The Guinness Book of World Records 2010 Edition

I mentioned this last year, every year Guinness puts out a book of Video Game World Records that's about one-third history lesson, one-third propaganda for new games by passing off every new game as a record-breaker, and one-third wild speculation. Their "top games" lists were better done than I would have expected since they quoted some objective sources like awards given out, although they did seem a bit biased by the hype of the year. A couple of their picks, Modern Warfare 2 and Scribblenauts received tremendous amounts of hype but I heard a lot of complaints after the fact. They also named Call of Duty one of the most important franchises of all time, when it may be headed for a death spiral thanks to the recent problems between Infinity Ward and Activision.

Their section on Adventure Games was interesting as usual, they squeezed it in as a specific section for a chapter on action-adventure games that covers everything from Tomb Raider to Zelda. Their top 10 adventure games made for a solid list, it referenced the highlights of the LucasArts tradition, the latest adventure games on the DS, and a couple others like Myst. The Sierra games were completely forgotten this year however, since there wasn't even a knockoff Leisure Suit Larry game to reference, there was no point in digging into the Sierra archives. Monkey Island got top billing due to its recent sequel and remake, and Phoenix Wright/Layton were heralded as the up and comers. It looks like if your intellectual property isn't significant in the present, it's not judged to be significant in the past either.

Like I mentioned last year, they refer to the genre as "Point and Click Adventure Games", which is even stranger than you might think, since all of the games they listed can be played on platforms that don't require clicking. Phoenix Wright and Layton in particular are almost completely removed from the tradition of pixel hunts where you point and click on things. Fundamentally the games are about solving abstract puzzles in contrast to real-time puzzles like Tetris. I think calling them "Adventure Games" suffices as a label for most of us, you just have to label Action-Adventure games a little differently.