Over my gaming career, I've worn a lot of hats. I've vicariously led armies in campaigns across real and fictional lands, rolled marbles through a series of mazes, wrestled for the world title, shot lots of zombies in the face with heavy artillery, demolished buildings, been mayor of a city, gone fishing, explored dungeons, and dozens of other things. And across all of those games I've realized that not all activities translate well to video-game forms.

For instance, I managed to find a copy of the King James Bible for the original Game Boy, and because if its novelty, I was compelled to buy it. And, aside from some really terrible games, the only thing to do with it is to read the Bible... on a 2 inch screen that can show about 40 words at a time, and according to this page, there are 783,137 words in the whole thing. Which means you're going to go crosseyed trying to work your way through the thing. Though, thankfully, you'll probably run out of batteries first.

Or we could consider something like video slot machines. With the mechanical arm taken out of the picture, and the tumblers reduced to video game representations, we're left with just pressing the 'insert coin' button and then the 'spin wheels' button over and over and over and over.

Yee. Haw.

Of course it goes the other way, too. I mean, could you imagine a non-video game version of something like Tetris Attack?

Because I sure can't.

About a year ago I successfully played a prank on the Internet, and the results were better than I expected, and I thought it did a pretty good job of explaining why I have such a strong dislike for 'Top X Lists', but I figured I could expand on that with a more generalized tack.

And with that I'd like to present: The top five reasons why your Top X list is dumb and wrong

5. Lists are lazy. All Top X lists, including this one, are lazy. They take very little effort to produce and are really just filler. All you need is some space to fill, a desire to not really talk in depth about anything, and a wacky topic, which brings me to...

4. Topics are getting wacky. There have been so many Top X Lists that it's getting tougher to find a way to connect ten or so seemingly unconnected things. Stuff like, "Top 13 games where the number of powerups you can get is a prime number" or "Top 7 cartoon characters based on ancient Greek cartographers" is becoming the norm.

3. Your rankings are wrong. No matter your methods, about half the people who read your list will find something wrong with it. You ranked something dumb as super-high, or left something off the list that obviously should have been there. What are you, an idiot?

2. When you're doing "Best of" or "Worst of" lists the same things pop up over and over again. Top whatever video games: Final Fantasy something, Zelda something, Mario something. Worst video games: ET, Atari 2600 Pac-man, Smurfs, and then some terrible adult game. Yawn, seen 'em.

1. Once you reach a big enough mass of material, trying to pick the top few is futile. According to this list in 2005 alone around 175,000 books were published just in the United States, not to mention the rest of the world. And you're going to tell me that you can pick the top 25 of them that featured protagonists riding on the back of a talking dinosaur? You'll have to pardon my skepticism.

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I'll admit it, when I see stuff like this, I get a little jealous. Now, don't get me wrong, I have no allusions about the reach of this site. I understand that I'm not a member of the press proper. I don't have press contacts, and I don't get press releases. People don't come here for breaking news, reviews, and previews. Sending me anything would have limited benefit to any of the companies involved.

"More after the jump"