The Third Annual Coint and Plick Poll: ILG’s Best Video Games of 2009 - Part One: #77 through #93

you know that PJ shooter is actually a video game and it's not just a euphemism for when you woke up this morning and discovered you took a whiz in your pyjamas... no wonder it left you cold tho

RF:G is way too low.

yeah i did not expect to be the only vote for that, thought people were pretty into it

lol I am guessing all of my votes were for super mainstream games since I do nothing but play WoW all day/night

also sorry in advance for pushing WoW:WotLK so high in the standings with my overinflated vote

i am thinking im going to get 5 of my 10 votes here at position 77. i already have 3!

#77: Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010 – Wii – 5 pts – 1 vote
Official Game Site

http://www.teamteabag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/tiger-woods-pga-tour-10-wii-040.jpg

Metacritic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWUdsy2kGUc

http://insideblog.easports.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/inside_5F00_ea/wmp2.bmp

Jeff LeVine: I've never played real golf, so I was surprised on my first playthrough with MotionPlus (using Tiger play now) that I ended up at only +5 through eighteen holes. It's cool that the MotionPlus makes you do a real swing motion and I think that makes the game a lot more fun than the ps2 and 360 versions I'd played the hell out of years ago, but it's also still pretty fake and a lot less "sim" than I would have thought. You still swing on a fixed plane and no matter what you can't completely miss or even really flub the swing. Since I'd never even swung a real golf club in my life, I expected to do pretty awful with 1:1 controls but after a couple of minutes, using Tiger of course, I could tee off for monster 320 yard drives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViNoY8DTBto

http://media.mlive.com/auto_impact/photo/tiger-woods-buick-enclavejpg-4ca36a74e9241abf.jpg

"I want to shed some light on why EA SPORTS has decided to continue with Tiger on the masthead of this game."

http://media.nj.com/golf/photo/tiger-woods-car-crash-ae8e58dccdeece13_large.jpg

ZS: I'm quickly getting a lot better and shooting even par instead of 15 over. Part of the improvement may come from buying better clubs but a lot of it is probably because this time I'm not drunk while I'm playing.

#77: Forza Motorsport 3 – 360 – 5 pts – 1 vote
Official Game Site

http://www.vgchartz.com/games/pics/8600222aaa.jpg

Metacritic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWXx4-gKi9M

JeffLevine: There’s so much content here that you could find new stuff to do for years. Sometimes Forza feels a little dry but overall it's just very solid, especially once they improved the online play.

http://www.vgchartz.com/games/pics/4655436aaa.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I58jmG5NnDc

Obsessive Suspension Tuning Calculator Spreadsheets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO6Yg4ovJIM

Eurogamer Interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd35dTTwKSM

Goole: This is fairly amazing. My initial reaction is that everything is one full step better that FM2: looks better, sounds better, drives better, the menu interface is better. All the details make more sense.

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2009/06/fm3lemans001_opt.jpg

#77: Critter Crunch – PSN – 5 pts – 1 vote
Official Game Site

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

Metacritic

http://dagger471.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/critter-crunch1.jpg

Jamescobo: You know who sucks? Anyone who doesn't buy Critter Crunch.

http://www.ps3blog.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/crittercrunchrainbowvomitamazing120509580.jpg

Capy Games Interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwVERt46-uM

#77: Need For Speed: Shift – 360 – 5 pts – 1 vote
Official Game Site

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD14zWvdATY

http://www.islandcrisis.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/need_for_speed.jpg

Ste: The steering is the best I've ever felt in any racing game, very responsive. I’m not sure if this is just an in-car-view thing, as i usually play external view on other racing games. The external view on Shift is a bit crap but who cares when the cockpit view is so damn fun. I loved Grid, but Shift is tons better.

Producer Interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EErfROk_r2c

JeffLevine: Looks like a sim but plays like an arcade game. Lots of fun and truly great presentation along with the best cockpit view in a game ever. My main disappointment was the absurd number of bugs that EA released this with. It took months to patch out.

http://www.slightlymadstudios.com/site_sms/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nfsshift413screentw3.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pd8ZPQL7LE

#77: DeathSmiles – 360 – 5 pts – 1 vote
Official Game Site

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/936/936211/deathsmiles-20081205022209484_640w.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcChaLM-QPs

JeffLevine: The second Cave shooter on my list. Would be higher if the superior Mushihimesama Futari hadn't come out in the same year. It probably has the most balanced difficulty curve of any Cave STG I've played.

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/kotaku/2008/10/deathsmiles_hd_01.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oabKnWro1Pk

#77: NHL 2010 – PS3 – 5 pts – 1 vote
Official Game Site

http://www.endsights.com/wp-admin/images/nhl09.jpg

Metacritic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l29B4HcfukE

EZ Snappin: Slight improvements - particularly board play - make this the most polished NHL game ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoXAKsd9Jm8

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/900/900404/nhl-09-20080820013913542_640w.jpg

#77: Droplitz - XBLA – 5 pts – 1 vote
Official Game Site

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NazO7L89CKw

http://images.quickblogcast.com/101455-94893/droplitz_screens_xbla_03.jpg

Metacritic

Will M: I figured that all of the good puzzle game ideas, just like all of the good books, had already been made so there was no room for any new, non-lame, non-derivative ones. Droplitz proved me wrong. Unfortunately, it's so addictive that it's prevented me from reading, so now I can't be sure that there are still good books.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn7ln_3eef8

http://images.quickblogcast.com/101455-94893/droplitz_screens_xbla_03.jpg

Gamasutra Post Mortem

Okay, that's it for the #77s. I'll start a new thread on Friday for 77-51. Until then, any thoughts on the poll thus far? Surprises? New games you'll want to check out?

Those Muramasa screenshots look great, but I kind of hated Odin Sphere.

I just realized - I thought the minimum # of points you could assign to a game was five?

Don't think I even realized Virtual On was ported - what a weird choice for 2009! Surprised they just didn't create a new downloadable game instead. Otherwise I'm not too surprised by the early results.

Also I totally forgot about the megathreadILXboardDEATH these posts cause lol

Yeah it was supposed to be a five point minimum, but I kinda gave up. I need to reinforce that rule next year. It would make my life a lot easier.

The new thread every 25 posts approach is explicitly to help alleviate the megathreadILXboardDEATH syndrome.

my main surprises were that ODST and Red Faction scored so low.

Yeah, totally for the best. It's funny to see Site New Answers completely freak out!

I was a little surprised at RFG being so under the radar in general when it came out, but I think that franchise has lost it's buzz in the past couple of installments. Not surprised about ODST either for similar reasons, though obviously Halo is still huge - but nobody here really talked about it? Seemed kind of lukewarm on the internet, though for all I know it probably sold millions.

i think the initial "ODST will be a budget release" statements falling by the wayside and it going out at $60 def hurt its impact, also how much more goddamn halo do we all need really?

oops i thought red faction guerilla was just the dlc add on thing

man this is some loooooong tail shit

"loooooong tail"?

Surprised to see Forza already. And NFS Shift, for that matter. I seem to remember quite a lot of us playing and enjoying one or both of them, according to the individual threads.

Yup, that's what I was thinking reading the latest bunch, didn't expect to see Forza 3 so low, and with only one vote. I mean, I've not played it and didn't vote but I thought it would be higher.

In other news I bought 50 Cent Blood on the Sand and think it deserved more than one vote. It handles a little clunky compared to others in the genre like Gears of War, but something about it feels solidly arcade-shooter, like when I used to play Devastators at the arcade as a kid. It's pretty good fun.

So far there are a couple of games I haven't even heard of (pixeljunk shooter, critter crunch, death smiles) that I'm interested to check out now too...

"loooooong tail"?

― forksclovetofu, Thursday, January 28, 2010 1:05 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

The Long Tail or long tail is a retailing concept describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities.

i.e. you coulda set a score cutoff so that shit that gets one vote doesn't show in the results.

Ah, but part of the fun of this is seeing those danglers that you probably hadn't heard of or completely forgot about.

i understand the concept, just didn't see how it applies.
and yes, the idea is to try to have a yearly representation of all the games we play

lady if u have to ask

that's what the show your ballots aftermath is for. xposts its your show, bro. just making suggestions

eh, i like having a concordance

Eh, I don't that show your ballots stuff afterward, I mean we had thirty votes here. Also easier to talk about this way, before we get to the heavy hitters.

In unrelated news, this thread is the first real test I've had to see the difference in heavy page loading between Firefox and Chrome, and wow. Immense. I'm just keeping a tab open in Chrome for this now.

which did u vote for

I'm also thinking of the last poll thread I was in, that '00s TV thread, where after the results were done it totally devolved into people just listing their votes and stopped being fun or readable.

i think the thing neogaf does well (i know, i know) is present a thread with a ton of back information on games so you can see/read/hear everything about them before you take the plunge. I'm not saying we need to do a lot more of that, but a once a year taking-of-stock seems appropriate. As I said, more than an arbitrary THESE ARE _YOUR_ TOP TEN list, I like the idea of coint and plick as a 365 day signpost for a state of the hobby/art panorama. Constricting that in any way strikes me as not serving the final purpose.
Also: aspies

i dig getting the one vote stuff! i mean theres a shit ton of stuff released every year and im willing to sift out stuff on the basis of one vote rather than by metacritic score

plus then i know who to angrily shake my fist at if it sucks

yeah, including the one vote things, in a poll this small, is great!

you are all wrong and stupid

Fuck tha haters, Forks. It's good reading through all the stuff about games that (in many cases) didn't even occur to me. Plus, y'know, every vote means something. Also with it being split over a few threads, if you aren't interested in the 1-voters; wait for the next thread(s) before getting all butt hurt that we're not at the top ten yet.

looking forward (srsly) to the logjam of 10 point single vote getters

The Third Annual Coint and Plick Poll: ILG’s Best Video Games of 2009 - Part Two: #52 through #75