1996 VIDEO GAMES POLL

I went with the obvious -- Civ2.
Ones I haven't played, and just included because of their fame: Red Alert, Diablo, MoO2, Quake, Blood Omen, NiGHTS.

sm64

is this really the cream of the '96 crop?

i will rep for diablo, if only to justify the absolutely ridculous amount of time i devoted to it at the time.

Resident Evil I suppose.

Can't believe I was half the age I am now when that came out ;_;

CivII and SM64 are the only ones I've played, and Civilization narrowly gets the nod.

I am also repping for Diablo because that shit was ridiculous. The hell with how long I personally spent playing it, just the amount of time I hung out in college WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE play it is completely absurd.

ha yes that too

This was around the time I started losing faith in consoles (it came back with the following generation). I never did play SM64, though. As much as SMRPG was good stuff, Civ 2, MOO 2, and Diablo deserve major props...

Quake easy - so many good memories playing the shareware maps on a LAN with buddies, stepping up from the Doom generation.

terranigma

mario kart 64; pilotwings 64; command & conquer (PS1 - plowed many hours into this)

wasn't breath of fire II '96 in NA or were you counting japanese release dates??

I counted Japanese release dates, which means Terranigma wouldn't count either.

the love for diablo was inexplicable to me then. the shit was just plain boring.

civ 2

The Diablo games are fucking boring. I dug 'em a lot at the time, but returning to them recently makes me wonder what I was so enamored with.

Gonna go with SM64 I guess.

I picked Puzzle Fighter.

i think it is an endorsement of the grand free marketplace of ideas that goole is able to call out diablo as boring and give props to civ 2, which bored the bejesus out of me.

the fact that twisted metal 2 was my second choice probably says a lot about my attention span though

I'm aware that no-one else will be voting for WipeOut XL / 2097, but we got a Playstation a year late and so this was the "OMFG the future is here!" game rather than the original.

Also the year I started work, and so had ca$h to buy a lot of these. Oh man, Masters of Orion II!

SMRPG was a MAJOR thing in my life. But Diablo! And the days of Twisted Metal around th' house!
So torn. Going SMRPG out of brand loyalty and memories of the Olympics. I beat it right around the time Kerri Strug broke her goddamn leg!

Super Mario RPG

the master of unlocking = master of my heart

NiGHTS. easy

didn't realise wipeout xl was 2097; I'd vote that

such an improvement over the original; in fact, it still looks great today!!

I'm aware that no-one else will be voting for WipeOut XL / 2097

Hi have I not paraded my wipeout fanboyery around here enough?

NiGHTS was kind of amazing even if only 3 people actually bought it.

Civ II, Diablo and Tomb Raider are all also very, very high on my list.

I always have hated Quake.

NiGHTS was kind of amazing even if only 3 people actually bought it.

i bought it with the funny controller, and the guy in the shop accidentally gave me two copies of the game!

waht

he didn't realise that the game came bundled inside the controller box, so he grabbed another copy of the Nights game and so when I got home and opened up the box it was like WOW MERRY CHRISTMAS READERS !!

I wonder how many copies he gave away before he realized!!!

(probably 3; man that game should have sold more)

oh wau, was quake this year too? Totally missed that.
Pretty sterling year.

xp, yeah it was Dixons store anyway so I didn't feel bad.

resident evil is the only one of these i spent any time on

It seems bizarre to me that Quake and SM64 came out in the same year, it feels like they were a whole generation apart.

Mario is still my favourite game of all time, but it almost feels pointless to vote for it.

Will probably have to vote Civ 2 but am really torn between that and Tomb Raider and, to a much lesser extent, Mario RPG.

"i think it is an endorsement of the grand free marketplace of ideas that goole is able to call out diablo as boring and give props to civ 2, which bored the bejesus out of me."

dude, civ 2 is way more fun than diablo. that might be the one game on the list that i could fire up right now and enjoy as much as i did back yonder.

Well, it's "you make your story" vs "hey look at the shiny story we're barrelling you down".

Is this the first year where CGI became common as a carrot in the game design process? Even in Civ, the movies for the wonders were nearly as much of a goal, for me, as the benefits they conferred. The same could be said of C&C, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, possibly Quake and Master of Orion? I suspect all of it looks eye-boilingly bad these days though, with the possible exception of Wip3out, where it was used at the start for OMG TEH FUTURE effect.

Also I'm glad to see other support of Wip3out, I was in two minds about picking it because it wasn't as influential as the others, but then if other games aren't interested in what it does well (interest in popular culture, actual design designed by designers, lovely hover car racing), then that's more the fault of other games.

It seems bizarre to me that Quake and SM64 came out in the same year

I was thinking the same about Blood Omen and most of these, then I remembered that it's the first, 2-d, game in the series, which no-one played.

I loved Blood Omen and never played any of the sequels.

Choh, Andrew! Wip3out = the third Wipeout game, not just any old Wipeout game!

Doh! I knew there was funny capitalisation, I meant WipeOut, or at least I think I did. I read a nice piece by the writer of the universe recently.

Diablo
Quake
Resident Evil
Wipeout XL
Super Mario 64

You know I don't think I ever really thought about how this year was basically ground zero for modern games. Huh. If only I had owned a PC, a PS1 and a N64 when I went to college, instead of a Mac that I used for desktop publishing work, and a fucking trombone.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

voting for Red Alert but Civ2, Duke Nukem, and Twisted Metal took up a lot of my playing time too

This is a lot easier than the '92 poll, cause I just wasn't playing as many games in '96 and didn't have any of the appropriate-generation console system. But my brother had an N64 and Super Mario 64 is one of the best games of the decade easy...virtually the only must-play game in its entire genre. Tomb Raider was also fantastic to me, as I've rambled about in the giant best games of all time poll results thread.

But this goes to Duke Nukem 3D, which I played the FUCK out of. More than played, made maps for, lots and lots of maps, every day after school fucking around in Build.exe. Really my first experience creating space in a virtual environment (Lode Runner aside), and now I'm in architecture school so, credit where it's due. The game seems a lot cheesier to me now and obviously it hasn't aged that well graphically, but I'd still play it over almost any other shooter I've ever played. I mean, the pipe bomb and laser trip mines alone == CLASSIC.

(Dud: the shrink ray. God dammit.)

voted civ 2 but i maybe shoulda voted for super puzzle fighter 2!!

you know.. im a huge mario fan... but mario 64... eh not so much!!

I haven't played any Mario games since Super Mario Bros. and I was such a fanatic of all the NES ones and that, even that Doki Doki Panic nonsense.

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

Okay, I can understand the top 2, but how the hell did Wipeout XL get third? I'm not buying that one for a second...

British voters. That said, I too love Wipeout.

Sometimes I get the UK/US splits, and sometimes I don't - so I would get if Chuckie Egg XL was #3, but what's the story with Wipeout in the UK? Or was the N64 not successful there?

Developed by Psygnosis, features songs by british electronic artists, was played in clubs.

I found this article recently, maybe from another thread: http://www.noiseheatpower.com/wipeout.htm . Skip down to the paragraph that starts with "'WipEout' though. 'WipEout' was different. "

I wish I could get into Civ, as it seems like it should be really fun, but I can never get past the first half-hour without getting bored.

I LOVED Civ, but can see why it wouldn't be for everybody. A huge problem for me is how much bullshit your computer opponents can get away with that you can NEVER do, just marauding all over your territory whereas if you do that to them they declare war on you and bomb you into smithereens. Civ2 is WORSE about this if anything, and the attempt to remove the micromanagement (by adding an automatic city manager) fails because the automanager is so dumb... town of 2,000 people building hydroelectric plants before they build granaries, etc.

I am so happy Quake isn't in the top 5!!!!

Yeah, a lot of the British wipeout love is due to the soundtrack. I actually bought the soundtrack on CD because I couldn't afford a playstation. the whole aesthetic was like catnip to kids like me.

wipeout is like top five game sdtrk maybe #2 after jet grind radio