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

Hello ILX! In the end we managed to get 25 ballots for this poll, five more than the 3rd gen poll from last year!
Four TV consoles (SNES, Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, NeoGeo) and two handheld consoles (Game Boy, Game Gear) were represented in the nominations for this poll. I have narrowed it down to the top 78 per your ballots, because there was a two-way tie for 77th place.

This is probably my favorite generation of video games. So many of the games that made this list (and a good chunk that didn't!) would end up on my "desert island," more than any other generation. The Game Boy was my jam for over a decade of my life and changed the way I spend my free time (would I play Marvel Puzzle Quest if not for GB Tetris? Probably not). The Super Nintendo was a gift I got when the N64 came out (my mom's boss got their kids an N64, and my mom got the hand-me-down SNES), and, looking back, I feel incredibly lucky to have had it instead of the N64.

I hope you enjoy this rollout! Big thanks again go to Karl Malone for collecting, cropping, resizing, uploading and even putting IMG tags on all of the amazing box arts you're going to see in this one. No screenshots this time aroundů If you want to see how the games look, I recommend you boot 'em up!

http://i.imgur.com/QEEajd9.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/zL5K3yY.jpg
77 - Rings of Power - 38 points / 1 Vote

http://i.imgur.com/ToInrAT.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/j1Vooe9.jpg
77 - Final Fight - 38 points / 1 Vote

oooooooooops

Let's see if this works!

http://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/70084-final-fight-snes-front-cover.jpg

(if anyone is reading yet: do you prefer the score/title above or below the images?)

Looks fine as it is to me.

below is cool

same here.

as far as screenshots go, almost all of the backs of the boxes feature a few, so it should be easy to get a feel for what they look like.

also as far as screenshots go, sorry about mistagging the final fight cover, and if there are any more mishaps in the rest of the countdown (hoping there aren't) the anger and confusion should be directed my direction!

rings of power looks pretty sweet. for some reason the dragon popping its head in the side of the playing field on the back of the box looks like exactly the thing i want to be doing right now

final fight is classic, of course, especially multiplayer, but the annoyance of constantly having to try to avoid hitting whoever you're playing with drops it down several notches in my book

i thought Rings of Power was probably obscure but sad i'm the only voter. at the time i thought it was amazing. a huge isometric open world RPG that kind of points towards Baldur's Gate, with real character, depth and mystery. probably only held back by a clumsy control set but once you get over the frustration of making the party do what you want this is a ton of fun imo

(will i'll take a quick tour through the image spreadsheet again to make sure the tags line-up - that way i don't have to be nervous the rest of the countdown and you don't have to take the time to check before posting them all)

http://i.imgur.com/suZlLpZ.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/2pPtNrI.jpg
76 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time - 38 points / 2 Votes

@Karl Malone let me know if any of them change! Because I am posting from a .txt i pulled from that spreadsheet

http://i.imgur.com/q0jhJmp.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/CCpx68U.jpg
75 - Mortal Kombat 2 - 40 points / 2 Votes

TOO LOW

i mean, i didn't vote for it either i guess, lol, but come on.

i vividly remember my dad calling me into the living room for a very awkward chat about how the game i wanted for xmas was rated Mature and i was 10

I only played this game for maybe ten minutes of my life for the first year it was out, but that doesn't mean it wasn't one of the most important games in my young life. i owned at least 3 magazines that dedicated their cover stories to MKII, a game I was not allowed to play. One of the mags, Tips & Tricks, even had frame-by-frame recreations of the finishers for every character (this was like a 22-page article!) with the codes to do them. I read and looked at tihs obsessively. Some kids had porn. I had game rags.

xp lol basically same!

if i was honest i probably shd've found a spot for MK but i don't really know which ones i've played on what system and i've never been able to pull off finishes without cheats enabled because i'm Not That Kind of Gamer so i left it off in the end. i really appreciate the whole series's gonzo-ness tho

(i've gone through half of the images for the rest of the thread and haven't found another fuckup, so i think the final fantasy III/final fight snafu is an isolated incident (spoiler alert: FFIII places in this poll))

fond memories printing out movelists on our loud dot matrix printer.

i loved how many secrets and bonus things they put into MKII. ofc "Toasty!" was a huge middle school in-joke at the time.

http://i.imgur.com/fbmNA8h.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/22E1Yj4.jpg
74 - On the Ball (a.k.a. Cameltry) - 40 points / 1 First-place vote / 1 Vote

(same game, two regions covers since we could not find a back cover for on the ball!)

left field

http://img.gamefaqs.net/box/9/8/9/50989_back.jpg

admittedly not a v. revealing back cover

well then

xpost On the Ball

this was my vote. i think this game sold somewhere between 30-45 copies. it is not the #1 game of the era, but it belongs in the top 100 so i threw it as many points as possible.

the ball is the center of the screen, and you rotate the screen around it as gravity constantly pulls it toward the bottom of the screen (sort of like a labyrinth-style wood and metal ball maze in real life, held sideways). the music is intense, the timer for each level set to promote maximum anxiety, and it makes people some people physically nauseous even to watch (although, similar to a crazy driver, if you're in the driver's seat it's not as nauseating).

it's actually a really fucking cool game. i wish more people would try it.

oh sweet, thanks for finding the back cover NV - i couldn't find it after 5 minutes of searching and had to move on

it sounds way more intense than the low quality screenshots are able to convey, will try and emulate it at some point

http://i.imgur.com/rUmxgF7.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/rO25EQe.jpg
72 - Final Fantasy IV (a.k.a. Final Fantasy II) - 42 points / 2 Votes

my top 5 were all RPGs of some stripe and i didn't vote for a single FF game in the end. that was probably a mistake but i didn't play any of them at the time iirc. VII was my introduction and also what put me off the franchise for ages, i've played quite a few of the 4th gen games on emulation in the last few years but never fallen deep in love with any of them. somehow they're too samey or too vanilla for me.

i should probably have voted for final fight but i can't quite disentangle my memories of it from those streets of rage 2 so i decided not to, sorry big guy

http://i.imgur.com/mKu4ZQ7.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/fM861yB.jpg
72 - Nobunaga's Ambition - 42 points / 2 Votes

xp. would've voted final fight but i primarily played the arcade version (inveruglas caravan park, loch lomond).

http://i.imgur.com/339uB4l.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/wsdDMYW.jpg
69 - Castlevania: Bloodlines (a.k.a. Castlevania: The New Generation) - 43 points / 2 Votes

just realised i was an actual adult before any of these games were released, explains a lot about my foibles and omissions i guess, synapses already hardening

i have no clue how the top 20 will go. i kind of assumed FFII would be in there. maybe others were like me and thought one FF game (III) on the ballot was enough, but FFII is an excellent game as well

http://i.imgur.com/bbVLG4O.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/tZjHN80.jpg
69 - Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen - 43 points / 2 Votes

http://i.imgur.com/8DunJXl.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/vEabLKb.jpg
69 - Wonder Boy V: Monster World III (a.k.a. Wonder Boy in Monster World) - 43 points / 2 Votes

i still have to play ogre battle. i've played gba tactics ogre, and the psp remake of the snes tactics ogre, but never the progenitor.

http://i.imgur.com/l9W7ahl.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/zEtHfKh.jpg
68 - Cannon Fodder - 43 points / 3 Votes

Wow MKII is very much too mow! This game is a classic. Played the shit out of it at home and in bars.

Cannon Fodder is a great game but I had it on PC, didn't vote for this version.

http://i.imgur.com/E6u9Y8p.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/yoa74yl.jpg
66 - ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkatron - 44 points / 2 Votes

http://i.imgur.com/877qymn.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/EPykmcm.jpg
66 - UN Squadron - 44 points / 2 Votes

http://i.imgur.com/tm2tYSU.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/RnthEUj.jpg
65 - Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins - 44 points / 1 First-place vote / 2 Votes

Lots of games I've never played so far.

don't think i've heard of un squadron, looks fun. wonder what went wrong with the first three evil projects

UN Squadron is my fave shmup of the generation and one of my faves of all time. I actually bought it on eBay when I started collecting my "dream collection" of snes games.

and 6 golden coins is amazing! such a great soundtrack (SML and SML2 both kill it) and introduces a hat made of bunny ears, which is fantastic.

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.

90s PC Gaming Poll, Episode I: A Question of Vengeance (1990-1994) - NOMINATIONS thread - deadline Nov 15

yessssssssss

sweet!

i know this isn't precisely the right thread but i set up 4 controllers w/ my macbook last night and we played multiplayer nes games for hours last night (esp super off road which continues to be like the best game ever). i would've set up some snes games but one of the controllers was an nes usb controller so it only had the two buttons. i had a replacement xbox controller that would've worked but my brother had borrowed it. anyway - 4-player multiplayer nes emulation works perfectly. i assume snes will work well too. anyone have any experience emulating 4 player N64 games?

i haven't had much luck emulating ANY N64 game. i'm using OpenEmu for mac, which works very well with NES/SNES/Genesis/Gameboy titles, and supports almost any other system as well, but it seems like nearly every N64 rom i download crashes within a few minutes, has numerous crazy emulation problems which renders it unplayable, or won't even start in the first place. it's possible i just had very luck with the first 7-10 games i downloaded but after a while i just gave up and went to the older systems.

it's been almost 4 years since i finished this poll. i always wanted to do all of the generations eventually but i guess i kinda fell off after this one? next up would be 5th gen, n64/psx/saturn/some of the weirdest also-ran consoles in videogame history (3do? cdi? jaguar?).

are there still ppl who would play along for the next one on the board? should i do it? i wanna do it. i have been feeling some ps1 nostalgia recently, even if those games are abssssolutely not as easy to play in retrospect (both from a "slightly harder to emu" standpoint as well as a "oh wow early 3d vg controls sure were rough" one).

WHOS IN. HOME GAME POLL VOL 3

why not

wait the cdi was the snes generation, replace that in my previous comment with... uhh... the apple pippin. even weirder

ok! i'll start it soon

oh hellll yeah

Yeah, years of fairly intuitive control schemes have really spoiled me. Playing PS1 (and even some PS2) games now is often like trying to tie a knot with my mind. Like how did I finish RE3 in a day twenty years ago when nowadays I just keep walking into walls and getting ravaged by hellbeasts?

No, let’s wait another 4 years!

jk I can’t wait!

I had a n64 but I only had two games & they were good & I'll vote for them but then I lent it to my brother who then lent it to his girlfriend's brother but then they broke up & that's my sole exposure to this generation, never even saw a ps1 in person, so my ballot will be those two games but I think one of them will win the whole poll so I don't feel that bad RIP

p stoked to give some love to Blast Corps and Tetrisphere

first thing i thought of with this poll was "i'm going to make room on my ballot for Blast Corps, even though i only got to watch my friend play it for 2 hours that one time". looked amazing (at the time)!

i haven't played Blast Corps since probably 1998 but i remember it being such a jam. there's one vehicle with bad, shitty control, but otherwise it's the best-ever spiritual successor to Rampage: you take all your big toy construction trucks and smash all the buildings!!!!!

Console Game Poll vol. 3 - Nominate the best 5th Generation Console Games (1993–2005; N64, PSX, Saturn and more!)

So now that my kid is old enough to play video games I have downloaded some emulators and I ended up playing Aladdin for the first time in my life, and wow this game is really super cool, gameplay is super fun and the graphics are lovely, I can't believe it only got one vote in this poll!

Genesis version I assume.

Actually no I was playing the SNES version, and I just put the Genesis one to see if there was any difference and indeed it's a completely different game! I'll give this one a shot too but my first impression is I really miss being able to bounce around, swing on posts and rocks, climb on platforms etc. all the stuff you can do on the snes version. The graphics and animation are better on the genesis though, that's for sure.

Just watched a cool short doc about the making of the Genesis version (which I've still never played) SNES version was cool tho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOnUITJqRQQ

This "Devs Play" video on Genesis Aladdin and Lion King is quite interesting. Like how they were forced to make one level in Lion King really hard so that kids couldn't see more than a certain percent of the game during a rental period.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kILeyo1iv0A

SNES Aladdin has a special place in my memory as I played it at a kiosk at Walt Disney World shortly after the game's release. I didn't play it again until I got a good emulator on my PC.

i tried to get into it recently as part of the big batch of titles i loaded onto my SNES mini.... i had a decent enough time bouncing around the first levels but apart from the beautifully done graphics it didn't grab me. i don't think it's a bad instance of its genre (maybe the controls could be a LITTLE tighter), but it's a genre that just isn't my jam these days: platformer with very large sprites and limited screen real estate, loose level design with a lot of meandering around unnecessary paths to collect stuff you don't strictly need.

but boy is it a great-looking game! such smooth animation in the sprites. back then it really did feel like playing a cartoon!

Imagine being 12 in the early nineties and someone told you you could download a file to your computer in 10 minutes and have access to virtually every Genesis/SNes game ever released? Mindblowing. I'm going through one of these bundles right now looking for hidden gems and while a lot of it is pure crap (Captain Novolin anyone?) there has been some rewarding finds:

Beyond Oasis: this Zelda-link RPG for Genesis lets you incarnate Ali, a young Prince who has found a magic gold armlet that once belonged to a wizard.

Trouble Shooter : a fun shoot-em-up in which you play two teenage girls with jetpacks trying to rescue a prince who was taken hostage. There is a real missed opportunity for a 2-player mode though.

Which brings me to a question: what's a good smu with a co-op mode? Nothing too frantic (i.e. not Gunstar Heroes) because my son is new to video games and still struggles with Mario.

lots of beat-em-ups would do the trick (final fight, streets of rage) but I’m not sure about shooters!

Might be good to find one that has a code (infinite health etc) to keep the little one happy!

yeah beat-em-ups seem easier to come up with, he's a fan of TMNT and Streets of Rage

one for the back pocket is Final Fight, starring Haggar and Cody. Haggar got so famous that he ended appearing in a couple other Capcom games. Cody is Patrick Swayze in Road House, so if you can say some of those catchphrases while fighting, it makes the game better. on top of all that:

Extra Credits
Enter your top 3 high score initials as CAP, COM, GUY (in that order) to start a new game with 5 Credits.

i was taking a quick look at smus for SNES, ran across this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXatiYxLl8g

the rare youtube game reviewer who isn't incredibly annoying! they go through pretty much every SMU on SNES in just a few minutes. Space Megaforce looks amazing! unfortunately you'd still need to figure out which ones are co-op and which are single player only.

hey thanks a lot I'll look into that

generation 6 incoming