- Jeff does not like Super Mario Bros. 3, the general consensus choice for the best NES game. He has saved the title to be the very last game he ranks in the project. He will therefore conclude the series by putting it at #105 or something. He will then, given his ego, retire from NES ranking secure in the belief that no one will ever like Mario 3 again.
- Meanwhile, anyone looking at the list subsequently will open it up, go "Hey! Where's Mario 3?", and then, finding what is likely either one of their favorite NES games or the only NES game they know and enjoy in a ridiculous position, immediately close it, defeating any usefulness the list had as a ranking and system guide.
- Jeff's fans will continue making you can't argue with the list! it's just science! "jokes" that were never funny, choke out any conversation, and completely miss the point of the original bit: that these lists, being opinions, are inherently subjective and the exact opposite of science and objective fact.
I've stopped watching most of Jeff's content because he's frankly too much of a jerk nowadays, but I've mentioned that the NES ranking project has brought me a lot of joy. That said: I personally consider the ranking itself beside the point. The real fun was in watching Jeff encounter and react to the more obscure titles in the NES library (going down this timestamped list for segments I recall particularly enjoying: Zombie Nation; Krazy Kreatures; Arkista's Ring; Magician; Faria; Space Shuttle Project; Hydlide; Jaws; Dirty Harry; Nobunaga's Ambition; Castlequest). No matter how the rankings ultimately shake out, I think that, along with using the videos to find titles to explore on one's own regardless of Jeff's rank, will remain the best way to approach this project.
Note: I discovered recently that the initial installment on my planned series on GAMES Magazine's odd choices for Game of the Year is actually one of the site's most-visited articles. I wanted to revisit the series - and to my pleasant surprise, I found a set of complete scans and a complete analysis of the main article from three years ago in the recesses of my hard drive. They are posted for your enjoyment here unedited.
I'm not sure why I never posted the article, but I can make a few guesses. One, there's a light streak in some of the scans on the side, and a bit of stray paper that appears in a few images. I'm sorry, folks, but I can't redo the scans right now. Those are staying.
Two, I note in the article that this edition had a few extra features I wanted to cover as well, including a short separate article on games for kids and a feature on interactive movies. I hadn't gotten around to scanning those - I vaguely recall I wanted to fix the streak issue. For the time being, this post will be restricted to the main Electronic GAMES 100 article. I'll go back, but it won't be soon.
A true extravaganza awaits us.
Coming out in the U.S. this year: Panzer Dragoon, KoF '95, Street Fighter Alpha, Virtua Fighter 2, Earthbound, Phantasmagoria (it was huge at the time), and a little game called Chrono Trigger. Past GAMES's late-September deadline (discussed in previous installments), we have Donkey Kong Country 2, TIE Fighter, and Gabriel Knight II.
So what won? You're never gonna get it, motherfucker. You're never gonna get it in a million years.
I've been playing games for over four decades at this point.
This is, without exaggeration, the most poorly-designed, poorly-functioning RPG I have ever experienced. It is misery to play.
Even if you haven't played it yourself, I've sure you've heard all the stories about the ill-conceived stat system where you can hit your own party members to increase your HP etc. I would like to emphasize that the lamented stat system represents merely the outer layer of bad decisions. There are, like, nine layers of bad decisions below that. There are numerous points in the game that seemed to indicate the designers had no idea how video games in general work, much less their own. There is a roadblock in the game (the Dist/Deist Cave) where it is honestly astonishing, worthy of intensive study, how every single bad decision in the game comes together to create a complete clusterfuck. It is astonishing. It is a masterpiece of incompetence that seems impossible to achieve without intention.
I will also emphasize that every single aspect of the game, from the battles to the world design to the constant poisoning to the utterly astronomical amount of grinding most spells (some of them mandatory for progress) take to become useful to the goddamn insistence on uselessly putting resurrected players in a position where they can't attack for utterly no player benefit, is designed for a maximal waste of the player's time. It is not content to be merely bad, like a Phantasy Star III. It wants to hurt the player.
Before I begin the discussion in earnest, I'd like to get this out of the way: I did not use exploits. I attempted instead to approach the game on its own terms. Using the game's many exploits seems to be a ubiquitous method for dealing with the game's many issues: even the author of this playthrough, who was going for a more organic, fresh-faced "first-time player" approach to the series, knew about and used the Toad and no-armor exploits, used save states in the final dungeon, etc. I don't want to hear, "Well, why didn't you use exploits?" I was trying to show the game respect, engage with its systems honestly, and play it straight. Claiming my complaints are invalid because I didn't use exploits is a self-defeating argument. If you have to break the game to make it work, the game is already broken.
I just got a comment on the overview I made of elements Lunar borrowed from Ys that reflects an odd bit of discourse I've noted elsewhere around the article, so I'm going to address it in its own post.
I'm going to restrict this conversation to this one reply because I had a parent die following an amputation literally a few days ago and have limited capacity right now for conversations where folks explain to me things I already know, like the identity of Studio Alex.
I'm well aware of comments elsewhere fixating on the use in the post of the word "steal"—which actually isn't used that often; twice in the article, as much as the above commenter's suggested replacement of "influence," which they seemed to think wholly absent, is used. This oversight kind of reveals that the problem here is an emotional overreaction—a gut-level, offended recoiling from any perceived slight to Lunar, followed by a conviction that hair-splitting about terminology will wipe away what's, well, staring us in the face.
Dude, look at the original article. Look at it. In many cases, it's not a vague "influence"; it's willful 1-for-1 copying, particularly with the shot compositions. I'm not saying that I hate Lunar or that Lunar is without merit or originality by noting this. I'm saying that Lunar's creators took a number of its ideas from elsewhere—namely, this one series whose early incarnations were in the West trapped on less-popular consoles and imperfect ports and are therefore largely unfamiliar to Western gamers. I'm quite comfortable with my word choices in the post and feel I was more than fair in assessing the extent of what Lunar took from Ys.
(Re: the poster's specific objections: I don't see how Tomi's Falcom connection negates the argument—if anything, it makes it stronger—or how claiming "hey, other games copy!" proves it didn't happen in this case.)
If the post bothers you, consider it from this angle: Great artists, as it is said, steal because they make others' ideas their own—they bring the ideas to life in ways the originators didn't. As I state right at the top of the article, I think Lunar did far better with the ideas—I don't have pages and pages of posts dedicated to Ys on my blog or social media, after all. (The people freaking about the article conveniently overlook, say, the part where I compare Dark Fact and Ghaleon to a 2600 and ray tracing.)
But, folks, they stole. Let's not be willfully blind here.
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