Gawker’s gaming-focused vertical, Kotaku, has published another list, this one purporting to enumerate The Best Isometric Video Games. It’s certainly an…interesting selection of games, and the author begins by cautioning that he applied a very strict understanding of what constitutes an isometric viewing angle.

Note that I’ve been fairly strict about what qualifies as “isometric”: the principle itself was designed to simulate the presentation of a 3D space on a 2D display, so if the game has a free camera which actually allows the exploration of a 3D space, or has a fixed camera that doesn’t properly recreate a 3D space (ala Link to the Past’s cartoony distortion) then that’s cheating.

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Fun fact: the isometric perspective in most games isn’t quite true isometric.

Amusingly, the first few comments are rife with complaints that games such as Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin, earlier Diablo titles (Diablo 3 is on the list), and several other notable examples of isometric-viewpoint games were missed or not considered.

That said, the article does include both Ultima 8 (which is arguably the inspiration for Diablo, since we’re doing the whole fun fact thing) and Crusader: No Remorse. So for whatever its other errors might be, it at least gets those two right. (And to my mind, the inclusion of Little Big Adventure is also quite appropriate.)