I’d have bet money on Demon’s Souls winning the whole thing but the way people are talking here that may have been an unwise investment
Katamari Damacy is one of three games that should win this tournament and Shadow of the Colossus is the one game I truly loathe on this ballot aside from Snake Eater. But at least Snake Eater had that ladder bit, that was good, what did the colossus game have? Some good looking monsters in a game that felt like shit. Imagine if that horrible (I assume) Adam Sandler movie about the guy who had 9/11 PTSD featured Katamari instead of SotC. I bet it woulda been good then, but also I’m glad I’ve never heard “Lonely Rolling Star” during a movie, I think if that happened I might die.
I will vote Tetris. Nothing can beat Tetris, except Outrun 2, and maybe Katamari. Creating nice orderly stacks and erasing them is the most pleasing thing you can do in this world (that doesn’t involve **** or ***). Killer 7 is a better game than Shadow of the Colossus or Snake Eater but it’s still very bad cuz you cannot manually advance the text, it does not respect the player, it wastes your time because some bean counter said “you gotta pad this shit out, you gotta make sure this 5 hour game lasts 20 cuz that way it’ll be worth $50 worth of yencoins and we don’t have a bunch of day 1 trade-ins at Book-Off” and that’s why almost every single PS2 game is bad.
If you’re voting against Outrun 2 you’re admitting that we’re not compatible. You will never be sitting in the passenger seat of my sports car. And that’s fine, that’s fine. Not everyone has to get along. But Outrun 2 is the most anti-lonely game lonely game. I play Outrun2 and dream of a day where that might be me cruising along underneath those blue skies. I play Demon’s Souls and think “this is the best game ever made and I’m one of 3 people who knew this would be the best game ever made way back in 2008 but also it’s pretty depressing, I bet if I had a wife I wouldn’t have spent 2,000 hours playing this.” Vote Outrun 2.
I’ll vote Dark Souls. I think Demon’s Souls is better. I think the way Dark Souls kinda falls off in the second half is one of my favorite things about it. I wish the final boss was just you stepping on a teeny tiny slug. That would make it perfect. I think Zelda is good and I hope we have a 4 way Zelda final. I think that would be a nice way to atone for the sins of SB1.0, foremost amongst them the fact that I was too shy to post cuz so many people really hated Zelda.
I’m voting for Doom.
I’m voting for Mario 3 even though MGS2 is the only Kojima game I like. I think that dude is a hack, I think anyone who gets off on his shit would be better suited reading pretty much any seinen manga from 198x while idling in some PC-98 VN, I think MGS5 is the only good open world game that isn’t Breath of the Wild but I won’t give him credit for it.
Don’t ask me why, I don’t want to talk about it!!
Look, Nocturne’s a good game but it’s 90 hours long. I played that shit like 20 years ago. All I remember about it are some cool environments and a dude in a wheelchair and a battle theme and resetting cuz I didn’t like the skills my pokemons got and that the game crashes if you put a tilde in your name. Earthbound is a whole other level, it’s just as beautiful, it is way funnier, it has a way worse battle system, it has more to say about being a human being, if you vote against it now you’ll probably regret it someday and when that day comes you’ll think back and go “Bachelor was right, as always. I should burn all my PS2 discs and send the ashes to him with a letter of apology for doubting him.”
I like Bloodborne way more now than I did way back when. I have replayed it like 4 times and each time I’ve gone “well that was better than I remembered.” It’s very good. But GOD HAND is better, even though I will never replay it cuz I don’t want to think about builds or combos or all that other shit, it’s such a PS2 game, but it’s the best PS2 game, and Shinji Mikami was the best PlayStation developer. Vote GOD HAND.
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yeah, same.
also, voting demon’s souls despite being an outrun 2 gal.
i’m just even more a wading through plague swamp kinda gal
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THE TRAFFIC JAM ALONE, C’MON
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I twice recently tried to play SoTC got 3 collossi. The world is great. Desolate and huge and questioning. I felt awful killing the big beasts. I knew what was coming. I did what was the right thing and turned the game off. Katamari Damacy in it’s perfection against time is about playing the game too good until there is no more game. A reverse tetris. You did too good and now must wait for a buzzer.
Speaking of Tetris. I am the whole reason Grandmaster Plus 2 is the tetris on this list. Because again Co-op mode is that good. Two people fighting against the end. It should be co-op Missile Command. Hoard mode. It’s about working together. Killer7 is big and weird and I still listen to the soundtrack and replaying it is on my list of things to do with my 36 years experience getting mad at media.
I was there when the Demon’s Souls servers shut off. I had a dang griefer for an invader. I also invaded. It was lovely. Until the world might be mended.
I also play Outrun 2 every chance I get. Every chance I also think “this is the last time I will play it as intended.” Then covid happened. Before I left Akiba for what would be the last time I went to HEY and played Deathsmiles and then I played Rave Racer which was right next to Outrun 2 and frankly the HEY O2 machine is kind of broken and the RR machine is beautiful. I hated Namco Arcade games for being rival to Sega for too long. Namco Arcade games rule.
I will say again I think Link’s Awakening is a game for children and it is time to move on. Yeah I like Christian Slater’s Fern Gully as a kid, but I am not going to put it in my top 10. Give me more deeply strange NPCs that are dangerous. With a side path that feels like a main path and a main path that feels like a side path and then you have two strange Seperents telling you lies and then you go into a DooM Level underground and create 2 sequels that cause endless debate because the first game was that delicious and weird.
I am also older and think I am too old for Chrono Trigger. It’s great. Just let me go read a book about actual history or a movie where two actual humans fall in love but their families oppose. The ennui of passing youth. I am now older and more experienced in all kinds of things than the creators of CT and I bet they’d do things differently in their own work and be wrong.
DooM is the best game and you could give up video games for DooM.
No one needs to be told Mario 3 is good. You can individually shoot a whole bar in MGS2 and then some watermelons and then have this pile of movie references thrown on you before the world became just putting your fucking characters in the shining. I can and have still pull something new from each MGS game playthrough. Ah I noticed this this time. I have watched Mario 3 virtuousos on the streets of Akiba destroy world 8 on a famiclone for a junk shop that now sells facemasks and skin lotion to Chinese tourists. Who knows what those shops are now. I miss the Mario Virtuousos. Let me see you shine again on a cold Tokyo night. Now you’ll see a jackass Canadian with tribal tattoos say Mario is fucking sick and I have to think your fucking 30 as he sets his open strong zero on some junk carts seconds before knocking over that strong zero laughing and walking away and I having to remember how many assholes treat Tokyo like a playground disneyland.
Hobo seemed to make some good points about Earthbound and I keep meaning to play it in Japanese. I felt in my gut that Mother 3 is too condescending. Earthbound isn’t Mother 3. I have never been on the SMT train. Let me go to high school and have weird social relations.
Godhand.
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nobody needs to read these, but i think it’s nice practice to try and make my thoughts coherent every once in a while.
shadow of the colossus’ best part is just idling about the world. i don’t like fighting colossi, and not because it makes me feel particularly bad (games that make me feel bad are often good) but because i just don’t find the puzzle box type of boss that interesting to play and you gotta do it 16 times. the mood also isn’t as strong or unique of an experience as playing katamari even just once. if this was a tournament where the losers would be erased from cultural consciousness i’d pick sotc to be erased before katamari. katamari just contributes something far more valuable that nothing has managed to copy, not even its own sequels.
killer7 is one of my formative games. it’s one of those feel bad games. but also a feel cool game. it’s probably very shallow, but i’m all in on the way the game styles itself. the camera angles while playing, the absurd cutscenes, the slamming soundtrack. even the dumb, possibly annoying stuff like each character having a phrase when destroying an enemy’s weak spot kind just works for me. it feels kinda satisfying to just hear my character shout “fuck you” as clockwork when i’m doing good. that could be a manufactured memory but i feel like one of the characters did.
i didn’t fully know what i wanted from a videogame until i played demon’s souls. turns out its more king’s field rather than more souls sequels, but demon’s souls led me there. outrun 2 is a wonderful time but i might have trouble accepting a wonderful blissful time over getting punished in a dark bloodstained dungeon. don’t read that as dirty.
i love the micro-world of link’s awakening, the way each screen has a kind of unique identity, how charming the little characters in it are, the dreaming elements (altho they are few and not super pervasive). it’s also mostly built on very simple puzzle structures that feels kinda unsatisfying to deal with. it’s the same problem i have with sotc bosses but in a different area. also much less dynamic about it. everything has very strictly coded 1-way interactions rather than any kind of richness to it. it feels fake. dark souls has interactions with tons of nuances to them. all stuff that matters and makes you consider how the world in it works. or you can ignore it, but it’s all there. it’s not built on this strict puzzle box structure, but instead on allowing you to find some own expression in how you play it.
i wish i could remember reasons to pick chrono trigger over doom but i don’t. i think i finished doom and doom 2 on uv like 7 or 8 years ago? chrono trigger is way further back than that, and soon after followed a period of believing all jrpgs are just terrible (pretentions i’m fucking done with) so chrono trigger might be worth revisiting some day.
i tried replaying smb3 some months back and felt an emotional flatline. i had this experience some years back where smw stopped doing anything for me but i could enjoy smb3 and now it’s reversed. i don’t know what that’s about. i love playing mgs2.
i’m gonna replay earthbound, but as it is it’s nocturne.
god hand allowed me to mess up my build more badly than bloodborne ever could. is that good or bad?
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It’s kinda weird to realize you’re older than your parents were when you were born, and how they were likely way more clueless than you were at that moment, and how they also probably felt a depth of emotion you’ll likely never know, and it’s doubly weird how you have had all these life experiences and read all these books and been to all these museums and had all these near death experiences, and, also, watched them die, but it didn’t truly dawn on you that they are/were actually people too until you re-experienced this video game for little children.
Maybe a personal fault on my end, but maybe not. Maybe this is a great work of art.
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That’s Mother’s quality that goes unappreciated because it’s a niche keep-it-weird game here — it’s pop for all ages, not obscure.
Re: demon’s I’m not sure the world can be mended but I was less depressed when I could clear my head by going for a drive with the top down
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I haaaave. it’s ok.
like earthbound a lot despite coming from nintendo but nocturne is the greatest
dont think i can really choose between demon’s and outrun 2
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Katamari Damacy
vs.
Shadow of the Colossus (2006)
Shadow of the Colossus is a game I only finished when the PS3 version came out that looked mostly the same as the PS2 version (which even supported widescreen), but ran with an almost good framerate. My friend Ryan (the other person on the Kingdom Hearts podcast I made) never had a PS3, so I took mine to his place and we beat all of them in one day. It was pretty OK. It made you feel a little too heroic sometimes for killing the things it was trying to make you feel bad for. It’s the nature of puzzles - it feels good to solve them, even if solving them means doing the serious bad thing. The puzzles are pretty cool in design though, so that’s something.
Katamari Damacy is a whole damn thing. It was a budget game that just sorta showed up and people didn’t know what to do with it at first and then we all played it and it was a good moment of discovery. It rewards you messing with it. It has great music. It has a character who feels the right amount of spite for people playing videogames. It’s perfect. It has a sequel that is more and is kinda angry about being more and that is just what it should be. None of it is super serious and it doesn’t need to be.
Winner: Katamari Damacy
Tetris: The Absolute: The Grandmaster PLUS 2
vs.
Killer7
I have still not gotten to play this co-op TGM good times, despite Rudie selling it on me hard. I live in Cleveland and there is a pandemic, so my options are limited. The only people i get to see on a regular basis include at least two Tetris nerds (my wife and my mom) but I don’t think either of them want to do this. Maybe I should find out. I will give it a shot.
The one thing I do know for sure about Tetris is that my friend Ryan once moved into a kinda shitty apartment in Canton, Ohio, and it had like one closet that wasn’t in a bedroom, and another friend spent hours as the rest of us were moving Ryan’s stuff into the place perfectly arranging every thing he could to fit into that closet. We called it the Tetris Closet because everything was so perfectly stacked in there. The door closed flush, but when you opened it, nothing fell out at all. It was a marvel. Ryan was probably kinda pissed about it, because I am sure he needed some of that stuff.
It was in this shitty apartment with the Tetris Closet that I beat Killer 7 the second time in my life. I had taken Adilegian’s Killer 7 analysis and turned it into images so I could read it on my PSP while Ryan played, because for some reason the PSP could not read TXT files. So I spent a weekend sleeping on Ryan’s couch and powering through that game. I remember we took a break at one point and went to the Walmart near his apartment, where I bought the MF Doom Cartoon Network album. It was pretty good. We ate a lot of shitty pizza. We tried to figure out what the fuck was going on. We spent probably too long just hanging out with Rave On. It was a great weekend.
Killer 7 is still a thing I treasure. Like I treasure that weekend, but I also just love that game. The soundtrack is so good. The art is so good. I’m sure it is somehow problematic now but even though I bought a Steam copy of it, I haven’t installed it yet. None of my friends live in shitty basement apartments like that any more. We all got older and live in a place where houses are cheap and plentiful. We have responsibilities and shit that make crashing on a couch for a weekend to play one game a lot less possible. But Killer 7 still rules.
Winner: Killer 7
Demon’s Souls (2009)
vs.
OutRun 2
I like Demon’s Souls. It’s a great game. It’s also one of the ones I havent finished, but that is nothing against it. I just didn’t do it. It’s still good. Maybe I will finish it some day, who knows? I bought it the day it came out in the US. I suck at finishing things. I did play a lot of this one with Ryan though.
OutRun 2 is fucking perfect and I don’t give a shit who I play it with or where I play it, it is still fucking perfect. I love it. I want it to be ported to everything under the sun. M2, you did a really good Switch version of Outrun 1, so like get on that so I can play OutRun 2 when my kid is on the TV. Or take it over to Ryan’s house easily.
Winner: OutRun 2
Dark Souls
vs.
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
Dark Souls is another one I played a lot of and didn’t finish and that is OK. It’s still really good. I did not play it with Ryan, though he played a lot of it with a different friend, and that is cool. It’s good. I should finish it.
Links Awakening was the first game I bought for the first Game Boy Color that I lost forever (of 2, GBCs are apparently just not meant for me to have and to hold on to). It was really good. I think Dark Souls is better though, and also fuck voting for a Zelda game, really.
Winner: Dork Swoles
DOOM / DOOM II
vs.
Chrono Trigger
Both of these games came out before I met Ryan, but we sure talked about them a lot when we did meet. Everyone I knew played Chrono Trigger in an emulator in the waning days of dial-up internet, when downloading a ROM was a commitment. Like so many games, I never finished it, though I liked it a lot.
I don’t know that I ever finished the main games in eithe DOOM but that is OK. I don’t really know how neccessary that is. We did all talk about DOOM a lot in high school, and someone installed it on all the computers in the lab so it was always there. It still rules. I still own it for so many different systems. It’s great. Being in high school in the backhalf of the 90s meant everyone talked about DOOM, and the various shit you had to do to get it to run on whatever PC you had at home. Editing autoexec files to like free up just a bit more RAM. Sure Quake happened, but nobody i knew could run it all that well, so DOOM.
Winner: DOOOOOOOM
Super Mario Bros. 3
vs.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
Time for the big reveal: I should probably beat MGS2. I know I will enjoy it. I’ve read about it all so much I feel like I already have beat it. But I have not. So I should.
SMB3 is fine but nobody needs to hear about Mario games at this point.
Winner: MGS2
Earthbound
vs.
Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne
Time for the big reveal: I should probably beat both these games. I know I will enjoy them. I’ve read about them so much I feel like I already have beat them. But I have not. So I should.
You can’t really co-op RPGs that well with a friend unless you live together, so I didn’t play either of these with Ryan. Nocturne is way cooler though, so.
Winner: Nocturne
God Hand
vs.
Bloodborne
Shit this is the more difficult one. I love both of these a lot. But I own a God Hand shirt, and if I was gonna couch co-op one of these with Ryan, that would be it.
Winner: God Hand
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yeah, it becomes somewhat impossible/arbitrary at a certain point but im a big fan of listmaking and i like how it makes me consider the “weight” of a game in my heart and judgment and reveals priorities and value systems that i wouldn’t have been conscious of otherwise
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polls are now open. voting will end in one week.
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A lot of you don’t like working together and it shows /twitterjoke
i am dripping with sweat having to choose between sotc and katamari; my final decision was informed by the fact that i am a depressive masochist rather than a jovial hedonist
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i think katamari is pure Joy And Fun whereas sotc is a self-flagellating journey through not just ethically dubious character motivations but also a beautiful blooming sea of choppy frames and controls that i’ve heard a ton of people complain about…both left such a life-altering “woah, video games can be like this?” on teenage me and picking between them feels like choosing which thumb is my favorite — i can’t imagine my life without either!
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katamari is deeply sarcastic to me but
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okay
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Voted Katamari because I started playing it again recently but it was really close. I probably like Shadow of the Colossus more. Katamari has a tremendously strong soundtrack though so that also tipped the scales.
I went Killer7 over Tetris though it was practically a coin flip.
Outrun 2 has more Ferraris than Demon’s Souls. Like, a lot more. In fact, Demon’s Souls doesn’t have any. Not even a single GTS in the whole game. It’s a great game otherwise despite this single thing which makes it objectively inferior to Outrun.
Link’s Awakening is wonderful but put me down in front of the two and I’ll spend more time with Dark Souls.
Doom is still a tsunami-level force of history that continues to surge. Crono, Marle and Luca should have visited 1993 on their little adventure.
Mario 3 is one my most cherished games but Metal Gear Solid 2 was my first meta-level gaming life event where I unhealthily obsessed over every little bit of information I could find in the months leading up to release. The soundtrack is seared into my soul and I still have the strategy guide somewhere (it was also the first game I bought a strategy guide for). I will get all of those dog tags someday.
I have played Earthbound to completion at least once. Maybe if I could say the same for Nocturne things would have been different (I’ve only played a bit of the original MegaTen).
Bloodborne is good. It’s so good it’s great, even. Select Button Gaming Confession: I have never played God Hand. 
I know, I know. I just never played it back in the day and now I probably never will since it’s likely been passed by other games now.
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okay, i did vote bloodborne as well, but i do think god hand is one of those entirely unique stand-alone games that nothing really even dares to mimic so being passed by might not be applicable?
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