selectbutton 85: a little less sixteenth round, a little more "voting"

[Sakurina]

@Rudie

Here’s a real one: can someone make an argument for Chrono Trigger more than it is pretty good and all the parts work? Like be real do the emotional parts make you emotional? When the music swells does your heart swell?

And this is why these kinds of lists put together by an aggregate of people will always result in bickering and some people feeling like the list is unsatisfactory: you can’t guarantee the criteria you are personally evaluating against are a) the same as other people and b) something everyone else even cares about.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to many people on this forum from the way that I talk that I mostly don’t engage with games for narrative. My two main evaluation criteria for games I play are “hit button feel good” and/or “how engaging are the gameplay systems/the core game loop”.

Ico would never stand a chance on my personal ranking because it isn’t trying to be that kind of game, and I am not even in the market for that kind of game. I get on paper why Ico is a notable game, but I have no personal interest in actually engaging with it, so it would feel dishonest of me to vote for it.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t recommend Ico to someone who is into that kind of thing, but since the audience of this list is unknown, I’m not tailoring my recommendations for anyone in particular. I’m just asking myself “which of these would I rather play” and seeing where things end up. That’s also why I’ve been relatively quiet in these threads, there isn’t any particularly deep logic to anything I’m doing.

I think you would have more of an argument against Chrono Trigger if this was explicitly a game about impactful or notable games with stricter voting criteria than just putting together a list of “top 64* games” with the criteria left up to the voters’ interpretation. But again:

@anonymous

i hope we can view this project and its results as something to do on a lark rather than as producing any sort of legally binding statements about Our Tastes As A Community! i understand that by its nature this sort of thing is liable to be more of a popularity contest than anything else, and i hope people see it as the frivolity that it is rather than as something which provokes alienation or resentment.

Like Bachelor said, if this list isn’t to your particular taste, nothing’s keeping you from making your own. I don’t necessarily mean a personal list either, make a thread with a clearer rules system and crowdsource recommendations if you want. One thing I really liked as an SB1 lurker was the amount of different recommended game lists with distinct criteria, and each one approached recommendations from a different angle. I think that had a lot of value, and definitely contributed in expanding about how I approach evaluating games. A lot of that has died down since SB2, and I think it would be cool if it came back in some way.

(also I hope someone is compiling a list of links to all these threads because searching for them is absolute hell, especially since the naming scheme changed midway through)