NOW YOU'RE POLLING WITH POWER. SUPER POWER. Console Poll, vol. 2 - 4th Generation RESULTS

I'm playing Crusader of Centy now and this game is great. I have no idea how I haven't heard of it before.

Yeah I need to check it out too. A few friends have mentioned it over the years but I keep putting off playing it

(although I don't think I actually cried during it, as I did with the endgame for Mother 3).

and here I thought I was just some kind of weirdo, anyone else played thru Mother 3? Or, has any videogame ever elicited tears from you?

i've been re-visiting Rondo of Blood. so many things to love

- jump on/off stairs at any time by holding up. stairs always sucked in CV but w this mechanic you can just on and off them w ease.
- Super Castlevania IV might have stand-up jazz bass but this is the only Castlevania with SLAP BASS.
- amazing boss rush in stage 6, best one of the series. fighting 5 bosses from the first game? the mummy and frankenstein? yes plz.
- branching paths. every level has a secret exit and a secret boss (?) very good for replay
- that creaky door sound when you push RUN on the start screen. creeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaak. so perfect.

Is this console generation not held in as high regard as the preceding?

btw thx for a v nice poll w lots of great insights, haven't played many of these games but.... yr posts make them come alive

Yeah, great poll all around!

I think this generation is very well regarded, or at least its canon of greats is very very clear and still much-discussed everyplace. If this thread is less rambunctious than the last, that's surely a factor. This is maybe the BEST generation for certain needs, and virtually all the 2D genres which emerged in the NES era but here have their kinks mostly worn out, at least once you escape the lower tier of the usual garbage (usually better looking than the NES equivalent, tho not actually better - tbh Super Star Wars for example borderline here, it looks and sounds phenomenal but really isn't all that fun imo). There's also a demographic bubble effect of course - huge overlap with the 80s kid/millennial cohort, and the period when video game consumption as a steady, non-fad, always-been-there part of childhood took hold.

But you really can own 77 good to great games for these systems, and most are pick-up-and-play. I don't think that will be true again though just maybe sixth-gen would make it.

Pick-up-and-play is not an unalloyed positive IMO, the umbilical cord to arcades.

Nah, I dig that, and some of my enduring faves here (Zelda, the RPGs) are obviously much more serious commitments. Just, from the vantage of my mid-30s, something that has you in satisfying, rich gameplay within two minutes, that you can also set aside after thirty, has immense value. The save slots alone thus might make SMW just slightly more appealing to me than SMB3, assuming one can't emulate the latter.

SNES9x installed (and Direct X 9 installed as well), Yoshi's Island ROM downloaded, USB controller ordered. Thanks poll!

As far as this generation of consoles -- mentioned before I had a Genesis, but not SNES. That was the last console I owned until I bought an XBOX 360 a few years ago. For people of my age, I think the original NES was a bigger deal than this generation, if only because by the time SNES and Genesis happened, altho I still played games, I was frankly outgrowing that stuff in favor of, say, music and the prospect of adult-ish life.

However, I think that is entirely due to my age. Clearly this generation has tons of fans.

The NES was a bigger deal to me too, and I may have more nostalgia for a handful of games on that system than anything here, but the top 77 here just wipes the floor with the top 77 of that era. 4th gen was a huge step up in quality, building on and improving what made that generation great. I don't know if Will plans to run a 5th gen poll, but I suspect it'll have a lot less people participating - the N64, orig PS, and Sega Saturn were a big lateral shift in gameplay towards 3D, and I think the whole generation of consoles suffers from lack of polish. N64 in particular has so few good third-party games, and even some of the first-party games were not great

Well I consider the 5th and 6th generations the greatest, but I am aware there's bias there - it's the first consoles I owned.

I'm sure I'm biased as well - having grown up with the 3rd/4th gen consoles - but I do have a lot of fondness for the PS2 and Gamecube, certainly more than the PS1 and N64. By the 6th gen consoles, the 3D games were pretty much perfected, IMO. The 5th gen consoles just did not do much for me outside of Mario Kart 64 and Smash Bros

But you really can own 77 good to great games for these systems

I'd suggest you could easily own 77 good games for _either_ the SNES or Genesis. I'm not even remotely familiar with the Turbografx library as this was a thing I read about in magazines and not once saw in a store. Not much of a Zelda fun usually but Link to The Past is a definitely classic. I'd still take SMW over it (it's such a simple game on the surface but has endless replay value), and the ROM-hacking community around it is incredible. My #1 was Sonic 3 & Knuckles which I think might be under-played because it came out a little late in the cycle and having to buy two carts was a huge burden - I only ever rented Sonic & Knuckles so didn't get much time to play the locked on game as a kid but as an adult, it's fucking good, long, fun, superb soundtrack, more complex than the preceding games but also still pick-up-and-play.

Never had a Game Boy myself but its library in hindsight trounces the Game Gear - there are a few quality exclusives on the GG though - one that I highly recommend you give a go is Sylvan Tale, which is a top-down adventure in the vein of Zelda, but with the change-form gimmick of Wonderboy 3 on the SMS. Was never released in the West, but it's not accessible due to a fan translation, and it has probably my favourite 8-bit game soundtrack of all time. Oh and Sonic Triple Trouble, Tails Adventure and the two GG Shinobi entries plus GG Aleste are great but it's not a system dripping with great games that you didn't have (or couldn't have done) on the SMS, colour palette aside.

besides a couple of others that will certainly show up micro machines (well, the second one) was my favourite racing game of this era, and maybe the most fun multiplayer of all of them.

Completely missed this poll, but Micro Machines 2 would probably have been my #1.

Having 2 extra controller ports on the cartridge and then even incorporating an 8 player game where 2 people share a controller was immense fun. Possibly my favourite multiplayer game of all time.

Or, has any videogame ever elicited tears from you?

― erudite beach boys fan (sheesh), Sunday, October 9, 2016 3:09 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Once I cried describing something from one of the MGS games to my then-gf, i can't remember what i was explaining/which game it was tho. couldn't have been 5... probably something from 1 or 4? i think i was a bit drunk tbh

*FFIII SPOILERS*

I was very emotionally affected when Kefka poisoned the town, because I hadn't played a game where such brutality had so brazenly occurred, and then later, after exploring the train-going-to-the-underworld, when the team gets off and sees Cyan's family getting on, I felt punched in the guy and cried. The final "we love you Daddy!" line or whatever was on the nose, it wouldn't played better if they were simply silent ghosts departing the world, but that moment when I realized the game was going there was the heaviest thing I've experienced in a game

*punched in the gut, *would've played better

holding off going deep on crusader of centy until the genesis usb controller i ordered arrives. this is completely indefensible as i already have a snes controller which works just fine for genesis games but i always wanted a genesis when i was a kid, is the thing.

in the meantime i got to world 2 in yoshi's island and died at the first boss (the bug on the cover) in secret of evermore. both of these games are wonderful imo. baby mario's crying may be annoying (tho not nearly as annoying as zelda's low-hearts alarm) but he is such an original+elegant way of implementing "health", more fun (tho admittedly much more forgiving; when i actually "die" it's almost always cuz i fell off a cliff) than trad mario's power levels. (mario64's straight HP system is one of the most disappointing and unmario things about a personal canonical totem). enemy variety is terrific -- the guys w baseball bats who whack yr eggs back; the psychoactive gasbags who trip yoshi out; the guys who curl up into protective balls you can spit out as projectiles. (always loved eating things w yoshi in SMW as a kid; can't believe i missed out on being yoshi all the time.) the art has the advantage heavily stylized game art always has: it doesn't look dated. (thinking of wind waker vs. ocarina/majora's here.)

secret of evermore is like some ff-zelda-baldur's collision; i really like it. like zelda it's real-time and about swiping stuff w the B button -- but if you don't rest a few seconds between swipes you do negligible damage, so there is essentially a turns/rounds system operating (hence baldur's: it is a turn-based system disguised as a real-time one, which you can also pause at any time to target a spell or direct yr companion's attention at something etc.) all this means some interesting intricacies can be set up wrt boss timing or big multiple-enemies fights, but basic walking along and grinding plays much more like zelda than FF. arcadier. the first dungeon meanwhile was genuinely beautiful (also disgusting): it is the hollowed carapace of an enormous dead insect and you are crawling up an enormous complicated maze made of its decaying innards; as you climb bits of the maze fall away behind you, but instead of reaching dead ends you always reach a long chitinous slide back to the beginning; because the maze decays, no wrong path can be taken twice and you are certain of eventually finding your way through. thought this was a great way to design an FF-style dungeon with no switches, doors, keys, pressure plates, anything. then at the end you fight a giant grub living inside the skull, with the sun shining through empty eyes behind it (this is on both the front and back of the box so i worry it is a high point). v grateful to have learned about this game.

i think video game generations, especially of the extremely fertile 3-4-5-6 sequence, are remembered best based on when you were a kid (or rather, what you had when you were a kid -- i was usually a generation behind, a p common experience prob).

thanks again will even tho i was derelict!

btw every time we do this i make noises about doing a PC (in the literal sense not the microsoft sense, so macs included unless there is outcry) gaming poll but i never follow through. would there be interest in a 90s computer nomination thread? decades is an imperfect taxonomy as always -- secret of monkey island vs quake vs riven vs deus ex is pretty chaotic (conveniently the last infocom text adventure was in 1989, but no such luck of course w e.g. ultima) but imo like democracy everything else is worse. would choose 90s out of selfishness and because i assume the demo is bigger (since 80s kids were also 90s adults who play civ and stuff).

(whoops deus ex is 2000; thought it was 1999. anyway.)

has anyone tried emulating multiplayer games and know if you can do it by plugging in 2 usb controllers?

and i'd vote in a PC poll

yeah emulating multiplayer games is no problem for most emulators

i am totally down with PC gaming poll/series! Long ballots, please....

when Will M. first brought up reviving games as a ballot poll series (way back in january 2015! god, where is my adulthood slipping away to? seems like yesterday), I was arguing for doing PC, arcade and console all together, but with some kind of convoluted way to break up the chronology a bit. Accepting that consoles have gotten split off, I still think grouping by chronology (rather than, say, doing DOS/Windows games and then another poll for Apple/Mac) makes a lot of sense... keep stuff you might have played around the same time together in the same poll.

Decades is appealingly simple and if it's arbitrary, it's an arbitrariness handed down rather than chosen. You do end up with the problem where stuff that came out in '89 (and has way more to do with stuff from '90 and '91) ends up getting ranked against unrecognizably different stuff from '80, while on the other hand you find yourself comparing Monkey Island and Half-Life or whatever. I guess that's not such a big problem, really, and it'll always be hopeless since you're also comparing PC, Apple II, Commodore, Amiga, Mac... not to mention some wildly different genres. Could be a really cool free-for-all in the end. If it were me I'd be really tempted to do it as half-decades... but that would be a ton of work and probably just suppress turnout!

the nominations list for a decade of cross-platform PC games will prob end up, in addition to ridiculously diverse, ridiculously huge, so i get the half-decade temptation. but then yr looking at 6 big-ballot polls just to cover the "medium" to 2010 (seven if people wanna vote for colossal cave), plus yeah decreased turnout for all of them.

"dos games" is a tempting poll as it contains lots and lots of games but not unmanageably many and working w a tighter array of hardware power. but then you orphan games all over the place and leave the mac kids waiting for a promised but unguaranteed version for them, just like always.

sry for ridiculouses! just saw we've put it on the list.

agree as regards use as intensifier.

If you're playing Secret of Evermore, remember to use the L and R buttons to let the dog sniff out alchemy ingredients!

Maybe it could just be divided in two? I'm thinking again about 1995 as arbitrary cutoff- not that Win95 or Netscape were directly such watersheds for gaming (and obviously Win95 wasn't at all on non-MSDOS systems) but it just kind of sits at the right point with a lot of things changing, before vs. after - graphics technology, death of shareware, internet becoming a thing, genre shifts (death of adventure games, rise of true 3D shooters etc.). You could also go a little earlier and use MYST or something as cutoff, which might also give more space for 80s classics, I dunno... just spitballing here. It'll inevitably be a blast no matter what!

haven't checked in on this thread yet but it's awesome to see Rings of Power at the top - surprised even one other person remembers that game.

it was an obsession for me when I was in elementary school. It had to be then, because I can't imagine myself having the patience for it at any other time. Even for an RPG there was so much trial and error, so many situations where you had no clue what to do but wander around for hours and hitting the A button in various places. I later found out that the instruction booklet (which we didn't have, since we got it secondhand) contains a lot of the information you needed to beat the game. Which I eventually did, many years later.

Zombies Ate My Neighbours. Christ what a great game. I still remember the music so well.

lol frogs I was exactly the same - second hand cart, no manual, trial and error

what if for PC games you did it by genre + not by year?

When you get into PC games, the division between genres is so enormous, it's like entirely different parts of the brain are stimulated by different procedures.

I have zero tolerance for online multiplayer, and no interest in "pretty graphics" (though I was moved by "Journey" for sure). ADOM continues to be my #1 game of all time, with Tetris at #2, just because of the crazy brain-effects that they have on me. But a close friend of mine who's a huge gamer has no interest in either, he's into DOTA, which is like.. the fucking stupidest game I've ever seen lol. It's almost like games shouldn't be divided by genre but by personality.

fwiw while I'm on it my favourite PC games were ADOM, Star Control 2, System Shock (original only please), Space Quest 3, ZZT, Another World, and Civilization. I loved Epic Pinball and Tyrian too, but that was mostly bc I had a teenage relationship with Epic Megagames the way one might have for a boutique tape label these days

i keep trying to get into ADOM but idk it just doesn't engage me like nethack

Feel like dividing by genre will just cause all nom/voting threads to be completely absorbed by what counts as what genre, while potentially suppressing turnout. Like, just speaking for myself, I'd be much more likely to vote in a poll that just covers the years when I played the most games, than in an ''action games'' or ''strategy games'' poll covering a much longer timespan, where I might really only know 5-10 games total for which I'm super stoked to have the chance to vote. Plus, ranking DOOM versus Star Control II and Alley Cat may be weird, but not fundamentally weirder than idk Dragon Warrior III vs Kung Fu.

I had a teenage relationship with Epic Megagames the way one might have for a boutique tape label these days

Ditto, never thought of it quite this way but it describes me perfectly

Oh man, looking at Epic's output... I forgot all about Castle of the Winds. Or remembered it periodically without calling to mind anything of substance - just an RPG with a very, very "Windows 3.1" look and feel. Some good times there - basically an ugly game and I don't think there was much of a plot, but just looking at some of the icons is bringing back a vague flood of afternoons spent banging around in its nondescript depths.

My older brother was a graphics artist on Jill. Tim Sweeney was often on the phone-- my brother was 15? 16? at the time. Mark Rein hung out in his bedroom and the Digital Extremes guys lived nearby. Brother spent two years as lead programmer/designer on Traffic Department for them only to have it given a soft push; he was so disappointed that he turned down the offer to work on Unreal. (He works at Google now so he's not complaining.)

Castle Of The Winds was amazing amazing, most of their games were. I played One Must Fall to death. I think I won every one of their games except Ken's Labyrinth and Ancients

castle of the winds was i think my first rpg ever. i beat it. not the part you had to pay for of course. just part one: A QUESTION OF VENGEANCE. and yeah it used the generic 3.1 window system, buttons, etc.

otm about epic, tho i never took sides w them against apogee or whatever. just enjoyed the shareware bounty, jumped w CTRL, shot w ALT. (later tho epic were responsible for unreal tournament, a platonic form.) another epic orphan is DARE TO DREAM, a three-part emo adventure epic whose designer, cliff blezinsky, in the unreal era became "cliffyb" and made caustic remarks about dare to dream in interviews. don't be afraid of your feelings cliffyb.

1995-2016 is just as big a mishmash as everything else i think: early CD-ROM games up against eighth-gen console ports. genres depress turnout and cause fights yeah and i like the weird juxtapositions of will's polls. plus:

fwiw while I'm on it my favourite PC games were ADOM, Star Control 2, System Shock (original only please), Space Quest 3, ZZT, Another World, and Civilization.

these games don't have a lot to do w each other! would be plenty happy w ballots that looked like this. w the exception of SQ3 however i think these all fit in 1990-1995 and are thus an argument for it. anyway i will think about decade vs half-decade all day and make a thread tonight while the mainland sleeps.

traffic department 2192 was the coolest thing ever because at the beginning it asked you if you wanted adult themes or not and if you said yes people in the cutscenes had exchanges like "i'm going to bed" "WITH WHOM". adult!

absurdly, almost inconceivably cool to be a 15-year-old graphics designer on jill of the jungle btw. also loved spiritual sequel "xardoz" (?).

xargon.

Funny story about Castle of the Winds - one day, long long ago, I was at Wal-Mart and saw the second game on the shelf for 5 bucks and thought long and hard about spending my allowance money. I eventually passed because I hadn't beaten the first one yet. A few weeks later I went back with the intention of buying it and...it was gone. And I never saw it again.

Years later I found it online and figured I'd put it to rest. Let me just say this, it is way, way harder than the first game. It was so tough I had to get a hex editor to beef up my character and it was STILL difficult. Cool game though.

Lol I am credited as programmer on Traffic Department because I rather gruellingly transcribed about 60% of that dialogue from a typewritten script to code, I was 11. Wrote three music cues for it too but went uncredited. Originally the script was extremely, hilariously coarse, but the PG option was included at Epic's request, and then they got cold feet about the R version still and all the "fuck"s were replaced with local colour like "k'r'roc" and "farq'ing". The original script was so good. I still have the hard copy at my parents' house.

ZZT was always Epic's crown jewel, as far as I was concerned. The gameplay was not that interesting but the programming language was so easy that you could do incredible things with it. My brother and I designed a full screen dragon where invisible walls would sequentially turn into solid walls to create an oscillating dragonhead that would breathe throwing stars at the character.

I have so much nostalgia for MOD music from that time omg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqubUdo-j1Y

And old ANSI based videos created with Thedraw, unfortunately I can't find too much info on them on the internet these days

unfortunately missed most of the discussion (and am enjoying this 90s pc games follow-up) but wanted to vainly post my own ballot for this thing:

Final Fantasy VI (III)
Super Street Fighter II Turbo
Super Bomberman
Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Langrisser II
Final Fantasy V
Donkey Kong Country 2
Shining Force 2
Secret of Mana
Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen
Super Mario Kart
Yoshi's Safari
Aerobiz
Chrono Trigger
Legend of the Mystical Ninja
Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon: Another Story (Angel)
Star Ocean
Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire
Earthbound
Super Mario World

oh god yes, ZZT. my best friend and I poured hours into that game, making worlds and soundtracks that I think we were the only ones to play

totes digging fgti's Epic memories.

re: cut-offs and dates - not that i think it helps particularly, but i'd definitely say that "early CD-ROM" ends in 1993. that year saw myst, 7th guest, rebel assault, and return to zork. maybe all still 'early' in a meaningful sense, not necessarily a medium that's found its footing by any means... but i guess i think 'early' is like 90, 91, 92 - The Manhole, all the Sierra games upgraded with speech (shoutout to the very odd, awkward but kinda addictive Jones in the Fast Lane), Sherlock Holmes... i dunno, fine distinction i guess. i just remember fucking around forever in the early 90s with this wretched compilation CD of dozens of C-list games. one of those things where maybe the CD-ROM drive itself came with five CDs of shovelware, and only one was games (and thus only one was interesting to me). so many miscellaneous CGA and EGA games of no particular distinction. "life and death," the baffling surgery simulator, was maybe the highest-profile title in there.

i also remember, around this time, sierra pushing the idea that what they made (or might someday be making) was really "interactive films," and telling teachers or whatever that what i wanted to do when i grew up was make interactive films. to my credit i am sure i was NOT thinking of 7th guest type things. i just figured king's quest type games would only grow more popular and more advanced.

anyway, though, i could still dig the later break point around '95 or '96 cause it's not like all at once all games started being "CD-ROMmy" - some of the very very best sprite-based, classically "VGA-looking" games are from 93-94! x-com, serpent isle, star control ii, warcraft, etc. just fun to think about this stuff.

i've been playing On the Ball. love it! maybe not a long-lasting pleasure for me tho.