it’s a dubious honor but mgs2 is the first kojima game with a textually-confirmed gay couple (vamp and the marine commander lol). raiden is noteworthy for being the only male metal gear character explicitly designed for straight girls to objectify (as opposed to for hideo kojima the homosexual to objectify). emma emmerich is the only character in any videogame i have ever identified with. on the other hand, true metal gear fujoshis always pick the ugly grizzled old men from worse games to ship because we are intelligent and refined.
regardless of actual yaoi content mgs2 is the sexiest, coziest, comfiest, most asmr-inducing game ever made and i love to rotate it in my mind. all that amniotic water and meticulous schematic structure and back-and-forth ritualistic progression and precision stealth and long dulcet-toned codec calls and luxurious sound design and slick flawlessly color graded surfaces and architecture. its tight constraints relative to the “open” later games squeeze the most out of kojima’s design vocabulary. mgs2 makes me want to fuck.
I’ve not played Spelunky or Disco Elysium but the latter is supposed to be well written and cares to consider communism in a thoughtful way? Seems worth voting for.
These days MGS2 feels like smoking a joint on an overcast autumn afternoon, slipping into a hot bath while your lover uses the toilet, and listening to an old cassette tape of Terence McKenna while CNN drones away on a TV in the next room. Also there’s a big knife inexplicably and precariously balanced on the edge of the tub. In other words, my kinda game.
Earthbound feels like being 7 years old and heading out for a bike ride with your Walkman clipped to your Baltimore Orioles belt only to realise your Cartoon Compilation cassette has been replaced by the mixtape your cool older cousin made for their highschool crush and you end up riding through strange neighbourhoods for hours only to return home after dark where your mum is waiting in the doorway and it’s hard to tell if she’s crying out of worry or because she’s just that pissed off.
Sonic & Knuckles feels like lucid dreaming a feature-length special episode of your favourite Saturday morning cartoon during gym class jazzercise, waking up and drawing it all out during lunch break only to find that your kid nemesis has done the same thing for their favourite Saturday morning cartoon but you decide to bury the hatchet and smash the two comic opuses together and everyone on the playground spends recess acting out this cacophonous culmination of childhood TV consumption and delinquent doodling.
Elevator Action is great but Shin Megami Tensei, which I haven’t played yet, has “demon negotiation” and I can’t vote against something like that.
MGS3 feels like the opening night of your middle school play but all your castmates fell ill from eating tree frogs and had to be replaced by their parents who use the opportunity to sling passive aggressive grievances and express illicit romantic impulses and familial frustrations until the show ends with an improvised version of a misremembered James Bond theme song that makes the principal cry (and have a heart attack).
Godhand feels like slamming some beers and laying into a punching bag for hours only to realise it’s not a punching bag at all but your backpack full of homework and tax documents.
LSD: Dream Emulator doesn’t feel like any acid trip I’ve ever had or any dream for that matter. Having the word ‘Emulator’ in your title is pretty cool though.
Bloodborne is a game I’ve only been able to play for a few hours when my roommate was out of town and not using their PS4 and I’m certain it’s a game I was bloody born to love.
F-Zero GX is what drinking a litre of Surge circa 1999 was supposed to feel like.
That’s the problem! If the vote was for Frank Cidfaldi’s Annotated Playthrough I’d say yes. Gimmick is very very hard and about dealing with precise semi unpredictable physics.
Everyone voting Gimmick! I would be extremely curious to see you actually play Gimmick! .
Yeah even if you didn’t go for the secret ending where you had to absolutely master the game to get the key items, that game is too demanding for me to play and is one of those aesthetically perfect game objects I’ll never play.
I remember it took a while to get used to spiking the star, getting the hang of that one thing made it a lot easier imo. I was never able to make that boat shortcut though.
As cool as it is to see a remake, I’m very confused as to why they made it an arcade game.
LSD vs. Wario Ware…I’ll always love both of these games and LSD is a perfect example of late 90s PS1 art game fiber-optic cotton candy before 3D game design standards codified and B-tier game studios felt less free to dream, WarioWare is a low barrier-to-entry club sandwich of cut-up satisfying disembodied game interactions sweetened by absurd humor.
Both games can be revisited to give pleasure forever with LSD’s endless amount of surreal polygonal dreamworld exploration and gradually warping accumulation/fractalization of textures and audio to represent fading memory of dreams as you awake and in WW’s case, fun-size candy dopamine shots to pop into your mouth/brain as long as you have a GBA-capable device at hand. I put more time over the years into WW so will give it my vote out of sheer time invested but open to switch over depending how it turns out.
Oh, um, in a tribute to dying physical media and thinking back to the original retail release of these games, folks mentioned the dream diary/art book of sorts that comes with a limited edition of LSD but it’s also hard to forget the original WarioWare’s manual, which has fun character stickers to go along with their goofy little introductions. I can’t find a picture of the us version of those but, in a similar spirit, here’s a picture of the gamecube version which has fun little pencil mazes to trace through
now that we’ve gone through every game in the bracket, I may as well do a ‘games that should’ve been in this bracket but aren’t list,’ since I never even clicked on the nomination thread. since this is with the benefit of hindsight, it’s a list that is strictly looking to fill some of the holes that I can fill, rather than represent exactly whatever my tastes are. so here are 15 games, in no particular order. it’ll skew toward western games, since our list is heavily japanese, and because I’m me I’ll play it up and include 3 blizzard games at the top:
Starcraft: Brood War. brood war is the premier competitive video game ever made. it is fun to play if you suck, and its skill ceiling doesn’t exist. it invented esports with its meteoric rise in Korea, which baffled the rest of the world at the time. at its height from about 2004 to 2010, brood war was arguably the most popular sport in Korea. two television channels existed primarily to broadcast matches, and an entire professional qualification, drafting and training system was developed to support it, under the oversight of the Korean government. it is still played at a very high level today. it has managed all of this despite not having a balance patch since 2000. apart from esports, brood war still rules. I will submit that it has the best sound effects of any video game. some of its music is seared into my brain. the character quips every time you select or move a unit somehow never get old. the terran are by far the best space marines in gaming, and there no aliens in gaming since 1998 that aren’t standins for either the protoss or the zerg.
Diablo. diablo is quintessential blizzard in that it is smooth, snappy, refined, and easy to play, but it is very not blizzard in that it did that while inventing a genre instead of unapologetically aping something the developers already liked. it is not systematized and meta-gamed like its more popular sequel. aesthetically it is oppressive and austere in a way that was not touched by anything for me until demon’s souls. like brood war, it sounds perfect. it contains my favorite piece of video game music.
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. this is the game I’ve played the most in my life. nothing else is particularly close, and the rest of the top 5 would have at least two other versions of wow. it sits in between the two most popular versions of the game. the original game is a titanic blizzardized incomplete reinvisioning of everquest, and wrath of the lich king is the polished, theme park apotheosis of that vision, reoriented around storytelling and player empowerment. tbc is some weird liminal object that doesn’t really know what it wants to be. the world it takes place in is strange. the narrative justification for its existence is tenuous. it has the sense of place and progression of the original game, with some of the mechanical progression and structural changes of wrath. its space world feels dangerous and broken. it has a moody, weird soundtrack that you would never expect to hear in an mmo. its main city is an amalgamated refugee hub in the ruins of a semi destroyed capital. it feels like a proper game. idk.
alright, there’s the blizzard games. I’m not writing 150-200 words for all 15 games, I’m too lazy for that and no one would read it anyway. here are some more.
Dodonpachi. a pure, perfect, influential shmup that never gets old.
Thief. because I’ve never played thief 2. the best stealth game. thick and dense and oppressive and full of inventive level design that doesn’t feel like going through the motions.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. I should just change this to the recent remaster, but whatever. a perfect score attack game that also feels expressive and joyful. a cultural touchstone. a soundtrack full of songs I’d never listen to on their own, but that feel vital in this configuration and presentation. a titan of level design.
Soul Calibur (DC). my favorite 3d fighting game. it’s so smooth and beautiful. it’s a classy game in a series that has felt crass and empty ever since. it is mechanically inviting in a way that fighters rarely are. you can customize the intro.
Halo. I’m shocked this game didn’t make an SB list. one of the few games that ever felt ‘next generation’ to me. it basically invented a decade of console gaming. it has nice colors.
Metal Slug 3. the best game of its kind, and a virtuoso pixel art extravaganza.
Baldur’s Gate 2. so many giant games feel empty. so many western RPGs feel obtuse. this just feels like a bunch of people loved it.
NHL 94. the best sports game. one of the best party games. it sounds like hockey in a way that even hockey doesn’t anymore. its sense of inertia is perfect.
Simcity 2000. a sim with personality. I played this game all day when I was a kid. you decide if progression is worthwhile, because there’s nothing to win, no one to defeat, and a complicated city is just more difficult to manage. sometimes you just want to stay small. sometimes you don’t. who knows? it has fun newspaper headlines.
Missile Command. perfect in its fatalism. feels tactically desperate.
Stardew Valley. these characters just feel fucking welcoming, idk. like sim city, you can choose to min max yourself into hopeless complexity. in this game that makes you feel personally empty and shitty, since it often means forgoing everyone and everything in your cute little down to toil away on tile-optimized monocrops all day for millions of dollars. you can make things very pretty instead if you’re good at that sort of thing.
I’m tired, lets save the last one for later.\
it says I can’t post this because I took it out of the other thread and tried to put it here. let’s add this filler paragraph and see if that tricks skynet into letting me exist.
yeah but I haven’t yet beaten it cause I try to do it while getting the secret last stage. it has some really hellish difficulty spikes, like the cannonball ride to the stage 2 secret item, but I don’t see that impacting my overall feelings about the game. like, I’m kinda fine with a lot of games that I might not be able to finish.
i wanted to quickly respond to this as someone who also adores mgs2, but whose pet contrarian theory is that kojima is a pure formalist who has never made a valuable or cogent textual political statement in any of his games. i particularly feel this way about mgs2, but i’m starting to reevaluate that stance. people have spent the past however long praising kojima for his thematic or political prescience in mgs2, because they think he was making a symbolic political argument, though they never seem clear on what exactly he’s advocating or criticizing beyond “how it is in 2020.” imo in doing so they undersell just how incoherent these symbols are, but i increasingly feel like that’s the point.
solidus is a republican american fundamentalist war criminal who wants to liberate the US from the deep state and the 1%. the censorious control a.i. wants to prevent people from going insane from fake news/conspiracy theories (in that sense they’re a “mortal enemy that makes a great point” - people compare them to twitter, but twitter are economically invested in amplifying this stuff on a structural level even when they make weird lip service gestures opposing it), but their examples are muddled and littered with moralistic false equivalency right wing talking points of the sort they criticize (“rights of criminals are given more respect than the privacy of their victims”). it’s full of things that seem like transparently evocative symbols but are riven by internal incoherence and mixed messaging. in this context snake’s advice to “find the meaning behind the words, then decide” feels less like a platitude about making your own way and more like urging raiden to develop a meaningful materialist system for understanding and responding to political contradictions as they really are (though this is also undercut by the “for the children” stuff, continuing the trend).
anyway i’m not sure what my point is but i suspect that those elements are more valuable specifically for their incoherence than for their prescience or critique, which leave me a little cold and unsatisfied. they obviously bear a resemblance to the present, but i don’t think art is a mirror of the world, even for the future. despite all my time spent with it i’m still not sure what it’s doing in some ways, which is part of why i keep going back.
I had a revelation some months after getting around to MGS V that after loving the first three games pretty much every one afterwards just annoyed me in terms of narrative and character more and more to the degree that I realized my relationship with the series had become toxic and the best thing I could do is just leave them in the past and never look back.
…And then someone had to make this topic.
The early games are pretty great; I’m voting against every entry for my own mental health.
I have no clue what the hell Gimmick is other than apparently a platformer.
I think this is actually the “weakest” set of games for me personally and rather than having to choose between two games I think highly of I’m instead faces with multiple matchups between games I have no real feelings for.
Hence, I’m putting all my energy behind Wario Ware.
I beat Gimmick!'s true ending and had a blast. It was something else to play the game unspoiled by Cifaldi’s video but I get why it exists, because so many people won’t stumble into all these cool secrets or be able to beat it. But it’s an incredible experience to stumble into these things, to learn the game slowly, to take the game incredibly seriously and to be rewarded for your astute ideas and observations and curiosity in ways other platformers merely scratch the surface of. I echo jellicle’s comment about the levels feeling like realized places and I feel so much of the secrets require you to think of them in such a way, that takes you out of the mindset of “this is a game” and all of your expectations of a gamey videogame and how they should be structured and all their limitations, and really start thinking about the game’s environments as a Realistic Another World, a playground of possibilities.
I love Sonic and I love Sonic 3 & Knuckles but it has some very annoying issues (levels are too long, lots of boring sections that just waste your time, too many bosses and most of them aren’t good, the entirety of Sandopolis and Lava Reef) that makes the game feel less and less shiny to me as it once did, while I am still nearly as starstruck by Gimmick! as I was when I was in the thick of it
