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

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.

i think it was SMB3

haha - maybe!

but i wouldn't even want a save system in it, is the thing. you don't miss it at all. i feel sorry for "the kids" who have only played re-releases of the game (through wiiware or emulators) that have save systems, because i doubt they feel as compelled to play it over and over again. when you have a save you don't really revisit old levels nearly as often, if at all. but replaying SMB3 levels is so key to what makes the game legendary.

Agreed. In particular the first two worlds really start to feel like old friends; it's a good thing they're among the stronger in the game I think. Plus it actually increases the novelty factory of the later boards that you might sometimes skip past or just not get to. There's also a certain pace to it, if you really play straight through, where you do get rewards and reprieves every so often; again, not that it's remotely a "hard" game but there's still, for example, that payoff in the water world where you can take a little boat far out to the east (I think after judicious use of the hammer if you didn't use it in the desert world?) and just basically pick up a bunch of little bonus mushroom houses IIRC. That's satisfying as heck.

I do basically agree that the lives are a little too freely given. I don't recall a game of SMB3 ever coming down to a nail-biting "whew!" like, I really needed to win that level on that life. But there are lots of death-defying stunts within the levels, so eh.

Is there a master list with all the noms so far? like a google doc or something?

more noms

Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II (NES)
Pang aka Buster Bros. (I only played it in the Arcade and on my Playstation Buster Bros Collection but it was on earlier stuff. wiki link)

I'll try to remember more later

I loved loved loved first Wizards & Warriors, out of proportion to its actual quality. Rented it many times just to march through the same few levels, relish the treasure chests again, sigh at the tedium of ascending the castle exterior, thank god for the Feather of Feather Fall.

I can't remember if I didn't enjoy the sequels as much or if they were just really rare. They looked great in Nintendo Power, that's for sure. I think the third was supposed to be a little more quasi-RPGish, in a Faxanadu/Zelda II kind of way?

Castlevania mostly feels "fair" and it's so evidently a leap forward in graphics and enemy/level design and stuff

YES in a lot of ways it is like the Souls games are now now. If you master enemy patterns and know how to properly react you should be able to one-life it. It's INSANE that they have NG+ in the original Castlevania, which makes the game harder by manipulating damage. That game is already insane. As for level design, look no further than that room before the Grim Reaper, where you are dodging Medusa heads and axe-throwing knights that take multiple hits to kill.

Highly recommend the Anatomy of Castlevania: http://www.anatomyofgames.com/gamespite-quarterly/gjs13-anatomy-of-castlevania/ it goes into depth at why it's so good, how it may be the first game that really tried to do a linear and cohesive design. IE random platforms sitting in mid-air are connected to brickwork in the background and stuff. It is a masterpiece of impossible architecture. Here the sprite art really shines: what could be rather boring brick walls and archways have weathering and worn paint and moss drawn onto the tiles, one pixel at a time. This details suggests a world beyond what you just see on the CRT. Castlevania tugs at your imagination.

Sorry that links is broken. Try this one. http://www.anatomyofgames.com/anatomy-of-a-game/

Jeremy Parish is a great game writer. He covers a lot of the games in this poll on the site.

I used to read that guy religiously, going back to like, 1999/2000 or so. Evangelion Thumbnail Theater, all that stuff. He must be the king of unfinished or now un-archived projects, so many loose threads. Clearly struggling between the 'blog' and the 'kitchen sink website' as formats. As it is so much of the recent stuff is virtually un-browsable; maybe that's an incentive to buy the books. I do like that he's picked up the print volume as a format, and zeroed in on a few recurring obsessions (the "Metroidvania" genre in particular).

The only thing is, and this is hardly unique to that site, but there's also a real tension between what's brilliant about the insight and what's popular with most of the readers. I feel like a lot of projects like this burn themselves out screencapping everything and basically let's-playing every single step of the game, like a walkthrough but every sentence has to be written snappily and with nerd panache. Sometimes that's fun to read but sometimes it's just flab keeping us from a really taut single medium or long-form essay about, in this case, the anatomy of the particular game. Part of me loves the idea of a 14-article series on Zelda II, or 27 parts on Super Mario Bros., but I suspect some of the strengths of the insights actually get buried in all that coverage... which nonetheless I'm sure is very popular. This is by no means unique to Parish, and he has a way better ratio than some other blogs I could name, but you kinda wish his experience in print journalism would have helped him internalize some checks on excess. OTOH he's writing about what he loves so, y'know, more power to him!

Sticking closer to content, one thing I wonder about is the tendency for most of the games to assume that they're really well-thought-out masterpieces and that every little move is just incredibly amazing, or just brilliantly effective, or just perfectly calibrated. That's another common tendency in this kind of writing and it's exhausting, but I think it also starts to seep into the argument; he has a general predisposition towards games that 'teach' their mechanics through gameplay, and a good eye for ways games do this in subtle ways that also flesh out the story or atmosphere of the world. But I feel like, and I should have examples for this, but sometimes it starts to feel like every single thing you do in a game is a planned little teachable moment; every jump you have to make early on is there to train you for a more complicated jump in World 7. And yeah, sure, in general I buy that but this was also just an era of games being hard as fuck and throwing you in the deep end, and sometimes stuff wasn't really telegraphed all that well but the games were still fun for it. I dunno, I'm not explaining this well and it's not a reason not to read his stuff. Maybe it would be better to say that his essays for their emphasis on this theme have forced me to think for myself about what makes a good difficulty curve or how much of this stuff is necessary for a good game.

BTW: What is the best world of Super Mario 3?

Without knowing Castlevania II's secrets (ie without internet help), you won't be able to win. It's not the game's difficulty but the fact that you need a Nintendo Power or the prodigy kid down the street in order to progress in the game. I mean you would have to be pretty damn lucky to find/solve the secrets on your own.

Nobody I know bothered to play all the way through Link II. I wonder if it had any bitchy secrets as well

the tendency for most of the games to assume that they're really well-thought-out masterpieces and that every little move is just incredibly amazing, or just brilliantly effective, or just perfectly calibrated

Well given memory limitations everything was more or less meticulously thought-out, from level design to song length to character art. The designers themselves have admitted as much, the famous example being Mario's design was due to the limitations of pixel art, his moustache and hat being added to fix animation problems that cropped up with the tiny resolution they had to work with.

Nowadays there really aren't any limitations so less consideration probably goes into it. If you can only include X amount of art/music/gameplay, it is going to be the absolute best you can come up with.

But yes there is probably some projection/fandom in there largely coloring things.

Also I may be confusing this (with DOOM?) but I seem to remember them saying the first stage of Mario was built at the end of development, after they had figured out the tools, and thus were able to use more deliberate planning irt what the player would encounter and how they would likely respond.

Sure, I just think it gets taken to this level of "and here's yet another example of the unfailing inexhaustible genius of the designers" and it just becomes unreadable after a few paragraphs. Definitely talking more about the game design/challenge/information stuff here than the pixel art stuff. Obviously, there's more care at all levels in the classics than the far, far more numerous dudfests... s'what makes them the classics!

Zelda II is profoundly flawed but in the end, basically playable and satisfying in its way. If the first one had never existed it'd probably be pretty well remembered as an ambitious if incompletely-worked-out action RPG. I can think of only two totally baffling points that really scream "Nintendo Power, take me away!" which is basically zero compared to Castlevania II. Will be stunned if anyone ends up voting for that one...

Thanks for responding to that

I never understood the love for Zelda II. All I can remember is getting it and being like WTF, this isn't Zelda. But I was 9, so maybe I'd feel differently now.

Yeah it's pretty fun.

CVII is really fun too when you have a walkthrough. Killer music. The bosses are piss easy but I don't mind that after the nightmare bosses in the first game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfh0ytz8S0k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rsycfDliZU

zelda 2 the first game i ever beat. dark link an all-time end boss. (his cameo in ocarina is kind of misplaced and random.) a genuinely difficult game, probably less forgiving than the first (definitely meaner: ganon's digitized chuckle on game over) and the last zelda game to be hard at all. its dangerous places (the forests, the pitch-black caves, the big mess of rocky maze in the southwest, the town where people are bats) are stressful and frightening in ways no death mountain has ever been, and a combination of nes-memory restrictions on text and a number of NPCs hugely increased from the first game meant even the non-hostile townspeople (health-restoring hookers aside) seemed standoffish and terse. the rare game i remember (vividly) as a hostile place, remote from help, instead of as a beloved playground. it's also weirdly colorless, simultaneously too simple and too fiddly to be a working platformer, and (alone in the series) reliant on dedicated, mindless grinding without any of the monster or spell variety that's supposed to entertain you when you're doing that in FF games. so it probably deserves its reputation in comparison to the likes of zelda 1 and link to the past, but in the post-twilight-princess era of nintendo's long enslavement to ocarina of time it definitely shouldn't be called the series' worst anymore.

I had a great idea for the upcoming Zelda game the other day. You start the game with a sword, shield, bow, boomerang and bombs
http://i44.tinypic.com/2z8ce9u.png

tbf the last Zelda game was in thrall to Link To The Past rather than Ocarina (and was all the better for it)

Myself and a few other guys are using Minecraft to build a working 3D remake of the original Zelda. Not sure how you guys feel about Minecraft, though.