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This December we’re rounding up all of our Popten bloggers, and inviting anyone who has an opinion, and churning out Popten’s Top Ten of the Decade. From obvious lists like Top Ten Albums, to the much less obvious, we’re quantifying everything that was worth experiencing in the last ten years.
As we put the finishing touches on our lists, which we’ll be hitting you with from now until the ball drops, we want to formally invite all of you OCD wordsmiths to jump in and start quantifying alongside us. Contact us at info [at] popten.net — or tweet us up @popten – if your list is good, we’ll publish it right here. (And while we’re not quite BoingBoing, we get a healthy 20K uniques monthly, so you’ll get read.)
And while we wait for December, here are some great lists from The Onion’s A.V. Club. They won me over when they brilliantly, and correctly, articulated exactly why GTA Vice City is the best of all GTA games (and my all-time favorite game). Sadly, it’s eight places too high on the list…
The Grand Theft Auto series is known for masking clever satires of American culture with gleeful violence, and Vice City, a parody of 1980s Miami, makes the ideal setting for the decadence the series simultaneously idealizes and lampoons. Mafioso in Hawaiian shirts, polyester-clad cocaine lords, and petty moguls form the cast of caricatures the series does so well, populating a world where the excesses of its crime-spree gameplay feel appropriate. GTA’s intelligence is often lost in the hullabaloo over its violence, but Vice City simply asks players to be as absurd as the characters around them, creating a plausible, neon-soaked fiction that’s as funny as it is canny. Rockstar burdened San Andreas with too many disparate activities and rendered GTA IV with inappropriate gravitas, making Vice City the best whole-package showcase of the series’ brilliance.
