No one should take my dislike of Undertale personally except for Tony the Fox himself
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wait I just noticed that like fully half of the games in the entire bracket are sega games. maybe we shoulda just done a full sega bracket and then a non sega bracket
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i feel like we both expanded pretty well why it doesn’t fall into that “shaming you for playing a violent game” Spec Ops: The Line territory but w/e i get it. it feels like a pretentious premise and i know not everyone can shake that off, and if the writing doesn’t land with you, the game just ain’t gonna land, no matter what or how much else the game does. readin’ is the meat of it.
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You got an android? Get Pizza Boy GBC and the Game Boy Camera ROM, and now it’s an app for your phone
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Undertale is the only good Visual Novel I’ve played, and it’s because all of the characters have their own theme songs, but Toriel and Asgore’s themes are intertwined in this wonderful way where Toriel is herself, but Asgore is nothing without Toriel, and it’s so wonderful how that’s described only through music.
Undertale is a game where I finally understood why people like superheroes when Undyne fucking destroyed me and I thought “Oh shit, she’s so strong and I love her” and it turns out that she gets even stronger when you truly piss her off.
Undertale is a game where two skeletons have a more real relationship with each other than 99% of game characters.
I know it pisses people off and it’s a meme and whatever, but it’s really a game about relationships and characters and the endgame of “oh you killed too many monsters” is a secondary goal to just depicting some monsters who love each other.
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I was trying to get across why it’s not exactly the same - it was like reading something with a lengthy recitation as preamble. It doesn’t help that I wasn’t into the monster design enough to care about them.
The quote I grabbed appears to be from Tony and just encapsulates the frustration I had. I would like Undertale more if it didn’t start from first principles.
Also, Crazy Taxi is everything. Is it the Taxi that is Crazy, us, or society? I’m mad as hell
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undertale makes me sad because my parents got divorced and frankly that’s more than i can say about literally any other game okay???
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Crazy Taxi makes me happy because it reminds me of my dad’s extremely poor driving and confusing invocation of the biblical character jehu while collecting me and my brother for split custody weekends
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yeah I agree, I disagree with the way Tony the Tiger carried out the marketing of the game, but I also get it because you need to sell your fish. I get it also because despite how the marketing keeps telling you that it’s a game in which you don’t have to kill anyone, people will still reach the end of the game frustrated that they didn’t meet the requirement for the best ending (and at the same time complain that it’s too short/only 5 hours long) I wish the game could just speak for itself more instead of feeling like that
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Is it better to have your dearest games in contention or not, I wonder
Y’all can direct your antipathy toward KRZ and D2 to my inbox for revenge
But what would Toriel think hmm?
Tony the Tiger says rollicking argument is grrrreat
Idk much about undertale fandom and subcultural stuff, but it is extremely popular with Normies right? Like children who have never even played a JRPG before? I give the game a lot of credit because I find crossover stuff like that really fascinating. Was there any other game at any budget level this decade that had like, an actual story and characters and stuff, that was remotely as popular?
I wouldn’t know if the game is actually good, because I gave up. I would like to go back and finish it someday, though.
It should not be permitted to vote for both outrun2 and crazy taxi, they are like diametrically opposed.
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Excuse me I contain multitudes
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Oh shit. In Crazy Taxi your main motive is profit, perpetuating capitalism. In Outrun (2) your main motive is your partner’s sustained entertainment, yielding love/polygonal hearts. The choice is painful, but clear.
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We can talk about merits without being reductive of the other game y’all.
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take that, uber
I’m going to abstain for about half of this bracket.
Here’s what I’ve decided on,
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD
vs.
STREET FIGHTER III THIRD STRIKE: FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE 
This one might be hard for some of y’all, but it is an easy one for me.
CAVE STORY
vs.
TETRIS: THE ABSOLUTE: THE GRANDMASTER 2 PLUS
Cave Story is really good, but TGM2+ wins.
CASTLEVANIA: RONDO OF BLOOD
vs.
MYSTERY DUNGEON: SHIREN THE WANDERER (1995)
RONDO! Rondo is one of my favorite Castlevanias. That backflip is so good.
DEMON’S SOULS (2009)
vs.
NIGHTS INTO DREAMS
Fuck your choir bullshit, where’s your Sax solo Demon’s Souls?
Nights wins!
OUTRUN 2
vs.
GAME BOY CAMERA
Deus Ex losing made this a lot easier for me.
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I wonder what it would be like if we did a bracket like this for something non-video games. Whats the most votes that a single movie or music could get? Is there a general shape of a coherent aesthetic there? It would be fun to do with music because we could all expose ourselves to nominees pretty easily.
Like with video games, we clearly lean towards SEGA (particularly Sonic Team, wowza!), consoles, and Japanese games. What patterns are there for movies and music?
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assuming the sb movie “hivemind” as such is just speed racer, miami vice, robocop, fire walk with me and maybe a handful of anime
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I’d imagine Wong Kar-Wai, Johnnie To, and John Woo would also feature heavily. Oh and Michael Mann would be represented by a serious voting bloc.
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If that is the standard we are voting on, let me tell you about why I can never play Jill of the Jungle.
It’s the summer of 1995. I am 14 and going to be a freshman at one of the best private schools in the city, a bit of a shift from the city public schools I grew up in. I spend most of the summer home alone, or hanging out with a few of my friends in the neighborhood. On this particular day, I was mostly by myself, but my friend Alex and his younger brother Jeffrey came over to mess around with some shareware CD I had. Jill of the Jungle was on that disc, so we started playing that. Alex got called home for something unremembered, and so Jeffrey and I were taking turns on this when my dad came home at like 1 in the afternoon, which was super abnormal.
I wrapped up the level we were on, and then my dad told Jeffrey that he needed to go home, so he left. My dad sat me down in the living room and told me that:
- He and my mom were splitting up.
- He had not informed my mother of this.
- He had rented an apartment and I had a room there.
- We needed to go buy a bed for that room that afternoon.
So we went and bought that bed from Norka* Futons and went to the new shitty appartment and built it in the tiny room that was to be mine there for the whole like year my dad would stay there before moving in with my stepmom, who died of cancer this year. And then we went back to my house, and mom came home from work and made dinner, and I sat there in awkward horrible silence as my dad eventually got up the nerve to tell her. She started crying. I went and sat out on the front porch with my dog Buster and waited for something to happen. They started arguing. I sat there. I don’t remember when I went back in.
So maybe I don’t want a game making me think about this. Maybe this is why I can’t tell you if Jill of the Jungle is good, why I have never played Jill of the Jungle again. Maybe this is why I am voting for Crazy Taxi, which was the dream of perfect videgames my freshman year of college, the year i got to escape living with my parents for the first time, when I could see that my life didn’t have to be controlled by their divorce.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
*: It's Akron backwards.
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