Console Game Poll vol. 1 - Vote for the best 3rd Generation Console Games (NES, Sega Master, Atari 7800) here! (Poll Deadline: October 13th)

Ballot coming together here! As always with these things it looks like a crazy person wrote it. Also looks nothing like the order I had these same games in in the big poll in 2008. Shifting memories/tastes with time, but also the inevitable "well, this isn't better than THIS..." item-by-item process moving stuff around.

Ballot in, and hopefully not too late... man, that was tough. Already feel like I could flip half of it around and feel just as good about that lineup. At a certain point, with only 20, it really has to be games I really would pick up and play RIGHT NOW and be totally happy with - had to let go a few things that I know are historically important or which really held my attention at the time. Still some narrative/importance feeding in to certain picks of course.

I tried to submit 16 weighted games and 20 unweighted games since that wasn't explicitly prevented by the rules. WillM wasn't having that. Here are the 16 I ended up cutting.

A Boy and His Blob (NES)
Adventures of Lolo (NES)
Batman (NES)
Battletoads (NES)
Castlevania (NES)
Contra (NES)
Ducktales (NES)
Ducktales 2 (NES)
Faxanadu (NES)
Kid Icarus (NES)
Kirby's Adventure (NES)
Metroid (NES)
River City Ransom (NES)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles I (NES)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II (NES)
The Legend of Zelda II (NES)

boy and his blob easily one of the most overhyped games of its era imho - at best an "ambitious failure." some of those other ones you have there are stone cold classics though. man, the results of this are going to be interesting.

I agree that the premise of ABahB is better than the actual game.

I sincerely hope that those who vote for games released on Genesis and master system are voting for the SMS version. Re karateka I'm sorry if a month of nominations wasn't long enough!

― Bouncy Castlevania (Will M.),

When I was looking at Sega entries I felt that I couldn't pick any Master System games if they came out on the Genesis at the exact same time unless they were significantly different than the Genesis version.

Ugh, naturally I thought the deadline was today. I can submit a ballot this morning if it isn't too late?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpVKPUoI554

http://s1.postimg.org/mgagou60v/test2.png

press x to PERCY

FIGHT
PRAISE
DUMP

i don't mind more ballots coming in today if you didn't get it done! i won't start posting results until next week anyway.

there are a couple of ppl i emailed back to get their ilx username--one of them i assume is doctor casino, not 100% sure who the other is? check your email and let me know, two people!

Looking forward to talking about the winners!

ballot sent

Thinking again about my ballot, feeling good about it. Felt like I really cut past a lot of the inherited wisdom I've built up in my mind, where Game X is groundbreaking and a classic and so on, but, come down to it, did I actually enjoy it in 1990? Or just grind headachingly against it because it's what I had to play? I think my twenty now look like a pretty good desert island collection and long story short, I am regretting selling off my NES a couple years ago when I was moving to NYC and figured that any and all downsizing was inherently justified.

I've never played any sms/famicom/atari 7800 games, and also haven't played any NES games since the heyday of emulation, so my recollection of all of this was pretty fuzzy.

xp emulation is your friend bro

yeah i know but just ain't the same. i wanna sit on the floor six feet from the TV with an awkward plastic rectangle in my hands and nowhere to be.

i'd just settle for having nowhere to go and nothing to do
fuck we are old now

Really wish I had played Ninja Golf as a kid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYEcJt9Auc8

No way I couldn't vote for the psychedelic Desert Falcon.

Hi all, I was planning on starting this today but due to insane workload it'll probably be later in the week. Don't worry, it'll still be this week :) I've got 5 days planned, I'm thinking it'll be wed-thu-fri, mon-tues or something.

Is it too late to vote?

If you can put in a ballot, like, today, I can count it. I'm going to start the images tonight, though, so it'll have to be soon.

sent

looking forward to this, will, and i think we all understand about workloads and stuff!

i say this in every poll (and may have already posted about it in one of these threads) but i always prefer a really slow rollout (like 1-2 entries a day) anyway. gives a chance to have a conversation about the games, less sense that you "missed" the whole conversation about something because you were at work. there may be some dud days where no one has much to say about a canonical game but ymmv.

We have well over 100 entries in this poll, so 1-2 a day would take months (and I am probably doing C&P 2015, so I'd prefer not to cross over)

Was reckoning 20-25 a day, but I could down that? Is your opinion popular or does everyone else prefer the faster speed?

i'm gonna have to dust off the ol' emulator for this rollout

can't wait!

i'd prefer slower as well (maybe on the order of 5 or 10/day) but you should do whatever's easiest for you. you're the pollmaster!

yeah i would always always defer to the pollmaster's wishes - it shouldn't become work or a burden (as we were just discussing on 'order and timing.') didn't realize it was going to be a 100-item countdown! must have been a good spread of votes, that's exciting. THAT SAID, i would always go for fewer per day. five i can manage. if i 'miss' a day, going back to join the conversation about 25 things is pretty hopeless, so i'll at best toss in selected ~hot takes~ on ones that jump out to me as important. but again, it's up to you and i may be in a severe minority anyway!

For selfish reasons, I'm fine with a quick rollout (always eager for the distraction of a hectic ILX thread while at work).

moreso than with almost anything else, my sense of accuracy and righteousness as regards my ironclad assessment of the truly great iconic NES games is unshakeable and likely different than yours.
basically if you are not down with kid icarus, shadowgate and adventures of lolo, gtfo

I watched a YouTube video last night on hidden NES gems. Have you actually played any of these? I'm 0 for 10.

Cowboy Kid
Kickle Cubicle
Rescue: The Embassy Mission
The Legend of Ghost Lion
Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom
Monster Party
Nightshade
North and South
Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth
The Krion Conquest

i played kickle cubicle, princess tomato, monster party and wurm

I played Rescue a little bit, but it was the Atari ST version which was called Hostage. It came in a four-pack of Infogrames games that my dad got when I was a kid. When my parents saw the content of the game (iirc there was sniping involved) they took it away and I didn't get to play it anymore. I was ok with this though because I thought it was scary & I still had Test Drive, Bubble Ghost and Operation Neptune.

Actually, Bubble Ghost gave me the creeps too. And Space Ace. Computer games scared me, apparently.

Test Drive didn't come in that four-pack... now I need to know what that fourth game was.

it was a remake of asteroids, and once i remembered, i typed the four games into google to see if there were any hits, and there was one: me introducing myself to ILG in a 2008 forks thread for ILG to introduce themselves to each other. weird.

Krion Conquest appears to be a clone of Mega Man, except Mega Man is a witch?

North and South is a pretty fun two player game. It's a quick strategy/action mashup.

Nightshade was quite strange but good looking when I watched a friend play it. It's a point and click game with some fighting elements (remember fighting in Indiana Jones And The Fate of Atlantis?). I like how NES games often combined genres. Usually it turned out for the best. I think the fighting was wonky in Nightshade though.

I read about Princess Tomato when I posted the edited Percy tomato picture upthread. It seems like this game might be a bit like Deja Vu which I finished playing a few days ago. (Good game, not top 20 for me though).

Other games I tested out on our nomination list included Strange Home which seems to be quite awesome. It plays like a top-down adventure/rpg in the style of resident evil. I remember watching a video review for that game and having your whole crew survive might be a bit random (unfortunately). Having just played Clock Tower for the SNES a few months ago, I understand what it's like to play through a game and discovering that I could have saved people if I had done one thing slightly different. Either way, I had save states and it wasn't much of a hassle to get alternate endings. Less-than-perfect endings were still enjoyable but I can't help feeling a bit defeated when I don't get a 100% ending.

i'd prefer slower as well (maybe on the order of 5 or 10/day) but you should do whatever's easiest for you. you're the pollmaster!

― 1998 ball boy (Karl Malone), Monday, October 19, 2015 2:02 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this sounds good to me.

Monster Party is pretty cool, not a ballot-maker but a cool overlooked platformer, kinda like Little Nemo or Astyanax in that sense. Higher production value, more concepts than your average title. Also basically all the dialogue rules:

http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/103583-monster-party-nes-screenshot-oooookay.png

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bb/Monster_Party_3.png

http://bogleech.com/monsterparty/mpbig-alreadydead.gif

Shadowgate IMO is kinda cool but basically irritating, far more irrational "puzzles" than the worst of Sierra.

for a kid with no PC until 2001, they were revelatory

oh man, thanks to archive.org my crappy seanbaby knockoff nintendo review page from 2000 is still viewable online, complete with images.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080905143743/http://www.ummagurau.com/writing/video/nesdisc/sg-mirror1.gif
https://web.archive.org/web/20080905143743/http://www.ummagurau.com/writing/video/nesdisc/sg-mirror2.gif
https://web.archive.org/web/20080905143743/http://www.ummagurau.com/writing/video/nesdisc/sg-mirror3.gif

^^^ pretty awesome i admit. this is what happens if you look at a well:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080905143743/http://www.ummagurau.com/writing/video/nesdisc/sg-well.gif

and what the hell, these are great/disturbing too:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080905143743/http://www.ummagurau.com/writing/video/nesdisc/sg-bluedragon.gif

https://web.archive.org/web/20080905143743/http://www.ummagurau.com/writing/video/nesdisc/sg-fountain.gif

https://web.archive.org/web/20080905143743/http://www.ummagurau.com/writing/video/nesdisc/sg-murder.gif

Here's a screen grab I just made from from Deja Vu.

This is what happens if you click -hit- on the unconscious woman you find in the trunk:

http://s11.postimg.org/40n7iyxwj/Deja_Vu2.png

ugggggggggggggggggh

let alone a larynx!

oi

so yeah i would have a preference for 5-10 a day not 20 a day but that's just me