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Who won out of Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous, the crowdfunded space sim sensations pitched to us a decade ago by two of the genre’s most celebrated game directors? Star Citizen being a spiritual follow up to Wing Commander and Privateer, and Elite Dangerous being a direct sequel to Elite, Frontier: Elite 2 and Frontier: First Encounters. Well, it depends how you define “win”. Or, indeed, “exists”. This is just one of the Enthusiastic Disagreements we have in this week’s Best Games Ever Podcast, along with GTA vs Saints Row, Call of Duty vs Medal of Honor, and another one that we can’t remember.
Remember Lemmings vs The Humans? Well, Lemmings was this puzzle game where you had to coax large groups of the titular rodents across increasingly fiendish levels, using such units as: builders. Blockers. Diggers. Other ones. I dunno, it was a long time ago and I’m 40 (aka dead). The Humans was more or less a Lemmings ‘clone’, right, and they had a sort of rivalry going on that, in my small child head, was as much a defining battle between 90s pop culture icons as Oasis vs Blur, or Oasis vs Ocean Colour Scene, or Oasis vs Oasis.
Who won that rivalry? Well, these things are subjective. You could define it it terms of sales (hard to verify) or cultural impact (hard to quantify), or you could simply base it on which series survived longest. Which would give The Humans the win here by three years, having released its last entry on Nintendo DS in 2009. Not that anyone noticed. The last Lemmings game flopped out to equally minimal fanfare on PSP and PS2 in 2006, and it wasn’t even a proper sequel so much as an enhanced re-release of the original. It’s notable that both series’ guffed their last guff on 7th gen handhelds, and highly amusing to me that the once beloved Lemmings, of which there is a bronze statue in Dundee, lost this battle to the never beloved The Humans, of which there is no bronze statue. In Dundee or anywhere else.
It’s such a good pick for this week’s episode of The Best Games Ever Podcast that you’ll no doubt be unsurprised to learn that nobody actually did. If you want to find out what esteemed regulars James Billcliffe, Tom Orry, and Sherif Saed did pick, you’ll have to watch or listen to it via the handy methods listed below.
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Special thanks to David Bulmer for performing “Jim’s Theme”.