f13.net

So, if you're not in discord, too bad, so sad, you missed the first round of The Ultimate Battle - 1985.

Here are the results:

(https://i.imgur.com/AQzLWzC.png)

The Oregon Trail (specifically, Apple IIe - the one every child alive played) took home the trophy. We've moved on to 1986.

Now, The Ultimate Battle isn't "most influential" or "most popular" or whatever. You take any metric you want, and after discussion we throw up a poll and choose the best game for the year. Each discussion is open for a week. This week ends next Sunday at Midnight, upon which we flop over to 1987 and quit discussing 1986.

This has its own channel in Discord, and I likely won't delete the history, so you can scroll back and see uh, whatever you want to see.

Anyway, when we're done we're going to have a DEFINITIVE list of the best games by year, after which I'll probably widdle those out by decade, and have the final 4 fight each other, coming to a best game ever.

Which will be Demon's Souls.

So, yeah, join in the fun or your vote doesn't matter.

If you'r banned from Discord, your vote also doesn't matter.

Finally, we're also going to start Discord movie nights via Rabb.it.

So there's that.

1987 will be pretty easy, methinks  :grin:

Anyway, great ideas, will definitely join in shortly  :thumbs_up:

1987 has a lot of great releases, so I imagine it will be one of the tougher years to sort out.

86 is fairly tough itself.  So many good time sinks there.

Yeah, but "Leisure Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards" will obviously come out on top.




Or maybe not.  :grin:

1986: Leaderboard Golf C64

I know this isn't the voting forum, I'm a rebel. Also, I was basically over gaming by 1986, though I did play Ultima V a bit after that. There is a glaring lack of Ultima IV on the 1985 list.

1886 is a bit tougher since we are using US release dates for NES games.  Still, of everything I've heard so far, Rampage takes it for me.

I kept suggesting Ultima IV, but no one pays attention to me.

1987 is Nethack.  All other arguments are invalid.

Pfft. Both Moria and Larn were better.

Hockey was invented in 1886 - I think that takes it. I might be misremembering but I think Rampage was post-Victorian?


(fnarr fnarr)

Oddly I don't know what Larn is, but I agree with Moria being better than Nethack.  Without a doubt.

That's why I'm not on Discord. If I want to be ignored, I can just spend an evening with the old lady.

 :drillf:

Guys, seriously: 1987 is all about Dungeon Master.

1987 was ALL ABOUT Double Dragon in the arcade.

True (elbow was OP :D). But eventually you went back home, turned on the Atari ST and played Dungeon Master.

Or at least that was my life back then. Cool uh?  :why_so_serious:

Oh, and I listened to Black's "Wonderful Life" pretty much all day long. That too.

Didn't Sid Meier Pirates come out in 1987?  Seems that would be a lock.

Exactly. Pirates! locks it for 1987 on anything but arcade. Arcades, Double Dragon and Black Tiger. But yes, Pirates! takes it all.

We'll see?

1987 includes Zelda, Metroid, and Castlevania.  Zelda will probably take it for me as I played the original endlessly.

I prefered Larn and Nethack to Moria. It's all about individual taste. When you feel like losing some time, find Larn and give it a try, it's a midpoint between Hack and Moria in time, with a different feel. It didn't eat as many of my college nights as the 3.0 release of Nethack, but close.

Tell me about it;  I'm amazed to find that some don't like ADOM.

 :why_so_serious:

More people need to join the discord channel - both 1985 and 1986 are now  tied.

Oregon Trail won 1985.

Too many damned kids is my suspicion.

 :geezer:

Bubble Bobble has won 1986. Was close between it and Rampage though.

1986.

lol

Yes, 1986.

This is what happens when you stay here and let the Euro's outnumber us in Discord!

As I said in channel, I loved Bubble Bobble.  But come on!  Rampage!  Come talk to me when The Rock makes a Bubble Bobble movie.

Based on Central Intelligence, the rock would be great as bub or bob or even Baron von Blubba

1987 has gone into a runoff featuring Nethack, Mike Tyson's Punch Out ! !, and Metroid.

lol people not voting for Metroid.... kys

I don't think you fully understand what's happening here. We're not judging years in a vacuum. We have full knowledge of all of gaming. There's no reason to pretend Metroid is the best game looking back when things like Super Metroid and Dead Cells exist.

but I'm glad you like Metroid so much?

Haven't weighed in on the discord chat (I find the format hard to follow, too much going on if you are not in there all the time).  Metroid was I game I liked a lot, but MT's Punch Out was the shit.  When that thing came out it was a leap forward.  Played the tits off of it, and I was great at it.  That would get my vote between those two.

What didn't make it to the finals?  Are we not counting things like Zelda and Dragon Quest in 87?

Dragon Quest didn't hit the U.S. until a couple years later (it's also not particularly good, especially when it has to stack up against PC RPG's as well). Zelda was counted but fell just shy of making the final list.

My bias will be towards consoles until we hit the late 90s, because I didn't get into PC gaming until then.  Which might be something to keep in mind...If I were to bet (and I could be totally wrong), I would put money on most of us having the main consoles of that era, with many percent fewer of us owning PCs of any kind. 

Anyway, I have trouble with the dismissal of Zelda, but maybe that is more because of its general influence on what came after than because of the game itself.  I would, for example, rather play Punch Out right now given the choice.

All console right up until Civilization.

I'm in the console-only boat early too, but judging by Discord we aren't a clear majority.

Zelda wasn't dismissed; it was in the initial 1987 vote but was not one of the games tied for the top.

So, wait, since I don't think I understood either ;  What you're saying is that if the game in that year then got eclipsed, either in genre or sequel, by a later iteration, it really doesn't deserve the vote for that year ?

That makes things sooooo much harder...

Since the NES never really was a thing in Germany (hard to obtain and expensive) and other more exotic consoles were only available as Japan imports (PC-Engine for example) I can only really contribute C64 and Amiga games until 1992 when I bought a SNES and my first PC.

So expect me to lobby hard for Speedball 2 or Turrican instead

But that at least makes sense, since Speedball 2 is one of the finest games ever made ever.

People can fancy this up all they want, but its literally “vote for what you like best of this year”.  I personally feel no obligation to vote on anything based on its “influence”, and vote on what I loved and played the most as a child.  I mean, I may use influence as a personal tie breaker, but this entire poll thing is a way to show basically “The games that had the greatest influence on the members of F13.”  Not the best actual games.

So like, just vote on whatever you liked best.  Zelda not even making it to the tie breaker round is fucking hilarious in that regard, but I also have to admit I played the ever living fuck out of Punch Out.

For me, Zelda is a perfect example of a game eclipsed by a later title. I played the original a lot when NES was all I had, but Link to the Past blows it out of the water and I have never even thought about replaying the original ever again once I got LttP.

I have never ever played a Zelda game.  So there's that.   :heartbreak:

Zelda also only missed the finals by 1 vote, so it's not like it was ignored.

If we go by what I played the most during that time it would either be Kick Off 2, Speedball 2, Lotus Esprit Challenge or the Amiga versions of Eye of the Beholder and Dungeon Master.

nerd

People are using all sorts of metrics for this. Mine is a combination of "most fun" + "has it been done a million times better since."

Which had more impact then on me? Metroid by far, the atmosphere, the soundtrack, it was just such a cool everything.

Which would I rather play right now? Metroid by far. Punch Out I'd be playing entirely to be like "hah remember this shit? look at that guy, I remember beating that guy" not because I miss anything really about the actual gameplay.

So no I don't get it.

Using "has this been improved upon" as a metric is confusing.

"This has been improved on" means to me that it was such a seminal game, other games took its success and built upon it. They were genre/mechanic-defining games.

A destinction should be made between genre-defining, and genre-popularizing. Metroid is very arguably the latter and even then only in certain regions as Metroid especially early on wasn't a bit in Japan.

Edit: Also Castlevania had Metroid beat that year on music and atmosphere so Metroid isn't even the best by that metric.

Also, I don't know why it even matters. The resulting lists I throw up to vote on consist of the best games ever, by any metric. That we vote on one over another doesn't even matter. It doesn't shit in the importance of another game.

Castlevania isn't really a Metroidvania though, it's just a side-scrolling platformer.

I was making two separate points. The edit was referring to Hoax's statement that Metroid had the most impact on him for games from that year due to music and atmosphere.

Metroid wasn't a metroidvania either because it didn't have any castles.

I think it is fine that there are no guidelines given and that everyone has their own view of what's important.  I would just advise that you avoid the potential bias towards PC stuff in the early years.  Only uber nerds and rich kids even had these things back then, and the result of that is you get something genre defining like Zelda possibly losing out to something like Speedball 2, which about 100% of the world's population has never heard of.  Yes, this is an imaginary argument, but hopefully you see my point.

It's because of that kind of thinking that there will probably not ever be a Mario game winning, despite the fact that most of you played early versions until the skin on your thumbs was totally peeled away. 

You can't get away from that.  A lot of these 'consoles' you speak of were unheard by my people.

Fire Bad.

Until they changed it for the release of the SNES Nintendo had outsourced the distribution of their products to third party distributors for the PAL region. Nintendo of America was responsible for the US market but in PAL region A (Great Britain, Ireland and Australia) they sold distribution rights to Mattel and in PAL region B (rest of Europe) they had sold distribution rights individually for each country. Usually to smaller outfits that neither had the marketing budget nor the network necessary to really promote it.

Nintendo was also very stingy with their inventory and the console was ridiculously expensive and since they didn't have connections to the big outlets in Europe the NES was pretty much unknown and hard to obtain. That is a crass difference to e.g. the US where NES itself did all of the marketing and distribution deals.

I think the Nintendo 64 was the first console that managed to be 'hey, we're here.'

And I'm aware how late in the day that was, gaming speaking.

Good counterpoints.  But if we stick with the Zelda or Mario examples (not that I am specifically lobbying for either) can you not step back see how strange it appears for them to be outshined by things most of the world has never heard of?  I am pretty sure even my 90+ grandmother knows who Mario is.  Super Mario Bros on the NES was basically a "holy fuck, they have finally done it" kind of epiphany for the mass market of video games and consoles.  And there are a few more examples of this that are going to get outvoted by something like Nethack or whatever, something that has had no influence, no lasting appeal and nobody has ever heard of.

To give you a perspective: In the late eighties vastly more people in my country would have known about the shameless Mario Clone "The Great Gianna Sisters" made by Rainbow Arts than would have been able to tell you about Mario. So much so that people were irritated when some weird japanese toy maker tried to sue them and made it so they could no longer sell the game.

Because everyone had a Commodore 64 (Europe was basically Commodore country until the mid nineties and then switched to PC) while most people didn't even know that Nintendo existed and was a thing. Also we had no Arcades

The original Playstation was probably the first video game console that really changed that for European markets because even the SNES and the Nintendo 64 were niche compared to the vast number of PC and C64/Amiga/Atari ST owners. Nintendo's weird "don't release most of the things in Europe and when you do, do it three years later than in the US and Japan" policy certainly didn't help either.

Also, that gave rise to the view amongst most that Mario was/is shit.

And that's because Mario's shit.

Mario is and always has been shit. But I'm terrible at platformers, which may color my judgement some. I spent more time on games like Kings Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and Police Quest than I ever have on all Mario games combined.

hot takes in this thread

STEAMING hot takes.  :why_so_serious:

I mean, I can see maybe saying original Mario was shit.  It was a thing we all played endlessly because it was the only damned game we owned, which doesn’t really mean I wanted to be playing it over other options. But pretty much every main title Mario game after that has been legit well crafted fun (and I’m including Mario 2, which is an acid trip).

Yeah but this is essentially Hot Takes - The Ultimate Battle.

Super Mario Bros. 3 was by far my favorite, and will likely get my vote when it's up. The original was good, but (like Zelda and LttP) I never played it again after SMB3 came out. The oft-maligned SMB2 was also superior to the original, even if it was a completely different game.

when this list is done it will be absolutely definitive

and yeah, full of hot fucking (correct) takes

To me it's just a matter of, if I'm going to call something game of the year, it has to be timeless to some extent. It has to be something that I would still go back and play. Granted I'm fairly into retrogaming. I've built multiple RaspberryPies, I have all the old AD&D PC games on GOG, etc..., so I do actually go back and play a lot of this stuff.

Some games do get completely eclipsed and it makes it harder to go back to them. I can think of a single reason why I would play Metroid instead of Super Metroid for instance, whereas I think the original Punch-Out is a better game than Super Punch-Out or the Wii Punch-Out.

1988 is going to be a bit hard for me because so many of the games I liked from that year were heavily flawed and done much better later on, like Metal Gear, Castlevania II, and Pool of Radiance. Even significant games that I wasn't into at the time like John Madden Football, Phantasy Star, and Wasteland are more notable for what they lead to than for being games that any of us would even think about trying to revisit.

Personally I'll probably go with Pool of Radiance for my '88 pick because that is a game I still replay every few years, and while mechanically the later Gold Box games are better, PoR is actually my favorite "story" of the lot. I know I'll be in a bit of a niche with that pick though.

See, I'm not into retrogaming too much, so I'm generally basing my pick on how much I played the game and how influential I think it was to later games. I played the ever living hell out of Wasteland and while it might not hold up against its descendants, it was absolutely mind-blowing when I played it then.

If its "game I loved and played the shit out of for years over and over" I'd have to say Battlezone.

Poll for 88 is up in discord.  Get in there Wasteland people if want to make your mark (Zelda 2 is currently running away with it).

Ahem. Zelda II: The Adventures of Link has won 1988. This is obviously the ONLY year this game could have been released and won literally anything. Nonetheless, it was a sound and clean win. Good job, Link, you short-armed little shit.

(https://i.imgur.com/ZtMxAlk.png)

Onwards, to 1989, wherein things get complex af.

Who put the NES version of Metal Gear on there over the MSX version? You should examine your game choices whoever you are, dear sir.

Also, the arbitrary start year of 1985 excludes M.U.L.E. (1983) from being eligible and this travesty puts the legitimacy of this whole Ultimate Battle into question. I’m shocked, shocked and appalled and I will write a stern letter over this.

The NES was an abomination that set gaming back 20 years.

Yeah, it's a real tragedy that peasants from families that couldn't afford PC's still got to play games.

whew, this take is so hot i might split the thread into politics

what's your opinion on the Neo Geo MVS? Naomi?

1. metal gear wasn't going to get votes, so who cares. if you want a say, join the discord channel
2. you answered your own question there, it was entirely arbitrary

It is interesting to see the different takes in different regions of the world. So many contributing factors, from system price and game price vs relative income to varying release dates and cultural preferences. But I think the single biggest factor in the 80's at least was piracy. Stuff that could be pirated, and systems that enabled piracy, were a lot more popular almost everywhere. Commodore 64 reigned supreme in that regard, and likely a lot of the most popular titles from that era (at least by the metric of most played) will be things that were pirated around extensively on the C64. Which means games like the truly genre-creating Dungeon Master and later some of the graphical ground breaking games on the Amiga don't really have a chance. Not because they weren't better than their competition at the time, but because they weren't played by nearly as many people due to being less available for free.

I did a replay of Zelda II over the last couple days. I'm not 100% on board with schild's assessment that Demon's Souls is a Zelda game, but I will say that Zelda II is absolutely a  Souls game in a lot of ways. Even if you're using save states (unless you're using them right in the middle of combat), you are not going to brute force your way through this game and if you aren't patient this game you will get punished for it more often than not. There's leveling, but even if you try to grind xp, you aren't going to overpower your enemies. Due to your small attack range, you need precision, but there's only a few occasions where the game feels unfair.

I breezed through Mega Man 2 and Castlevania 2 in a little over an hour each, but Zelda II was a god damn ordeal and I loved it.

You loved it?  I remember playing it when it came out, but I would have guessed this Zelda title above all others would not hold up very well.  I am suddenly wondering if and how I should get my hands on a copy.

Yeah, its a game that when I first played as a kid, none of us liked very much.  Then I went back and played through the whole thing when I was a teenager, and really enjoyed it.

Like Castlevania II, due to some poor writing/translations there are some bits that would be almost impossible to figure out without a guide if you're just coming into the game cold. I know the game well enough that it's not an issue but I have no idea how someone without prior exposure to the game would react to it. Also I did use save states in parts as a time saving measure (not to cheese the game). It's hard, and it's not for everybody. There are some frustrating parts where a lot of shit gets thrown at you at once, and there are enemies that require good reflexes and learning their patterns. There aren't a lot of ways to get health back outside of towns. When you're in a dungeon, you can use maybe one cast of the healing spell you eventually get and then you're out of magic. If you don't know where all the hidden stuff is, you're going to have a hell of a time trying to fill your magic bar back up.

It's a challenging game. Not challenging like the first Castlevania (which is hard because it had a save system in Japan because it was a disk system game). Not challenging like Bionic Commando which is a pain because of the counter-intuitive mechanics where you don't have a jump button. It's challenging because it expects you to put in the time to actually get better at it.

And yes, some stuff is going to fell a bit dated, so I'm certainly not saying everyone needs to go out and play Zelda II if they haven't already. It is one of the games on the NES Classic which is fairly easy to find these days. And hey, Bubble Bobble, Punch-Out, and Mega Man 2 are on there as well, so you've got 3 Game of the Year titles and a likely 4th.

I finished it as a kid 30 years ago (shit I’m old) without any help and it was a slog. I was also extremely patient to try all sorts of things out to determine the translation meanings (everything does eventually help if you squint right). It was overly difficult but not impossible. When I replayed it recently I remembered all of it and the challenge was only training my reflexes back up to handle the jumping and more difficult monsters. Really the only “hard” part is the last level because of how long it is and you must choose the right paths and conserve resources to stand a chance at the last two bosses.

But really, there’s plenty of games out there that were good that year (some of us have no idea what discord is...)

I also replayed Zelda II a couple days ago and I absolutely still love it. 

Pirating may have been the biggest selling point for a lot of people but even if there hadn't been such a huge library of pirated games and stuff Europe would have leaned towards Commodore and the other home computer systems like Sinclair Spectrum or Amstrad or Atari.

Commodore and Atari had a network of distributors in Europe, they sold through to general stores and had contracts with the big European mail order companies (equivalents to Sears) like Quelle or Neckermann. You could buy a C64 or an Amstrad CPC, add-ons like disk drives or material like floppy disks almost anywhere. I could have walked into the local department store in my hometown of 16,000 in bumfuck nowhere in 1985 (and I did) and buy a C64, a 1541 disk drive and everything else I might need or I could have picked it out of a mail order catalogue and ordered it from our own big mail order companies. (with a 30 day returns policy)

Buying a NES or a Sega Master System or a PC Engine/Turbografx16 would have required that I actually knew those things existed and even if I did I'd probably have needed to buy them from a specialized store as Japan imports that came with a huge premium and additional drawbacks (different video norm, different power requirements, a language I couldn't even read)

It additionally didn't help that the European NES came out on 9/1/1986 or almost three years after the Japanese release and one year after the US release.

It was more an issue of awareness and access not purchasing power. A C64 with a 1541 disk drive was ridiculously expensive. It cost $595 on release which is $1551 in 2018 prices (adjusted for inflation) and the 1541 disc drive was basically the same price with $600/$1560 in 2018 prices. A year later prices dropped to about $300 for the C64 and $300 for the disk drive. The NES by comparison cost $199 or $249 ($412 adjusted for inflation) depending on the SKU.  So you would have spent either $3120 to $1560 in 2018 money on the C64/1541 Combo while the NES would have cost you about the same price as a current gen PS4/XBox One. An Amiga 500 which was the next huge success was even more expensive.

Nintendo basically never corrected that. The European subsidiary Nintendo of Europe was founded in 1990 or ten years after NoA. The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive was more successful than the SNES (SNES EU version launched two years after the Super Famicom and two years after the EU version of the Genesis) and Europe is basically Playstation territory since the original Playstation which had what was basically a global launch with the Japanese version predating the US and EU versions by only six months.

Maybe things would have gone differently if a European subsidiary of Nintendo had existed in 1983 and if people had been able to buy a NES bundle at their favourite department store without being price gouged by importers or local distributers and without an additional 3 year delay between Japanese and EU releases.

look at that

my little exercise in picking the best games ever is provoking some of the most meaningful conversation about gaming this website has ever had

wild

mega man 2 for president of 1989

Populous, Bitchcakes.

You push me into finally trying to figure this whole discord thing out once and for all. Just to make sure the right game wins and I hate myself a little bit for that.

Shit, quick, erase all the conversation history about Jeff!

EVERYTHING available on the Amiga was available in pirated form. EVERYTHING.

Our black CPUG (in contrast to the white one without pirates) had a few Amiga users. There were more of them in the white group, but I'm pretty sure any of the big titles were available...if you joined the dark side group.

In a nail-biter, Mega Man 2 has taken it as of midnightish est whatever today is:

(https://i.imgur.com/mpGnx9f.png)

(https://i.imgur.com/Rs8og4Y.png)

Props to Gary "Azure Bonds" Johnson, the true spoiler of 1989.

 :grin: :grin: :grin:

There was a round 2? You suck at making announcements.

no u

shocking exactly nobody who has ever played a game

(https://i.imgur.com/GTaM6OZ.png)

super mario bros 3 took 1990

1991 poll is up.  Looks like a duel between Street Fighter 2 and Final Fantasy 4.

I guess that must be the arcade version of Street Fighter 2.  Tough one.  Personally, the SNES version (particularly the hyper version) is one of the best games of all time.  And it still holds up today.  We have one of those mini SNES console thingies with SF2 built in.  My smart mouth 13 year old challenged me to a game, and then proceeded to get his ass handed to him utterly, 20 times in a row regardless of character chosen, even with the handicap fully in his favor.  THAT is how you do fighting games.  Pixel perfect controls, ridiculous reflexes.  Mortal Kombat was also great, but it was like fighting in molasses by comparison.

But the arcade version.  Tough call.  While amazing, it was the SNES version that made it a household name.

You either:

1. Didn't live near an arcade.
2. Didn't play SF2 with other humans in an arcade, if you did live near one.
3. Have a spotty memory of SF2 as a phenomenon.

The SNES version was positively massive, but the arcade version was industry and genre altering.

No, you are wrong about all three of those.  I fell in love with it instantly, and played the crap out of it in the arcade.  But then the SNES version came out and we played it 100 times as much and it introduced the game to many more in our circle.

So it's more a case of picking between A) the superior arcade version that started it all, or B) the mass market version that I played until permanent calluses were built up and probably played more than any non MMO ever.  Or C) maybe I don't actually have to pick between them.

If I had to transport myself back to 1991, SF2 wins anyway.  FF4 was not even on my radar.

do you wonder why you played the SNES version a hundred times as much?

or are you making my point for me?


ah, you're making my point for me

also, the arcade version made it a household name


14,000,000*$70.00 isn't even $1bn

of course one could make the argument that you didn't have to plop a quarter or fifty cents into a SNES to play the thing

but one wouldn't make that argument because it would be stupid and also doesn't matter

edit: for the record, I rank SFII as one of the best SNES games to release, ever. But it doesn't even come near to what the arcade version did to gaming. The wheels of the industry were already in full motion before the thing even hit home consoles. It changed things forever. Ironically, so did Final Fantasy IV/II.

edit 2: To wit, I might make a future Ultimate Battle of "Best Franchises," which is a super interesting way of looking at the industry, I think.

I suppose I was mainly just talking myself into it, which I did.  Also, would not have guessed the arcade version actually generated that much of the revenue.  I was in the military at the time, so the kinds of arcades we were exposed to were different, with fewer or no kids.

A point could be made that the arcade version actually wasn't superior.  It was from a graphics point of view surely, but given my choice I would take a SNES gamepad controller over the arcade joystick.  Also, the hyperfighting version (or whatever the exact name is), was even better.  Cranking the speed up to max was the shit.

And as one of the rare people that owned a 3DO, that was probably my all time favorite version.  The controllers for that console fucking sucked, but they sold SNES adaptors.

Look, I'm using this as my vote for Street Fighter 2 in general.  I will not be voting for the SNES/Sega version, Championship/turbo/hyper/super editions, or what ever.  All of those are just one big blur of Street Fighter 2 dominance through the early 90's, so I'm just voting for the first one as a catch all.

Maybe it's because I played so much in the arcade before I had a SNES, but I couldn't disagree more. For me the shoulder buttons on the SNES were an incredibly poor replacement for having two extra buttons in the arcade. I remember long sighs and eye rolls from all my friends whenever we played on the SNES, as I would always remap the controls so I could avoid using the shoulder buttons. I'm not saying I was obsessed with Street Fighter but in the sixth grade I could either ride the bus home or take a ninety minute walk. If I walked, there was a bar with a SFII machine about halfway home that would allow kids into the front area to play. If I had more than a dollar to my name, I would walk home just to play that game.

I think the placement of the shoulder buttons was fine for all other intents and purposes, but SF2 requires some dexterity and reactions that made involving the shoulder buttons problematic.

But honestly, I was amazing at that game, and was more than capable of turning it into a tactical advantage.  I would put my heavy punches up on the left shoulder button.  During 90% or more of a battle, I would relay on shorter and quicker stuff which reset faster and let you perform more of them, while also being effective (e.g. a medium dragon punch is still nasty, and you are back on the ground that much faster).  As long as you are thinking ahead and getting ready for the awkward shoulder button movement, you then throw it in for a powerful and fast change of pace, and watch your opponent despair at being fooled.

Hard kick went on the right shoulder.  Most meaningful usage of the hard kick was still easy enough from the shoulder button.

I refer back to my original statement then, given your response about the military and not being near a normal arcade. And you don't have a spotty memory of the craze, you have NO memory of it because you didn't experience it with the rest of the population. -_-

It actually came ou a half year before I actually entered the military, and I clearly remember it in the arcade I went to every weekend with all the other teenagers.  My experience is not invalid, you are just doing the usual “the way schild experiences an event is the only way that matters” thing that you do. 

It being an industry changing phenomenon that started in arcades and nearly singlehandedly elongated the life of arcades wasn't a schild experience, it was just reality.

Your experience isn't invalid, but it certainly keeps changing based on evidence.

Liking the home version because you had it at home is obviously completely valid, but that's not why the conversation went this way.

I concede your point anyway, I am only saying it is universally the case.  Mortal Kombat had a much bigger visible impact at that same arcade I am referring to.  Before this conversation, I would have wrongly guessed that banked more at the arcade. 

Mortal Kombat is a more interesting conversation due to the censorship and the graphically intense violence in the arcade version. That aside, poopy compared to SF2.

(https://i.imgur.com/WxHQqv6.png)

Runoff between SF2 and Final Fantasy IV.

I might abstain. I refuse to kill one to let the other live.

Ok, I lied. I voted for Final Fantasy IV. I started listening to music from both games and the feels were more feely with FFIV, by a huge margin.

(https://i.imgur.com/2rXmJ7H.png)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHV2zmmiXHQ

Only due to a defector from SF2 wanting there to not be a tie again!

Though I'm pretty sure said defector is correct, and people are just voting to keep shit tied on purpose.

Some of us are too noob to find the poll so we can vote to make a tie.

(https://i.imgur.com/0pM7L2C.png)

well a bunch of idiots fucked up 1993

good job everyone

doom

weak

Haha.  So which game should have won from that list in your opinion?

BaK my fav. Syndicate also a good option.

Who won 1992?

Final Fantasy IV.

MOO or X-Wing.

But man, gaming used to suck. 93 is just when I got back into it, and I mostly played Civ and Ultima 7.

shild's vote is always in blue in the screen shot

Bingo.

Super Mario III won 92.

so Shild voted twice for '91?  :why_so_serious:

schild

also, you can vote more than once on the initial poll, only run-offs have a forced one-vote per person max.

to the surprise of no one that played it

(https://i.imgur.com/KZnjS10.png)

ff3/6 takes down 1994 hard

We managed to give X-Com the honorable follow up though.  Good job team.

FF VI vs. Super Metroid vs. X-Com is about as difficult of a choice as you can make. I’d have chosen X-Com myself but I can see why FF VI has won.

In what is easily the least exciting year thus far, the winner is:

(https://i.imgur.com/6t7cy1G.png)

Warcraft II.

Eight-player Descent LAN games at work after-hours. Six degrees of freedom in true 3D. Even non-gamers joined in. I reckon I could still enjoy that today.

Just wait till you try it on the phone.

(https://i.imgur.com/dpv92QU.png)

I expected Diablo to win, but I didn't expect it to win so soundly. At one point it was six points ahead of anything else.

We're finally getting to the point where everyone had a PC.

(https://i.imgur.com/FKuDpgX.png)

This is actually 1997. Correct game won, real fast too. It was evident within minutes who was going to take it. Proud of all of you.

(https://i.imgur.com/pwMsfMn.png)

final fantasy tactics took it, not actually surprising even though it was a strong year.

Fucking console gamers.

It's a little deeper than that. A lot of us vote for the best of a genre / best version of a game. Baldur's Gate isn't the best Baldur's Gate style CRPG. Unreal isn't the best Unreal. Ocarina of Time isn't the best Zelda. It's not shocking FFT won.

Planescape: Torment will *probably* win 1999.

FFT was certainly the best SRPG ever.

I feel like Disgaea 2 is probably my favorite but I'm not going to besmirch FFT or any opinion of it being the best.

This tracks with my reading of the list. I was thinking Thief was great, but Thief 2 was the height of the series. Tribes was good, but Tribes 2 was great.

Also, Half Life just sucks and always has :D

I actually voted for both FFT and BG, among other things.

(https://i.imgur.com/Yi7082w.png)

Planescape takes down 1999 handily. Second place was an interesting 3-way tie though. Except Everquest. Everyone who voted for EQ is suspect.

You really cannot underestimate the impact Everquest had on gaming, positive and negative. Mostly negative but still. And yes, I voted for it, but you've suspected me for years.  :rimshot:

He didn't say the game was suspect, only the people who voted for it  :oh_i_see:

This isn't Time magazine's Person of the Year though, we're actually trying to come up with the best game.

What Vel said. If a game influenced my life or my personal gaming tastes, then I might vote for it, but I'm not going to vote for something just because it was popular.

By earlier criteria, WoW would be the mmo to get best game by year.

Though if the actual criteria is best game, no mmo will win because they're all garbage from a gameplay standpoint. Few genres died so hard.

What do you mean by "earlier criteria"?

There's no earlier criteria that says every genre must have a best game. MMOGs stand little chance of winning any of these polls.

I'm certainly going to vote for WoW, since I played the shit out of it for years. If any MMO has a chance at winning, it's WoW.

WoW came out the same year as Orange Box. So. A shorter but objectively, infinitely superior experience. Hell, lots of us played TF2 way more than WoW.

Sorry, not Orange box. WoW came out the same year as Half-Life 2. Also an objectively better experience. As a reminder, in 2004, f13 gave game of the year to Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines: Colon: Bug Mess.

I've never played Half Life (1 or 2) or Vampire, so I'm still voting for WoW. Technically I'm voting for 2008's WotLK-era WoW, but we're rolling all expansions into the base game so 2004 gets it.

It was literally ten posts before I mentioned it. Jesus christ you guys.

To say that people vote for some games because they're the best in their genre/series is not to say it's the only criteria, or even the most important one.

I'm sure there are dating sims out there that could be considered the best of their genre, but most people here still wouldn't vote for any of them (well some of you guys did play Hatoful Boyfriend a bit I think so maybe that ends up on the 2011 list).

Beyond that, if you were on Discord you could actually see us talking about these games and why we're voting the way we do. It's hard to condense all that down into this thread. Plus you'd be able to vote for stuff yourself.

Everquest had a HYUGE influence on my life and personal gaming tastes, as well as on the industry as a whole. It wasn't about popularity. Its success as a 3d MMOG led to most of the AAA publishers trying to get in and outdo that success. I'd vote for WoW for the same reason.

I mean, it's more fun being consequence-free and just bitching, MURCA GRATE AGIN BAM

Also the invite expired, I blame the liberal media.

I didn't play Hatoful Boyfriend but I might vote for Katawa Shoujo.

(https://i.imgur.com/KJSaZkv.png)

Yeah. Also, this was 2000, not 2001.

Thief 2? Sacrifice?

Sacrifice still stands as some of the best spell effects of all time, I wish someone would integrate that into a modern game. The top end spells like Volcano and Tornado? Madness. Fun multiplayer, too.

For that list I'd say BG2 or THPS2.

edited to add: looking at a list now, NOLF was also pretty great

And if you'd pop into chat, you could ensure some of them make the list!  :grin:

I'd forgotten about NOLF, and while I loved it, if I'm being honest with myself...there's no way it touches A B or C.

:D

(https://i.imgur.com/tuFxfXR.png)

Legit the first year where I don't even think anyone gave a shit what won.

Meeeeh

Pretty much. I'd say the right game one though. Vice City was the sole reason why I bought a PS2.

GTA3 was genre defining.  That alone doesn't put it in the same league as many of the games we've voted on for the last few years, but it was a pretty amazing console experience at the time.  A whole lot of companies have basically been iterating its original formula for the last two decades.

In a sane world, Smash Melee would have singlehandedly forced the entire incestuous genre of shitty fighting games to reinvent itself. Alas we don't live in that world, but it's still probably the only game on the list that has an active community today, eighteen years later.

I didn't vote though so *shrug*

Street Fighter, many of the old variants, still have a huge scene. MK3 as well. Killer Instinct's is small, but real. Also, DOA.

Basically, what?

I think he meant on the list of games on the poll.

Edit: Which I guess still wouldn't make sense because people still play DAOC and there are people running PSO servers out there as well.

I did (and should have said *most* active - I could be underestimating DAoC's subscriber base, I guess), but Schild's point is that having an active scene in the fighting game community doesn't indicate a game's influence or non-shittiness, which is fair.

Melee was still the most interesting thing to happen to the genre for, like, a decade in either direction.

In the scene of what? Brawlers? If that's what you meant, for sure. Fighting games? No.

I never liked any of the Smash Bro's games.  They were playable, but never really derived much when playing them compared to almost any other fighter.

It has a hugely active community, but I'd argue one of the smallest skilled playerbases as a percentage of overall players. Being actually good at Smash takes way too much effort since it was originally just Mario Party But Fighting Instead of Partying also Fan Service.

Which is why it's such a shame that the ideas from Smash couldn't have been implemented by a company that actually gave a shit about its competitive community. Graduate the technical requirements a bit, have a control scheme that isn't completely pants-on-head, maybe add some goofy game modes for casuals; there is zero reason not to do these things but we'd all rather continue to hump the remains of Street Fighter 2 with another identical remake.

Also, "too much effort" to be "actually good"? Are you saying the skill ceiling is too high, or... what?

I wrote an angry post, but after calming down I decided to delete it and reconsider.

Still, you have to explain this: "In a sane world, Smash Melee would have singlehandedly forced the entire incestuous genre of shitty fighting games to reinvent itself."

What shitty fighting games? Smash is not a big deal in the Fighting Game Community, so what are you talking about? It has its appeal to some people but it doesn't have much to bring to the genre. Seriously, I really don't get what you are talking about. It's like you see Smash like some sort of revolutionary game in a genre that needs innovation. What? Fighting games are doing fine, doing great. Probably better than ever. Who needs Smash other than the Nintendo people?

Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinkt, Tekken, Dead or Alive, King of Fighters, Marvel vs Capcom are all basically reskins of the same game. You could transplant a character from any one of them into any other and very little would seem out of place. And they're not one-offs; they keep getting new versions and sequels every year or two. I don't mind incremental improvements, but what really differentiates them from the Street Fighter 2 we had in 1991? When you play that game, what do you miss aside from balance and more characters?

Super meters were a great innovation, and tag teams are pretty cool I guess in games that have them. But for the most part they're all just repeating the design decisions we've gotten used to. As an obvious example, the use of quarter/half-circle inputs that have become ubiquitous for specials is completely arbitrary, and it's frankly bizarre that it's still commonplace for games to make it intentionally difficult to physically enter move inputs on the controller, so much so that it's a significant barrier of entry for casual players. In a sane world that design decision would at absolute best be considered niche and exist in one or two series that cater to people who value hardcore technical skill, and in the rest we'd be able to do our moves by just pressing a button or two.

Last time I tried to talk about this with some fighting game people (I started the conversation out less confrontationally that time, I promise) they told me that having some input lag at the beginning of your specials was important for balance reasons because it let you time the moves so they come out quickly after a knockdown, without being able to pull them off instantly from a neutral position. When I pointed out you could achieve the same thing just by letting the first few frames of the special animation clip the get-up animation, they acted like that was contrived and confusing, as if animation canceling isn't an entirely normal thing that every game has already. The lengths people go to to reify arbitrary mechanics just because we've all gotten used to them carried out over and over again throughout the last fifteen years are stunning.

Look, I like fighting games. I have a lot of fond memories of Soul Calibur and Guilty Gear, which I gave a pass in my list above because I think they do some interesting things even if they're not *that* different. Guilty Gear made my top 20 when we were doing those lists. And yeah, fighting games are fine, they're fun, they do the job. If you really love Street Fighter and that's all you want to play forever then it's ideal, even. But I don't know how you can look at the competitive fighters that are out there and not get the sense that most of them are pretty much the same game you've seen a hundred times; that you'd already seen a hundred times ten years ago.

And then there's Smash Bros. It's not a perfect game, and in a vacuum if you wanted to put <your favorite game> over it I wouldn't argue. But Smash 64 was a fighting game that did *everything* different from what we were used to. The floaty platform physics, the aerial play, the real stages instead of different skins on an empty rectangle, the scaling knockback and escalating tension as damage racked up, the ring-out victory condition, the simple control scheme, even the colorful aesthetics and goofy casual game modes set it apart from pretty much everything else in the field. Smash 64 didn't necessarily invent all those concepts but it made them work together splendidly, and Melee refined it to a level suitable for serious competitive play despite competitive having afaik basically no support at all from HAL/Nintendo. If you think Smash didn't innovate or bring anything new to the genre compared to all the games I listed above then we must just be disagreeing on what words mean because it's not really even opinion at this point.

So naturally, the rest of the fighting game community spent most of the next decade shitting on Smash players and every other major game dev in the field has been churning out SF2 clones ever since.

And again: there's nothing wrong with Street Fighter 2 clones. Many of them are great games. But it's like the supermarket has 20 different brands of chocolate ice cream and one brand of strawberry, and no major creameries have even bothered trying to come up with a third flavor because the public is all convinced that chocolate is fine.

I haven't been a true fighting game fan for many years now, but your entire premise is off when you say:


Some of these might clone each other, but no way are they all reskins of the same thing.  Furthermore, the arbitrary mechanics?  For Street Fighter to a huge degree, and MK to a bit lesser degree, your timing and skill in pulling off the move is just as important as which move you selected.  Being able to do all of these things was what separated novices, good players and great players.  And you could see the differences by watching.  Not remotely arbitrary.

Smash Brothers, on the other hand.  Last time my boys played it (as teen and pre-teen) - and they were pretty decent at it - they would occasionally let their 4 year-old brother in for a laugh.  It usually took me a while to figure out which character he was controlling, because button mashing was almost as effective as skilled play.  He rarely won, but he sometimes did or got close.  I called it Button Smash Bros.  You are not wrong that it changed the formula a lot, but it feels wrong to me to even inlude it in the same discussion.  It is the ADHD of fighting games.

I hate to break it to you, but your kids aren't very good at Smash Brothers, and "button mashing was almost as effective as skilled play" is a facile dismissal that just tells me you don't know what skilled play looks like. All of the spacing, reflexes, and timing elements of other fighting games are just as present in Melee; technical skill is deemphasized somewhat since most of the moves aren't hard to pull off but you have to be more improvisational with your combos thanks to the way knockback and damage work, and the aerial game means there's a lot more positioning to consider especially if you're not playing on Final Destination.

Also, are we both talking about Melee? 64 was good but not especially refined and Brawl made some fuckstupid decisions that may or may not render it not worth talking about. Unfortunately I can't speak much to the newer ones, but the only real issue Melee had was that its balance wasn't great.

Of the seven series in the bit you quoted, would you choose two of them and describe what features are not in common between them?

Or, put it this way: here are the first results on Youtube for:
"Tekken final": https://youtu.be/uiMWBKipnzc?t=162
"Mortal Kombat final": https://youtu.be/DW2iN-UbDkw?t=2
"Smash final":  https://youtu.be/fZ3c3JCNzIQ?t=30

If someone watching these videos were describing the mechanics of the games to you, without using proper names or visual style, how long do you think it would take you to figure out which each one was? If not for the super meter in MK or the sidestepping in Tekken, would you ever be able to distinguish the two?

That's like saying "have someone describe driving a car versus driving a bus....."

Yes, there are mechanical similarities, and they are built off the same principles.  But in the real world, they look and feel completely different.  Being good at one in no way makes you good at the other.  We can say the same about all of these fighting games.  I was amazing at street fighter (at the time of SF2).  I was "pretty good" at MK.  I stink at and hate all the Smash games.  I was okay at Tekken.  Etcetera.  Same genre, notably different execution.  Going from Street Fighter to MK is like walking on pavement versus walking in the mud.  Which is not a critique of MK, because sometimes I want to walk in the mud.

I disagree with what you said.

Let's put it differently: you care about reinventing fighting games. People who like fighting games do not.

Some people have been trying to come up with new sports for ages, yet Basketball, Football, American Football, Hockey and the likes are still what they were with no need for innovation.

Street Fighter "clones" are fine and what Fighting Game fans want to play. Smash gimmicks could be fun for some people, but they are not meant to innovate shit and not meant to improve any fucking formula. The core of Fighting games is a different thing and don't need no big innovation. Also, you linked three finals videos and the Smash one is the one that makes me want to instantly turn the computer off. A lot of the appeal is to see big characters beating each other out, not seeing rolling pokemons on platforms vibrate each other down a cliff.

A better argument might be that these games haven't really evolved a whole lot over the years (except possibly Smash?  No idea), which I think ezrast is kinda also saying.  I can go along with that.  Recent proof being that I bought MK X a couple years ago, popped it in and proceeded to obliterate my kids, despite none of us having ever played it.  I, of course, played it up as if I was just an amazing natural talent, but the truth is that the game has not changed overly much since its inception, and the same basic skills are required.

Great, you can like those games all you want. I was pretty clear about that in my wall of text above. But I find your stance shockingly conservative and I don't think there's anything substantive I can respond to in your last paragraph at all. (edited to tone down the invective a bit; sorry)

Here, since I clearly wasn't obvious enough the first time that "reskin" was hyperbole and that I have, in fact, played fighting games before, let me rephrase: each of the seven games I listed (each of which has had multiple revisions and sequels; we're talking about literally dozens of titles here) is built on the following assumptions:
- A game consists of discrete rounds; the winner is the first to reach two or three wins
- Each round begins with exactly two opposing fighters in an arena (sometimes players have backups that can assist or tag in)
- Some arenas may have cliffs or walls around the edges, but the interiors are featureless
- Each fighter has a health bar that resets each round; a round is won when one fighter hits the other enough to make their health hit zero
- Each fighter has a variety of light/medium/strong basic moves with certain sequences designed to cancel into each other
- Each fighter has a set of special attacks, generally performed by pressing three or more specific inputs in sequence
- Movement is mostly one-dimensional - jumping is usually allowed but sticking to the ground affords better control, and the z-axis is de-emphasized or absent entirely

Obviously there's a ton of space within these rules to be twitchy or deliberate, or emphasize mechanics or spacing or reflexes or mindgames, or differentiate yourself in lots of other ways. These aren't super nuanced rules, but they are restrictive along a certain set of dimensions, and they're pretty fundamental to what we think of as fighting games. Sometimes a game bends or breaks one of the rules (health doesn't reset in KI; air dashers put a lot of stress on the last point). Those changes are seen as pretty out-there next to the old standards we all know and love.

Smash breaks every single one, and still manages to have a solid competitive scene.

Some of us respond to this by recognizing that even if you like the classics, even if you don't like Smash in particular, the fact that Smash exists indicates that there's a ton of unexplored room to play with the assumptions underpinning the genre, and maybe come up with something interesting.

Some of us decide that because it's different from the things we like, Smash isn't a real fighting game worth engaging objectively or in good faith - it's a cartoon gimmick game for babies.

I don't think the second group is a respectable place to be for anyone interested in critical discussion about video games.

Thanks for that; it's a point I may have understated: most of these games go through many, many revisions with only minor changes. I do like that they get updated, though, and I respect that development frequently needs to be conservative for the sake of the competitive scene, so it's not all downside.

As long as they keep the fun in them somehow.  Which cannot be said, IMO, with games like Madden and FIFA, to name a few.  Some of the basic core is the same, but I feel they get less fun with every iteration for the sake of "realism".  Or more cynically, just so they can have a reasons to charge people 60 bucks for the same fucking product every year.

None of these are remotely the same game. If you're gonna lead a post that long off with total horseshit, don't be surprised if people don't get past that.

You are hung up on the need for innovation. Here's your list:


Nothing is wrong with that. It's what  the majority of fighting game players want, totally comfortable with it. It's why 50.000 were watching the Street Fighter 5 Cupcom Cup finals last Sunday.
It's not about being conservative because ooohhh the good old days were better! and let's all fear the change together! It's because that formula and those games are a specific thing which to many would NOT be interesting if changed too much. In fact plenty of experiments exist and they do have their own niche (within what is already kind of a niche genre). Smash is a different animal and that's why it caters to almost completely different people (that's why it was controversial when it was first admitted to EVO). It's great that it exists, but your complaints about lack of innovation in the tradition of fighting games is only coming from the fact that YOU now enjoy Smash more than you enjoy traditional ones.

For the FGC people the Street Fighters and the Tekkens are SPORTS. They do NOT NEED innovation the same way you don't add extra baskets in basketball or allow two forward passes in American Football. There is NO denying that the majority of fighting games haven't been innovating. And you know why? Because there is no need, no demand for revolutions. Just small iterations. They still do come up with new stuff with every new release but they do not need to reinvent the wheel and if they did they would just lose their followers.

You really sound like someone who has been bored with hockey for a while and start chiming around that it would be so much better and more spectacular if they allowed to play with three pucks at the same time because you saw it on Spike TV, it's called xTreme Hockey and it was so much better. Ok, more power to you. But these are highly competitive games, these games were eSports WAY before the concept even existed. Innovation comes in many shapes, newer version, v-triggers, prospective shifts, aerials, new skins, new characters, new combo systems, new combo breakers, cancels, ultimates, guard breaks, new skins, graphics, and so on. But no there is no such need for major changes as long as the sequels are making their audience happy and the competitive scene healthier than ever.

Remember when Starcraft was king, and then DOTA came along and wiped it away and changed the RTS scene forever? People did not even know they needed or wanted DOTA/LOL and what we called MOBAs for a while, but they did. It was ripe.
Well here's the thing, Smash came and it DID NOT change the fighting game scene forever. Not because the world isn't sane, but because Smash is not such a big deal.

I am gonna say it again. You clearly like what Smash has been doing. Great. It has room to grow on its own genre and there's always room for cross pollination in videogames, regardless of the genre, so it'll keep happening one way or another.

But your initial statement:


is laughable and simply based on personal preference.

Can I say they're... pretty similar? Or that their core mechanics are near-identical? Or that they're all, like, very obvious, very direct descendants of the Street Fighter 2 legacy that have shown extremely little divergence from their source material compared to, say, how shooters evolved from Doom over the same time period, or RPGs from $early_90s_rpg?

How much nuance do I have to add before it's not controversial, or does everyone actually think that Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinkt are as distinct experiences as, I dunno, Planetside and Rainbow 6, or whatever?

I mean, Capcom vs SNK is a thing that exists. They took a bunch of Street Fighter characters and a bunch of King of Fighter characters and put them in a game together and I'm under the impression that the characters played roughly like they did in their source games; am I misinformed? Did people have a hard time envisioning how this would work?

And, Falc, again, I'm not suggesting anyone stop making Tekken, and I think you're really overstating the sports analogy. Dragon Ball FighterZ is a new game and had more entrants than any other at Evo 2018, beating out Street Fighter and both of Arc's other, established, series. They're also still hosting two different versions of Smash, so unless Evo is an outlier these days I'm finding it hard to buy the idea that the FGC isn't interested in new games or games like Smash.

Anyway, there's more to gamers than the FGC hardcore. I'd at least have expected a few more mediocre clones trying to capitalize on the fanservice/party game angle than the one lame Playstation thing we got. Not that I'm particularly sad about that part of it, but it is odd.

There were a few more Smash clones; one with TMNT, and another one with Cartoon Network characters.

There's a lot of fighting games that have tried something different but most of them didn't get large following or have long-term staying power. A few examples:

Bushido Blade: No health gauge. Attacks were mostly one-hit kills.
Power Stone: Up to 4 players in a 3D stage that you could freely move around in which also had power ups and traps.
Fantasy Strike: Came out last year. Like a traditional fighting game but with simplified controls.
ARMS: Up to 4 players. Behind-the-character view. Does not play like a traditional fighter.
Dissidia Final Fantasy NT: Looks terrible from videos I've seen but certainly not a normal fighting game.

Maybe newer stuff like Fantasy Strike and ARMS will catch on, but I don't really see them drawing in people who like traditional fighting games.

Since neither me nor any of my friends owned a console growing up, the closest thing we had to a fighting game was One Must Fall 2097. It does have most of the things in your list, but there were two things that sorta made it different:
- You could go with different pilots in the mechs with their own stats for speed/damage/resilience, so a Jaguar piloted by Ibrahim would work very differently than a Jaguar piloted by Cossette
- Most maps had environmental hazards: walls electrocuting robots thrown into them, occasional spikes coming out from the back of the arena, orbs you could hit to trigger a fireball under an enemy, etc.

I guess the question is: how much of that is considered innovation vs just small iterations on a well-known standard?

I still don't see where you've described what parts of Melee or Smash Bros in general you want to see in other fighting games.

It was buried deep in my first wall:
More generally, I want to see more tight, competitively-focused games that live close to, but outside of, the deep-but-narrow design space occupied by traditional fighters.

edit for Velorath: Bushido Blade is a good example of a game I liked a lot and found interesting; I don't remember if it was competitively viable though. There was a game called Blade Symphony a few years back that tried to take the concept and tune it for competition but I wasn't thrilled with the execution for some reason or another, maybe because it was in early access at the time.

Zetor: I don't think you need to draw a distinction between the two - a small feature can still be an innovation, just a small one. I wouldn't generally consider numbers tweaks and balance changes to be innovations, though even those can have transformative effects on design - setting everyone's health to 1, for example.

None of the things you mention are particularly interesting or innovative. But this tells me that you like them so much that what you want is more Smash clones.

It's like me and my known love for auctions in video and board games. I would put them anywhere and I feel they'd improve any game. For real, before any match, there should be a quick 30 seconds auction for character stats out of a pool. So every match is different!
In a sane world, there would be auctions in fighting games. Alas, we don't live in that world.

Haven't there been a few melee clones made? Rivals of Aether, Brawlhalla?

Hey Falc, I did a bad job framing the conversation from the beginning. I was trying to be provocative, it came out as the wrong kind of provocative, and I'm sorry for shitting on a thing that you and others feel strongly about.

The auction idea is legitimately interesting to me and is the sort of thing I like to see come up in chats about game design, so whatever your intentions were with this post, thanks for sharing it.

Don't get Falc started on auctions. He's biased.

Yes, I definitely took the bait. I am sorry for taking it too seriously, I am just glad with where the fighting scene is and how strongly tied it is to its roots while at the same time always offering new games and ideas for everyone. Nothing scares me more than something (like Smash, but not only) eventually wiping out its core rules and transforming it into something completely different.

Different strokes and such. I look at those Tekkan and MK videos are see boring trash.

(https://i.imgur.com/DNzh2Uy.png)

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos wins 2002 in the least exciting discussion we've had yet. 2003 isn't much better.

BF1942 was a top 3 game I ever played. Up until then FPS games had been mostly quake/duke nukem style so it was very fresh with the large open maps, 64 player servers, advanced physics, and all the very fun vehicles.

(https://i.imgur.com/BkhwI4g.png)

The last dog awful year has passed us. Congratulations KOTOR, for uh, whatever you did for gaming.

KotOR was decent, but elevated by the state of the Star Wars franchise in 2003, it was the best thing since Empire. That counts.

(https://i.imgur.com/eZKO5LK.png)

For a good long while I was worried WoW would take it in a year that could only be described as an absolute unit. Maybe one of the five best years in the history of gaming. To have a plain jane diku take it because penetration or something is just depressing.

Wake up Mr. Windrunner, wake up and smell the ashes.

Now we never need to talk about MMOGs again.

Not that HL2 should not have won, but I have a special place in my heart for Far Cry.  Partly because of the sweet graphics and the countless hours I spent trying to upgrade and optimise using it as a bench.  But honestly, the weapons mechanics were terrific.

And KOTOR2 came out the year after KOTOR?  Crazypants.

Quite a year for games.

KOTOR was Bioware and KOTOR2 was Obsidian so there was a bit of overlap in that early work on KOTOR2 started before the original released. Also KOTOR2 got rushed out early and had a bunch of stuff cut from it.

VTM-Bloodlines: I still go back and play it from time to time. Plus one of the greatest soundtracks in gaming history. God do I love that game, despite all its bugs and jankiness.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant  :yahoo: Best JRPG that no one ever played. Probably my favorite game of all time. And it has to go up against one of my other favs in VTM: Bloodlines. The first Shadow Hearts was near FF7 quality, although the combat system and story are far better. The second improves in every way possible and dials up the weird Japanese humor to Persona levels.

I would give up a toe for an HD remaster.

Shadow Hearts Covenant was a gem. The old man collecting porno magazines was weird though.

Perfect, you mean perfect.

The only part of Covenant that was weaker than the first was the first area. SH starts dark af. Covenant less so.

A PS4 remaster of the series would be a dream. Or even a new one.

Yeah, I know, which is why I didn't say "no wonder it was so buggy".  It simply hadn't occurred to me that they were so close.  Still great games, I still occasionally take one or the other for a spin.  I think the gameplay and style holds up just fine...I wish they would make another one with nothing more than a graphical overhaul.

I replay it every few years as well. The haunted hotel level was the first time I remember a game honestly scaring me. The way that they made the different clans, especially the Malkavian and Nosferatu clans play so differently still impresses me.

(https://i.imgur.com/ZBAuVIB.png)

This is a fucking embarrassment to gaming. Many apologies to Fumito Ueda, Shinji Mikami, and Hiroyuki Kobayashi.

What’s the purple octopus head?

Dark Corners of the Earth.

(https://i.imgur.com/RYyw9UO.png)

2006, the year of Diablo 2.1.5.

Huh, GH2 was winning at 6 votes last time I looked.  But yeah, TQ was fun.

(https://i.imgur.com/K4ad0rd.png)

(っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ You're not a good person. You know that, right? Good people don't end up here. Can you hear me? ♥

The winner of 2007 is the... well, it's kinda the Orange Box. But yeah, Portal.

(https://i.imgur.com/43VSF5a.png)

lol

i think i'm the only person who plays games here

beeg American teetees

I present to you, 2009. The only year that mattered. To me, at least.

(https://i.imgur.com/rP06ij0.png)

I made some threats around Demon's Souls losing, but they were ignored. People played the odds I wouldn't follow through. Now we'll never know.

Dark Soul's is the better game :awesome_for_real:

no

so many nadir years

(https://i.imgur.com/0sPLmas.png)

New Vegas takes it and it's not even really close.

This is likely the last we'll see of Mass Effect since Origin came out.

12 to 10 is pretty close.

We wont see anymore Mass Effect because this is where the series ended.   :awesome_for_real:

Even I agree with New Vegas for that one.

Wasn't ME3 the one with the good multiplayer? As someone who completely shuns multiplayer, I liked it. I'm not saying it's Best Game for its year, but it's not automatically out of contention.

Yes, ME3 had a super-fun horde mode.

(https://i.imgur.com/Kxnzj4N.png)

So I let this one run long to see if Minecraft would somehow sneak into a win even though I didn't give a shit about the results of 2011. Turns out it wasn't even a race between Minecraft and anything else. It was Portal 2 and Skyrim to the end. Wild.

Minecraft didn't surprise me because none of us was ten when it came out. I'm more surprised that Dark Souls ranks so low. Even though Schild has been leading the witnesses here a bit.

It wasn't a marquee year though going by the list.

Minecraft had a pretty big following here even back when it was still in beta/early access.

Demon's Souls was the best Souls game. The other Souls games have been varying degrees of good but not to the extent of any of us pushing for them for GOTY. I don't know that schild has even finished any game in the series other than Demon's Souls.

nope not even a little close to finishing any besides demon's souls, which I finished X times where X is a number I don't remember

I think I've played more Minecraft with f13ers than any other game. Except maybe 2013's winner. Ahem.

(https://i.imgur.com/GHgCNvs.png)

you idiots, you fools

kidding, if PoE wants to win this year, so be it, king of trash mountain

We had various f13 minecraft servers for years. It's been kind of a big deal.

Rocksmith 2014 deserves a vote from me, they fixed the latency issues of the original and cleaned up a lot of UI stuff. It's basically a band if you don't want to play adult musician babysitter sim irl.

(https://i.imgur.com/NEO7ioA.png)

Well. The dragon takes it.

wildcard entry shadowrun: dragonfall has knocked out 2014

who knew people cared about that game

I did.  :why_so_serious: That game was fucking awesome.

(https://i.imgur.com/cSDN4Dx.png)

2015 was not, as they say, lit.

Witcher III took it.

MGS V was good once you got past the initial awkwardness.

Weird to see Soma get that many votes. I don't remember much being said about it once it released.

Witcher 3 is still a solid winner. Fantastic game.

(https://i.imgur.com/7IsG6Po.png)

Hex would've been a clean sweep if Cory Jones wasn't a big poopyfaced assbag.

But for real, this is a fine victory even though Firewatch was better.

(https://i.imgur.com/hLC4Smc.png)

Persona 5 took 2017 and it wasn't even close.

Uh, k.

Yikes, I played one game on that entire list, and it wasn't very good. Guess that's what happens when you don't own a PS4 or Nintendo device.

It was clearly the best game of the year, so that shouldn't be a surprise.

If you'll note, I didn't even vote.

This is where things stand:

1985: Oregon Trail (Apple IIE)
1986: Bubble Bobble (Arcade)
1987: Mike Tyson's Punch Out!! (NES)
1988: Zelda II: Adventures of Link (NES)
1989: Mega Man 2 (NES)
1990: Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES)
1991: Final Fantasy IV / II (SNES)
1992: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES)
1993: Doom (PC)
1994: Final Fantasy VI / III (SNES)
1995: Earthbound / Mother (SNES)
1996: Diablo (PC)
1997: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PSX)
1998: Final Fantasy: Tactics (PSX)
1999: Planescape: Torment (PC)
2000: Diablo 2 (PC)
2001: Grand Theft Auto III (PS2)
2002: Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (PC)
2003: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (PC)
2004: Half-Life 2 (PC)
2005: Civilization 4 (PC)
2006: Titan Quest (PC)
2007: Portal (PC)
2008: Mount & Blade (PC)
2009: Demon's Souls (PS3)
2010: Fallout: New Vegas (PC)
2011: Portal 2 (PC)
2012: Borderlands 2 (PC)
2013: Path of Exile (PC)
2014: Shadow Run: Dragon Fall (PC)
2015: The Witcher III (PC)
2016: Darkest Dungeon (PC)
2017: Persona 5 (PS4)
2018:
2019: Slay the Spire (PC)

Anyone know of a site i can make brackets on that allow voting via bracket? Thanks.

also, slay the spire is winning 2019 don't @ me

I even like Zelda II but it is a crazy outlier on this list once you see them all at once.  Does this mean 1988 was the worst year for video games?

Zelda II was a good game winning a weak year. 2013 had a not good game winning a weak year. 2005 had an ok but not even close to being the best game beat a much better game.

2005 is a fucking embarassment

Good point, POE is terrible, but at least it has the virtue of being a coherent and focused realization of its deranged and miserable vision of what a video-game should be. Zelda II is good, but it's kind of a mishmash. 

Tried three times now to play Shadow of Colossus, and it just can't hold my attention.  Killed the first 4 bosses, and its just not a very fun game.  Does the entire world and game play change drastically at some point?

And Zelda II probably only made it because it was a weak year, but the game is legit.  I just loaded it back up on my NES classic after that poll and couldn't stop playing till I beat it.

this post is a rollercoaster

Figured you'd like the contrast.   :awesome_for_real:

So what you're saying is that I should eventually try Persona 5.  I consider BotW to be a unique accomplishment and a standout, and yet it came in second place or something.  Interesting.

And something called Slay the Spire for 2019.  Seems pre-mature, but that may be because I literally have no idea what that is.

A lot of us played Slay the Spire a ton last year but it's "official" release wasn't until January of this year. If you were in Discord you'd have heard us talk about it more (there was a small thread here though). Never played Persona 5 but I'm pretty sure BotW is the better game. BotW is on the WiiU and Switch though which means less people here played it. As you can see by the results, for the purposes of these polls PC > Playstation> Any other post-SNES consoles. Hence Civ IV beating Resident Evil 4 (which launched on the GameCube).

Yeah, I think I have stated before that there is a bit of a bias towards PC titles winning where out in the "real world" most people wouldn't even know what they are.  But that's okay.  I doubt P5 would be considered the better game by most of the planet, but I suppose that is not the point of all this.  What is the point of all this?

Wow, just noticed that. So the worst iteration of Civ is the only one that somehow made our list. That year must have been horrible.

It won because of the Fall from Heaven mod.   :awesome_for_real:

Hey thats my gag (and it's true, jokes on you if you didn't play it)

Anyway, Horizon Zero Dawn was pretty amazing on a couple levels, so I'm also almost interested in P5 except for how everything about it is repulsive.

As the main contest is winding down now, thought it would be interesting to look back and see what all the 2nd place winners were for each year.  We had a lot of really hard fought years where games won by only 1 or 2 votes, and when everybody was really into this for the first half, several years that had to jump to new tie breaker votes.  As obviously we can't force tie breakers on 2nd place winners, there are a bunch of ties (and in some cases 3 or 4 way ties) for certain years, so more games on this one.  Also, boy, 1999 to 2004 you can tell what what genre this sad community was deep into.   :why_so_serious:

Also, calling 2018 right now for Conan Exiles (so Deadcells gets 2nd) since everybody seems to have voted.  Unless Schild moves it to a tie breaker vote, that's it.  And of course handing 2019 to Slay the Spire since we can't vote on an incomplete year and its obviously better than anything else.  


1985:  Bard’s Tale (PC)
1986:  Rampage (Arcade)
1987:  NetHack (PC)
1988:  (Tie) – Phantasy Star, Pool of Radiance, Ghouls ‘N Ghosts
1989:  Sim City (PC)
1990:  (Tie) – Final Fantasy (NES), Smash TV (Arcade)
1991:  Street Fighter II (Arcade)
1992:  Wolfenstein 3D (PC)
1993:  SimCity 2000 (PC)
1994:  X-COM: UFO Defense (PC)
1995:  Chrono Trigger (SNES)
1996:  Civilization 2 (PC)
1997:  (Tie) – Fallout (PC), Final Fantasy VII (PSX)
1998:  Baldur’s Gate (PC)
1999:  (Tie) – Everquest (PC), Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (PC), Quake III (PC)
2000:  Deus Ex (PC)
2001:  Dark Age of Camelot (PC)
2002:  Battlefield 1942 (PC)
2003:  Star Wars: Galaxies (PC)
2004:  World of Warcraft (PC)
2005:  (Tie) - Guitar Hero (PS2), Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)
2006:  (Tie) – Gears of War, Guitar Hero II, Neverwinter Nights 2, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
2007:  Team Fortress 2 (PC)
2008:  (Tie) - Fallout 3 (Cross), Left 4 Dead (PC)
2009:  (Tie) – Dragon Age: Origins (Cross), League of Legends (PC)
2010:  Mass Effect 2 (Cross)
2011:  Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC)
2012:  X-Com: Enemy Unknown (PC)
2013:  Papers Please (PC)
2014:  Middle-Earth:  Shadows of Mordor
2015:  (Tie) – Bloodborne, Rocket League
2016:  (Tie) – Grim Dawn, XCom 2
2017:  (Tie) – Horizon: Zero Dawn, Player Unknown: Battlegrounds
2018:  Deadcells
2019:  Slay the Spire

Diablo 2 is maybe the only game in the history of gaming that can beat Deus Ex and not make me sad.

(https://i.imgur.com/7Cvk2nt.png)

I gave this year a long enough amount of time for people to buy Dead Cells and not vote like fools.

But here we are.

Conan Exiles.

We're an embarrassment.

1985: Oregon Trail (Apple IIE)
1986: Bubble Bobble (Arcade)
1987: Mike Tyson's Punch Out!! (NES)
1988: Zelda II: Adventures of Link (NES)
1989: Mega Man 2 (NES)
1990: Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES)
1991: Final Fantasy IV / II (SNES)
1992: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES)
1993: Doom (PC)
1994: Final Fantasy VI / III (SNES)
1995: Earthbound / Mother (SNES)
1996: Diablo (PC)
1997: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PSX)
1998: Final Fantasy: Tactics (PSX)
1999: Planescape: Torment (PC)
2000: Diablo 2 (PC)
2001: Grand Theft Auto III (PS2)
2002: Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (PC)
2003: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (PC)
2004: Half-Life 2 (PC)
2005: Civilization 4 (PC)
2006: Titan Quest (PC)
2007: Portal (PC)
2008: Mount & Blade (PC)
2009: Demon's Souls (PS3)
2010: Fallout: New Vegas (PC)
2011: Portal 2 (PC)
2012: Borderlands 2 (PC)
2013: Path of Exile (PC)
2014: Shadow Run: Dragon Fall (PC)
2015: The Witcher III (PC)
2016: Darkest Dungeon (PC)
2017: Persona 5 (PS4)
2018: Conan Exiles (PC)
2019: Slay the Spire (PC)

I have no idea how I want to narrow this down further. So we may move on to movies so you motherfuckers can vote even more poorly based on exposure and nostalgia rather than quality of film.

Meh.

1998 was perhaps the toughest year for me personally, but I cannot be upset with either of the top two games from that year winning - I've easily put hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into both games collectively.