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

never forget: I just played Chrono Trigger for over an hour.

*slaps forehead*

obviously i haven't read that thread enough!

lol tbf I've never read past the thread title.

https://i.imgur.com/9hu4rGR.jpg
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44 - Ape Escape - 181 points / 4 Votes

SHINING FORCE III TOO LOW

the ads of this era really speak to not only what karl is talking about but also the overwhelming idea that kids with SNESes grew up into teens with PS1s and they went hard in the paint on edgy/sexy/violent/etc. i can't remember if any have come up yet but i know some are coming up where even kid-friendly NINTENDO answered the siren's call of edgy.

https://i.imgur.com/XgcelEf.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/ZlXmmzz.jpg
43 - Grandia - 182 points / 5 Votes

TOO LOW

the quintessential "i want to play this, bring it to europe already sega" game.

played it this year on the switch, the port is less than ideal but the game still owns, reminded me a lot of skies of arcadia but with a much better battle system, albeit too easy

btw is there vote splitting by platform on this, Will? or are those 5 voters combined sat + ps1?

Votes were platform-agnostic unless specified by voters (which did not happen -- idk if there were any games with serious different versions over platforms this generation?)

like snes/genesis shadowrun or aladdin were entirely different games, afaik ps1 and saturn grandia were more or less the same game with better/worse performance and more/less content (iirc)

that's all from something i maybe read 20 years ago in a magazine tho so i can't really say

https://i.imgur.com/Cxu18oF.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/MNyE0gZ.jpg
42 - Xenogears - 184 points / 3 Votes

for those counting at home that is 6 underrated rpgs in the past 10 reveals

i mean the thing with xenogears is once you get to that final disc (can't remember if it was two or three discs, but either way the last disc is less than half of the game) it gets extremely texty and weird and just not as novel and exciting and thrilling as everything before it, but to a 14 year old kid that was just a shotgun blast of ~ p h i l o s o p h y ~ that frankly some friends of mine never recovered from

Xenogears is the prototypical JRPG in my mind, I only watched it once at a friend's house (same friend who had the VHS Evangelion subbed versions, obv) but it seemed completely inscrutable and twee, with very impressive looking giant robots.

hahaha it is definitely inscrutable but i for sure do not remember it as twee!!

only two other people voted for xenogears?!?!?!!?!?!!

did tomboto vote in this poll btw?

no tomboto :(

i am one of the other xenogears voters and i put it pretty dang high (8th on my ballot)! which is more of a function of how much of an effect it had on me vs how "good" it was (that's pretty common for my ballots for these things and this generation in particular)

yay dragoon saga, a lotta love for that one.

I remember playing it whilst my mates were getting stoned, and after about an hour one of them said "what's this swimming game you're playing?"

https://pdsoasis.github.io/finalpic2.jpg

the mid-game of xenogears, like hours 20-70, was some of the most interesting RPG stories i've ever played.

one of my most painful gamer moments of all time: i got to the very end of the game, just before the last boss fight(s), and some sort of weird game ruining glitch happened where i couldn't progress, but also had no previous saved game to go back to. i just got stuck. it was up in the clouds, somewhere. i remember spending several hours walking around the same patch, talking to people, trying to figure out wtf to do, eventually giving up. i don't think gamefaqs was a thing yet

which is more of a function of how much of an effect it had on me vs how "good" it was

this is 100% how i made my ballot, which a generous sprinkling of import only games i never played and never will

https://i.imgur.com/GvtldiQ.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/PDSkIUV.jpg
41 - Blast Corps - 187 points / 5 Votes

This was a weird generation, wasn't it? (I didn't vote)

this is 100% how i made my ballot, which a generous sprinkling of import only games i never played and never will

actually this is kind of interesting now that i am looking at it but this generation may be the one that is the most influential on my tastes as a game liker? what this generation did (ps1 in particular) is it introduced games-as-experience in a way that the previous generation only did occasionally (final fantasy vi springs to mind) with big moments and novel inputs/outputs (and that said i didn't play FF6 until i had already played a lot of ps1 stone-cold classics). looking at my ballot now, the top 10 totally falls into this category -- games that i thought about long after playing them, even if it wasn't the best moment-to-moment experience. this has kinda stayed with me over time and i find myself doing things like playing all of persona 5 in two weeks while avoiding every dark souls game ever made.

hah xp but appropriate re: me navel gazing abt this gen

BLAST CORPS made the lower stretches of my ballot, even though i didn't get to play it much myself. i watched a friend of mine play it for many hours, though, and it takes the demolition thrill of something like Rampage and updated it to a city scale with 3D graphics. I'm not sure how it would stand up today, but at the time it was mesmerizing to watch

https://i.imgur.com/CtaEm2K.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/s0e0zrb.jpg
40 - Bust a Groove - 189 points / 4 Votes

LOL how many ads did the belly tat thing I wonder

yes it's a bust a groove 2 advertisement but (a) i couldn't find one for bust a groove 1 and (b) i thought it was funny that it was literally the exact same ad as um jammer lammy

xp lol yep

I know this is the most basic observation about this generation, but it's still remarkable how futuristic it felt at the time, while also having aged the worst out of any video game generation ever. 8 bit & 16 bit is evergreen, and lots of PS2/Xbox games still look great to me, but these are just so fantastically ugly for the most part.

xp omg these ads

I enjoy the weirdness and colorfulness of this gen, 3D was still new tech and there it seems like there were a lot of devs trying throwing ideas against the wall to see what would stick. It seems like gaming became more conservative in the ps2/xbox era (I could be wrong about this, because that was the start of my basically 10-15 year hiatus from gaming)

It's true that a lot of these games are ugly, but they're ugly in such an *interesting* way

There's another ad that I sadly have no memory of what game it was from but it was some kind of fighting game featuring a woman with like, mostly white/orange/blue clothes? Possibly a backwards baseball cap and a bandage on her nose? And the add for that one definitely heavily focused on her midriff, and it was the first time in my life I had ever seen what I have heard described as "Australian cleavage"

The game was probably trash, but that ad was frozen in my mind forever

PDS, PD zwei and grandia are still beautiful

dreamcast was when 3d graphics crossed the threshold to good enough

speaking of horny ad campaigns

https://i.imgur.com/om6T4it.jpg
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39 - Tomb Raider - 193 points / 5 Votes

i didn't pick any of them but the most egregious ads i saw while going through were the ones that essentially sold the gameshark as "we don't have he nude code yet but we're working on it"!!!

phwoar!

Too high?

here are a few cheat-code-device ads from the era and in my memory they were ALL LIKE THIS

too high. i need to give the more modern tomb raider series a chance, maybe (although...is it like Uncharted? because i didn't enjoy that), but i stopped playing after 2 because i just wasn't having much fun.

signed,

harshly critical prepubescent 15-year-old me

I enjoy the weirdness and colorfulness of this gen, 3D was still new tech and there it seems like there were a lot of devs trying throwing ideas against the wall to see what would stick. It seems like gaming became more conservative in the ps2/xbox era (I could be wrong about this, because that was the start of my basically 10-15 year hiatus from gaming)

― american primitive stylophone (zchyrs), Thursday, November 12, 2020 10:44 AM bookmarkflaglink

It's true that a lot of these games are ugly, but they're ugly in such an *interesting* way

― american primitive stylophone (zchyrs), Thursday, November 12, 2020 10:44 AM bookmarkflaglink

strongly agree w this but also think the flagshippy brown-and-grey "realism" stuff has aged the worst-- like resident evil and tomb raider tbh.

It's true that a lot of these games are ugly, but they're ugly in such an *interesting* way

― american primitive stylophone (zchyrs), Thursday, November 12, 2020 3:44 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is almost certainly a "correlation does not equal causation" thing but i always felt that the PS2 era had a console that tried to looked like a sleek, adult stereo hifi device and software that attempted to look like sleek, adult hifi stereo video games

i need to give the more modern tomb raider series a chance, maybe (although...is it like Uncharted? because i didn't enjoy that)

it definitely shares a lot of dna with the uncharted games but includes more open world stuff? the only modern tomb raider i beat was the first one and i found it more appealing than uncharted but i think the reason was because i liked lara's growth vs drake's lack thereof. but also the entire game is pretty much protagonist torture porn which was pretty offputting

https://i.imgur.com/bYnWQe4.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/h2FRpTx.jpg
38 - Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver - 194 points / 3 Votes

most of those gameshark/related ads are about what you'd expect from the fin de siècle 13yo-boy-directed marketing of a product whose slogan is "abuse the power", but the condom one doesn't even make sense.

holy shit idk why i didn't look this up before but there are a bunch of high quality scans of pretty much every issue of gamepro just... available for download on the internet. awesome

I definitely binged BLAST CORPS when my brother’s N64 was home for a summer. Such a great and satisfying concept for a game, amazing it’s never been re-done. There were a few hitches in it – one of the vehicles is nigh impossible to reliably control IIRC – but man: “you’ve got to go knock down everything in the path of this runaway truck” is such a great stupid idea.

BUST-A-GROOVE was a one-weekend rental with a buddy when I was staying over at his place, we just rocked it. I’m pretty sure it’s the most basic rhythm game imaginable, you just have to follow the moves at the exact right times, nothing else to it – but the soundtrack was fun enough that I ended up downloading MP3s and burning a CD of it. The hamburger guy’s “very very very very very very good!” song cracked us up at the time.

The other funny thing with the ads is how teeny tiny the screenshots are in so many of them. Like so much space given to some dumb photo shoot, and loud edgy “your parents won’t like THIS” ad copy, and then only the barest hint of what playing the thing would be like.

It’s interesting thinking about the experimental vs. ugly aspects of the period’s aesthetics --- 99% Invisible just did a podcast about Geocities and had people talking about the pink on yellow palettes and all of that, I think there was a willingness to be loud in 90s digital aesthetics which would have been great if the games could only just look a little more polished. Some titles in the next generation pull this off a lot better, like Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi.

most of those gameshark/related ads are about what you'd expect from the fin de siècle 13yo-boy-directed marketing of a product whose slogan is "abuse the power", but the condom one doesn't even make sense.

― difficult listening hour, Thursday, November 12, 2020 4:04 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

what are you talking about?! only a gameshark can prevent STDs (sword-transmitted dismemberment)!

my god if i went back in time and worked for gameshark's marketing department i'd be making hundreds of dollars

https://www.outofprintarchive.com/