DieHARD GamePOLL - Console Poll, vol. 3 - 5th Generation RESULTS

was surprised this one didn't place lower considering how many times it was referenced in the nom/voting threads...

err place higher dammit

https://i.imgur.com/zA5DSfu.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/NfZq92v.jpg
74 - Colony Wars - 110 points / 2 Votes

got hold of this specifically for this poll and didn't end up playing it enough to vote for it but def saw the appeal, a stripped down wing commander for consoles. it had already started to "branch" in the first fifteen minutes (i.e., i had already failed a mission in the first 15 minutes lol) which i thought was cool.

Colony Wars made my ballot! although, like Driver, the sequel is arguably better. but i went with the original because i figured it would find more support there (one other person voted for it, lol)

Colony Wars was a very, very good game, i thought. it was also intensely difficult, and there was this one mission about 10 hours that i never could beat, despite trying repeatedly for years. so my vote is for the first 10 hours of Colony Wars.

i voted for driver i think!

xp i was a lil bit disappointed by the physics, which seemed arcadey in a way that undercut the hard-mil-sf vibe the rest of the game was successfully going for. love a good cockpit view tho (star fox 64's just fundamentally doesn't work) and what i played of this already had some cool ones.

hi, it's me, the Saturn owner

daytona port doesn't hold a candle to the arcade version but still...

TOO LOW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv_GQNh9D68

xp (my gold standard 90s space dogfighting games are xwing/tie fighter-- never actually 100% clicked with a wing commander either tbh except for privateer, which is like a lego elite/frontier. it is a lot more fun to fly the spaceship in colony wars than it is in privateer tho.)

i wanted a saturn real bad lol, not even sure why. think i just like the word saturn.

(and the word sega.)

SEGA!

i believe all that about wing commander / tie fights, dlh - sadly, i never owned either one so Colony Wars was kind of my intro to the genre (unless Descent counts?)

descent counts cuz i need terminal velocity to count

https://i.imgur.com/37S2w5i.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/4e6E5CC.jpg
72 - Diablo - 112 points / 2 Votes

aw nuts, i must have somehow cut the bottom off of that ad

wow daytona looks gorge in that video.

haven't played the port but diablo is a perfect game. "well except for not being able to run." nah.

you couldn't play online in PS1 diablo, i assume?

which i guess means you would miss the thrill of being murdered by crazy online PVP people as soon as you stepped outside of the town

a friend did a v good full-body impression of the rogue firing away like a machine-gunning legolas while stopping every five shots to heal herself to the sound of a choir

diablo was a LAN game, to me-- assume the ps1 versh has splitscreen which is not ideal but closer in spirit to my memory of the game than it is to the online maelstrom model, which i associate w diablo 2, even tho you're right, it was already there.

i never got a chance to play Diablo on LAN - you're right, that would have been MUCH better. and i ended up playing split screen with my parter on Diablo 3 (very different, of course) and it was a total blast. i could see that holding true the PS1 port of the original as well

a friend did a v good full-body impression of the rogue firing away like a machine-gunning legolas while stopping every five shots to heal herself to the sound of a choir

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, November 11, 2020 2:15 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol this rules

i didn't vote for diablo but ps1 is the only way i ever played it! my computer would never have run it so i rented it a couple of times and thought it was very fun but kinda scary!

https://i.imgur.com/82gvuOi.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/LiZ0YYc.jpg
72 - WWF Wrestlemania 2000 - 112 points / 2 Votes

sorry for the size of these images they are surprisingly tough to find sometimes!

kinda scary!

it is totally scary, which later ones are not (tho i also have had a blast or two w diablo 3).

(sounds like i'm just unaware i stopped being a child in the interim but no i swear d1 has atmosphere.)

i miss that batshit n64 controller. the d-pad was practically ornamental.

i also had one of these. manufactured by blockbuster! do not particularly recommend.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/TLcAAOSwXXxe67FL/s-l225.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/PTkS3bn.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/9iXsbTt.jpg
71 - Heart of Darkness - 114 points / 2 Votes

A version for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer was announced,[4] but the game spent so long in development that by the time it was finished, the 3DO (which was not even launched until a year after development on the game began) was no longer commercially viable.

I had no idea Diablo was nommed; I would have voted for it, but I never played it on PS

never heard of Heart of Darkness before... looking at footage online i dig the overall aesthetic, i would have probably into this as a good 2D platformer for the PSX. something about the way the character moves does remind me worrisomely of Flashback/Blackthorne/etc. --- that Prince of Persia school of platforming where having a smooth, rotoscopey animation meant your sprite just felt sluggish and unresponsive. but no way to tell without playing it.

having a smooth, rotoscopey animation meant your sprite just felt sluggish and unresponsive

my secret is i feel this way about another world.

https://i.imgur.com/f9eFFZm.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/QvvM61b.jpg
70 - Tenchu: Stealth Assassins - 115 points / 3 Votes

DLH OTM (xp)

tenchu almost my ballot. but i really couldn't remember much about it. must have been a wild weekend rental

DLH, the quality varied extremely widely on those controllers, because I had one that was my go-to (I loved the tension in the analog) and I never used the regular N64 controller if I could help it.

I remember seeing Wrestlemania 2K in action for the first time and getting wracked by lols, the character creation was revelatory at the time, and the WWF license elevated the game even more.

Another World is totally one of those games for me too! though a beautiful piece of digital art, etc.

i was going to say "was this a European developer? they really went in for that," but then I looked it up and Heart of Darkness "was supervised by game developer Éric Chahi, known for Another World, this time with a team of artists and developers."

https://i.imgur.com/MzyllZW.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/AVSjswe.jpg
69 - Metal Slug - 119 points / 3 Votes

(couldn't find a decent ad for the original metal slug so you get this much later one for the anthology)

i can't believe i haven't even posted 10 of these yet lol

I had one that was my go-to (I loved the tension in the analog)

oh i mean it definitely makes more sense and you could reach the d-pad if you needed it. and yeah, completely different feel in the stick.

three way tie coming up!

https://i.imgur.com/TD8dzpu.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Hj3tY2P.jpg
66 - Virtua Fighter 2 - 126 points / 2 Votes

Ok I voted for Colony Wars, despite it being a nearly impossible game that I never came close to finishing. I loved the Wing Commander games (although I probably never finished any of those either) and I was kinda into how uncompromising this one was, and the laser fx looked cool.

It's definitely one of the most memorable games of the era for me, even if it was eventually unplayable. Still waiting for a current gen update of this genre that's actually fun (maybe developers decided that 360' space combat is just too much of a UI challenge?).

many xp

metal slug is one of the many saturn games that were never localised but still made my ballot due to hype nostalgia (also one of the many that required a RAM cart expansion)

i played the sequel in the arcade and it was as good as i'd imagined the original was when all i had to go for were magazine articles

i still think VF2 looks good to this day, back then it was mind blowing for a saturn game, especially coming after the letterboxed 15fps daytona port

Also the (worst) thing about Colony Wars is that you'd often have to do escort missions, and then you'd get distracted by actually engaging with enemy fighters, or just get disoriented and lost in space, and the ship you were escorting would get blown up.

I remember Virtua Fighter being a go-to arcade game for me, don't remember playing the home versions though.

Tenchu seems sick, wish I would have played it at the time.

that Prince of Persia school of platforming where having a smooth, rotoscopey animation meant your sprite just felt sluggish and unresponsive. but no way to tell without playing it.

I think/hope that there's a game coming up that gets the plusses without the minuses!

https://i.imgur.com/FSGBX9b.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Uslo0lv.jpg
66 - NiGHTS into Dreams - 126 points / 2 Votes

bomberman hero, the other n64 one, didn't even have multiplayer lol

and then they made a bomberman 64 2 which almost no one bought and is one of the rarest n64 carts

and then (i just looked this up, never knew about it before) the final n64 game ever released was a japanese-only 2d bomberman game confusingly titled bomberman 64

i ended up playing the spastic Interplay-produced Atomic Bomberman during the era. it was... good enough

access the level editor by simply pressing CTRL-E six times from the main menu

i missed this rollout entirely but it made for a good friday read... so thanks!

did you voet?

i misspelled that on purpose, and i'm not sure why (joek?)

i did voet
i was the other voet for FFT as #1 with you

<3

Hard to believe that SATURN BOMBERMAN didn't make it!

セガサターンのサターンボンバーマン10人プレイは凄い迫力です‼️ pic.twitter.com/fUcEQ8MJd4

— 今宮年男（大分県一心寺住職） (@imamiyatoshio) November 22, 2020

also missed this, cheers to KM

the best mario kart is simply the one with the most tracks. which is the newest one i assume

agree with this general principle except that iirc Wii Kart has more ten-star new tracks than Kart 8 (the WiiU versh), and also picked better "retro" tracks to spruce up

but Kart 8 also iirc has a four-course round of retro Rainbow Road courses, so swings and roundabouts

all of the ones with blue shells are bad

i typed that out a couple days ago and then deleted it, but that's otm

rubberbanding has always been a part of mario kart, but it's gotten out of control

play on Time Trial if you can't take the heat imo

been reading through this thread. missed all the action, but i would have voted Paperboy #1. Happy that OoT beat Majora's Mask.

I was coming here to post this article, which gets at what I was saying above about the PlayStation

https://superchartisland.com/wipeout-2097/

But I forgot that I sat on my hands to avoid asking Sufjan - why? What has Ocarina of Time got that Majora's Mask doesn't?

you don’t have to get that annoying n64 expansion pack

I just really love OoT for the giant leap it so successfully made. MM really only suffers in comparison because it wasn't the first one I played. If I revisit them, I could see enjoying MM more. First play through of OoT was just so damn magical, though.

I'm currently playing link's awakening for the first time, though (on Switch). More OoT stuff was introduced by that game than I'd realized. Jumping from NES to N64 made the leap seem even larger than it probably was.

LttP??

I've played the SNES LttP on switch as well. It seems like Link's Awakening polished a lot of these elements that were in there by LttP, as I think you are saying. but I'm playing the remastered Link's Awakening, so maybe that's coming out of that? Link's awakening has fishing, helpful owl, dampe, etc. Some of the puzzle solving in LttP also felt like an outlier, whereas LA feels more like OoT Zelda, albeit with goombas lol.

I've never felt such a complex emotion as the one I felt when the Slave-y Ur-Quan kept trying to argue that they were just trying to protect you from the Genocide-y Ur-Quan

you imagine the threat of unknown invaders,
or alien pestilence borne on the solar wind.
we have seen these.
but
you do not acknowledge your worst enemy.
we have found dead worlds without number,
planets ravaged by atomic fire or gaian collapse.
these worlds were not rendered sterile by outside forces.
they bear sad testament
to the effects of unrestrained instinct and emotion,
or simple ignorance.
we will
prevent
such mistakes.

generation 6 incoming