Collider put out a ranked list of the best video games released since 2000, and I always enjoy these things the way I enjoy watching someone defuse a bomb. Any list that tries to compress 26 years of gaming into a handful of slots is going to make somebody furious, and that's half the fun.

The source piece doesn't hand you the full lineup in the summary, so I'd rather not parrot entries I can't verify, but the era it covers is the era, the one where gaming went from cartridges to whatever we call the current mess of live services and 80-dollar box prices. You already know the usual suspects that show up in these rankings. Open-world redefinition, dense western epics, the soulslike that broke into the mainstream, the zombie story that made everybody cry. If Collider's list zigged away from any of those, I'd genuinely love to hear about it.

Do I have quibbles sight unseen? Of course I have quibbles. I've been doing this since the NES era, quibbling is my cardio.

Any list with a 2000 cutoff, same problem every time. Deus Ex came out in June 2000, which makes it eligible by a matter of weeks, and it almost never gets its due on these things. I remember finishing it on a summer night that year and just sitting there, stunned that a game trusted me to think. When people praise modern open worlds for systemic freedom, and they should, I keep thinking about how Warren Spector's crew was handing players a toolbox and stepping back before most of those designers had shipped anything. Ion Storm's imprint is all over the design language these lists celebrate.

My other gripe is the usual one for these rankings: RPG representation. A list this tight has to make brutal cuts, sure. But Persona 5, Dark Souls, even FFXIV's rebirth, all of them reshaped what people expect from the genre. Nina in our office would fight me on FFXIV specifically, and she'd have a real case, that game's comeback story is unmatched in the medium.

But lists like Collider's aren't really about being right. They're about starting arguments in group chats, and by that measure this one probably works. Go read the full ranking through the link above, then tell me what's missing and whether they got the top spot right. I'll start: Skies of Arcadia. A Dreamcast game from 2000 that still has no equal, and nobody ever puts it on these lists. Some wounds never close.