selectbutton 85 14: videogames, the seat of the soul

losers again, so the losers of these matchups will be eliminated. as usual, the bracket as it currently stands can be found here. voting is now open and will close in one week.

1
  • F-Zero GX
  • Final Fantasy Tactics

0 voters

2
  • LSD: Dream Emulator
  • Final Fantasy VI

0 voters

3
  • Super Mario Bros.
  • Game Boy Camera

0 voters

4
  • Gimmick!
  • Silent Hill 2

0 voters

5
  • Disco Elysium
  • Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer

0 voters

6
  • Quake
  • Cave Story

0 voters

7
  • Dragon’s Dogma
  • Puyo Puyo series

0 voters

8
  • Nier
  • The Legend of Zelda

0 voters


VOTE

9 Likes

Nier, Game Boy camera, and FZero GX are my horses here.

Vote according to the love you have for that game’s spirit and help a loser out of the bracket.

2 Likes

Why is it so many stars shine far away?
While there’s only one that determines the day

On Earth it’s the very same tale:
We drink from one well
A common life spring

Captain Falcon will always prevail
Sending forces of darkness away

When myopic confusion threatens your lunch
Falcon will be unleashing a Falcon Punch

Thank heaven he’s on the right side
Or else there’d be no where to hide

Captain Falcon will always be found
Hot on the trail tracking rogues down

Give it up for the “Capitan”
Three cheers for the falcon

3 Likes
  • Final Fantasy Tactics. I’ve never been able to play any F-Zero game after the SNES one without running right off the track and I haven’t found the games attractive enough to care to try.
  • LSD: Dream Emulator, I think, though I kind of hate to vote against FF6 again.
  • Super Mario Bros. is a boring choice but I can’t pretend I don’t still think it’s great. I should play it again at some point. It’s been many years.
  • Silent Hill 2 is just going to win automatically for me in most cases.
  • Cave Story, though maybe this is a little unfair because I have never tried Quake.
  • Dragon’s Dogma, but were the contender Panel de Pon I would vote differently.
  • I have not played Nier and although I have good memories of Zelda 1 I think I will leave this outcome up to others.
3 Likes

feeling attacked rn

4 Likes

F-Zero GX (Just a real sucker for this game)

LSD: Dream Emulator (Games you think about a lot)

Super Mario Bros. (Will always be the creepy terrifying game my child mind made it before Mario got a voice)

Silent Hill 2 (Still makes me feel things)

Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer (I still need to play Disco Elysium okay)

Quake (Infinitely playable to this day thanks to quaddicted)

Dragon’s Dogma (I really suck at Puyo Puyo)

Nier (Really tough choice here, but Nier is one of those games that did things and went places I never expected in a game. Also I played it at a really emotionally tough period of my life, and the soundtrack is the soundtrack for that.)

4 Likes

I can’t believe I’m probably going to have to vote against FFT. I will vote for FFVI, and I’d feel dirty voting for 2 FF games in one thread, especially when one of them is against the best arcade racer

NEVER VOTE FOR A NINTENDO

will need to consult the bracket if there is any Namco representation at all.

Will play Disco Elysium on console in 20XX

1 Like

Disgusted that the image search for “Nintendo rocks” is mostly images of painted rocks.

F-Zero GX is one of the fastest games and FFT is one of the slowest games so this is the ultimate personality test, we’re finally gonna learn who knows a good time when they see one and who’s been so incredibly Stockholm’d Syndrome’d that they enjoy taking 5 seconds to make a decision and 40 seconds watching unskippable animations of lumpy potato people flinging rocks at each other.

12 Likes

LSD does nothing for me, I wish it did, every time I’ve played it I just chafe at how slowly you walk and think “I’ve read books and comics and watched movies and listened to music and they all offered better experiences in way less time and oh yes, I’ve also had dreams, why am I playing this.” I will vote for Final Fantasy, can’t believe I’m saying that, even though I think that game is quite good.

Super Mario Bros is one of the perfect video games. Was I the first person the nominate the Game Boy Camera? Probably not, but I’m going to pretend I was anyway. I will say I’m voting for Mario even though I’ll probably vote for the camera. Go check out the Vanity Pics thread everyone, I think there’s one of the only photos of me from the first 48 years of my life in there and it was taken with a Game Boy Camera.

I’m totally sure 90% of the people who nominated and have voted for Gimmick have never gotten past the first stage. I count myself amongst those people (if I voted for it, or nominated it, I can’t remember to be honest.) I will vote for Silent Hill 2.

Shiren is great but Disco Elysium is one of the few games that’s actually worth reading and that’s fucked up, you’d think there’d be so many great games to read but there aren’t.

I’ll vote Cave Story I guess I dunno I liked Quake multiplayer when I finally got to play it on a Mac in 1999 but it’s so fucking brown and I have a strong anti-NIN bias, my opinion of Bowie took a nosedive when he kept hyping up Reznor as some great artist, that dude’s lyrics are embarrassing, imagine being older than 14 years old and listening to that shit, yes I stopped posting in these threads cuz all my ugly opinions come out, don’t take it personally okay

The only fun I had playing Dragon’s Dogma was when I recruited a pawn named after Jobriath, I’ve probably posted about that a lot, I still suspect whomever made that dude posted on here at one point or another. I’ve only won like 3 games of competitive Puyo Puyo but I bet someday colors will start making sense to me, I bet someday I’ll have a positive W/L ratio, I bet someday I’ll go back to Dragon’s Dogma and have a good time throwing my own custom made Jobriath at a griffon or some shit

I replayed the Legend of Zelda last year, it took me a few hours, it was a game I couldn’t beat as a child, I fucking demolished that shit as an adult and I didn’t even cheat. I keep telling myself I’ll go back and finish Nier but I won’t, I don’t like the dungeons, I don’t think all the bullet hell shit works in practice, maybe I’d feel differently about it if I’d actually finished it but y’know y’know y’know I think I’m past the point where I wanna treat games like homework, if it ain’t constantly compelling why bother, maybe strip out all the sword bits and just give me a bunch of text to read in between hog drifting segments, save me some fuckin’ trouble okay

13 Likes

i like nintendo

5 Likes

voting is now open; polls close in a week

1 Like

Let’s take pictures forever.

3 Likes

I haven’t played F-Zero GX, but the F-Zero games I’ve played didnt do that much for me, which is par for the course for racing games. I also haven’t played Final Fantasy Tactics, though I rather enjoyed Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and understand the original is better. So I was inclined to vote for FFT. But acctually I haven’t played either so I guess I’ll abstain.

I haven’t played LSD. It’s a game I really like the idea of. FFVI is one of my favorite RPGs? But I won’t be voting for it, because even though I suspect I’ll like FFVI more ultimately, I don’t know that for a fact.

Super Mario Bros. is one of my favorite video games. It’s great. It’s perfect. I can’t vote for Game Boy Camera over it.

No Gimmick or SH2 for me. Same for Disco Elysium and Mystery Dungeon. Same for, uh, Quake and Cave Story. Do I like videogames?

I like Dragon’s Dogma significantly more than any time I’ve spent with Puyo Puyo, which is a charming falling blocks game in my experience, but not one that’s better than Tetris, so I just play Tetris.

Nier vs. Zelda is the real humdinger of the matchups here for me, since they’re two of my faovrite games. Nier helped change my view of videogames. Zelda helped establish my view of videogames and continues to change it as I revisit it every year. I’m giving this one to Zeld.

2 Likes

It looks like Gimmick is going to lose, so I want to say loudly that it is a perfect 2D platformer. It has slopes. You can throw stars, you can ride those stars and they bounce around in surprisingly dynamic ways. The soundtrack is a beautiful pop album that I can listen to from beginning to end and then start over. I love this little green goblin, this proto-Digimon. The secret rooms are incredibly challenging but once you pull them off, you feel amazing. It’s just Good Times: The Video Game.

12 Likes

hot take: trying to get the good ending in Gimmick provides more psychological terror than anything Silent Hill 2 can offer

note: this poster hasn’t played sh2

4 Likes

F-Zero GX is a great sega racer, which is why it’s the best game in the series. FFT is the job system fun of FFV but instead of being snappy and having a good time it’s a glacial slog where you can permanently screw up your save file which is unforgivable in a game that takes as long to play as FFT.

I haven’t really played enough of FFVI or LSD to really say but it’s looking like most of the JRPGs are getting destroyed so I might as well give it a vote.

Super Mario Bros is one of the best games ever made and it’s ok to say good nintendo games are good, it’s just equally important to not let our lives be controlled by nintendo. But SMB is one of the very best games they every made, and as cool as gameboy camera is it’s not SMB.

Silent Hill 2 is a game that seems less cool than it used to because every single horror game is silent hill 2 now. But it was really cool, and still is really cool.

I’ve played maybe five hours of Disco Elysium, and those are some of the best written five hours in a video game. I’m thinking about shit in those five hours months later. It’s transcendantly excellent.
Shiren is a good roguelike. There were good ones before it, and good ones after it. Shiren didn’t make me believe games could be a worthwhile storytelling medium, Disco Elysium does.

I gotta give this one to Cave Story because Quake is wonderful but Cave Story made me believe video games could be good after New Super Mario Brothers made me think I’d outgrown them. Much like Silent Hill 2, it only doesn’t seem as special now because everything stole everything from it. It’s still incredible.

Dragon’s Dogma seems neat, Puyo is Puyo though.

Nier vs Zelda is a hard matchup, but I think Zelda succeeds better at what it’s doing that Nier does, and it’s short snappy and the combat has held up fantastically well. I won’t hate it if Nier wins this one, though.

6 Likes

Quite conflicted about LSD vs FFVI cuz it’s like, experimental vs. conservative, left of field conceptual vs. mainstream craft and I think I oughta go one way but…idk FFVI has way more humanity and drama and beauty and music and pathos and I guess for me the VHS bedtime story beats the modern art installation in this case. I’d probably prefer an industry that took LSD (ha) as inspiration more than FFVI but it feels like a stepping stone. I played it. I get it. And once it’s got, that’s it. FFVI isn’t deep or anything but it’s richly textured and I’ll carry its moody vignettes and melodic empathy with me more than my tinkerings with LSD. Those feelings extend beyond the cartridge. There are plenty of examples, but thinking about this scene, descending the stairs recalling painful memories before ecstatically resurfacing, reborn, dove-bound with fractured recollections of loves lost fueling re-friendship…that’s the stuff of dreams.

Osamu Sato should have made more games though! Eastern Mind and Chu-teng are worth checking out. I want more LSDs and less FFVIs but the FFVI I have is better than the LSD I have.

6 Likes

im sick of final fantasy tactics now. f zero forever. i only like games that make your brain feel attacked from the inside when you hit walls

by that logic i have to vote for LSD, which is fine because this final fantasy doesnt have the number 14 after it

i can take pictures of all my friends re-enacting mario 1 and then print them out and make a long picture, and we can look at that picture and think of going viral. then burn the picture, then make yoshi noises til the mario song gets out of our heads

i havent even got past the first screen of gimmick but ill pick pretty much anything over silent hill 2

hahah shiren actually was the game that made me think games storytelling had more to offer
when we do this next year maybe ill be more conflicted but disco elysium isnt ON consoles yet hmph hmph hmph

quake 3 is the only quake i like the rest are brown and ugly. cave story is whatever but its less brown and ugly

puyo puyo is cute. dragons dogma is mud

zelda 1 was the first videogame i ever saw. the lost forest tricked my baby brain for an hour. what a miserable fucking experience, i loathed that game from age 4-10, when i acutally played it. i had built it up as some kind of endless forest maze ONLY game where you have to burn bushes until you find the door out and you have to make sure the fire hits the bushes exactly otherwise you have to start the maze over, so you better have memorized or written down your path because the only way to start the maze over is to trace your steps back exactly otherwise you are fucked Forever
luckily thats not the game
i mean maybe thats unlucky. who knows?

8 Likes

Wait @daphaknee plz consider this bit of numerology

3 Likes