Running video games (and consoles) thread

Final Fantasy X was my favorite of the series, though VII is great and I'm enjoying replaying the remake with the PS5 graphics upgrades. Not sure when part 2 of the remake is supposed to drop, thought it was this year at some point.

Glad to see The Last of Us on that list. That game affected me emotionally more than any video game I've ever played. Did not get around to playing Part 2 of that, perhaps I should add that to my list.

Of the Fallout games, I think New Vegas was the best. Fallout 4 was good, but not quite at the level of New Vegas.

 

Like most of these lists, it does feel a bit like a "creature" or captive to its times. Like to me, FF7 in the 90s is absolutely insane, and kind of an overreaction to the intense appreciation it has gotten at other points. You can basically lump console RPGs into "before FF7" and "after FF7." But, I realize from their intro that this version of the list that they've emphasized playability, fun, how it holds up, more than historical impact. If that's the case, OK, but 90s still seems low for it.

I haven't played Disco Elysium, Hades or Bloodbourne, but for every other game in their Top 20, I think you can make a strong case that it could be #1. Might even be able to expand that to the Top 30, since Tetris is lurking in there. List seems light on "yearly" games (sports, Call of Duty-esque stuff), but that also strikes me as kind of "right." If you ask me what's the best Madden or best NHL, I might have a preference, but they all kind of blur together. Part of the reason Tecmo Bowl or Tecmo Super Bowl "sticks" in people's mind is that the series fell off hard in popularity after the NES. (I think I'm the only one who's played Final Edition for the SNES, which still has the same gameplay, but also, a rudimentary franchise mode, off-season trades and free agency, and a Create A Player with players improving based on in-game performance.)

Responding to some other posts... I'd also probably have SMB3 over SMW, but they're both the tops of that series for me. New Vegas is probably my favorite Fallout as well - the DLC turns an A-, A game into an A+, because of how god damn cool the story of Lonesome Road and Ulysses is - but Fallout 4 just has such a ridiculous amount of stuff to do in it. I have friends who got "lost" in the settlement aspect and never even beat the main game.

My personal favorite all-time game is Super Metroid - play through it at least once a year. So, I feel like I have to put that #1, haha. I'd probably follow that up with Tetris, GTA5, Portal 2 and SMB3, if I was doing my own Top 5. A little something of everything that demonstrates what vidya games can provide. Fallout 4 or NV, The Last of Us, Doom, FF7, probably just outside of that Top 5. (I like most of the FF games, but 7 has multiple "gut punch" moments, not just the famous one at the end of Disc 1.)

 

I loved the original Last of Us - the part when you come across the escaped zoo animals, I just *watched* that part for a couple minutes. I don't think I've ever done that with a game before. But LoU2 came out during the heart of the pandemic, and most professional reviews basically described it as one step below emotional torture porn, and unrelentingly gritty / dark. As a result, I just haven't had the desire to play it.

 

Ah, totally missed Super Mario World at No. 2. Not sure how I did that. I still would put SMB in the top 5. None of the others happen without it and it is still iconic and playable today. I put 3 ahead of World, too, but that's just kind of my time period. I know a lot of people fall into the lines that World is the best.

I am a Nintendo guy, so it isn't surprising to me, and so many of these games set up so many others. I see what you are saying with GTA III, but it would still make my list somewhere! I played a lot of games throughout my life, but it really got me back into gaming after a break from college and early adulthood as much as anything. Of course that is just a personal bias.

Still think there needs to be some sports games on there somewhere. Sports games still drive much of the gaming industry.

 

My top 5 is probably SMB, GTA V, BOTW, Tetris and Tecmo Bowl.

 

Agree with this, although it's hard to separate them out year-by-year. Maybe they could have included the Madden franchise as a whole, or the Tecmo Bowl games and NHL '94. But how do you pick one Madden or FIFA game out of 30 when there are only minor tweaks from year to year? I guess whichever ones made the biggest leaps (like GM mode) would be the ones. Still hard to pick one out of the crowd, though, and most sports games are like that.

 

That's why I brought up the ones I did. Iconic and really set up the games that came after them. Any more, none of them are going to stick out. But Tecmo Bowl was the one that set the stage for seasons and what not, even though super basic was ground breaking at the time. Tecmo Super Bowl took it to the next level (I found some emulators a few years ago where you could update it with current seasons, although I haven't looked again for a while) and NHL 94 was what I think most think set the standard for all the coming EA games. And so many of us have our memories sitting around playing it. Like one of the first party games. There has to be something along those lines that make a top 100 of all-time list.

Another one that isn't nearly as popular was Baseball Stars. It was all fictional, but you could build teams and players and play seasons. Definitely ahead of its time. I loved that game!

 

Yeah, I'm with you that the "yearly" nature of sports games makes it hard to pick any of them. You mention NHL 94 - I didn't even need that one to get hooked. I had NHLPA 93, and that was awesome to me, even though it didn't have one-timers, spin moves or even a season mode with stat tracking. It's hard to find super big "jumps" in the sports series, except for maybe when they go to new and better systems, but then there were usually some warts.

 

What's the opposite of two great tastes that taste great together?

 

Hello:

I'm not as in-depth with what's going on in the video game world as I had been in the past, but I have a question that hopefully you all can answer: Am I out of luck as a PS4 and PS5 owner of playing Bethesda games?

I am a big fan of Bethesda and the Elder Scrolls/Fallout games along with the upcoming StarField game....I'm also a Sony fanboi and would rather not have to buy an XBox to play those games now that Microsoft has acquired Bethesda.

 

I'm sure they wouldn't just shut down servers and such. There's too much money to make and probably some licensing agreements that would be an issue. But I can definitely see future installments being XBox exclusives. Moving the Call of Duty franchise, for example, to XBox only could be a coup for Microsoft.

 

Piggybacking on Batman's comments - Going forward, yeah, their stuff will be tied to Microsoft consoles and the PC. Sony has released some stuff on the PC after a couple of years, like Horizon Zero Dawn, and it wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft did that too. (i.e. Fallout 5 will come out on PS5 / PS6 a year or two before Fallout 6 is an Xbox and PC exclusive, in attempt to spike sales of the new installment.) If it helps, it's probably "safe" to get either a PS or an Xbox, as well as a nice PC, and then you basically have everything covered. (Well, except the always-exclusive Nintendo stuff.)