Ok, so I hear a lot of people comparing OoT to GTA4 in terms of "best game ever". Here is why I think GTA is far better then OoT.
First off, I think people really mean "Best game for its day" when they say "Best game ever". If OoT were released today, exactly as it is, and it was the first time you ever saw it, you would laugh it away as shovel ware.
There is no question it was a good game for its day, but hardware gets better, budgets get bigger, creative minds get more creative. Most games today, even middle of the road games, outshine OoT today.
So, let's talk about how good it was for its day. It came out in 1998, and was an action-adventure game on the N64. on the PC in 1998 , we had Baldur's Gate, Half Life, Quake II, Thief: Dark Project, Starcraft, Fallout (1997), fallout 2, Unreal, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Myth II, and Falcon 4.0.
Every one of those games, from a technical perspective, was years ahead of OoT. You could not compare PC games to Console games back then, as PC's cost a lot to make, and you just could not make a piece of consumer electronics that had enough horsepower for the price. Also, a lot of those games (Starcraft and Falcon 4.0 mainly), are played by hundreds of thousands of gamers. They are not played as nostalgia to a time when they were young, they are still the definitive game for those genres.
Today is different. Spend any amount of money you want, and take any video/computer game you like, and there is nothing today that outshines GTA4.
Let's hope in 10 years, someone (hopefully me :p), will make the same comparison with whatever is out compared to GTA4. This is a great time to be alive, and be a gamer! :)
