Home Game Poll vol. 2 (c. 1988-1997): Nominate the best 4th Generation (SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis, etc console games ever) - Nom deadline: August 2

Previously, on ILX Home Game polls:
Third-generation console nominations
Results

This is the nomination thread for this year's ILX video game poll, this time covering fourth-generation consoles. This generation includes:
- Super Famicom/Super Nintendo
- Sega Mega Drive/Sega Genesis
- PC Engine/TurboGrafx 16
- Neo Geo
- Game Boy
- Game Gear
- additional weirdo consoles like CDTV, CD-i, LaserActive, Neo Geo CD, Atari Lynx, and NEC TurboExpress (per this article

This generation is often called the "16-bit generation" (although some microprocessors weren't actually 16-bit), and brought us thousands of colors and far more instruments for music and sound effects. It also brought the handheld revolution (which is going to make this a VERY interesting poll).

Let's start the nomination process now. In a little under a month, we'll start the balloting process.

ILX does what Kotakan't.

SNES:

Super Mario World
Donkey Kong Country
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Chrono Trigger
Pilotwings
Secret of Mana
NBA Jam
The Lost Vikings
ActRaiser
ActRaiser 2
Aladdin

Sweeeeeet.

Genesis:
Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse
Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins

Gameboy:
Kirby's Dream Land
Sword of Vermilion

Oh, whoops, I totally fucked that up.

Genesis:
Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse
Sword of Vermilion

Gameboy:
Kirby's Dream Land
Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins

SNES

Earthbound
Final Fantasy VI
Super Metroid

GB
Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

SNES

Contra 3: The Alien Wars
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
Super Mario Kart

Genesis:

Shining Force
Shining Force 2
Crusader of Centy (aka Soleil) - this rules btw
ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkatron

Early housekeeping note:

For the most part, if a game is on both SNES and Genesis (or, in some cases, Neo Geo) I will treat them as one entry. So no need to nominate, e.g. Mortal Kombat for Gen and SNES separately. If there are exceptions, let me know (e.g. NHL games are apparently different enough, and Shadowrun was actually two entirely different games)

However, Game Boy/SNES games are largely different enough that they'll be separate. I can't really think of any exceptions to this, but if there is one let me know in here.

I'll post a Google spreadsheet shortly that I'll try to keep up-to-date.

Earthworm Jim (multiple platforms)

Ecco the Dolphin (Genesis)

SNES

Terranigma
StarFox

Spreadsheet

Should be view-only, nominations should be put in this thread.

lol you might want to just snip my comment at the end of Crusader of Centy and i promise not to do it again

oops, haha

ows beat me to the Terranigma punch

TurboGrafx-16:
Military Madness
Bonk's Adventure

SNES:
Cannon Fodder

SNES:
Bahamut Lagoon
Donkey Kong Country 2
Donkey Kong Country 3
E.V.O. The Search for Eden
Final Fantasy IV (II)
Harvest Moon
Illusion of Gaia
Mortal Kombat 2
NBA Jam Tournament Edition
Rock n Roll Racing
Secret of Evermore
Super Street Fighter II
Super Mario RPG
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
UN Squadron

Game Boy:
Tetris
Final Fantasy Legend
Super Mario Land
Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow

Genesis:
Subterrania

Aladdin SNES and Aladdin Genesis are two separate titles, right?

Flashback (multiple platforms)
Another World (multiple platforms)

Wonder Boy V: Monster World III (Genesis)

(I'd like to nominate Monster World IV because it's great but it was Japan-only in its original incarnation and I didn't play it until many years later.)

Aladdin SNES and Aladdin Genesis are two separate titles, right?

― a simba man (Will M.), Friday, July 8, 2016 9:53 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yup they were def different

PC Engine:
Castlevania: Rondo of Blood

Genesis:
Pyramid Magic (Mega Drive/Meganet)
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Sonic 3 + Knuckles
Castlevania: Bloodlines
Monster World IV

Game Gear:
Tails Adventure

SNES
Lemmings 2: The Tribes
Soul Blazer
Super Castlevania IV
SimCity
Mega Man X
Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting
Demon's Crest
Mega Man & Bass
Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts
Lufia II
Tetris Attack / Panel de Pon

SNES

F-Zero
Blackthorne/Blackhawk

someone tell lamp to get in on this one

Dragon Quest V (Super Famicom)
Snatcher (PC Engine and Sega CD)

SNES:

Cybernator/Assault Suits Valken
Front Mission
Mystical Ninja/Ganbara Goemon 1 & 2
Zombies ate my neighbors
Super Punchout
Super Bomberman

SNES

Breath of Fire
Breath of Fire 2

SNES:

Uniracers

genesis -
Sonic The Hedgehog
Gunstar Heroes
Dynamite Headdy
Road Rash
Skitchin'
Saturday Night Slam Masters
ToeJam & Earl

i'm not nominating it (though any of you are welcome to), but today I learned there was a Genesis release called Toki: Going Ape Spit

SNES:

Super Double Dragon
Hebereke's Popoon
Pop'n Twinbee
The Lost Vikings
Pocky and Rocky
Chaos Engine
Cannon fodder

just remembered chaos engine (from 1993) has a steampunk setting lol

Not mentioned yet:

SNES:
Plok!
Pocky and Rocky 2
Super R-Type
Darius Twin
Gradius 3
King Arthur's World
Sparkster

GameBoy:
Kwirk!

Genesis:
Aero the Acrobat
Splatterhouse
Zombies Ate My Neighbors
Cosmic Spacehead

Megadrive:
Thunderforce IV

and Psycho Pinball!

Genesis:
Beyond Oasis/The Story of Thor
Haunting (Starring Polterguy)
General Chaos

oh man i totally forgot about the haunting! i had so much fun w that game

Dude, I just realized Beyond Oasis is on the PS3 Genesis collection. Looks badass. How have I never played that?

I almost forgot about Haunting too, had to wrack my brain a little to come up with some gems that hadn't already been nominated, wild game though, very interesting mechanics, funny that they thought to add the "Starring Polterguy" to the title, high hopes I guess? In a perfect world Polterguy achieves Sonic-level mascot stardom and the critically acclaimed Haunting series continues to this day

And Beyond Oasis is great! Second best Zelda-ish Genesis title (after Crusader of Centy) for me, really like the "elemental buddies" you get to collect and utilize throughout

Had to throw in General Chaos because the 2P is so good, best I can think of on the Genesis besides Toe Jam & Earl and maybe Zombies Ate My Neighbors

Megadrive:
Sonic The Hedgehog
Flashback
Xenon 2: Megablast

Gameboy:
Tetris

SNES:
Star Fox
Super Bomberman

Neo Geo : Metal Slug!

Snes :
Super Star Wars
Super Puyo Puyo
Cool Spot
Tiny toons adventures
Micro machines
Shadowrun

Mega drive :

Desert strike
Jungle strike
NHL 96

lol i told my brother i was looking for nominations for a poll about snes generation games and he reminded me about the super play 100, best 100 snes games as ranked by a british magazine we used to read as the kids in the 90s. my nominations are almost exclusively on that top 100: http://www.rvgfanatic.com/7464/1450199.html

thats a pretty reasonable list w/ some killer deep cuts. i briefly scanned the list so far and there's lots of obvious stuff missing (most of it on that rvg fanatic list) but id nominate:

SNES:

Aerobiz
Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon: Another Story (Angel)
Chester Cheetah: Too Cool to Fool
ClayFighter: Tournament Edition
Final Fantasy V
Fire Emblem: Thracia 776
Harvest Moon
Mario Paint
NHL 96
Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen
Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire
Soul Blazer
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together
Yoshi's Safari
Ys III: Wanderers from Ys

Sega:

Dune: The Battle for Arrakis
Langrisser II
Lemmings
Nobunaga's Ambition
Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium

not sure if i read super play regularly but nevertheless reading through that list is giving me pangs of nostalgia for that distinctive nerdy '90s gaming writing style

Yeah that's a definite style that existed in various publications. Super play was my brother and i's favourite because of their love for Japanese games and Squaresoft in particular.

the previous resident of my previous apartment had a subscription to game informer that he never had redirected, paged thru a couple of them and it wasn't very much fun! very serious business these newfangled videogames

Playing Chrono Trigger for the first time. Apparently you can drop a giant frog on your enemies? I'm in.

Here's the IGN SNES list fwiw

https://thegamecrisis.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/top-100-snes-games-ign.pdf

Reading each issue front to back... laughing at the silly captions, their infamous sense of humor (hey, where do you think I got the [blah blah -Ed.] stuff from?) [Super Play did it better -Ed.], eating up their blow-out reviews and reveling in their unique presentation top to bottom.

This was a p. common device in late 80s/early 90s UK gaming mags (RIP Your Sinclair) but I guess they got it from Smash Hits who borrowed it from Private Eye and ran with it? Definitely it was a very Smash Hitsy thing even back to the early 80s. This is rather hard to google but I feel sure that if anyone knows it is someone on ILX or in the early-ILX diaspora.

Oh uh games. I was mainly not a console person at this time, although I was v jealous of a friend's Game Gear and did finally get a Megadrive Genesis from a car boot sale many years later and then just played the games on emulators anyway, but this was my gaming era for sure so I'll be watching the results with interest.

EARTHBOUND (Nintendo) 88%
The fact that this is the only game on the SNES to feature a signpost advertising 'DRUGS'

Oh, that reminds me of the list of things Lucasarts had to take out of Maniac Mansion before Nintendo would let them publish it on the NES...
http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html

(sorry, really off-topic now and I promise I'm not going to comment on every single entry in the Super Play top 100)

SNES:
Kirby Super Star a.k.a. Kirby's Fun Pack
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time
Umihara Kawase

Genesis:
Kid Chameleon

also tom i already nominated langrisser although it is in fact good enough to be nominated twice

― ( ^_^) (Lamp), Tuesday, 12 July 2016 22:11 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm nominating the marginally different SNES version just so I can do a stunt ballot consisting solely of those two games

I've definitely come around to some of the "Sonic isn't all that good" critique, but then there's this thing of... but I played them, very enthusiastically! Counting Sonic CD, I sat in front of the TV for five games of the same basic mechanics (albeit with increasingly dazzling graphics and gimmicks). I think its kinda dull, let's call it "big sprite exploration platforming" hangs together better on some levels than others, and while gathering your rings back up after a hit is certainly annoying, it keeps you playing on through. Certainly if not for the marketing and the "high speed" setpieces, it would never have been a phenomenon, but they didn't just slap branding on a completely average 16-bit platformer. I think I'll end up just voting for Sonic 2, on the Mega Man principle that it's a huge improvement on the first one and none of the later ones really changed anything at all.

important references: the poochies of 90s platforming

i think i'm in the camp of 'sonic was unique + memorable but not v fun'

i have fond memories of sonic 3 + knuckles but i can well imagine its impressive vastness seeming like more of a slog if i were to play it again today

sonic 2, on the other hand, i can imagine holding up but feeling quite slight

SNES:

Kirby's Dream Course

Sonic 2 is probably the right amount of size and depth for a Sonic game imho, if Sonic 1 feels too short for you. IIRC I think S3&K introduces more "secrets" and stuff like that (unless I'm just straight imagining things), but the Chaos Emerald bonus-level quest kinda already gave me enough to work on (and throw my controller down in frustration when I JUST missed the cutoff on one of those racetracks - it's a very unforgiving approach that would never fly now).

Sonic 2 is great, and will definitely make my ballot. To my 12-year-old, cash-strapped self, the whole Sonic 3/Sonic & Knuckles thing seemed like a cash-grab, though reading through their wikipedia pages today indicates otherwise. It turned me against those games for some reason.

another: Star Ocean (SNES)

Sonic games always looked, sounded and felt great but generally controlled like ass unless you were really good.
kind of bad when you consider the main competition was Mario, but I appreciate them going for their own thing
Sonic 2 was the best of these imo

Genesis:

http://199.101.98.242/media/images/38140-Comix_Zone_(Europe)-1458995029.jpg
Comix Zone

SNES:

Joe & Mac
On the Ball
Out of This World
Super Adventure Island

surprised OOTW wasn't mentioned already, that game should place imo! (on the ball should also place, but won't)

has been mentioned but under its original title another world

well alternate title, I don't know which is original or whatevs.

oh, whoops! didn't see that. glad it's on there, at any rate.

it had an incredible atmosphere and filmic quality that is rare to find in games, even now.

Megadrive:

Landstalker

Game Boy:

Gargoyle's Quest

Forgot:

Vectorman (Genesis)

I think of myself as having played a lot of games in this gen but when I look at the snes list there's barely any games I remember, and they were all nommed in like the first ten posts here. basically I played a few 2 player competitive games and I played them SO MUCH but like none of the big RPGs people talk about, hardly any "weird" games, just, like 3000 hours of NBA Jam and Mortal Combat

To think you could have had so much more free time if instead of 3000h of NBA Jam + MK you had just played 1500h of Shaq Fu

hey Will:

is VIRTUAL BOY included in this poll?????

― ejemplo (crüt), Monday, July 11, 2016 9:44 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oops sorry thought i responded. no, it is 5th generation.

not convinced any virtual boy games would be competitive in any generation. i guess if it had been sent back through time to the mid-70s it would have impressed people, but so would Lunchables, FlexiBlocks, and the Big Mouth Billy Bass.

Haha true. Still it shall get its chance (just not this year)

Adding a couple while I'm thinking about it

(GB)
Metroid II: The Return of Samus
Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal
Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge
Mario's Picross
F1 Race
Qix
Baseball

Also I don't think anyone has done this yet, but just for the record, games released for Game Boy Color (and NOT compatible w/ regular game boy) shouldn't be included. They'll be in the portable-system-lean 5th gen. (GBA wasn't until 6th gen, apparently it came out AFTER the PS2! That surprises me for some reason)

Oh and (GB) Wave Race

Holy shit, this snuck up on me!

I'm realizing that, even though I owned two 4th gen systems, I must've only had ten or fewer games between the two of them. I guess that's called 'being eleven'.

you didn't borrow, rent, trade, sell, buy-used at all?

(no joke tho. some of the games i now "own" which are some of my most valuable ones were borrowed and never returned to ex-friends... oops)

ANYWAY. Last chance to nominate!

Have the itchy feeling something big is missing, but if I couldn't think of it before I doubt I'll think of it now. Looking forward to this!

Ken Griffey Jr Presents Major League Baseball
Battletoads in Battlemaniacs
Hagane
Super Turrican
Space Megaforce
Super Off Road
R-Type 3: The Third Lightning
Top Gear

Have the itchy feeling something big is missing, but if I couldn't think of it before I doubt I'll think of it now

im p sure there were some big-ish titles (street fighter turbo? one of the square rpgs?) missing that i assumed other ppl would get to that i didnt bother nominating in favor of making sure Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon: Another Story (Angel) got its deserved place on this list. if anything theres something very ilx abt us missing some obvious classic tho

as long as we have Legend of the Mystical Ninja on there, we're good

Goof Troop?

Had to check back minutes ago to make sure someone mentioned Road Rash, of course Will knows what's up.

But then what about

Road Rash II (Genesis)

i liked Road Rash II best of the series, definitely get it on there

ah yeah i was a fan of the goof troop game. think i got stuck at some point not very far in though :(

im p sure there were some big-ish titles (street fighter turbo? one of the square rpgs?) missing

good catch on turbo (hyper fighting was mentioned, not turbo). although i'm kind of curious how the vote splitting will work on that one. i only played turbo because i had a SNES, but wasn't it supposed to be slightly better than the sega version? or am i just remembering it that way because that's what i wanted to believe?

I mostly played "plain" SFII on SNES, because that was the one the neighbors had, and it ruled. IIRC some of the later editions had kinda weird-feeling control or just somehow were hard to transition to if you were used to the vanilla version. Was cool to be able to play as the bosses, and the new characters in "Super" were cool just to mix it up but you really don't actually need more than the basics here. I'll vote for Turbo if that's the one in the nominations, but adding more to the mix would be wrong IMHO - too little difference between them for it to do anything besides split the vote.

you didn't borrow, rent, trade, sell, buy-used at all?you didn't borrow, rent, trade, sell, buy-used at all?

Not 4th gen, I don't think. I remember playing a ton of NES at other people's houses but I maybe only knew one guy with an SNES. Played Super ESB for an hour or so. He also had one of the weird CD systems, which is where I first played Another World. Otherwise, yeah...pretty much stuck with the handful of 4th gen games I owned. But I played the shit out of some of them (Super Mario Land 2, Kirby, Sword of Vermilion).

Turbo easily the best out of the SFII ports. Speed was adjustable, more characters and moves, better balance. Super and Alpha 2 were bogged down by the hardware not be able to hack it.

SFII Turbo = Hyper Fighting, I think. Due to the similarity of the titles, I'm going to lump SF2, SF2 CE, and SF2T into one entry, and the other entry will be Super SFII.

I've also added Goof Troop, Road Rash II, and I really want to know what the classic is that we've overlooked, lamp!

I think I'd be inclined to vote for vanilla II.

street fighter i mean

Good call on the lumping-together, it makes sense for this title. Even "Super" I think could basically go in there. I for one am just going to vote vanilla. One of the rare arcade ports that really feels like an essential title for a system.

more snes noms

wild guns
sunset riders
knights of the round
super smash tv

added em. I also added a couple others but I accidentally deleted the list of stuff I added, and sorted, so I forget already. Mostly sequels.

i did love super smash tv
GOOD LUCK
YER GONNA NEED IT

YEEEERRRRRR

i never played wild guns or sunset riders but they were both heavily recommended by a friend of mine, back in the day.

Console Game Poll vol. 2 - Vote for the best 4th Generation Console Games (SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, etc) here! (Ballot Deadline: August 26th)