Just because the 1991 thread exists, does not mean the previous thread is closed. You are welcome to go back and post about 1986 whenever you want and I’ll update the list.
Why make this thread? I want to encourage discussion of old games. I think a lot of us enjoy plunging into the forgotten corners of game history and this feels like a good way to have people share out what they find.
Whenever I look at old games, I wonder if they have anything for today. I’m often amazed to be just as surprised by something old as I am from new releases. Sometimes, old games wind up feeling more novel.
Here are the rules
You are encouraged to recommend as many games as you like. You don’t even need to have played them.
I will also keep a list of Top 12 Works for Posterity. You can add to the list by voting.
To vote for a game, you must have played it less than a month ago.
You can only vote for one game at a time. You have to wait until someone else votes for a game to add another.
There is no limit to how many games you can vote for over time.
More votes for a game will solidify its status as a Work for Posterity.
This time, the list will always end at 12. If there are ties for votes, the most recently added games will kick older ones off.
And those are all the rules! Please let me know if anything is too confusing and I’ll try to fix how I wrote it.
1991 is a pretty nice year with many consoles and computers supporting their own ecosystems. Hope you have fun with this thread!
Top 12 Works for Posterity (1991 edition)
Metal Black
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior
Puyo Puyo
ZZT
Lemmings
Hebereke
Metroid II: Return of Samus
Sonic the Hedgehog
Wizardry Gaiden: The Suffering of the Queen
Super Mario Bros. 3 (PAL)
Conquests of the Longbow
Commander Keen IV: Secret of the Oracle
votes
Commander Keen IV - AutomaticTiger
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior - LaurelSoup, extrabastardformula
Conquests of the Longbow - parker
Super Mario Bros. 3 (PAL version) - dogs
Wizardry Gaiden: The Suffering of the Queen - boojiboy7
Sonic the Hedgehog - HEAVYVIPER
Metal Black - dogs, daphaknee, muaad
Metroid II: Return of Samus - HEAVYVIPER
Hebereke - MintyJuffowup
Lemmings -captainlove
ZZT - ellaguro
Puyo Puyo - MintyJuffowup
Commander Keen IV: Secret of the Oracle kicks off a series of platformers that both very clearly precede the structure of doom but do a lot of interesting stuff with enemy design and movement that I wish someone would copy but nobody to my knowledge ever has.
sometimes in life you come across something new to you that immediately feels right and true right down to your core, like say taking ears for trophies off other players in diablo 1 or
you live the outlaws life in a hideout in the woods commiserating with the fellas every night, in between strikes on the wealthy, or going to the fair. you got a horn you can blow to summon all your pals out of the woods to help you ambush scumbags, or because theres a monk from a secretive militant order who challenges you to a duel who thinks you’re about to ambush him but no, you just want to borrow your buddy little john’s quarterstaff real quick to honorably beat his ass to death with. this is a game of 1991 and forever after
that Mario 3’s pretty alright. i played through the first world this morning on my threeds. still owns. absolutely dickhead hard tho. such delightful slippery inertia. but the difficulty is metered by the approach to lives. it reminds me of Rondo of Blood, the way it wants you to achieve a minimum level of competence and familiarity, but not all in one go. still tense, but not disheartening.
goes without saying that it’s up there with Gimmick in terms of how much it looks like it shouldn’t be possible on an NES. graphics out the got darn wazoo, man.
1991 brought us Wizardry Gaiden: The Suffering of the Queen for the original Gameboy.
I love this game, especially for the kinda broken ass fanslation that feels accurate to 1991 in game localization. But the game itself has a perfectly tight and interconnected map (for the first half) that feels so much like it inspired the later 1-1 Demon’s Souls style of level design that I often wonder if this was The Wizardry game that From employees were all talking about when they decided to make videogames. There are little weird regions of the dungeon, and shortcuts that take you back to the beginning in smart ways, and a puzzle involving building a bomb that makes no sense and all the sense. And then there is the second half, where you find out the princess you thought you were saving from the evil wizard on the final floor actually turned evil herself and becomes the final boss. I haven’t even gotten to her yet, but damn, that’s a great excuse for making a “post game” that is just as long as the main game.
triple posting sorry everybody nevermind booji beat me to it i have a special interest in lists and I’m currently perusing this list cos i’m too baby to know off the top of my head what games came out in 91 (and also cos the Wikipedia entry is like cartoonishly barren).
dude brandish came out in 1991. i ain’t played that properly but i did get it running in an emulator and that shit has graphics dude holy fuck. wasn’t there someone on here playing through brandish? was that booji? idk anyway probably somebody on here has knowledgeable opinions abt brandish beyond “dude, graphics”.
Though, 1991 is the PC-98 version, which is probably the hardest to play because it is built around being played solely with the mouse, which is weird as hell. The later SNES release is a bit easier to get a handle on control wise, and the PSP version is definitely the best way to play it now. But Brandish rules. Falcom making an attempt at a dungeon crawler with some added Falcom weirdness (the whole world rotating instead of the player takes some big getting used to, but that’s not a complaint. I would say that Brandish Renewal, also for the pc98, released in 1995, keeps the original controls but just looks/runs better. That version was briefly available on the eShop EGG Console releases, until it was found out that the version of DOS they used for them emulator is actually owned by M2, who hadn’t licensed it and were kinda surprised by this. Theoretically this has been worked out between EGG and M2, but Brandish isn’t back on the shop yet, as far as I know. I did grab a copy of it before it got delisted though.
1991 also gave us GUN FRONTIER, an awesome Taito vertical STG that is just really great on its own. Space Western themed, but everything is made of giant guns. Also historically significant for a few reasons:
Gun Frontier was a giant inspiration for Shinobu Yagawa, which damn, like so much STG history would be different without that.
Gun Frontier also led to the development of the next game on this list by mostly the same team.
ANOTHER MORE IMPORTANT GAME
That game is METAL BLACK, which was originally titled Project Gun Frontier 2, and was released later in 1991. And goddamn, just play this game if you haven’t. I can try to write up more about it, but people should just credit feed through it at least once because it is amazing.
I’ll back one of the more obvious picks, Sonic 1. The weighty yet slippery Rube-Goldberg platforming, poppy soundtrack and vibrant aesthetic really made it stand out, not to mention the cultural impact. Maybe later entries did it better, but I’d say the first should make the cut specifically for ‘91.
Hell, Super Mario World dropped in ‘91 too. That’s two platforming milestones in one year!
duuuuuUuuude metal black holy shit i show that to my students every year even tho i’ve never actually sat down and played it. reckon i’ve watched a full longplay like 4 times though. that’s a game of all time that one.
This is a great house rule, very much in the spirit of the thread. My own house rule is that I have to play at least one other poster’s recommendation. ConQuests of the Longbow is looking pretty tantalizing.
Yesterday, I unexpectedly had to spend another night at my mom’s house as I waited to help a not-quite-step-brother drop off his rental car. This led me to trawl the shop on my Switch for City Connection and EGG Console releases that fit this thread. I got a lot that I may talk about eventually, but first, I want to focus on Hebereke or U-Four-ia: The Saga as it is known in the West.
It’s a Metroid pre-Super Metroid, which already puts it in the company of some of my favorites. The first 15 minutes started the way all my favorite Famicom games start: I struggled with the controls, took a lot of damage trying to attack enemies, and died thinking that I would just have to get a power-up later. Well, turns out that’s wrong and I should have read the manual. I can kill enemies by jumping on them, but only if I press down while doing so. Then they leave behind a Puyo-shaped* ball that I can throw at enemies.
Once it got its hooks in me, I was in for the whole ride and I basically played through the whole thing in two sittings. This isn’t the most refined or exciting Metroid-like. It’s not even as ambitious as the earlier Sunsoft Blaster Master. Still, it feels like the developers made it just for the fun of it and I cherish it for that. You can duck in the game and it’s nearly useless, but each of the four characters sure has their own unique way of wiggling on the ground.
The original Japanese dialogue has a great sense of humor, too. When I beat the game, Hebe talked to me personally and said “Kind of a mediocre ride, huh?” I feel like giving him a hug.
Let’s remember Hebereke the next time someone starts frothing for a modern-day 40-hour Metroidvania.
