1988 VIDEO GAMES POLL

"rise from your graves!!"

lol i love Altered Beast more than it deserves but I've spent more time on SMB 3 than on the rest of these put together

so many solid gold classics, but i've probably played mega man 2 more than smb3, ninja gaiden, blaster master, or all versions of tetris combined.

hang on i read it wrong, SMB 2 was 88 as well? they had it in one of my favourite pubs, i spent a small fortune on it that year

too hard

it's a four-way tie for me

u can't just say that cryptically man, you've gotta spill

SMB3. although http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1988_video_games there might well be a classic here.

putting in SMB3 kind of destroys the poll. so, i'll vote ninja gaiden

I was dating this girl and we hadn't been dating long. I thought a fun thing for us to do would be to play smb3. It was through that self-conscious feeling you get from seeing someone else experience for the first time something you're familiar with that I realized that smb3 at least starts out boring. Smb2, on the other hand, is kind of genius for its freefall opening stage and how it eases you into the game without seeming depopulated, and for its bright, cartoony look and palette, and for its verticality and flexibility and visual theme makeovers. I guess you could argue that smb3 has most of that, but smb3 just seems longer (or shorter if you use the whistles). Its pace is off and its environments seem less lifelike and more mechanical than its predecessor. Smb3 is built from a thousand tiny parts and smb2 is built from one great stone. Smb3 is elephant art for video games and smb2 is termite art.

I'd probably vote mm2.

i haven't played all of these but yeah SMB3 could win a much larger poll than this. on the other hand ultima 5 is second only to 7.

considering voting for blaster master.

I remember playing a lot of these as a kid. I never really enjoyed platform, side-scrolling games though. Ice Hockey was the shit, so that. Tecmo Super Bowl ('91) had to be my most-played NES game ever.

i actually own pool of radiance. in a gold box with an elvish code wheel and everything. never really played it.

when the results come in some people are gonna be like "who's the dickhead that voted for ninja gaiden" well let me introduce you to that dickhead, his name is underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned & he will put ninja gaiden up against the mighty mario iii and whatever else you've got

there should be an ultima poll but everyone would have to agree to just vote for whatever they feel like without worrying about not having played every ultima because who's played every ultima. or even a majority of ultimas.

(i have at least begun every ultima)

why only 23 options? where's all the pc games? what a shitty poll you have given us on this day, lamp

as iconic as smb3 is i can see someone making a case for ninja gaiden or mega man 2 - everything else here is v much small potatoes in comparison. smb2 is - nerd alert - 'conceptually' a really interesting game & presents a queer and unsettling world w/blase grace but its not all that much fun to play. and while dragon warrior iii is probably a really 'important' game but its also frustratingly oblique in places & badly balanced. final fantasy ii is also just a total mess particularly in this famicom version: buggy, poorly laid out, non-existent characters, lousy story. but its also completely broken in a bunch of ways but its an admirable attempt to revisit the idea of 'leveling' in an rpg.

super contra is important.

also it has co-op over both of the mario games.

i voted other, but of the options on the list i'd go w/splatterhouse

what a shitty poll you have given us on this day, lamp

fuck you too. i have no idea what important pc games came out in 88, i did some googling to find any best of lists for 88 but all the sane ones were p much console only. if there are any SUPER GOOD pc games that i missed just post them itt and chide me jamescobo style and ill feel appropriately chastened, i promise.

*storms out in a huff, slams door*

also just realized nothing on this list is a bigger cultural deal than tetris; even w/ mario it's the character and not any specific game that's iconic. not that these are the criteria we should be using. but i was in a car the other day and someone was playing tetris in the back seat. on a game boy.

lol sorry mate

just wouldnt have minded seein some police quest 2, king's quest iv, manhunter new york or wasteland on the list http://forums.explosm.net/images/smilies/shobon.gif

tetris is definitely better than any of these games, but i was just reading about "tetris: the soviet mindgame" and wasnt certain if i could vote for it based on thinking very highly of o.g. tetris

oh i'm dumb i thought that was just a whimsical subtitle lamp had added.

haha i wasnt sure either which is why i looked it up

yeah the tetris thing seemed sorta interesting so i threw it in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris:_The_Soviet_Mind_Game

police quest 2, king's quest iv

haha my dad totally had copies of these in the early 90s. & i saw kq4 on the wikipedia list too and meant to add it. sorry :/

tbh i know this list is p console oriented but i was in preschool in 88 so i did my best. also all the 90s have been done (except 98 for some reason) but only a couple of years in the 80s

I have never played Ninja Gaiden although the Retro Game Challenge translation makes me want to. I suppose Wii VC is the easiest way to buy it?

poll also missing exile, ghouls 'n ghosts, bionic commando

but come on, it's SMB3

whiney wrote me an angry letter about this thread because of SMB3 inclusion

88 was, regardless, a great fucking year for gaming.
weird thing: my heart says ice hockey

haha what did ole whiney have to say?

i voted SMB 2 in the end

SMB3

fuck Tetris forever

Track & Field 2 was epic b/c of the finger-destroying versus mode in arm wrestling, plus you could pick countries, the kind of little thing that would go missing in those days.

Things that are missing: R.C. Pro-Am !!!!!!!!!!!!!

F-19 Stealth Fighter! so massive at the time, running missions over ~real places~ & blowing them up Ralph Reed style.

Life & Death provided many lols, realizing how tedious being a surgeon must be.

The Commissioner's Disk of Earl Weaver Baseball (top #5 video game ever) came out that year, & even though Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer came out in 1987, I only got it for Christmas that year so my 1988 was pretty much that plus Earl Weaver plus SMB3 plus Contra plus Double Dragon. 1987 was so massive that 1988 was mostly catch-up time.

I tried to vote on the train, lost connection so it said no votings, when I try again I get tsked. Grrr. Would have been a boring vote for tetris tho; no harm done.

dropped in on this off of new answers & gotta say:

mega man 2
ninja gaiden
super mario bros. 3

^ fucking impossible decision

"the fact that Lamp lists Super Mario Bros 3 in this even though it was only available in Japan for two solid years makes me furious

1988 VIDEO GAMES POLL

It's like calling Yankee Hotel Foxtrot the best album of 2000 or something"

haha really? I didn't remember SMB3 coming out so soon; guess I didn't play it much in 1988!

guy has a point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._3
"The game was released in Japan in 1988, in the United States in 1990, and in Europe in 1991."

wellll we already polled 1990: 1990 VIDEO GAMES POLL and smb3 was left off since we've been going by first release date worldwide since these polls started

mario 3 may be my favourite ever game, so that.

i no longer actually enjoy doki doki panic. i tried to play a rom of it a while back and just cba. great soundtrack though.

wellll we already polled 1990: 1990 VIDEO GAMES POLL and smb3 was left off since we've been going by first release date worldwide since these polls started

if this is the case, then SMB3 - even tho I was just getting around to SMB2 at the time. NG & MM2 are both top-five NES for me, but yeah SMB3 is my all-time #1 of any platform.

voted smb3 becos confused over tetris caption

1st place is SMB3 because c'mon.

but since everyone's going to vote for it, i went with my close second place, Ninja Gaiden! also i just wanted the excuse to bust this out, when i finally beat it after like 20 years of trying:

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/ninjaend.jpg

smb3 here too. only tetris could possibly swing it, but smb3 is just so so aweseome and the best mario ever

why only 23 options? where's all the pc games?

RIP Amiga and ST owners, lost in time like tears in rain.

otm!

xxxp great Bruce Forsyth impersonation: "Good game, good game!"

pools of radiance. this is so important to me I just tried to vote again. rolling my 20d up in your face.

i finally beat ninja gaiden thru the power of emulator ram saves

no idea what to vote for. might go with a sympathy vote for double dragon 2

Famicom version of Gradius 2 is really really good. had to google Pool Of Radiance, no idea what that was :/

I've been trying to work out what I was playing in 1988 because it was none of these. We got an Acorn Archimedes in 88 though so I probably spent my whole year playing Zarch (which came out in 87 so doesn't count).

Virus was '88 though (^_^)

i finally beat ninja gaiden thru the power of emulator ram saves

throwing-star-tossing, flying ninjas on the stretch before the final boss is one of the most thankless challenges.. and then you have to beat, what, two or three consecutive bosses? fucking brutal.. I did it, once. In repeated plays, I would just stop after defeating the giant Cthulu dude b/c fuck those flying ninjas.

man, i loved ninja gaiden and played it a ton, but never got past the boss at 5:37 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO-fdq4yflA

so close! underrated music too.

tons of classics from 1988, a bunch of which not mentioned! games i've played from that year (using wiki page for help remembering):
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance - don't remember this one so well. not as great as the Dark Sun one.
The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate
Double Dragon II: The Revenge
Final Fantasy II
Gold Rush! - love old Sierra adventure games
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella
Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places) - i have some crazy adolescent stories to tell about friends discovering/playing this series
Life & Death - most overlooked game to not be included in poll, such a classic
Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World
Manhunter: New York
Neuromancer
Police Quest II
SMB2
SMB3
Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny
Zork Zero

and actually, the most overlooked game bc it's one of the best of all time, not just of 1988:

WASTELAND

the flying ninjas weren't as bad as the birds. also this jump at :10 was my nemesis - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO-fdq4yflA

one of Sierra's most prolific years ever? (new PQ, LSL, KQ, plus Manhunter + Gold Rush!)

wasteland wz awes

what other years have we done? i kinda feel like we should do some massive year by year polling with top 3 vote choices in each year competing for grand poll prize. but for this to work we need to redo ones that have clearly important choices left off.

i think when we were doing these more often i had the idea of eventually doing a top two of each year. i think the time frame wouldve been 80-2005? we've done:

1980
1985
1987
1988
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1996
1997
1999
2002
2005

i think the only one that really deserves a 'redo' is whichever one i left goldeneye off of. or you could just include goldeneye

this one missing some really important games too,tho

wasteland is indeed great and i guess i'm a brat kid but fallout obsolesces it for me. zork zero had some good set pieces but after beyond zork it was a huge disappointment -- a glorified treasure hunt. plus it uses the fucking tower of hanoi puzzle, although i think it manages to avoid the 15 puzzle.

am on board with any poll plan you guys devise, the more complicated the better.

none of those pc games would ever be in the top 3 be realistic

Wasteland would've been my vote, no contest. Re: Zork Zero -- it was funny (and had the Portcullis puzzle, and used the word 'Portcullis') and also it was kinda a return to form after the weird RPG'ish Beyond Zork (still amazing and maybe the best in the series in some ways, but not classic Zork at all). Actually, Zork poll would be pretty cool.

my order: return to zork > beyond zork > zork 1 > zork zero > zork 3 > zork 2 > zork nemesis > zork grand inquisitor

augh i tried to type out mine and my eyes went insane from all the zorks

i refuse to take seriously someone who has played through every zork game

beyond zork > zork 3 > return to zork > zork > zork 2 > zork grand inquisitor > zork zero

never played nemesis. should track it down. and aw what's so wrong w/ zgi.

let's poll the packaging on classic old PC games...Infocam games were awesome that way...flight sim manuals were like 200 pages long...

oh and technically the three "enchanter" games take place in the same universe. sorcerer would be near the top of my list.

let's poll the packaging on classic old PC games...Infocam games were awesome that way...flight sim manuals were like 200 pages long...

― Euler, Wednesday, June 29, 2011 9:26 AM (17 seconds ago) Bookmark

god don't even get me started on how stingy the motherfuckers are now. and yet the industry is supposedly flush with cash. i guess they're spending it all on getting mad men actors to make exaggerated expressions of dishonesty.

the last few pc games i bought didn't even put the discs on separate spindles.

considering voting for blaster master.

― my Sonicare toothbrush (difficult listening hour), Wednesday, June 29, 2011 12:05 AM (17 hours ago)

feeling this

also since this seems to be confusing people

THE TETRIS ON HERE IS NOT OG TETRIS IT IS A DIFFERENT GAME PLZ DO NOT VOTE FOR IT JUST BECAUSE U GO OOOHHHH TETRIS

just because yugioh tetris
http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/121/f/d/Tetris_Yu_Gi_Oh_Card_by_Double_EE.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ikkA7aFq1s

still my jam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKjVcQOf7cw

also a jam

the flying ninjas weren't as bad as the birds.

iirc it might have especially been all that shit flying @ u at once, while you are simultaneously expected to be leaping among absurdly precarious obstacles & still scrambling to find each and every "upward maelstrom of flames" power-up scattered throughout the boards.

Jj, I wouldn't say tengen Tetris is a competely different game. The mechanics are the same. The cool thing about tengen Tetris was the little animated scenes between levels. Plus it had two player. My mom was really good at it.

Also I think it's more accurate to say tengen Tetris is the "og" Tetris.

Actually, Zork poll would be pretty cool.

I really want to do this! And just tried setting it up, but I got confused, there are some set-in-the-Zork-universe-but-not-Zork games and some "interactive computer comic books" and stuff, and I wasn't sure what to include or leave out. So I guess I'll leave it to someone who's got a better idea of what's what.

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

ilx: where zork polls happen. kinda makes you proud.

I went with Super Dodge Ball because it was a college 2player fav

It's Dark. You Are Likely To Be Eaten By a Zork Poll!

I call doing the 2001 poll.

write-in vote for Captain Comic, possibly the first side-scrolling platform game on PC
(possibly not, but wikipedia sez Commander Keen was and that was two years later so fuck wikipedia, at any rate)

I fear the 1988 game I've spent most time playing was Leisure Suit Larry, which is, uh. Most of the games I look up thinking they're from '88 are from '87 or '89, e.g. Rainbow Islands, which is sort of from both (arcade '87, conversions '89).

Obv SMB3 is awesome but since I didn't play it until well into the 90s it feels kinda wrong to vote for it here. And Tetris is too, but I've become confused as to whether this thing is Tetris or not. (NB I have never owned the Nintendo version of Tetris and it was not the first Tetris I played, so I feel 0 loyalty to that. Grew up playing no-name Tetris clones on various platforms.)

The mechanics are Tetris. The differences are that this one has a two player mode and little cut-scenes and different graphics.

surprisingly difficult to find images from the og phantasy star quickly in google

http://www.shinforce.com/mastersystem/reviews/Phantasy_Star/ss-Phantasy_Star-03-640.gif

anyway, this game broke me as an individual in ways i have yet to fully understand the damage of

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

final fantasy ii 1

haha really????

hey thomp have you tried playing the o.g. phantasy star recently? curious if its playable 20+ years on...

whiney wrote me an angry letter about this thread because of SMB3 inclusion

― Don't start the chain you know? (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, June 29, 2011 7:52 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark

looooool

I tried Ninja Gaiden on PC emulator yesterday. Level 6-2, oh boy, was that intentionally impossible? It gives you darts several times, but then on that one floor where you need them, you die and then can't get them back.

<3 whoever voted for super contra

although maybe it was me, i can't remember what i voted for

lamp i started playing it on my phone this year, er

i never had a copy as a kid, my best friend at the time did, so it was a game of limited access, a weird gateway to the other, etc, i don't know why today is elegiac videogame reminiscence day -- but i had, like, a broad sense of how the game world was organised, stuff that happened, but no idea of what the game's progression was like. actually he loaned it to me eventually but i just wandered around doing shit without trying to advance the plot, i think; i did that a lot in videogames as a kid

what's interesting is that the game itself (sort of) fosters that -- after you've done a couple things you can wander around a great deal of palma and motavia without too much blocking you. i didn't get all that far -- i got the party together and was doing the stuff you do in order to get your own spaceship. but it was nice that you had to put two and two together to work out most of your next steps (ha or go to gamefaqs). like i've been playing final fantasy: 4 heroes (or whatever it's called) on DS, and that got some flack for making you actually talk to people in towns, but there there's pretty much only one dungeon around at a time, plus you know when you've done something because it goes CHAPTER OVER, NEXT CHAPTER .. i think the relative openness of the world in phantasy star was sort of important in inculcating the desire for this particular sort of time-wasting in me to begin with. whereas the first sequel was basically 'on this planet you go around clockwise ... on this planet you go around anti-clockwise.'

the amount of grinding required is in the agreeably frictive region for me. you need to make maps, that is weird, that you need to make maps; also the way that doors work makes making maps annoyingly counter-intuitive. you can talk to the monsters, i enjoyed that. like once you get to motavia you can avoid a lot of random encounters if you don't feel like killing all the alien dudes. so okay tldr: it's pretty playable. at least a few commutes' worth.

i need a better job

hey, i liked reading it, despite never having played PS

awes post f'real

Who's my other bro that voted ice hockey?

it felt like the challopyest of challops but i really did love that fucking game to bits. It's ripe for a touchscreen version!

what's interesting is that the game itself (sort of) fosters that -- after you've done a couple things you can wander around a great deal of palma and motavia without too much blocking you.

haha i hate when older rpgs do a poor job of delineating where you ~should be roaming~ on the overworld map! stuff like the first dragon warrior or ffII where you can suddenly be facing monsters orders of magnitude harder than the ones you're leveled for just because you crossed a bridge or wandered a screen to far to the left...

i mean as stupid and arbitrary as most of the geographical boundaries are in most games, i kinda question how much rpgs benefit from being 'open-world'.

I'm with you re. open world rpgs; among other things from an rpg I want a good story & it's hard to combine the non-linearity that an open world should provide if it's worth the name "open" with the linearity of a good story.

The definition of open world back then was "let's just make it so you can go anywhere you want, but still way too hard to pass through until you're X level" and today it's "now you can deliver pizzas inbetween shooting people in the face!" so it's kind of a tough comparison

That said, games like Fallout/Planescape Torment had a pretty good balance of non-linearity and a strong central plot

nah see i think the overworld monsters in psone are set up such that you're not likely to get your ass kicked; some of the dungeons will do that but that doesn't bother me.

it's not actually nonlinear in any meaningful sense, i think, though you might be able to get the car before the spaceship, or something. you can decide to go to motavia just for fun rather than working out that you need to go there.

but it does a much better job of differentiating things and not making you feel like towns are identical waypoints nos. 5-10 than most things did, at the time. much better than psii.

i like how every now and then in those old rpgs you could beat the odds and beat a dungeon before you were "supposed to" and end up with some item that was in turn way overpowered for where you were at. think i might have pulled this off in ff1, or maybe it was dragon warrior 2.

japan doesn't know how to make nonlinear rpgs. but yes: fallout, planescape, betrayal at krondor, elder scrolls (mainly morrowind) -- games where you can be pulled through the central plot as quickly as you like, but it's easy to get distracted. and in betrayal at krondor's case, where the central plot itself requires wandering the gameworld trying to figure things out.

grand theft auto got developers very confused but its own approach to sandbox is kind of a different thing; also, as l.a. noire showed, a dead end when applied to anything beyond the original gta model of "just blow things up until you get bored, god knows you're not gonna want to do the actual missions".

ah but just cause 2! If they had just had a STORY

i think the world of ruin is the closest jrpgs got to perfecting the 'go anywhere you want, do the quests in whatever order you want' rpg

grand theft auto got developers very confused but its own approach to sandbox is kind of a different thing; also, as l.a. noire showed, a dead end when applied to anything beyond the original gta model of "just blow things up until you get bored, god knows you're not gonna want to do the actual missions".

completely disagree. l.a. noire gave you an open world map, but then gave you next to nothing to do in it/interact with (secret cars, the odd crime coming over the radio - all of which are the same). imo this says a lot about the people who made l.a. noire and very little about sandbox gaming per se.