>> Squeex Says "Top 50." · Our Crowd Has Notes
Squeex top "50" games everyone should play
Squeex dropped a video calling it his top 50 games everyone should play. We did the only responsible thing and ran his picks through the one court that outranks any streamer: our own duelling crowd.
A house rule on the bars you're about to see. Nobody here filled in a review form. Every number comes from duels — "this or that?" picks folded into a per-player ranking and then a community median. A game's beats-% is just the share of a typical library it beats: 50% is dead average, 90% means it's beating nine games out of ten that people actually own. It's taste, not marketing.
An honest confession before we start
It's not really a top 50. The list Squeex wrote out runs to 33 games, and he calls it "games everybody should play" rather than a ranking. We're treating his order as a ranking anyway — that's the whole game here — but the picks themselves are his.
And because needmoar runs on Steam libraries, the good chunk of his list that never left Nintendo hardware has to sit this one out. What's left is everything our crowd can actually vote on: his call on top, the community's verdict beside it.
Squeex's list vs the crowd
The verdict
Where our community can actually check his homework, Squeex mostly earns the nod — and the places he doesn't are the fun part. The disagreements aren't random, either. The widest gaps cluster around games whose magic lived in the moment rather than on the disc: the multiplayer comfort food you had to be playing with friends — Left 4 Dead 2, Battlefront II, Call of Duty 4 — and the old-guard classics you had to be there for, like Grim Fandango and SimCity 4. Our rankings come from one player weighing a game against their own library, alone, today, and that's exactly the lens that undersells a co-op night or a genre that peaked twenty years ago.
The rows where he and the crowd shake hands are the mirror image: self-contained, single-player craft that still stands up cold — Resident Evil 4, Dishonored, Peggle, the Metal Gears. Essential-to-own and most-preferred were never quite the same list, and the seam between them runs right along "did you have to be there?"
Honorable mentions go to the picks we weren't allowed to score. Ocarina of Time, Super Mario Galaxy, Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart, Pikmin 2 and Smash — plus a couple of launcher-exclusive holdouts like Minecraft and The Sims 2 — never shipped on Steam, so they never stepped into a duel. Take that as its own kind of endorsement: the crowd can't drag down a game it can't get its hands on. If Squeex says they're essential, they get to keep that title uncontested.
Think the crowd's got the rest wrong? The duel arena is open all night — sign in with Steam, put your own library on the line, and settle it yourself.
