There are old blurbs in here for killer7 and Demon’s Souls that I wrote too early because I couldn’t read the bracket order.
KATAMARI DAMACY
It’s going to Katamari, the game that let me roll around in its global village sandboxes. I can’t play fighting games and only appreciate them aesthetically, and I really only enjoy the Soul Calibur and Tekken home versions that provide a lot of single-player content for us no-friend-havers
RESIDENT EVIL 4
VastleCania made a good argument for Majora earlier but when I finally played it on 3DS, I appreciated how moody it was for a Zelda but got totally lost in trying to figure out how to proceed even with the baby mode modern Nintendo-wanting-to-please-everyone tutorials. It’s going to RE4 that I’ve probably cleared 20 times. Would recommend emulating GC/Wii as the HD versions running at 60fps made the button mash QTEs impossible for me. I also feel like maybe the first Dead Rising does a better job with the conceit of juggling priorities on a timer.
CRAZY TAXI
It’s going to arcade Sega again. Every time I tried to play Undertale I just lost interest. I think I was put off by the game seeming to penalize you for killing enemies because I couldn’t see a way around not killing them.
SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS
I think without SotC I probably wouldn’t have known about IC/SB. Maybe my gateway was earlier through shmups.com but I remember a Tim Rogers piece leading me here and something about the colossi essentially being inverted Zelda dungeons that kind of made my jaw hang open for a bit. It’s the only Fumito Ueda game I played to completion. The environmental puzzles in Ico and Last Guardian just ended up confusing and frustrating me, though I plan on going back to them because I wanted more of that world that evoked so much with so little.
BREATH OF THE WILD
Going to go with BotW, though I appreciate 3S aesthetically. BotW is big, beautiful and bold. It’s one of those well done open-worlds where every object feels hand-placed as if each has a specific contextual purpose. I like that the shrines are (mostly) bite-sized dungeons that suit the portable Switch. I never found all the shrines and it didn’t feel right to look them up with a guide, but I hope to finish them all someday.
CAVE STORY vs. TETRIS TGM2+ abstained
It’s going to go to Cave Story even though I haven’t played much of it. The TGM games are too intense for me to enjoy. I like that incoming pieces have unique audio cues. Maybe I should just abstain since I don’t feel strongly enough about either so voting doesn’t feel right.
KILLER7
SHIREN
Going with Shiren. It’s probably the only rogue-like (series) that was approachable enough for me to get into and enjoy what eventually became multiple installments. I know this is dumb but I can’t play non-metroidvania castlevanias and would just admire them aesthetically from afar.
DEMON’S SOULS
SONIC MANIA
I never played Riven, did play Myst and found it charming, and without Myst’s influence on that era I probably wouldn’t have been able to experience the FMV games that made up a good chunk of my childhood. But, I’m giving this one to the game I actually played, even though the later levels became a slog for me. Sonic Mania is at least as good as any Sonic Team 2D Sonic but I especially appreciate it for using or expanding ideas from the old games, like an interpretation of the Sonic 2 beta’s Dust Hill Zone and the revamped old zones.
OUTRUN 2
Outrun 2 no question. Want to say this is the better Outrun of the 2 and I changed my vote to FFT in the last round in part to reflect that. If it comes down to Outrun 1 vs 2, even though 2 owes a lot from its ancestor it is the better and more accessible game to play now. Outrun 1’s sprite scaling is beautiful but as you go down sharp turns and sudden elevation changes I start to feel like a dog trying to keep its footing in the back of a moving truck. I am also making Outrun 2 my salutary farewell vote to the end of an era because this game ended up being one of the last great hurrahs of Sega’s godlike arcade studios as people increasingly gamed at home/away from an arcade cabinet. Want to add as a pointless anecdote that the one time I actually got to play Outrun 2 in an arcade in the Philippines’ Mall of Asia, its steering wheel was busted or uncalibrated and it kept interpreting every turn as a sharp veer to the right, and my leg-braced foot could barely flex the pedals. Even with those limitations (maybe partly because of them) it was still a good time.