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

re: DOOM and NES games - - - - i feel like i must be explaining my unsolicited crackpot proposal badly, so let me just like lay it out in one place.

3rd Gen Poll: any games of any year for consoles including NES, Master System, other things maybe? any 'computer games' released in the years from 1983 (release of Famicom) to 1990 (release of Super Famicom) or, alternately, from 1985 (NES) to 1991 (SNES).

4th Gen Poll: any games of any year for consoles including SNES, Genesis, Turbo Grafx etc. years for 'computer games' run from 1990/91 (SNES release year of choice) to 1994 (PSX, Saturn).

obviously this involves crazy fudging, but most of that is inherent to the "generations" game. i mean the turbo grafx came out in 1989 but nobody bought one and that is obviously still prime NES years. ditto jaguar and 3DO for the fifth generation. i'm privileging Nintendo consoles as epoch-defining benchmarks in a way that probably isn't consistent or defensible. but something like that would be necessary IMO if the computer games are going to be matched up with the console games that are really of the same era and which have comparable ambitions.

this also puts the really archaic monochrome and CGA PC games, and most apple II stuff, up against atari 5200 (which feels fair) while letting, say, commodore 64 games really spread out and appear where they "should." like, the last ninja (1987) makes a lot of sense versus NES games, whereas, say, Choplifter (1982) is appropriately paired with the aforementioned apple ii/5200 stuff. just look at 'em! dunno if spectrum games show the same kind of progress.

i'll be heading back to my newspaper-filled basement now, excuse me

hell yeah Spectrum games came a long way from the early 80s to early 90s

tho the hardware was so limited that a lot of that journey feels in the head rather than on the screen. but something like Mike Singleton's Lords of Midnight is a staging post in PC game history imo

sopwith ruled

this era is too close to my heart with the NES; tough for me to even nominate. I think everything I love has already been mentioned anyway.

including PC really screws everything up because things advanced so rapidly at a certain point, especially past... '87? basically whenever VGA graphics came about

I didn't have an ega or vga system until 1993 so I know this era...differently

Yeah. I think I'll stick with the home consoles for this one, sorry. It makes the comparisons more valuable imo -- who did the best given these X number of closed platforms?

beyond time? timelapse? lol there were 893275932875239 of these and they all had ancient egyptian spaceships

hah, figures

the one I'm thinking was graphically less ornate than those, obviously a single bedroom coder affair, but tbh I'm probably best off transferring my nostalgic crush to one of those two, or not indulging it at all

xposts, broadly happy with the proposal though of course there are always going to be things which seem to fall on the wrong side of a divide. I think the VGA thing is fair as there weren't that many VGA games until about 1990 as far as I recall

it was a pretty big leap forward though, (probably) the last Spectrum game I bought was the terrible 1990 Monty Python game and I comforted myself that at least the PC version screenshots looked worse than the Spectrum. then soon afterwards Monkey Island, Wing Commander, Heart of China came out and looked (to me, at the time) amazing

Yeah. I think I'll stick with the home consoles for this one, sorry. It makes the comparisons more valuable imo -- who did the best given these X number of closed platforms?

― Bouncy Castlevania (Will M.), Monday, August 10, 2015 4:56 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, despite my arguing for the other way, i can 100% see that. the limited hardware of consoles really is such a beautiful study of constraints and design excellence (plus budgets of course) - like, seeing what capcom at their best did on the NES makes it sooooo shameless what lesser publishers were willing to dash out and charge actual money for. like lord of the rings versus a five-page xeroxed insert with a page missing. of course nobody here is actually going to vote for the real shit end of the NES range, but then comparing the greats and near-greats is just as interesting.

...I suspect nobody else was interested in my nostalgia tunnel but I think it may have been Entombed I was thinking of: http://www.abandonia.com/games/472/download/Entombed.htm

W PC gaming there are a number of events in the 80s that changed gaming forever. Win 95 is a good demarcation point in that prior versions ran alongside DOS so most gaming was done from within DOS rather than Windows. This is also the end of the floppy era I remember installing Win95 from like 40 3.5" disks. Games ran like crap in Win5 until the 3d accelerators came out and by then fate was sealed.

Uh I meant the 90s

Entombed looks right up my alley but as the Abandonia page says it's often hard to get games of that vintage running nicely on modern PCs

ha that looks neat a passing spacecadet. you weren't kidding about the reflective halls.

will let this thread re-rail but this was another worthwhile mystlike:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/34/Cosmology_of_Kyoto_cover.jpg

not really all that mystlike. v much for NV's brand of vr tourist. drift through, get suspicious looks from people, pet a dog, visit a brothel, meet a demon, die, come back as the dog, get attacked by other dogs, die, go to some punitive dimension, come back as the player again, standing somewhere different. a carefree and open-minded roger ebert called it "wonderful" in wired, back before he met gamers.

timelapse? lol there were 893275932875239 of these and they all had ancient egyptian spaceships

― playlists of pensive swift (difficult listening hour), Monday, August 10, 2015 4:10 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so otm btw

i've played Cosmology and it wd be totally me but for a non-game finding your way in is kinda tough>

i've never been sure there is a way in

v much for NV's brand of vr tourist. drift through, get suspicious looks from people, pet a dog, visit a brothel, meet a demon, die, come back as the dog, get attacked by other dogs, die, go to some punitive dimension, come back as the player again, standing somewhere different.

this sounds amazing, like the world I was sure existed in all adventure games if only I could find a way through the background scenery

also Timelapse is real pretty, suspect I'm not patient enough now but I would've loved it at the time

i like video games

i have nostalgic feelings towards some egyptian spaceships clicky thing though i have only the vaguest memories. entombed does look kinda familiar though. (what i do remember is that i started writing a novel based on it and this x-files book haha, i think i only wrote a couple of pages before abandoning it)

are you jorge luis borges

don't be ridiculous, borges' books were based on pacman

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tetris

let's not forget how he straight ripped off ken's labyrinth

Nice xp

I'm actively opposed to the idea of spending time and money on this pastime these days and I've never played a game on a PC and I haven't understood the last 50 posts itt but I was def a "gamer" cause I played a shitload of games from ms era to dreamcast era, I read that other poll thread when it got bumped & it made me proper nostalgic

I wonder how different it will be now from then, I noticed eg no "survival horror" on the 1st poll which is maybe surprising?

yeah i think eg the first resident evil is absolutely something that comes to mind when one thinks of ESSENTIAL PSONE MOMENTS IN GAMES but definitely not something that comes to mind when asked for goat

i think its context though, like if someone said "tell me the best games of all time, you get 100" i might forget RE, but if someone said "best PS1 game, you get 10" i might remember -- even though the former list might have 10+ games on it! like that RE game needs to be remembered in the context of the hardware or something. which i guess is why i like this poll concept. (it's going to be extra-cool when we get to PS vs. N64 vs. Saturn because it won't be as dominated by one console or another)

*10+ PS1 games on it

Dr. Mario
Little League Baseball: Championship Series

I think PS1/N64/Saturn will be pretty Sony-heavy if it goes beyond 20 or so!

I think that generation does suffer though from being a new explosion of new tech and new horizons - inevitably the stuff that comes later with more power does it better.

I have never played a PS1. I played a PS2 once for 10 minutes.

that poll will be weird for me.

Get u some Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII.

There are some pretty great PS1 games fwiw, dunno how well all of them have aged but I look forward to that poll in a big way (also a chance to rep for the half-dozen or so super all-time unbelievable classic N64 games).

BTW Will M., will there be a separate campaign thread once we have the noms together?

I played the shit out of some PS1. I co-owned a PS2 but I probably only played five or so games on an actual PS2 (although I've since played HD remakes and other PS3 ports). I basically just rode my PS1 hard from the late '90s all the way through the 2000s, in much the same way I'll probably still be stuck on PS3 by the time the PS5 rolls around.

I'm down with a campaign thread for sure! Although it'll be tough for me to actually play those campaigned-for games in September, personally, considering it's such a mammoth new release month in modern gaming :)

lol man when we start listing the big hitters of the psx/n64 era it's like, no, videogames had already started sucking by then ..

There have always been sucky games!

Man I wish I had a Nester-modded PSP right now.. !

Are the nominations drying up? I'd be willing to go to phase 2 early if so!

ohh hrrmm. i wonder. feel like i could easily be overlooking something really major and classic. but probably not?

also -

Ghostbusters

this is on for "worst" right???

Genesis:

Shinobi (1987)
Revenge of Shinobi (1989)
Shadow Dancer (1991)

xpost Wellllll...I cheated and nominated it even though I was technically nominating the C64 version, which I loved. I have no idea whether the NES or Genesis versions are worthwhile (although they do seem to be variations on the same game, from what I can tell).

Although I see the NES version has an amazing ending that I was denied:

CONGLATURATION !!!
YOU HAVE COMPLETED
A GREAT GAME.

AND PROOVED THE JUSTICE
OF OUR CULTURE.

NOW GO AND REST OUR

HEROES !

master system for this poll... genesis for the next poll!

Can you compile the nes list so far? I probably have more noms but this thread is hard to navigate for me (on zing)

Sorry, my mistake. Ghostbusters was released for NES and the Master System.

Ghostbusters for the NES is 100% terrible. I generally don't go out of my way to rep for the Angry Video Game Nerd, but IIRC his take on it does nail all the things I found totally dumb, un-fun and head-scratchy as a kid. "The Ghostbusters don't even own their own ghostbusting equipment."

I've got to properly set up this list with crossovers, so before you say a game is missing from x console make sure it isn't already listed for y console... this is the quick and dirty. also if you nominated something in the middle of a paragraph, i probably missed it and am sorry. (thanks forks for your initial re-listing, i used that too).

SEGA MASTER SYSTEM:
Action Fighter
Alex Kidd in Miracle World
alex kidd in shinobi world
Altered Beast
Batman Returns
columns
enduro racer
fantasy zone
Ghostbusters
Golden Axe Warrior
golvellius: valley of doom
James "Buster" Douglas Knockout Boxing
Kung Fu Kid
Mickey Mouse Castle Of Illusion
miracle warriors
operation wolf
Phantasy Star
psycho fox
rampage
rampart
Revenge of Shinobi
rocky
r-type
Shadow Dancer
shadow of the beast
Shinobi
smash tv
snail maze
sonic chaos
Space Harrier
speedball / speedball 2
spy vs spy
Spy vs. Spy
Super Monaco GP
teddy boy
TransBot
ultima iv
Wonder Boy in Monster World
Wonderboy III: The Dragon's Trap
ys
Zillion
Zillion II: The Tri Formation

ATARI 7800:
Dark Chambers
Desert Falcon
Xevious
Food Fight
Mario Bros.
Commando
Galaga
Donkey Kong Jr.
Tower Toppler