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.

But it's not, it was released a decade ago. Back then, it was fresh and new, now that there are various zelda clones out there, of course it wouldn't have the same impact as before, it'd be the one considered the clone. That'd be like saying what if GTA3 was released today, would it still have the same impact (knowing that crackdown and saints row has already passed)?

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.

You will be saying the exact same thing in 10 years time about GTA4, what you forget is that at the time, Zelda was a huge leap forward and a culmination of everything Nintendo had been building upto since the first NES game. Where as GTA4 is simple just the culmination of everything R* has learnt since GTA1, it wasn't a huge leap forward in gameplay (sandbox was done by GTA3) and the 3rd person cover system with combat is hardly original (though it's still done well).

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.

I doubt anybody would dispute the importance of those PC games in video games history, but you can't fairly compared a game with "infinite" replay value like starcraft with a single player 40+ hour experience like OoT. That'd be like me saying that because I still play one of the PS1's winning eleven games regularly (I own alot of the later releases on the PS2) that it is a better game than say Final Fantasy 7, which I play on random occassions rarely, just because I still play it now regularly.

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.

I'm sure you could have made the same comment (maybe not graphics wise) about OoT when it first came out.

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! :)

That is a very interesting point that I totally agree with. It has nothing to do with my comment of course, but it is interesting none the less. Happiness is not synonymous with fun. Having kids will make you very happy. Having kids will not always be fun. Being married can make you very happy. Being married is not always fun.

In other words, your links have nothing to do with what I said.

I disagree.  "Fun" is nothing but short term happiness.  Afterall you can't really have fun if you aren't happy. 

Even in your depressed or upset about something when you have fun you forget your problems and therefore for a short period of time are happy.