DieHARD GamePOLL - Console Poll, vol. 3 - 5th Generation RESULTS

Hello again ILX! 24 ballots were received for this poll (one down from the last generations poll in 2016) but thanks to changing the upper limit on how many games can receive votes, we've got more than enough games to do the top 77! Current plan is to roll them out over the next three days -- Wed/Thu/Fri, but knowing me, something could come up and I'll miss a day. Just a warning!

While this quiz was going on, I found a PS1 memory card in my house, and I wrote my name on the label in one of those white-out pens. I also wrote "PS1 MC3" on it, I guess because it was my third memory card, and for some reason I needed to clarify that it was for the PS1? Very cool and normal, teen Will!

I hope you brought your challops! What is TOO LOW? What is not TOO LOW? Let's start with one that is definitely TOO LOW imo. (in a few minutes, I need to link this everywhere first)

WOOOOOOOOOOO

before we start:

does "TOO LOW!" = a high number on the countdown list (i.e., #75)
while "TOO HIGH!" = a low number on the countdown list (i.e., #6)

? this is always a point of confusion for me

imo -- too low means it should have ranked higher, e.g. "ILX has underrated this thing"
too high = "you are all basic, this game is not actually good"

ok, that is what i thought, thanks!

i am ready

https://i.imgur.com/BaLzRHp.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/p1M5eWa.jpg
77 - Front Mission 3 - 103 points / 2 Votes

See? TOO LOW!!!!!! It should be on everyone's top 40 like it is mine!!

(also unlike previous polls i did not actually already set up all of my posts in a text file so this might take me slightly longer) D:

i didn't realize the front mission games were turn-based strategy?! i always pictured them as mechs tromping through the (extremely pixelated, low-poly) landscape

Someone explain the thread title pun to me?

Stoked for TOO LOW!

@Leee

I was going for something referencing this magazine from the era:
(except apparently I misremembered their capitalization?)

https://i.imgur.com/HGHjQYk.jpg

also i somehow picked one of the covers where it doesn't say diehard gamefan argh

anyway how about game number 76

https://i.imgur.com/7Hi65fS.png
https://i.imgur.com/8NDwVBr.jpg
76 - Driver - 106 points / 3 Votes

wow: quake 2, torment, alpha centauri, smash bros. not a street fighter connoisseur so don't know where that one falls but good month for first looks.

hyped!

xps o man i've never played this :(

YOU ARE THE FASTEST DRIVER IN THE ENTIRE CRIMINAL COMMUNITY.

driver was so much fun, one of the best car games of all time imo (although i am definitely biased towards ps1 car games because that's when i played the most car games. by the time ps2 came around i was old enough to drive and didn't play the games because they made me feel bad about the fact that i never got my license. they were no longer aspirational and just a reminder of my own laziness/inability to self-transport)

i voted for driver! to be honest, i think i spent >75% of the game in its cinematic make-your-own replay mode, which was actually pretty advanced and awesome for its time i think! you could put together a 70's chase movie style replay, placing the cameras wherever you want, selecting the length of clips from different angles, etc. now that i think of it, i think Driver 1 may have been the first "video editing software" i ever used, and certainly for that length of time

oh wow i forgot about that mode!!

i was just looking at the back of the box like "that mode looks cool"

Isn't Driver the one with the insanely hard and unskippable tutorial level?

I also wrote "PS1 MC3" on it, I guess because it was my third memory card, and for some reason I needed to clarify that it was for the PS1? Very cool and normal, teen Will!

relatable btw

Isn't Driver the one with the insanely hard and unskippable tutorial level?

― I want to luhbahguh babum gum (Leee)

it might be. i can vaguely remember it, but even in those days, the "extremely difficult and alienating early level" was something that still popped up in videogames from time to time, rather than the rarity that it is these days

https://i.imgur.com/msD3jc8.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/2Zxjw2a.jpg
75 - Daytona USA - 107 points / 2 Votes

Daytona USA was one of the games that i always salivated over in the game magazines, because i knew i'd never get a sega saturn. ruled in the arcades, tho

ah shit, forgot to vote. pretend that there was a #1 for majora's mask and another high vote for banjo kazooie

Hrm, what's the game I'm thinking of when I think of Driver? It had extremely realistic maps of London, while Driver apparently had not-very-realistic maps of Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York (and, via cheat code, Newcastle)

Sounds like Getaway on PS2

was surprised this one didn't place lower considering how many times it was referenced in the nom/voting threads...

err place higher dammit

https://i.imgur.com/zA5DSfu.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/NfZq92v.jpg
74 - Colony Wars - 110 points / 2 Votes

got hold of this specifically for this poll and didn't end up playing it enough to vote for it but def saw the appeal, a stripped down wing commander for consoles. it had already started to "branch" in the first fifteen minutes (i.e., i had already failed a mission in the first 15 minutes lol) which i thought was cool.

Colony Wars made my ballot! although, like Driver, the sequel is arguably better. but i went with the original because i figured it would find more support there (one other person voted for it, lol)

Colony Wars was a very, very good game, i thought. it was also intensely difficult, and there was this one mission about 10 hours that i never could beat, despite trying repeatedly for years. so my vote is for the first 10 hours of Colony Wars.

i voted for driver i think!

xp i was a lil bit disappointed by the physics, which seemed arcadey in a way that undercut the hard-mil-sf vibe the rest of the game was successfully going for. love a good cockpit view tho (star fox 64's just fundamentally doesn't work) and what i played of this already had some cool ones.

hi, it's me, the Saturn owner

daytona port doesn't hold a candle to the arcade version but still...

TOO LOW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv_GQNh9D68

xp (my gold standard 90s space dogfighting games are xwing/tie fighter-- never actually 100% clicked with a wing commander either tbh except for privateer, which is like a lego elite/frontier. it is a lot more fun to fly the spaceship in colony wars than it is in privateer tho.)

i wanted a saturn real bad lol, not even sure why. think i just like the word saturn.

(and the word sega.)

SEGA!

i believe all that about wing commander / tie fights, dlh - sadly, i never owned either one so Colony Wars was kind of my intro to the genre (unless Descent counts?)

descent counts cuz i need terminal velocity to count

https://i.imgur.com/37S2w5i.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/4e6E5CC.jpg
72 - Diablo - 112 points / 2 Votes

aw nuts, i must have somehow cut the bottom off of that ad

wow daytona looks gorge in that video.

haven't played the port but diablo is a perfect game. "well except for not being able to run." nah.

you couldn't play online in PS1 diablo, i assume?

which i guess means you would miss the thrill of being murdered by crazy online PVP people as soon as you stepped outside of the town

a friend did a v good full-body impression of the rogue firing away like a machine-gunning legolas while stopping every five shots to heal herself to the sound of a choir

diablo was a LAN game, to me-- assume the ps1 versh has splitscreen which is not ideal but closer in spirit to my memory of the game than it is to the online maelstrom model, which i associate w diablo 2, even tho you're right, it was already there.

i never got a chance to play Diablo on LAN - you're right, that would have been MUCH better. and i ended up playing split screen with my parter on Diablo 3 (very different, of course) and it was a total blast. i could see that holding true the PS1 port of the original as well

a friend did a v good full-body impression of the rogue firing away like a machine-gunning legolas while stopping every five shots to heal herself to the sound of a choir

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, November 11, 2020 2:15 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol this rules

i didn't vote for diablo but ps1 is the only way i ever played it! my computer would never have run it so i rented it a couple of times and thought it was very fun but kinda scary!

https://i.imgur.com/82gvuOi.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/LiZ0YYc.jpg
72 - WWF Wrestlemania 2000 - 112 points / 2 Votes

sorry for the size of these images they are surprisingly tough to find sometimes!

Not quite the same but I recently started playing a nintendo 3ds game (yes I broke out my 3ds again last week) callllllled Shin megami tensei iv and while it didn't hit the same as leaving midgar it was the first time in years I went "holy shit there's an over world?!"

i played something recently that sold that feeling well but i can't remember what now

Regret not voting now. I wasn't a huge fan of the N64 as a console, and didn't own any other consoles, but I'm surprised how many of the games on the countdown I loved. I have to stick up for Mario Kart 64 though. It was such a huge leap forward for party racing games and remains fun to play to this date. The newer Mario Kart games are probably more fun (though not Double Dash, they messed that one up a bit) but I got so much mileage out of that damn game

The only game I got more mileage out of in that era was Super Smash Bros, which would have been my #1 if I voted

I have played Goldeneye, and it seemed largely bullshit, but then I was only ever playing single-player.

As fgti suggested the level design is (mostly) exemplary; the time limits made replaying just as fun and challenging as the first run. A couple of friends got all the time limits, i got all but two ;_;

it literally had speedrunning as a built-in challenge - along with multiplayer you could say it was three games in one.

just got a chance to soak in the images itt and holy shit @ the circa-2000 majora's ad where the falling moon-- omnipresent symbol of inexorable ambient doom and a kind of crucible or touchstone that tests or reveals character-- is about to hit the world trade center lmao

aside from my goldeneye abstention i guess my biggest challop this cycle is that-- admitting up front that i missed out on it at the time-- i have never been able to buy the idea that "we digitized some cyberpunk paintings, wanna walk over the top of them?" felt more like "the future" than careening freely around the enveloping virtual spaces in mario (the year before) or ocarina (the year after)

i played FF7 for the first time in the obama administration, having never previously played a JRPG somehow (except for super mario rpg). i thought its form and content were weirdly unsuited to each other-- why did the designers choose to tell this story with these mechanics? i wondered. why am i ambushed every four seconds by invisible enemies? doesn't that fuck up the pacing? wtf am i supposed to make of it when all my friends walk into my body and disappear? now i realize, first of all, that "this is how final fantasy works"-- but more interestingly that the grotesque distension of wizardry/dragonquest mechanics to accommodate this vast cinematic ambition is itself a source of the vertiginous feeling that so impresses, the feeling of something opening up before you. so i think fully appreciating it relies on having played final fantasies before and better understanding just how much the form is being forced to absorb-- beginning with that famous moment when you turn on the console and the opening cutscene starts and you're like wow, this is what final fantasy is now? this all sounds like a backhanded compliment and i guess it is. it's tru tho, the cyberpunk paintings are beautiful.

during the obama administration, rather. was not locking the door of my west wing office and grinding for materia on mute.

MGS (which i first played even more recently) does seem like it woulda looked like the future tho.

That's a good post on FF7, dlh. I have still never played it, but I've absorbed so much of it through cultural osmosis that it feels like I never have to.

My biggest challop I guess was ranking Doom 64 above Goldeneye on my ballot. It's probably not a better game, but I kinda fell in love with it playing through the recent remaster. *Atmosphere* is major draw for me in any game, and Doom 64 has got one heck of an atmosphere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTQACBIvEF4

dlh otm

FF7s entire 'thing' feels like as glorious a dead-end as "fully rendered shot-by-shot puzzle worlds" (Myst) or "green-screen FMV seven-disc epics" (Phantasmagoria)

It wasn't until I got a couple hours into FF8 that I realized this was stupid

And then by FFX they added awful voice acting to the mix! FF4-6 really was some magic that wouldn't be repeated, I guess

things i voted for that didn't make the cut (i can't really defend some of these selections):

16: Die Hard Trilogy
three games in one! it's a gimmick that was 2/3s of a failure. Die Hard 2 was represented as a on-rails shooter (a la time crisis but much worse); Die Hard 3 became a really poorly implemented driving-centered game that was only played by the developers, and not for long at that.

but Die Hard 1 was absolutely addicting, to an extent that i'm afraid to revisit it and ruin my memories. the draw distance is horrible, everything is pixelated, and everything that was good about it has probably been iteratively improved a thousand times over since then.

17: NFL Blitz
22: Mahrio Pahty
27: Vigilante 8
twisted metal but with better graphics and more interesting characters/cars

28: Conker's Bad Fur Day
i didn't care for the single-player mode (banjo kazooie but worse), but it had a very addicting multiplayer mini-game called "Beach":

You play as either the Tediz or Villagers. Here, the Villagers attempt to escape to Paris while the Tediz try to stop them. The Tediz are limited to being inside some sniper towers, but they have access to weapons. The Villagers have no weapons, and must only rely on pure evasion to survive, and a few power ups. The Villagers must reach one side of the map to the other to escape. There is an explosives button on top of a hill. If a Villager manages to reach the button and press it, all Tediz in their bunkers will be temporarily killed, buying other Villagers much time before the Tediz respawn again. The Villagers must reach the escape area within a time limit. If the timer reaches 0, a laser beams down from the sky and instantly kills the Villager. This laser is described as being the Tediz' secret weapon.

i think that description (from the conker wiki) hints at what's wrong with the game. Conker, the character, and all the other characters, as well as the general world you live in, fucking blows. it's a bizarre combo of realism and cartoonish doofs, and none of it is funny. as a result, since playing Conkers Bad Fur Day (even the title....ugh) i have never been able to sit through anything that involves a wisecracking animal or small child who is on the verge of R-rated but still PG-13

31: Rayman
is rayman good? is it bad? does anyone like rayman? it's fucking hard, i know that

34: Ogre Battle 64
i've only played an emulation (i imagine this is one of those $150 N64 games these days?). it's more difficult and complex than FF Tactics, i think, but to a fault

36: Cool Boarders 2
one of those games you vote for because you remember having only 2 games for a system for months on end, and playing the shit out of both of them

37: Body Harvest
i was the only one to vote for this. it didn't deserve my vote.

39: Destruction Derby

i've never understood anybody ranking SNES Mario Kart over Mario Kart 64, but then, i didn't play the SNES one until i'd spent endless hours with 64, and so by comparison the SNES one seemed painfully slow, hard to control, flat, ugly, lifeless, constantly falling into pits, etc. i think i've had more fun playing its DOS shareware knockoff "Wacky Wheels." but if i'd encountered them in the other order i would probably feel differently!

KM otm Conker is bad

I like that somebody ranked Wave Race 64 as their #1, that game is so good!

I loved the characterizations and the overall vibe of Conker. To play a N64 game that has cursing in it is such a novelty. I see it as sort of a precursor to stuff like Psychonauts.

Hard to believe that SATURN BOMBERMAN didn't make it! This game was a blast. I think it's the only one from my ballot that was left outside the 77.

just had a blast playing goldeneye multiplayer, over Parsec. It all just came flooding back. Damn that music too.

mario kart 64 is total bullshit but i got very good at the way in which it is total bullshit

the best mario kart is simply the one with the most tracks. which is the newest one i assume

My biggest challop I guess was ranking Doom 64 above Goldeneye on my ballot. It's probably not a better game, but I kinda fell in love with it playing through the recent remaster. *Atmosphere* is major draw for me in any game, and Doom 64 has got one heck of an atmosphere.

doom 64 is v good yeah! partly for the same reasons as ps1 doom, which unlike doom 64 does not have its own set of maps but does have colored lighting, more darkness, a generally enhanced sense of menace + uh doom. sadly don't remember either running as slickly as actual-doom did on a 486. (ps1 doom certainly doesn't on my current ps2.) that will've been fixed in the remaster tho.

doom's hidden 2-dimensionality makes it much better-suited to the consoles of this gen than the post-doom full-3d shooters that actually became popular on them. pc doom on a keyboard is one of the most frictionless control schemes ever but i can't actually swear that the ps1 controls are any less so.

bomberman is always doomed to underperform in these polls because no single bomberman was played by enough people to get it where it should be and no single person can ever be sure which is the really good bomberman. yet bomberman is clearly, like, the second-best game ever made.

Bomberman Ultra for PS3 one the one that really got its hooks in me. Great game

The Bomberman I know and love was the game released on Megadrive (Genesis), and I really only preferred the single player level mode. (YES I DO HAVE FRIENDS FANK YOU.)

There's a half decent Steam version, which as per the current norm involves lots of online folk. Bombergrounds Battle Royales, and hey it's free.

My brother and I had Bomberman 64 and let me tell you, the game does not translate well to 3D

that's a bummer, cause the system natively supports four controllers, and several of its iconic titles (Goldeneye, Smash Bros, Mario Kart) are famed as party games first and foremost. i imagine if they'd made a really, really great 2D Bomberman for that system, it could have been many people's first or definitive experience with the joys of Bomberman!

bomberman hero, the other n64 one, didn't even have multiplayer lol

and then they made a bomberman 64 2 which almost no one bought and is one of the rarest n64 carts

and then (i just looked this up, never knew about it before) the final n64 game ever released was a japanese-only 2d bomberman game confusingly titled bomberman 64

i ended up playing the spastic Interplay-produced Atomic Bomberman during the era. it was... good enough

access the level editor by simply pressing CTRL-E six times from the main menu

i missed this rollout entirely but it made for a good friday read... so thanks!

did you voet?

i misspelled that on purpose, and i'm not sure why (joek?)

i did voet
i was the other voet for FFT as #1 with you

<3

Hard to believe that SATURN BOMBERMAN didn't make it!

セガサターンのサターンボンバーマン10人プレイは凄い迫力です‼️ pic.twitter.com/fUcEQ8MJd4

— 今宮年男（大分県一心寺住職） (@imamiyatoshio) November 22, 2020

also missed this, cheers to KM

the best mario kart is simply the one with the most tracks. which is the newest one i assume

agree with this general principle except that iirc Wii Kart has more ten-star new tracks than Kart 8 (the WiiU versh), and also picked better "retro" tracks to spruce up

but Kart 8 also iirc has a four-course round of retro Rainbow Road courses, so swings and roundabouts

all of the ones with blue shells are bad

i typed that out a couple days ago and then deleted it, but that's otm

rubberbanding has always been a part of mario kart, but it's gotten out of control

play on Time Trial if you can't take the heat imo

been reading through this thread. missed all the action, but i would have voted Paperboy #1. Happy that OoT beat Majora's Mask.

I was coming here to post this article, which gets at what I was saying above about the PlayStation

https://superchartisland.com/wipeout-2097/

But I forgot that I sat on my hands to avoid asking Sufjan - why? What has Ocarina of Time got that Majora's Mask doesn't?

you don’t have to get that annoying n64 expansion pack

I just really love OoT for the giant leap it so successfully made. MM really only suffers in comparison because it wasn't the first one I played. If I revisit them, I could see enjoying MM more. First play through of OoT was just so damn magical, though.

I'm currently playing link's awakening for the first time, though (on Switch). More OoT stuff was introduced by that game than I'd realized. Jumping from NES to N64 made the leap seem even larger than it probably was.

LttP??

I've played the SNES LttP on switch as well. It seems like Link's Awakening polished a lot of these elements that were in there by LttP, as I think you are saying. but I'm playing the remastered Link's Awakening, so maybe that's coming out of that? Link's awakening has fishing, helpful owl, dampe, etc. Some of the puzzle solving in LttP also felt like an outlier, whereas LA feels more like OoT Zelda, albeit with goombas lol.

I've never felt such a complex emotion as the one I felt when the Slave-y Ur-Quan kept trying to argue that they were just trying to protect you from the Genocide-y Ur-Quan

you imagine the threat of unknown invaders,
or alien pestilence borne on the solar wind.
we have seen these.
but
you do not acknowledge your worst enemy.
we have found dead worlds without number,
planets ravaged by atomic fire or gaian collapse.
these worlds were not rendered sterile by outside forces.
they bear sad testament
to the effects of unrestrained instinct and emotion,
or simple ignorance.
we will
prevent
such mistakes.

generation 6 incoming

Have we ever polled the console generations? 5th has my vote

i don't think we have but i would struggle between 4/5/6, at this moment i would give the edge to 5 as well!