welcome to the 12th fortnightly sb85 double elimination poll thread, make yourself comfortable and come sit by the fire. back to winners bracket. it is now voting week, polls are open and will close next friday. overall bracket here.
I guess it makes sense for a late-stage winner’s bracket poll but these are almost all exactly games I’d expect to show up in a “100 best of” list, with maybe OutRun 2 as a (positive) surprise.
imo nocturne, killer7 and demon’s souls are great selectbutton picks that show up relatively infrequently in other lists (at least this high) and 100% deserve to be here
The other two for sure but Killer7 feels like it also has status as a lot of otherwise artless people’s one “cool weird game” and gets brought up pretty frequently as a result.
If there were a short list of exempted games, kind of like those letters you can’t choose on Wheel of Fortune, then maybe a Commodore 64 game would have a shot.
Maybe this whole effort is actually to build such a list so we can do this in perpetuity with no titles from the “hall of fame” allowed in each new tournament.
Maybe this whole effort is actually to build such a list so we can do this in perpetuity with no titles from the “hall of fame” allowed in each new tournament.
This is exactly what I’m hoping for, but I’m not the one running the polls. However, if people want to pass around the mantle, I’m always willing to show up.
the problem with the mainstream videogame canon isn’t that the games are too well-known or familiar, it’s that many or even most of them are just not very good at all, their consensus evaluation the product of an immature critical discourse beholden to market-determined childhood nostalgia and unquestioned consumer product-oriented value systems that conversely marginalize other works of much greater substance. underdog contrarianism doesn’t need to be the motivating metric for a canon that looks significantly different from the norm, and that can also include canonical games that really are that good (several of the ones here!). a problem with a mainstream that operates like a fandom is that its opposition can react like a counter-fandom. obviously majoritarian polls like this one also tend to homogenize in a way that risks amplifying problems carried over from the mainstream, so it’s a thorny issue.
I prefer Demon’s to Dark, as my second most contrarian opinion after “Zelda is not that good, actually” is that “sometimes levels are better than open worlds” (which probably has some tangential connection with my Zelda opinion, now that I think about it).
But Dark Souls is the one with the good fortune to be up against a boring old Zelda while I am a bitter adult Sega kid and Outrun 2 is the most Sega on the Sega-est day of its life (with an electrified Sega-ing machine), so
It’s fun that all three versions of Souls’ answer to this are in the same poll. I think if the second half of Dark Souls’ world didn’t feel much weaker than the first it’d be a stronger argument for the open world method, but those games seem to benefit from the possibility to segment areas off into discrete levels, or just to go “okay this one’s done go back to the hub and pick a different one” rather than having to work around putting together an increasingly complex yarn ball.
