About time I do an opinionated quiz. I'll try to update this as my opinions change. Zelda alone takes up four spots, and Mario takes up three more, huh? I thought about limiting myself to a single game per series, but that would be disingenuous and inaccurate, so I decided against it. Honorable mentions for you in no particular order: Super Mario World, The Last Of Us, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past, The Legend Of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, Metroid Dread, Super Metroid, LittleBigPlanet, LittleBigPlanet 2, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble, Banjo-Kazooie, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, Astro Bot Rescue Mission, and...I could go on, but I think you get the idea. I like a lot of games. There's a lot of good games that exist, and even more that don't.
Respectable list. The problem I find with searching for “The Best” video game is that each game sets out to do a specific thing. Some games tell really good stories while others have really fun and creative gameplay. It’s difficult to decide to give priority to the traditional means of judging art or the completely new niche that video games created for themselves. Personally I enjoy gameplay more than anything else so compared to your list I’d keep the Marios and Metroid Prime, but remove last of us II, Elden Ring, the Zeldas and replace them with Phantom Hourglass (idk why this one’s just fun), Sly Cooper 2, LittleBigPlanet, Mario Kart Wii or DS or 8, Minecraft and uhhh Jetpack Joyride I guess. Yep those are the definitive 10 best games of all-time you heard it here first.
Agreed. It's hard to prioritize attributes when so many different games go for different things. I judge them based on a simple idea: Which video games give me the most positive emotions? These could come in one of many, many different forms (nostalgia was a big one for this list lol), but when you look at it from that lens, ranking can be very objective (in the context of your own personal list). There is no such thing as an objective list of the best games of all time (unless you consider the objective of video games to be selling copies, which is the primary goal of developers, in which case an objective list would be Tetris, Minecraft, etc.) since everyone will enjoy things differently, which sounds obvious, and it is, but people get VERY unnecessarily angry about this stuff so it's worth mentioning.
Also, while I’m aware that Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask were rereleased on the GameCube at some point, I’m pretty sure they weren’t put on there in 1998 and 2000 respectively.
This is true, but I'm considering the release date and console to be separate and unrelated things. I know that's kinda weird but it makes things more consistent for me personally.