Home Game Poll vol. 1 (1984-1992): Nominate the best NES, Master System, etc console games ever (Nom deadline: September 8th)

don't forget:

Dr. Mario
Little League Baseball: Championship Series

― 1992 ball boy (Karl Malone), Wednesday, August 12, 2015 10:51 AM (1 week ago)

Nes

Jackal
Track and Field

Nes

Mach Rider

Nes

Urban Champion

Nes

Ring King

whoops sorry for the omissions km!

also hahaha ring king

no problem! also, shoot, one more for NES: Tiger Heli

NES:
Super Spike V'Ball
Tecmo Baseball
Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage

Nevermind I was thinking of Super Tecmo Baseball.

we should do some "ILX PLAYS" on these.
i mean, fuck, there's a board.
http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/NewAnswersControllerServlet?boardid=56108700

Truly baffled at some noms. Fester's Quest? Karnov? M.C. Kids?! This is the shit you hoped you wouldn't get stuck with when you got to the rental place and it turned out all the Megaman games were checked out.

I know at least one ILXor is a die-hard fan of Base Wars, so I'm going to nominate that on their behalf.

Technically, the title really is "Zelda II: The Adventure of Link," not "The Legend of Zelda II."

Also, for clarity/memory-jogging, I'd mark "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project," not to be confused with the (very odd and obscure) PC Turtles game, "The Manhattan Missions."

And what the hell, I'll nominate Snake, Rattle & Roll - kinda dumb but spent a lot of pleasant afternoons with that at the neighbors'. They were the kind of neighbors that had tons and tons of NES games but almost all medium-bad or dull ones like Low-G Man, the clunky Godzilla game, and the aforementioned Fester's Quest. The snake game and Rampage were the main saving graces until they went 16-bit.

Oh and they had JACKAL which was awesome and which I totally thought I'd nommed upthread - thanks Euler. That's great two-player fun, just drive and blow stuff up, making progress together.

if marble madness doesn't place i'm going to hack into the mainframe and reveal everyone's ballots and last 4 of digits of SSN

Karnov was whats up fuiud

Kick Master is an amazing NES game

Ring King ruled

Karnov had cool music but the rest was your basic too-hard, awkward-to-control platformer, ime.

Technically, the title really is "Zelda II: The Adventure of Link," not "The Legend of Zelda II."

When I post results I'll write the name correctly, but for the sake of people seeing what's nominated i put sequels alphabetically beside each other.

added snake r&r, base wars, kick master, the sutf designbs game, tecmo baseblal, and super spike v'ball. and im trying to type in a very awkward positino so ill fix my typos NEVERF.

I'm playing some NES games right now and I have a new nomination.

DuckTales 2 (NES)

which nobody played at the time because it came out in 1993 with a tiny print run, but it's good despite having a poor soundtrack.

Dom "Very Awkward" Positino

Was always curious about Duck Tales 2! I think I finally checked it out in the emu era and it didn't "click." Maybe it was the soundtrack for all I know - first one had a pretty fucking great one, especially the Amazon and Moon levels. I liked to imagine that the little octopus alien guys were mouthing the dooty-dooty-deedo stuff that opens the latter.

yo rushomancy, if i didn't answer above, japan-only games are acceptable!

in fact i would love it if you would tell me more about sweet home. all i know is that there was a tie-in movie directed by, of all people, kiyoshi kurosawa :O

surprised that Myst is the same year as Doom. in the end i'd argue that the former's legacy didn't really go anywhere but it feels like an historical moment when something shifted

― the lion tweets tonight (Noodle Vague),

there was a good article recently about the creators of both games and what they thought of eachother's game
http://kotaku.com/what-creators-of-doom-and-myst-thought-of-each-others-1565214198

ooh, I'll look forward to reading that. The story behind Myst is so weird and non-typical for 90s games, it sounds much more like a 70s/80s origin story with a couple of outsider non-gamer weirdos cooking this thing up. see http://mentalfloss.com/article/63351/15-things-you-might-not-know-about-myst

NES:

The Adventures of Rad Gravity

was reading an old copy of Groo and this was on the back cover and i have no memory of this existing.

https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/11902449_10154187043572137_4587347480124198122_n.jpg?oh=f2ea560574b149e7ff24b8be922dfe23&oe=567D680A

also, that ad is from the JANUARY 1990 issue of groo the wanderer. so, total ground zero for 90's graffik design.

I remember the existence of TurboGrafx-16 (probably as much from those ads on the back of comics as anything), but I don't know that I ever saw one in person.

I remember that so well. Very striking image.

Was Bonk the only TurboGrafx exclusive to get any traction? I'm looking at a list of games and that's the only one I recognize that wasn't available for other platforms.

keith's adventure, i want to say? you were a nerd who could turn into a metroid looking dude.

i knew one kid who had one... i am like 20% sure i can remember who the kid is tho.

one of my best friends had a turbo-16 and a bunch of games, we played the shit out of it. It was a really good system!
Splatterhouse was what was up.

Legendary Axe was cool. Maybe next poll.

4th gen! def next poll!

also the game was called keith courage in alpha zones, apparently.

also sept 8 stands as the deadline because i just remembered i'm on vacation until then, haha

I didn't have the time to read the whole thread, but shouldn't the original greyscale Game Boy be included in this poll? It came out in 1989 in USA/Japan and in 1990 in Europe (that's when I got mine), it was 8 bit and the games are definitely comparable to what was on NES at the time. If the Game Boy is only included in the 4th generation poll, it'll be pretty weird to compare something like Super Mario Land to 16 bit games on the SNES.

We had this discussion upthread about the Game Gear. Both handhelds were distinctly 4th gen in terms of time period, despite their graphical inferiority, and I believe Will has opted to poll them as such.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/08/27/metal-gear-solid-v-preview/

Cool will Turbo CD be included? Played some games lately ("Gradius II", "Last Alert", "Gate of Thunder", "R-Type Complete CD" and they were INCREDIBLE. Electro anime Japanese weirdness cranked up. The intro to R-Type alone was like a 10-minute cutscene with voice acting and nearly full screen anime-style sprite animations. This stuff really intrigues me because in the US we didn't really get this we got EXTREME proto dudebro machismo marketing. The Turbo CD stuff is like mutant interpretations of Chuck Norris-era action movies.

Oops sorry for that link wrong thread. I was responding to

4th gen! def next poll!

Sorry to keep going OT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU80R7jGanE

What do you all think is the best 8-bit Mario from the original trilogy? SMB3 is frequently hailed as the greatest game of all time, and with that globe-spanning ad and "The Wizard", it definitely felt like a zeitgeist game. Plus it's so fun and has so many levels and secrets and things you can always go back to. It's also hard as heck.

Yeah, I have no doubt Super Mario 3 is gonna win this poll, and deservedly so. It's pretty much the 2nd best 2D era Nintendo game (the best being A Link to the Past). So much imagination, cool imagery, gameplay variation with the different suites, secrets, bonuses, etc... My family never even had a NES, but I still know SM3 inside out, because when it came out I used to hang at friends of mine who had it all day and play the game.

But SMB has the best physics imo. SMB3 felt a little floaty. It also gave you WAY too many lives, it was kind of the start of handholding imo. The music is the best too, if only for inventing the standards that all game music still strive for. I highly recommend the 33 1/3 book.

Maybe handholding started with SMB2, which was famously released as an entirely different game. Also pretty floaty physics. It was the first spin-off even though it was a mainline number game. I loved it. It was so weird and I dug the Arabian Nights influence. Player selection: CLASSIC. Almost wish they had it in SMB3 but maybe they felt that one was so different best to keep it simple at times.

One of my clearest childhood memories is the first time playing SMB2 at a friend's house, who was also playing me the Beach Boys for the first time. I didn't actually hear the music for a long time. It's still by Koji Kondo and it is still amazing. It kind of ramps up the silent film schtick they were developing. Mario as a kind of Super Saiyan Buster Keaton. I learned how to play it on keyboard, it's very ragtime. Playing through only a 3 notes at a time + noise channel it's fucking beautiful.

SMB3 soundtrack is great, I LOVE the drum samples. I think they don't really sample any melodic sounds but there may be a string or two. The new Matronix-style beat for the underworld theme is incredible. Koji Kondo is a genius. Some of this is very garage rock. Some calypso (as always) but more dubby here, with the drum samples.

Thank God Mario doesn't speak in any of them.

Yeah, SMB3 wins that fight VERY handily. So much craft and detail and joy and vastness, and yet not entirely unthinkable as a "sit down and play in one sitting since there's no save" game. Amazing control too. Basically the perfect NES game imo. The first one is also very pick-up-and-playable and also has basically era-defining control (that, nonetheless, hardly any third-party game ever came close to matching - the basic clunkiness of moving around in nearly ever licensed platformer has more than anything to do with them feeling like headache-inducing wastes of time), music and sound... it's a bit easier to just pop it in and play for a while but it also has less to unveil. Maybe purer as a "game" in terms of the player having to eventually become very skilled with an extremely limited set of skills; SMB3 isn't really hard by comparison.

Am I right that we did a poll of just the worlds from SMB3? Or was it from SMW?

There are a couple of other NES games that I could see giving it passing competition in this poll, basically the usual suspects of Zelda, Tetris and Castlevania, maybe Final Fantasy.

The original Zelda is groundbreaking and all, but man did that game get tedious and repetitive if you played it long enough. I don't think any kids in my neighbourhood had the stamina to play it all the way through (even though it had save codes, I think?), while most of us eventually managed to complete all the Mario games.

Castlevania is amazing but it's so hard to control. If the stairs were better, maybe.

Tetris might be the perfect game on a Ms. Pac Man level.

So much craft and detail and joy and vastness, and yet not entirely unthinkable as a "sit down and play in one sitting since there's no save" game.

in retrospect, not having a save system was SO important to SMB3 because, counterintuitively, it encouraged wandering and exploration. although of course it was possible to beat it relatively quickly once you knew where the whistles were and which rocks to break in world 8, the first several dozen times you played likely ended in, say, world 3 or 5 or 6, just because you had to go to school or dinner or bed or whatever. so you ended up playing those early worlds over and over and over again, and naturally exploring and looking for secrets as you went. to this day, i'm amazed when i sit down and play SMB3 for the first time in a few years and i still automatically know where tons of secrets are. it's just cemented in the brain, muscle memory style.

Music from SMB2 is a very good point. Love the character selection soundtrack expecially, pops into my head all the time.

It's amazing in hindsight what a huge mascot Mario was, for not having much backstory or dialogue or anything like that. I remember that Mario 3 commercial and it really did feel like that big a deal. Ditto The Wizard, the gigantic unveiling, obviously really heavy-handed promotion there but no kid in the audience would have disputed the game deserving such a massive unveiling. And all that without an "attitude" or anything like that. It was just so fun to play Mario games!

Zelda has actual save files with a battery in the cartridge - that was a big deal at the time, and for years afterwards tbh. Even lots of A-list titles like the Megaman sequels relied on really clunky password systems - graphical in that case, but godawful tedious gibberish input fests in nearly everything else. I guess I see what you mean about getting repetitive if you really played and replayed it; it's not something like Mario 3 where I played through and won many, many times (sometimes warping past less-beloved worlds, sometimes kicking back to savor every single level and get the Hammer Brothers suit). But it's more like a quest game or an RPG anyway, you save and come back to it and gradually progress and when you win you feel satisfied not coming back right away. Beating Zelda II the first time felt like the biggest gaming accomplishment I had ever, or would ever, attain.

That's a fair point about the Castlevania controls; they're just such landmarks of design, music, and scope for a 2D platformer. You compare the first one to Ghosts n Goblins, which has a similar theme and maybe even a similar number of levels, and while both are brutally hard, Castlevania mostly feels "fair" and it's so evidently a leap forward in graphics and enemy/level design and stuff. It's fun to play even just for the clear sense that you're moving through meaningfully different regions of this castle. Passing over the bizarre failed experiments of the second one, III basically takes all that many steps forward while perhaps being less satisfying as a game. It's huge and there are the multiple paths and multiple characters, but only a few of the individual levels come into focus as much. Still just astounding for how much they could get those cartridges to do on that system.

xpost otm

i'm trying to think of the most recently released game that has as much content as SMB3, with no save system.