phenomena is definitely also an sb movie
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Okay, now back onto the topic at hand:
Resident Evil 4 vs. Majora’s Mask
Wow, they said it. Chu 
Lip didn’t get enough votes so I am obligated to bat for Majora’s Mask. Collectively, I have probably spent more than three hours jamming out on the various instruments, bending the notes into atonal cries of pain. Every hour was worth it.
Resident Evil 4 is awesome though. I remember when my older brother rented it and feeling terrified when a chainsaw wielding plaga began chasing Leon. I wasn’t even playing the game! It’s great when a game really commits to killing you in the first hour. And while I’m here quoting other posters:
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KATAMARI DAMACY vs. SUPER STREET FIGHTER II TURBO
Katamari Damacy is less influential but more unique and has better music. SSF2T is not a game I will ever be excited to play but I recognise the legacy.
RESIDENT EVIL 4 vs. THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: MAJORA’S MASK
Both very good here. RE4 has always read as a prototype for God Hand in many ways to me. It’s pure, distilled Mikami and is probably one of the better (if not best) REs overall. It’s held back by some really dated elements like the shitty mid-cutscene QTEs that just kill you and Ashley escorting. There are too many Zeldas in this bracket but Majora’s Mask is interesting and full of sadness and omen. Even the villain is a child isolated. RE4 has regenerators but Majora’s Mask has the immense confirmation of fate as an enemy that is neither defeatable nor avoidable. I always liked to think that Link’s cycles through Majora’s Mask worked the same way the official timeline split after Ocarina did. So there are as many timelines in Majora as there are cycle resets in a given playthrough. All of them consigned to oblivion.
UNDERTALE vs. CRAZY TAXI
I never got very good at Crazy Taxi. For all of Undertale’s flaws I think it’s an important game for getting a new generation into quirky RPGs who would probably never have the patience to play through Earthbound. It has pretty great music and the character stuff is often fun.
SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS vs PUYO PUYO SERIES
I never got very good at Puyo Puyo to enjoy it. SotC is a funny one because it’s an awesome experience built around a very strange premise (that Wander would go to such extreme lengths to save a woman he barely knows). I’m voting the PS2 original because the remake looks off to me.
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD vs. STREET FIGHTER III THIRD STRIKE: FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE
Oof, now here’s two games that are arguably best in their respective series. Breath of the Wild is the most accurate sequel to the original (sans dungeons) while SF3 is a deliberate attempt to stray off the beaten path. Breath of the Wild’s crappy button mapping really sours it for me (in a contest this close). Otherwise it is probably the best open world game in a long while and easily the best 3D Zelda in a long while. There is a lot of Zelda in this bracket though. SF3 is a great fighting game and relatively accessible too which gives it big points. I’m gonna have to come back to this one.
CAVE STORY vs. TETRIS: THE ABSOLUTE: THE GRANDMASTER 2 PLUS
Now I love Tetris, but! I would’ve preferred Gameboy Tetris or at least NES Tetris. I watch TGM2+ and I cannot vibe with the sound design. It actually sucks. It sounds like a robot reading off a shopping list. The music is OK but I feel like its total aesthetic is not as well considered as earlier versions. The co-op mode intrigues me though but without having played it I don’t know if I can give it a vote.
On the other hand I have no strong love for Cave Story and preferred Kero Blaster. Default Tetris vote.
KILLER7 vs. SUPER METROID
I’m a professional, you can’t fool me. Killer7 was a game that felt like it had many things to say but not much space to say them in. Despite this it ends up richer than most games when it comes to theming. Sound is fucking through the roof with both games here but Killer7 has the edge. The first game I played that effectively transmits the truly insidious nature of propaganda and the power media has over almost everything we experience. I will come back to it again and again until I die.
CASTLEVANIA: RONDO OF BLOOD vs. MYSTERY DUNGEON: SHIREN THE WANDERER (1995)
I’ve played neither but the arguments for Shiren are intriguing me…
DEMON’S SOULS (2009) vs. NIGHTS INTO DREAMS…
Demon’s Souls is possibly perfect. I still hear the echo of the Nexus even now. What a horrible feeling, planning an expedition beyond the archstones. Not a single conversation stirs that cursed place. What is the world coming to?
This bracket is making me realise I really don’t care for a lot of Sega franchises.
RIVEN vs. SONIC MANIA
Riven is a borderline mystical experience and actually feels like a window to another world rather than some glittery software that boasts immersive polygons. Other games wish they had Riven’s charm and verisimilitude. I’ll never forget riding that goddamn minecart 500 times trying to figure out how to use a boiler.
OUTRUN 2 vs. GAME BOY CAMERA
I can take a picture of Outrun 2 with Game Boy Camera and make a stop motion video of Outrun 2 and would enjoy doing it. Outrun 2 looks like a good time with palm trees but having not really played it I can’t vote for it over Camera.
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Resident Evil 4 vs. Majora’s Mask
I liked chilling in clock town on the second day, but I also liked the village encounter of 1-1. Ultimately it comes down to RE4 having mercenaries mode and bug puke melting faces.
BOTW vs. SF3TS
I liked the climbing and cooking in BOTW. The rain and degradation mechanic didn’t bother me, what I didn’t care about were the runes or the shrines. I put all my orbs into stamina, I thought it was extremely lame that I couldn’t get the master sword with temporary hearts. I loved evading the mechs and climbing hyrule castle with what felt like the minimum amount of stamina upgrades required. I’m giving it to SF3 though, Yun’s “Zesshou Hohou” and “Kobokushi“ special moves feel better than anything in BOTW imo
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I started with Riven and still had a blast. You’ll get a little more joy out of the connections with Myst first but either way you’ll still enjoy the world I think.
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Myst’s plot is very slight, there’s little reason not to play Riven first
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this thread reminded me that I own the DS Shiren and never really played it. I bought it when it came out exclusively because of SB. so I started playing it a couple days ago, and it’s really cool! but my 3DS ran out of battery juice, as these things do, and I realized I can’t find my fucking charger. so now I got a 3DS charger coming from amazon so I can play shiren again. I died twice because I found companions, then those companions died and leveled up the monster that killed them, which promptly one shot me. take care of your friends, select button.
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Undertale vs Crazy Taxi
I played Undertale like, three months ago. It’s not so bad, but I kind of hated walking around in it the same way people say they hate walking around in Yume Nikki*. A fair amount of its humor bounced off of me. Is it because I knew it wanted to be funny? Am I stingy with my guffaws? Maybe. I think what hurt my enjoyment of the game’s humor was that I often had to take two or more tries to beat a boss. I hate reading the same jokes twice! I hate reading anything twice! I could never read much of the Bible when I was a kid because I didn’t understand why the Gospels kept repeating themselves!**
If this were Deltarune, I think I would put it above Crazy Taxi, but at this moment, I don’t feel many strong emotions about Undertale.
*I do not hate walking around in Yume Nikki. I relish it.
**I’m now at two references to my Christian upbringing ITT. I promise I will stop.
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Sry for the aside but i have never understood what type of laugh a guffaw is.
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Shadow of the Colossus vs Puyo Puyo
I love puzzle fighting games but I love Ueda even more. I’ve heard people criticize Shadow of the Colossus because it wants to make the player feel guilty about playing the game. I don’t think that’s accurate. I don’t think the player is meant to feel guilty any more than an actor playing the part of Othello should feel guilty for killing Desdemona. Like a Greek tragedy, Shadow of the Colossus is a story about fate and one’s inability to escape their nature. In a way, Puyo Puyo is also about that, but I digress.
I love the way that the camera frames the characters. Ico did an incredible job of immersing you within an idiosyncratically designed architecture. Shadow of the Colossus immerses you within a landscape. I love that there is a secret garden you can climb to.
I hate how I feel like I’m choosing the pompous option. I am just sincerely awed by the game.
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I think the sense of scale is one of the things that gets left by the wayside when people usually bring up the game to discuss the story primarily. It has such a good sense of place and makes good use of music to match the apprehensive wonder (lol) of being in a strange land.
When control returns after the cutscene here the strings kick in in just the right way and you are left in a space with this thing. The Colossi are such a natural way to get the player to look around them and assess the scale of the environment.
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I don’t know why this isn’t just how videogames are thought of normally, including by the people making them.
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I think that conversation was influenced by where Western game design was heading with its morality meters and emphasis on “choice.”
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Scott Adams (the game designer) had the right idea. The player is a puppet master.
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So far this is the earliest mention I can find of someone feeling remorse for killing the colossi, from a preview in October 2005:
Specifically this paragraph near the end:
Once we finally reach the head of the colossus, it only takes three or four more stabs to make it drop, the geysers of blood pouring from its dying body absorbed into our character, and he falls unconscious, and the build is now over. I felt kind of sad and regretful that I had just killed the colossus, as the preview code doesn’t give away the reason why we have to kill it in the first place.
I’m guessing writers for game magazines and websites were just searching for anything to say about a game that was already very minimalist by nature based off the demo where you’re just dumped into the world and can only fight the first colossus.
Though maybe there was something in the promotional materials that only the press had access to that suggested the notion. I can’t find anything though other than a grainy youtube video of someone unboxing a PS2 press kit from some conference.
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I remember instinctively feeling bad for killing the colossi, and I’m sure I didn’t read any reviews before playing the game. It’s hard to imagine that this wasn’t intentional to some degree, especially with some of the creatures that aren’t even aggressive toward the player. I don’t know that guilt is quite the right word, though.
When SB finally convinced me to play through Kane and Lynch 2, I found a similar experience there. It wasn’t that I wanted to stop playing because I as the player was doing something wrong, and it wasn’t as if there was even an attempt at the illusion of choice. I think it just goes with the direct and immersive nature of the medium. That a game is capable of causing a reaction like this is a good thing in my eyes, and I don’t necessarily want to resist it by taking myself out of the story or focusing on the distinction between the player and the character.
I have more than once quit playing a game because it evoked a similar feeling without any good storytelling to back it up. Two examples include Tomb Raider and Monster Hunter World.
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Undertale contains a quick-reflex shmup that runs at 30hz 
Crazy Taxi is a driving game 
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Shhhh you’re gonna make the frame rate doesn’t matter people angry again
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Without a titanfall to stan, I am a desperada for sega
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