From their bit on Sniper Elite 4:

This is Metal Gear Solid 5 without all the bollocks, basically, and where you're actively encouraged to snipe away at Nazis' nutsacks too.

I'm in at the right price.

Horizon is only around 30 as well. Really weird list so far. Sonic Mania is higher than Nier and one of the quotes is basically " I never liked Sonic and I still dont"

JonB wrote:

It's all a bit confusing.

It’s all a load of bollocks. Everything mid way up the list, because somebody’s daughter likes it? Aye, okay.

I wonder if Destiny 2 will make the top 10.

Zelda and Mario will be 1 and 2 which is fine.

By my count, they gave 95 games a ‘recommended’ or ‘essential’ rating this year, so how there’s room in a top 50 for games which got neither is anyone’s guess.

30-21 also apparently includes the Switch’s ‘true killer app’. Which by definition means that the standout console of the year can’t have any titles in the top 20. Either that, or it’s a spectacularly poorly compiled and written list.

It doesn’t take much time to work out which.

That killer app is also available on Playstation!

It's pretty odd reading a best of the year list where the games are described with so many back handed and qualified complements.  Might want to figure out a new voting system for next year, this one's a bit off.

I’m changing my voting in ours to also include games that I haven’t played.

They don't say killer app though.  'They' don't say 'the secret best game on the Switch' either.  Someone called Christian Donlan does.

Am I being pedantic or is the sentence managing to the hide in a blind spot every time I skim the article?

It's the sub heading of the article Mootsy.

Basically everything Donlan reviews is Recommended or Essential.

From a brief scan of the intro screed it seems like titles 50-11 just aren't in any order because it's been such a broad year, the real contention appears to be the top 10. The idea of being able to discernibly separate 50 titles into degrees of quality seems pointless to me anyhow, unless they were 50 attempts at the same thing. How can you contrast, say, Total War: Warhammer 2 which my personal game of the year, in any meaningful sense against Mario or Zelda? I know Zelda is the far greater achievement on almost every level compared with Odyssey, but I can barely stomach playing it because of the deep anxiety that it, and many open world games give me in their vast aimlessness. 

As ever, I think it just boils down to the idea of banner sites collecting aggregate opinions as utterly pointless to me as a reader and a person who plays games. I'm much more interested in what the individual byline holders think, and from that stand point 90% of the EG list is useless because they have clipped the discourse around each game to almost meaningless info bursts.

Tempy wrote:

From a brief scan of the intro screed it seems like titles 50-11 just aren't in any order...

I would love to agree, but the numbers, Templeton, the numbers...

Tempy wrote:

The idea of being able to discernibly separate 50 titles into degrees of quality seems pointless...

It hasn’t stopped us doing the same thing over and over since popular culture became popular. I’d also argue that comparing titles just because they were released in the same arbitrary period of time is daft, but look at us having fun.

I agree.

Word Magazine showed each journo's full lists of ten, iirc, unless I'm confusing it with a music website I used to read.  An overall list arranged from those lists is fine by me, but full transparency would improve it.

Edit: Which reads as 'moar lists', basically.