uk.xbox.ign.com/articles/772/772315p1.html
Orta’s number 21, but if you look through the list I’m not sure how seriously it can be taken.
Too many EA titles in there. O_o And Halo isn’t THAT awesome, but beyond those, the right titles are in the list, just in the wrong order. XD
You can NEVER have too many EA titles in a greatest games list silly! I think that’s got to be the first or second thing you have to learn as a “professional” gaming journalist…
To hell with Burnout 3, Burnout 2 is so much more deserving but, of course it wasn’t published by EA. 
It’s far from the most objectionable list I’ve ever seen, but from the standpoint of choosing games that shine on XBOX in particular it’s total weaksauce. I will agree that there’s no other game that deserves the top spot at least, Halo is the real deal and a better package for what it is than Halo 2.
Halo sold the Xbox. Seriously. It’s not a very pleasant fact but it is, unfortunately, a fact. Without Halo, Xbox probably wouldn’t have sold as well and PS2 would have totally owned its generation. Its significance can never be overestimated. It’s also the best FPS I’ve ever played. Tis a shame H2 was absymal though.
It didn’t? That’s news to me.
Not entirely so. It was the most successful of the consoles in that generation, primarily due to brand recognition (in my opinion), but it didn’t dominate the market to the extent that the PS1 did.
PS1’s impact on gaming was insane. It saw the word “playstation” enter mainstream English vocabulary as a word meaning “a video games console”. The UK TV show, “The Generation Game”, advertised one of its prizes as “a playstation” when it was, in fact, a Dreamcast. I routinely heard phrases such as “My kid wants one of those playstations for Christmas, but doesn’t know which one yet.”
Thankfully, this has now ceased and playstation is used only for Sony consoles again. The PS2 shipped…sorry, I should probably say “sold”…immense numbers, but it didn’t throw all other consoles of the generation into complete obscurity. N64 and Saturn had some top titles but neither had such a wave of purchase as the PS1. This wasn’t the case with the last generation, the GC only losing its ground late-on and the Xbox continuing to have a steady stream of releases until 360 came out.
Having a steady stream of releases (for the Xbox) doesn’t mean these actually sold that much better compared to say, how the Saturn fared. After all, we do know that Microsoft was trying to break in the market regardless of what losses they had to suffer to achieve that. Did they ever make a profit from the original Xbox?
As for GC, it came late on, and lost ground late on, I don’t think it got that many more games than Saturn/N64 did…
I’m sure if you look you will still find many people calling all consoles Playstations. Well, maybe not right now with all the hype surrounding the Wii and the poor showing of the PS3 but right up until the next gen systems were released I suppose…
I guess we’d have to find a place listing cummulative sales of games and systems for that generation to really judge if PS2 was as successful as the PS1…
Well PS2 was obviously as big a success as the Playstation, it continued to build the market, but it did not end out the generation in as dominant a situation at all. I was making this prediction like 3 years ago, trying to explain to people why XBOX would be a success for MS’ goals. While the unit total for PS2 puts everything else to shame, the last couple of years the discrepancy in software sales is a completely different story. When you’ve got major companies like Ubisoft who have some franchises that routinely sell better on XBOX than they do on PS2, that gave MS real leverage where it actually counts, third parties’ bottom line.
Actually, PS2’s domination of the last generation rivaled the PS1’s. PS2 sold somewhere on the order of 80 million units worldwide, whereas the next biggest contender (Xbox) sold somewhere around 30 million. Quite the big gap.
That being said - sure, there are a bit too many EA Sports games up there. But when you consider the fact that sports games make up a huge percentage of the gaming industry. Do we need 3 football games up there? Maybe not… but I can understand why they are up there. Other than that, however, I think it’s a really solid list.
Not as bad as 102.49 million of the original PS vs. 10 million for the Saturn and 32.9 for the N64 (Wikipedia). PS2 had a big gap, but:
a) It was not as big as the gap for the PS1 and its rivals, which says a lot when you consider the fully transformed nature of the gaming market at this time.
b) The Sony figures take into account units shipped rather than sold, so there will be discrepancy (sp) in the amount of units sold as replacements and so forth.
Other than the sports games, a solid list I agree with on the majority.