two of the 15, but one of them is not "That The Thing was Even Made." Notable absence: Uh ... the ... 360?
• Top 25 Most Explosive Video Games [GameDaily] GameDaily bravely tackles the subject of stuff getting blown up in games, somehow managing to barely find a scant 25 of them that feature explosions. This would be like putting together a "Top 25 Most Shootiest Games." Your number one pick is Crysis. Mine is Pole Position II. I love how the car exploded and flung off its tires.
• The Most Accurate/Inaccurate Comic Book GamesNot a top 10 per se, but Games Radar does examine which comic book games took the most liberties with their stories, which by nature, take liberties with everything from U.S. geography to particle physics. My most inaccurate game? Spider-Man for the Atari 2600, because you couldn't wall crawl without shooting a web.
• The 10 Worst Video Game Systems of All Time [Network World] Seems like every week someone does this, but Network World hauls up some really obscure failures to populate its hall of console shame. The Apple Pippin? Oh man, I totally forgot about that horrid excretion from the Gil Amelio days.
• Classic Novels Turned Into Games [IGN] Since Dante's epic poem The Divine Comedy just got its game adaptation with Dante's Inferno, IGN turns its eye toward other deserving classics of literature. I like it that Of Mice and Men is a beat-em-up for some reason. The Catcher in the Rye as a DDR game - "If you fail to keep Holden's interest meter above a certain point, he shrugs his shoulders and goes to his parents' house." - is likewise inspired. Me, I'd go for Slaughterhouse Five, as a kind of SCUMM-based adventure through time. The Tralfamadorians for some reason remind me of the Purple Tentacle.