Interesting going back to "Tetris" for a moment. I like where we are with the distinction "best of" types of games, but am not sure I agree with the reasoning just yet for not calling "Tetris" a great work. It certainly lacks substance in the classic sense - it has no depth, the game just gets faster instead of different or evolving - but wouldn't one almost - just almost - have to compare "Tetris" to a classic board game such as "Chess", or, better yet, "Checkers"? It's our videogame equivalent of those games, a game only possible in electronic form. Are we to then say that something like a "Checkers" is not great, while "Chess" is? "Tetris" to me is a great achievment simply for the fact that it's an "everyman" game that young and old, male and female like. The game doesn't seem to pander in any way to achieve this. It just happened to be a lucky configuration of events that made it a "perfect" pure videogame.

Is "Tetris" art? While there is some beauty to its abstraction and elegance to the simplicity of the overall design, I'd fall short of calling it art. Is "Elite" "art"? Probably.

So I agree with our first major accomplishment in distinguishing between two distinct categories of "best of" types of games, but not really the second, unless perhaps we were to base it more on the fuzzy concept of "art".

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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.
[ My collection ]
[ http://www.MythCore.com ]