Console Game Poll vol. 3 - Vote for the best 5th Generation Console Games (PS1, Saturn, N64, Jaguar, GBC, etc.) here! (Ballot Deadline: November 8th)

I remember seeing a neogeo for sale as a kid and I think it was 500 quid in early 90s money or something like that

it existed! i played it! it was amazing at the time! minimal ghosting and clean bright colors!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8I-q98jApA

was i right that 3DO games were super expensive? or was that neo geo games?

Neo Geo games were stupid expensive. I think $250 a pop! They were essentially just standup cabinet boards. Mostly they seem to have retained or increased in value.
https://videogamecritic.com/neogeoinfo.htm

i think that was neo geo games! since they were basically like little arcade boards or something. 3do was just on a cd so i can't imagine them justifying charging that much (unless i'm mistaken)

but i definitely remember neo geo carts being like 100 or 200 bux new

xp i agree w/ forks

geez i really just typed everything forks typed just slower and less informatively lol

let's start a podcast!

hey, i think they were both informative. thanks for confirming!

haha another podcast that is just what the world needs right *hides messy binder labelled "podcast plans"*

cool your boots Neo Geo boyz

ok i love y'all but cool your boots you monsters

i never bought any 3DO games beyond the five that came with my hand-me-down (the four i mentioned and myst) so idk. famously of course the console itself was Stupid expensive.

obviously star control 2 was the highlight. in the 1990s, if you had described star control 2 to me, i would have immediately given you all the money i had (eight dollars).

i wish i'd had star control 2 at like age 13 with no other fresh games in my hand - just like a summer to completely sink into understanding it and exploring it. woulda been real satisfying and imagination-filling i think. but by the time i played it i was in my 20s, it was an abandonware type download, i got real into it for a couple weeks or something but never drilled in to get good at it or really get the plot to come together. sigh...

this generation has a weird divide for me in that way, cause the big N64 launch titles i got to know in the mid-90s thru one of those teenaged summers - my brother had an n64 and he was home between college and grad school, and he and my sister and I played a TON of mario kart and star fox multiplayer, just an absolute blast, some of our funnest times together. and on my own i had mario 64 to really tackle cause my brother had already played most of it i think.

whereas the playstation games i really know, i got to know like 3 or 4 or 5 years later - late high school and college. plenty of time for great attachments to form and i logged a LOT of SOTN, Soul Reaver and Tony Hawk time in the dorms. they're awesome and they'll rank high in my ballot. but my relationship to games was just very different already at 18 than it was at say 7 through 15. my fondness for Bust-A-Groove stems from one weekend closer to 16, spent at my out of state nerd buddy's place - playing that, watching Pulp Fiction for the first time, and also experiencing SOTN also, lol. havin a blast.

i'm kinda rambling here. there was still lots of great gaming and social gaming in my college years, and in bursts later on. but there's just nothing quite like being crazy into a console game (or anything) as a kid with free time, and the N64 is the last system i really encountered as an asterisk-free Kid

to be sure, SC2 has a huge amount of empty space in it and most of the actual button-pushing gameplay isn't what you would necessarily call fun. (i definitely played a lot of multiplayer "super melee!" with neighborhood kids and it ruled, or did once we'd agreed to outlaw the Chmrr, but fighting the twitchy deadeye AI for the right to not have to reload a save almost never ruled.) it's just a dialogue-based adventure game with a very slow interface, like a sierra that kills you even more. but the writing and character art is real joyous.

a sustained-exclusive-attention game though definitely. you need to take pages of notes. you need to draw a map of "quasi-space".

star fox 64 on the other hand will never stop being fun; it takes 45 minutes to play and you get to put your initials in at the end. that's what should run you neo geo prices.

fgti recently posted on the thread "favorite space game" about SC2:

The 5th Gen poll reminded me of the game Star Control 2 and I had a huge rush of long-unaccessed memories flood into my brain. It has to be in my top 5 of all time... the music, the melee, the genuinely funny plot, I still feel creepy feelings about the VUX (and the mysterious Androsynth genocide), the Druuge and their slave trade, and the bizarre Mycon.

My first play through was mildly stressful, watching the Pkunk try and reunite with the Yehat once, twice and then finally a third time and I was deprived of my favourite melee ship and had to restart

The second time was enormously stressful... I was a diligent miner and took my time until the Kzer-Za sphere of influence suddenly started waning and winked out and the Kohr-Ah began their cleansing-- again, a restart

I definitely needed a walkthrough and definitely used a "here are where the good planets are" guide... there are few games that have enthralled me as so deeply as this one

― flamboyant goon tie included, Saturday, October 24, 2020 2:28 PM bookmarkflaglink

for sure means something that this rhapsodic post describes being twice forced to restart many hours in. also that-- at least in the 3DO version-- the "here are where the good planets are" guide was in the back of the manual, as if it would have been indecent for even a 90s video game developer to try and charge you for that information.

i too still think about the androsynth.

(sorry it's "fave space games").

I have 9 ballots! It'd be very cool if we got to 20, no idea how many people are yet to vote... hoping to get them in the next week and change!

thanks for the reminder! i made a first pass last week, just culling the noms to things i might conceivably vote for....

i don't want to take any chances so i'll be hand-delivering my ballot on the 8th

(no i just need to give colony wars a try)

I will vote but not yet

same

i am distracted for some reason

no rush! just bumping it

I wanna rhapsodize more about SC2 but I'll do it in the Space Games thread

I intend to vote but keep reminding us on here

Bah I would type for hours about how eerie the disappearance of the Androsynth was, it's like having the Romulans suddenly go missing and there is no explanation

But yeah the thing I liked most about SC2 was the music. The game came out in 1992, when video game music was just making the transition from CMF (Adlib-created FM-synth polyphony) to MOD (digital lo-res sampling over four tracks). MODs were generally (at the time) confined to demos from the Finnish scene, but SC2 had an entire MOD score which was wild. MODs were such a revelation. The inventiveness of the composers of this music still blows my nerd heart to pieces:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlOxf9a2Eik

^ the composer of this track (18 years old in 1991) would later go on to form Poets Of The Fall, a Finnish band that apparently has six #1 albums in that country over the past twenty years

Yeah anyway the music for SC2, entirely created in this format, is just... great. It's great!

I'm probably more invested in this than the next one, despite having every major console from then that I didn't despise. I think it just hit me right - I moved up to the city and into a flat with three friends in late 1996, and we got a PlayStation because they were cool and could do cool things.

It's probably the last time in my life that I uncritically accepted something as So Cool (checks release date for Pulp Fiction - yeah, we're good). And of course it helped that it wasn't the first generation of games for it - we got Tekken 2, Crash Bandicoot, Final Fantasy VII, Tomb Raider, WipeOut 2097 (not just 100 years ahead, but 101! And licensed tunes! And Red Bull!). It genuinely felt like every month some new future of games was being opened up.

fgti otm about the sc2 music: the eerie interplanetary navigation, all that time spent groovin in hyperspace. the various alien species' motifs.

played some colony wars, v fun but caught in a hinterland i think, kept equidistant from the arcade splashiness of starfox64 (by the limitations of the ps1's grafix) and the hardcore shield-allocation joys of wing commander/xwing/tie fighter (by there just not being enough buttons on the controller lol). didn't play much tho.

got 12 ballots! also if there isn't some serious correction in late ballots this is going to be a CONTROVERSIAL list

(kinda hoping it stays challopsy tbh)

making a final pass at my ballot. top ten is sort of defensibly canonical, bottom twelve has a lot of what outside observers might view as seriously challopsy placements

VOTED!!!!!!! my warmup for tomorrow.

nice! you already did the hard one, good luck with tomorrow, the second most important ballot you will cast in november 2020

now i am trying to think of what videogames are the most normcore video games. maybe i should ask t1m r0gers on his patreon thing

― TRANCED INTO RADIOACTIVE PUREE (Will M.), Tuesday, October 20, 2020 3:58 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

important update -- this question will probably be coming up on an upcoming episode of the insert credit show lol

Nice job, dirtbag!

I mean, form and content it's probably The Sims, which is contemporaneous with this poll's era!

minecraft? tetris? pac man?

microsoft solitaire

minesweeper

candy crush or clash of clans

working years: windows solitaire
retirement: angry birds on a tablet, on the couch

my ballot is in the making and WILL make the deadline

Nice!

I've downloaded 300+ images and counting for this poll. Still haven't decided how I'm going to use them.

downsample them to low resolutions and map onto elementary polygonal characters popping out of an ethereal fog, surely

^^

you could also use them as part of a FMV that takes 45 seconds to load and 10 seconds to watch

i wish i could recall the exact moment such FMVs went from gorgeous, rare and delicious treasures to absolute annoyances. sort of a repeat of what previously happened with snippets of digitized speech in the late floppy-disk era.

i remember them still feeling special in Tomb Raider, and i'm pretty sure i knew a guy who taped all the Final Fantasy VII ones onto VHS to more easily appreciate them...