Console Game Poll vol. 2 - Vote for the best 4th Generation Console Games (SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, etc) here! (Ballot Deadline: September 26th)

For people who don't get motion sick very easily, I highly recommend trying out On The Ball before voting

Finally did a reasonable pass at a ballot, narrowed down the stuff I want to crack open in emu for at least a bit before sorting it. Think I'm going with Shining Force I over II - - - the latter as far as I can tell is MUCH more elaborate and generous with traditional RPG stuff (exploring freely, character upgrade trees, etc.), but I've also realized that I don't think I ever played it back in the day, or maybe dipped into it a bit in the first emu era without getting far. So I can't honestly say it's one of my favorite games or anything.

The first one really is fun - found myself playing one full battle longer than I'd meant to, just cause it scratches that itch of, I wanna select an enemy, get a cool animation and sound effect, and then see them disappear as my character gains experience points. I wanna wander around cute medieval towns and see what kind of things they find for the sprites to do within the limited capacity of their script language. Basic stuff but boy is it fun. The annoying stuff is all in the interface - the people-talking sound is really annoying, and in general item-purchasing and management is kinda dumb. One nice streamlining thing is that it just doesn't fuck with armor at all, and barely has accessory items: you carry weapons, which can be upgraded, but that's about it.

shining force ii is just a better shining force i, particularly in how the battles were staged. ive probably told this story on ilx before but sfii was the first console srpg i ever played and it was a revelation to me - it combined a lot of what i liked about traditional jrpgs (immersion, number-progression, lots of fiddly customization) with more skillful, interesting gameplay. theres not that much depth to it compared to something like ogre battle or even langrisser but in some ways its better for it. the weird randomness of hiding powerful items and special characters in places that players wouldn't really think to look and that the game makes no effort to steer them towards is sort of immaterial to the xp of playing the game, and when you do stumble across one of the secrets it feels more like a bonus them something necessary. like a present just because.

i love SFI, never finished SFII but yeah feel it's better

Suikoden on the Playstation is perhaps my fave of this genre of all time, next poll i guess

It's always tough for me to get around long-baked-in fondness for a game and its world. The "characters" in SFI are about one pixel deep, but since I played the shit out of it at age 12, I've long since layered a lot of personality and accumulated affection into those few lines of dialogue, friendly character portraits, and badass attack animations. I'm just happy to be out adventuring with Luke and Tao and company - we've been through some times.

At a micro-scale I think something similar happens within individual games - I never really took to the last few party members you get in Final Fantasy 6 because man, so much shit has gone on between the rest of us, who are these clowns, they have no relationship to anybody. Of course, in that case it's also that the later characters come as the game's gotten nonlinear and you can shuffle the party around - so you don't have in the back of your mind that sense that "they were there" for key plot moments, tight spots you fought your way through, all that. I think this stuff in RPGs is really sweet and comforting, and like so much else depends on the thinness of the dialogue letting you flesh things out in your imagination while you're hacking away at goblins and clicking through menus to get to the health potion or whatever. Sort of like the flipside of Will's great reflections on single-character action RPGs and the lonely protagonist versus "these people in town."

voted. Paring off Splatterhouse and Shadowrun hurt.

geez, that deadline is sneaking up y'all!

15 people voted in the 3rd-gen poll who haven't yet voted in this one, VOTE OR DIE GUYS & GALS!

I did it at long last.

just went with an unweighted ballot and scrolled up and down the list a few times deliberating. can't say i feel 100% convinced of my choices, conversely i got in the ones that i loved the most

throwing my ballot together presently, just realized I failed to nominate Theme Park! Aaaahhhhhhghh oh well.

2 more days

2 more days until i inevitably extend the deadline GODDAMN IT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4koDIt68QI

More time to think about it *would* be pretty sweet

Have inadvertently sunk more than an initial checkup into Seiken Densetsu 3. I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who liked Secret of Mana (obv) or 16-bit JRPGs generally....though it's not QUITE the wildly ambitious lost classic I'd convinced myself it was. The story is really linear and threadbare, and the characters are so flat, with so little dialogue, that the much-vaunted replay value of going back and trying different character combinations seems a bit silly. Would have been better with fewer characters and just playing as one at a time, like a LTTP where you can go back and try playing as the thief or something. As it is, there's times it feels like a real 8-bit throwback - bunch of self-similar simple towns with simple people, simple dialogue, just marching along where they tell you to march. Oh, you need GUNPOWDER? Good thing the very next person I talk to knows where I can go get some...

It is *really* good-looking though - richer than its predecessor and brighter than FF6, so only Chrono Trigger beats it out in that department. Great, late tech demo of all the hardware can do. Combat's satisfying (if chaotic and button-mashy), and then stuff like buying and equipping gear is kind of a mess. Overall, I guess I'm gonna go with SoM on the ballot, but this definitely a cool game.

Alright, I am moving the deadline, as we have far fewer ballots than we did for the NES-era one. How about another month?

I'm looking at you, Noodle Vague and BradNelson and f sharp and ste and crut and sheesh and kingfish and tombot and le hague and intheblanks and polyphonic and original bgm and the once-ler and doctor casino and difficult listening hour and old lunch and it's a boy and thomp and mordy! I'M LOOKING AT ALL OF YOU

A month would be great! As alluded to upthread or...I dunno, somewhere, I've been in the midst of renovation-related moving and all my gaming stuff has been boxed up and in storage. This will give me time to utilize something other than hazy memories in casting my ballot.

ain't my fault! I totally voted with an hour or two to spare, forgot to post about it here tho sorry.

rock the vote!

oh man, spaced, will do it this week

yeah i really want to put more time into my ballot. super busy at work :(

Let's say September 26th then. Anyone reading this have the ability to change the topic?

Thanks, Will. This has been One Crazy Summer and the postponement will help greatly.

How many total ballots currently?

less than 15 iirc, i imagine we can do far better than that!

agreed

this stuff is so completely part of our cultural heritage (and/or paucity thereof, but for a different thread)

Whew, really glad for the extension - opened thread prepared to type ''shit shit shit can't believe I missed this.''

this stuff is so completely part of our cultural heritage (and/or paucity thereof, but for a different thread)

― thrusted pelvis-first back (ulysses), Monday, August 29, 2016 4:32 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

interesting that so much of it came from Japan! one of the few areas of western pop culture dominated by eastern producers

I'm glad that more people are going to vote, but have to admit that part of me was happy that my #1 choice (marvel puzzle quest, of course) would have greater influence with only 15 voters.

i am kind of bummed at how boring the rest of my ballot is, for the most part, though. even just limiting myself to SNES only, there are so many stone cold classics that it's impossible not to vote for.

you haven't experienced marvel puzzle quest until you've played it on the neo geo

Toughest stuff to rank in my ballot: all the multiplayer smashes that I know prompted endless hours of fun, surprise take-downs and devastating combos in earlier years, but which can't really deliver any of that on an emulator, single-player. I assure you that Metal Warriors, Tetris Attack, Rock 'n' Roll Racing, Super Bomberman (in my case, Super Bomberman 3, but whatever) and Zombies Ate My Neighbors all deserve your votes, but how I would rank them versus the staggering, genre-defining one-player classics, I have no idea.

Oddly, I can handle dropping Street Fighter II and Turtles in Time into the ranking just fine - maybe their pleasures are more basically sugar-rushy and need no present-day play to clarify.

SFII is among the most important games in my personal pantheon; I would sooner drop tetris.

And i'm very bad at it! But I spent so long trying.

my challopsy opinion is that tetris attack is the greatest multiplayer tetris game of them all. but yeah, 1P version, not as exciting. i think it still made my ballot though.

i voted for whichever would i rather play right now over whichever is the "better game". so instead of big pantheon stuff like Super Mario World/Zelda: ALTTP i voted Rondo of Blood, Revenge of Shinboi, etc.

Rondo of Blood rules, and in a way that clicks exactly with my idea of what I want to pick up and play now - ready-to-roll action in a package that you could really take on in an afternoon, no problem. Not too many buttons, either. In a way it might be the best Castlevania game - it's a regression from where the series was going up to that point, but it returns to the punchy simplicity of the first game and basically gives it a makeover while lowering its psychotic difficulty to where you could really hand it to somebody cold and trust that they'd enjoy themselves with it. Super Castlevania IV is close to this same idea, but IIRC a good bit longer and considerably harder. Dracula X68000 I never knew about until high school when a friend was struggling to emulate it and reported back on its staggering graphics and boss fights....

My ballot's a mix of "play it now" and "best," partly cause "best" sorta overlaps with "happiest memories" and those may make me feel like picking up and playing!

oh shit oh shit did I miss it again

no! deadline bumped down to 9/26.

yeah i have tons of great excuses but i will get on this

http://www.mancrates.com/crates/super-retro-gamer/

2 classic Super Nintendo games
(randomly selected from an assortment of time-honored, awesome games)

I bet!

classics like the nba live game they feature on the main photo (the snes versions of it have not aged well at all)

i will try to do this by the end of this week but a reminder around friday would really help

https://gmail.googleblog.com/2016/04/reminders-come-to-google-calendar-on-the-web.html

that man crates site is infuriating

the comments!

I'm looking at you, Noodle Vague and BradNelson and f sharp and ste and crut and sheesh and kingfish and tombot and le hague and intheblanks and polyphonic and original bgm and the once-ler and doctor casino and difficult listening hour and old lunch and it's a boy and thomp and mordy! I'M LOOKING AT ALL OF YOU

― a simba man (Will M.), Monday, August 29, 2016 8:32 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dude so sorry about this. i never check this thread and i'm super busy this entire month unfortunately

sorry for being lame

voted

i meant to play more of these again before voting but it's never going to happen (still haven't even ordered the snes usb controller i wanted to pick up) so this is entirely based off what i loved as a child

I did just enough dipping into games a few weeks ago to do some rearranging of the lower half of the ballot. The top was a lot easier - played the shit out of them and recalling their qualities and shortcomings is practically SPINAL FUNCTION.

lol of course all of these consoles have different video resolutions which will once again make making attractive images a bit of a pain in the butt

not to mention landscape vs portrait game boxes

Looking forward to those hi-res screencaps of early Game Boy games! So much puke green!

everyone give a huge thanks to Karl Malone for putting together & uploading all of the images for the poll! gonna make it a lot easier for me to get this thing done. I'm actually ready to do it this second, I'm just waiting 'til next Tuesday so I don't split it over a weekend.

shit i hit send before i remembered to think of & write an "always delivers" joke

Thanks Karl! You were always my second favorite member of the Dream Team, just behind Clyde the Glide (gotta rep my hometown and all)

no big deal on the images (as you'll all see, they follow a very simple formula, although i hope everyone will enjoy referring to them during the rundown)

speaking of...STOKED FOR THE MADNESS OVER HERE, is it tuesday yet?? :) :) :)

144 minutes to go

very interested to see how this hashes out, I did try to hit most of the obvious classics, albeit some ways down on a weighted ballot, because, y'know, of course we can all agree on super mario world, would love to see some surprises though

i'm familiar with most of the genesis-exclusive canon, but haven't really played any of them since i never owned one. i plan on using the results from this to decide which ones to tackle first, via emulation

i am the guy waiting outside the coffee shop at 6:58am

:D

looking forward to this, esp w Karl's graphics!

I...HAVE...OOOOOOPINIONS

xpost
oh, they're not anything special! just the basics. you'll see. :)

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

sorry it took so long... in my newly unemployed state i decided ot ignore my alarm clock... for 5 hours apparently :P

thanks for choosing 1UP 1UP 1UP 1UP 1UP 1UP 1UP 1UP 1UP 1UP