whatchu playing now

Hey so does ILG have like a Hall of Fame/canon of games that are must-plays? The main reason I ask is that I'm pretty far behind the current gen and am not generally a Day 1 purchase or terribly on top of gaming news, and a list of games to get, regardless of release year, would be great.

If not, would there be any interest in doing a poll on like an annual basis? (This is ILX so I pretty much know the answer to that.) And to carry the HOF-style thing further, we could have a Veteran's Committee kind of thing where we could vote on a pool of 8- and 16-bit era games.

Oh hell yeah!

I don't want to take away from the P+C poll, though!

i would definitely contribute to such a list. would there be a starting date or particular systems bc video games have been around for a while now and no matter how far behind you are you probably don't need me to recommend sim city to you iykwim

i could contribute, i just got back on the single player game train last year with Switch though so i missed like a decade worth of probably good stuff myself

am still trying to recalibrate my tastes which have changed a fair amount since my last go-around

Mordy, that's a good point (as much fun as it would be to vote for the OG Mario Kart or GoldenEye), and that should be something that everyone who participates should decide. And also the console vs. mobile vs. PC question!

(TBH I want to be a one of those voters that keep throwing votes to no-hopers like Vagrant Story or Fear Effect.)

we polled the greatest games ever a while back and a) it was a lot of fun & b) would almost certainly look much different today. it's amazing how many classic games have come out since that poll.

I love p&c but my ever growing backlog means I'm playing more and more stuff years after release these days. So yep, this would be a good opportunity to rep for things I came to late.

i'd likely come back for this btw

:D

you should do that but also just come back anyway

Forks do u have a switch

Whatchu playing

time to create an ILG wiki lol

i play games on switch/PS4/iOS

currently playing Zelda (restarting again again), Captain Toad (fun with friends), Hollow Knight (stalled out), Undertale (cute but less overwhelming than i was led to believe), Dungeon Maker (total time waster), Guild of Dungeoneering (i think i hit the wall here)

If i had a buncha extra time, I would focus on zelda and go back to Persona 5 and Doom for ps4 (which i think i played a total of an hour apiece before getting distracted) and restart Metal Gear: Awesome

So what does everyone think about the following rules?

- To try to ensure that games have withstood the test of time, qualified nominees need to have been released 1 (too low?) calendar year prior to voting. Is one year too little?
- Sixth generation and after? Limiting to 7th+ would narrow the field too much I think. Though is the 6th gen canon already in place?
- Mobile games OK! (AKA the MPQ rule.)
- Because of its P2W shenanigans and timesink shamefulness, MPQ has been banned for life. (Nb this ban will be lifted if/when we start this thing, I just figured having a Pete Rose in all this would be fun.)
- I want to avoid too much overlap with P+C (which the waiting period also addresses), but also kind of think that having a list in place by Black Friday and/or Xmas would be useful -- so maybe an October voting/rollout period?

Oh and

- Induction requires that a game be present on some percent (75%?) of total ballots received in a given year.

I think this poll would benefit from some limitations. Getting rid of mobile games might help with that.

oh hi! if the "6th gen canon" question is related to these things i did, we never hit gen6... only 3 and 4:

Console Game Poll vol. 1 - Third Generation console games (NES, Sega MS, Atari 7800, etc.)
Console Game Poll vol. 2 - Fourth generation console games (SNES, Genesis, NeoGeo, etc.)

I guess I skipped last year -- did 3rd-gen in 2015, 4th-gen in 2016, intended to do 5th-gen in 2017 but it ended up being a pretty wack year for me in general. would anybody be into it if I kept the series alive? Maybe 5th this year (PS1, N64, Saturn, etc), 6th in 2019 (PS2, Cube, Xbox, etc), 7th in 2020 (PS3, 360, etc), and maybe the 8th will be done by 2021 lol. Could also throw in a "pre-3rd-gen" one in there or something.

(that said, I would beg someone--ANYONE--else to run P&C this year if I did it)

i would probably sit out the 5th and 6th gen ones as i don't feel like i have played a meaningful number of games from those, especially non Nintendo ones

also Nintendo has thoroughly fucked up the gen delineations now without even getting into how to classify PC games

or handhelds

Intent was always to keep it to consoles because it's a closed ecosystem. Nintendo has more or less been on the same release schedule as the other major gen consoles, even if the hardware is increasingly different (N64/Virtual Boy with gen 5, Cube/GBA gen 6, Wii/NDS gen 7, gets a little more confusing with gen 8 with Wii U/Switch/3DS)

i more or less treat the wikipedia articles on the generations as the authority, they're uncontroversial enough

Thinking about reinstalling diablows 3

by that taxonomy Nintendo's had 4 systems this gen since theres also 2 functionally different 3ds specs. fine by me i guess

by the time we're in the 9th, we might count the switch as a 9th! also two different versions of the 3ds are still 3dses to me (or even like 3 versions... 3ds, new 3ds, 2ds) -- it's all the same software in that bucket. not surprised nintendo would have a bunch in one gen tho, considering how quick they released and dumped the WiiU.

I'm willing to bet that console generations are almost over and the next Xboxes(!) will be backwards and forwards compatible with at least xbox 1 x. PlayStation I'm less confident in that bet.

So, consoles only.

What about a cutoff date instead of generation designation?

I voted for mpq

Wait wait wait are we confusing Will's generation polls with a ILG Hall of Fame?

wait, consoles only is crazy talk

I would definitely think that PC games would be in a Hall of Fame.

The idea raises some interesting question though, about whether fall of fame / must-play are actually the same.

Like, four that I would definitely propose off the bat would be Half-Life / Half-Life 2 / Portal / Portal 2 - but would someone who's been playing Far Cry 5 be able to play Half-Life without their eyes bleeding? Hasn't it been basically superseded (definitely graphically, but also in gameplay) by its sequel? Similarly I'd recommend nearly anyone to play Portal because it's like a great EP, but if you didn't play it, should you play Portal 2?

Do we have a thread about the weird thing about games where it's one of the few artforms where sequels are regularly as good as the originals?

we've had the debate a few times over the past few years, so here is the reason for consoles-only in these polls:

- consoles are closed systems, there's a soothingly finite number of possible nominations
- games made for the same hardware (or similar, competing hardware) are more interesting to compare to each other vs. "going by year" and having like a late ps2 game against an early ps3 game
- console games are, for a lot of years, really different from pc games. pc didn't have chrono trigger, console didn't have starcraft. if someone wants to poll computer games, go for it!
- likewise arcade games, generally -- home consoles and arcades might've had similar games but they in no way play the same without the arcade

Re gen polls vs. hall of fame: not confusing them, but if the HOF starts with 6th or 7th-gen inductees per the earlier comment, then it stands to reason the gen polls also need to keep going! and i was reminding people they existed because it's been a while.

i mean the entire "consoles" thing started with me ONLY polling ps2 a grip of years ago which was even more restrictive! but people were less bugged by that, somehow

console didn't have starcraft

The Diablo III on Switch news has been mentioning Starcraft for N64, a real thing that existed and I think I once knew about thanks to Nintendo Power but certainly never played.

gross, can you imagine playing that game on an n64? did the n64 even display sprites? or did they make 8-polygon marines to display in glorious 10.80p resolution?

i'd be more interested in a poll of PS2 to present than all-time since i feel like the canon becomes way less established once you get out of the 90s and we don't really need to know that mario world and chrono trigger are good for the millionth time

Yeah no, I mean that your "Intent was always to keep it to consoles" was followed by Leee's "So, consoles only" - I (and I think Dan) took it to mean that you were talking about your respective polls, which makes more sense for your than his, IMO.

FWIW I have no real strong feelings about limiting to consoles, but in the interest of avoiding vote splitting, we might have a nominations process.

what PC game would be in the hall of fame? excel? word? paint?!

there's plenty of good indie games that never made it to console, also entire genres like map games and rts that don't work without m+kb

all pro PC propaganda posts will be flagged

Voting for Crusader Kings should probably count as a vote for Excel

we can vote for roguelites but not roguelikes

anyway here's my hall of fame noms

Paper Mario
Super Smash Bros Melee
Tiny Wings
Golden Sun

golden sun was ahead of its time in having way more text than the average jrpg player wanted to read

I mean, the fucking idea of a hall of fame without Minesweeper

actual 0% chance that there wasn't a minesweeper clone on DS i don't even have to look

game poll that's just consoles is like a film poll that's just viewmaster

lots of GOAT/HOF PC games that technically got console ports, but the console versions just suck (every FPS, for example).