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

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...

honestly, i think for me that moment was somewhere in the middle of playing FFVII, the first time around. at school my friends would be like "have you seen the freaking knights of the round summon???", and even though i hadn't seen it yet, i knew that i'd end up seeing one trillion times and would get sick of it

lol yeah that's so indulgent and ridiculous. not on my friend's tape though - that was specifically the prerendered plot-point cutscenes iirc.

oh of course, that's right. the summons weren't FMV, they were rendered. in that case, i do not remember the moment that FMVs became bad! because i was totally into those pre-rendered cutscenes, haha

God I hate cut scenes usually

MGS2 was the first time my response to a cut scene was "come on tae fuck"

i'm wondering if i ever really did burn out on them, or if i just stopped playing new games around 2001! ha. they definitely stopped feeling like special must-haves in the mid-90s though... like i had almost no urge to check out games like Wing Commander III/IV which were very much sold on their "cinematic" offerings.

but then again, Final Fantasy IX is on my ballot based on my experiences getting halfway through it circa 2011, and is there almost entirely for the cutscenes and the prerendered backdrops. the game eventually pissed me off enough that i quit, but i remember it as a really lovely, satisfying set of environments to be in.

in the ps1 final fantasy days we had a lot more patience for... everything. i have strong memories of hanging out with my friend while he ran in little circles on a tiny island in ffvii because the monsters there gave good materia xp

I did not have patience, especially cos my son was very into watching me play on the PS and made me read all the FFVII text out to him

if you're not there for the grind, you're no friend at all

Haha my flatmates had patience up to a point while I went Chocobo Racing to get that Knights of the Round...

#ivoted

And kept it real based on what I actually played (if not always finished) and what made the deepest nostalgic impressions

Which was PS1 only, although I remember seeing a Dreamcast at some kid's house once, and they were playing a fighting game that looked just mindblowingly futuristic. I've never tracked down what it was.

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...

I actually did this for MGS.

<3

i love that shit