GotG Round 1: Heavy Rain vs. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

Ghost Trick is dark horse FInal 4 contender.

You missed the part where its actually up to you to decide how you define Game of the Generation.

As someone who played both I voted for Ghost Trick because I had more fun with it and didn't laugh at all the terrible dialogue and dumb accents.

Ghost Trick is one of my favorite video games ever! EVER! Glad to see all the praise for it in this thread. I'd love to see how far it can go in this competition.

Exactly. Ghost Trick's story is waaaaaay crazier than Heavy Rain, and somehow manages to have almost no plot holes and wrap up everything nicely, which can't really be said for Cage's game. Man, just the characters, the writing, everything in Ghost Trick is SO GOOD!!!! I just want to type out all the wacky stuff that happens, but I'd hate to ruin the game for anyone who has not played it.

Ghost trick is both more of a video game than Heavy Rain and far better written. I'm very happy to see it winning but if Heavy Rain somehow wins I'll lose faith in humanity.

Ghost Trick is such a good game, you guys.

how is it even this close what the fuck

Heavy Rain is a straight up, bad game.

I'm not as crazy for Ghost Trick as a lot of you, but I still think it's a good game. So uh, good game beats bad game.

this is going to be close

Heavy Rain was so dumb that I enjoyed it a lot; also it was best played with other people.

Oh come on guys, I know most of you never played Ghost Trick and got enthralled by David Cage's vision but really, Ghost Trick.

I haven't played either and have absolutely no opinion either so I will abstain from this one. May the best game win.

Really glad Ghost Trick is winning this, Heavy Rain was ambitious but it completely fell flat.

That would be an unreasonable expectation. Given the fact that all of us have limited money and time, we can't possibly be expected to play everything under the sun. If this were a tournament of between, say, songs which can be heard on YouTube for free and could be heard in a few minutes, that would be a reasonable thing to ask, but video games are expensive and very time-consuming. Besides, we usually are reasonably able to assess whether or not we would like a game simply by seeing videos, reading reviews, reading forums, hearing discussions on the Giant Bombcast and comparing what we hear, see and read with all of our own past experiences with games of that series or genre. It's far from foolproof, but I would guess that people are able to predict whether they would like a game or not with a pretty high rate of accuracy. People credit enough that we can assume that they've chosen to buy and play the games they have for a good reason.

@chrissedoff said:

I think there are plenty of exceptions to your suggestion that we more or less have an idea of the quality of a game based on some impressions of it. Plenty of people disagree with the consensus.

If people are allowed to submit the overall reviewer/gamer consensus instead of their own, then this becomes a Metacritic battle/which game has the biggest cult following, and not indicative of what the Giant Bomb community actually thinks.

So I would also prefer it if people didn't vote if they haven't played each game, but obviously there's no way to enforce that at all so I've accepted that this is largely a popularity contest. And granted, some of these matchups feature good games that probably sold really poorly, and weren't played by a ton of community members. Looking at you, Valkyria Chronicles/Ghost Trick/Crusader Kings/Deadly Premonition.

@bisonhero: I don't think the results would differ much even if you distributed free copies to the all GB forum users, gave them 2 weeks off of work and paid them for their time. People tend to know themselves pretty well. I can certainly say with confidence you that the games you mentioned specifically would not have fared significantly better in a scenario where everyone voting had played every game in the tournament. I think you're overestimating the power of hype and marketing on us avid video gamesmen and underestimating the judgment of the GB community collectively. People, by and large, know what they like and the least effective way to change or broaden people's tastes is by demanding that they do so.

It's hard to effectively judge games you haven't played and have had minimal exposure to. Two weeks with every game in this bracket wouldn't necessarily change minds, but they'd certainly make people think more.

Cute pomeranian is stupid...so Ghost Trick

Well yes, it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to play all of these games. It's perhaps less unreasonable to think people might not feel compelled to vote in every single poll that pops up on the site just for the sake of it. I just think it would make the results of this voting more interesting if they came from a place of having experienced enough of each game to make a more completely informed decision. I haven't actually voted that many times yet, because there have been a lot of matchups where I haven't played one of the games either at all or at least enough that I feel like I can fairly judge it. Saints Row: The Third is one of my favourite games this generation, but I'm not going to vote for it over Asura's Wrath because I haven't played Asura's Wrath yet. I'm not sitting in some ivory tower, having played every game, demanding that everyone else also play every game, as much as you seem to have interpreted my words that way.

Like I said, I don't want to see any game lose just because not as many people played it. The Mortal Kombat VS Street Fighter 4 poll was really interesting because it was incredibly close and both parties were involved in the discussion, articulating why they preferred their chosen game from differing angles and it was great to see the passionate response to it. Take the example of this thread though and the people extolling the virtues of Ghost Trick far outweigh those defending Heavy Rain, but Heavy Rain has a substantial amount of the vote. I trust people to have an idea of what they will and will not like, myself included. That doesn't mean I'll never write off or ignore a really good game. Who knows? I might fucking love Xenoblade Chronicles. I wouldn't know because I haven't played it yet. Although I'm sure there are plenty of people who love that game that would be stoked if I DID try it out. Certainly, if Ghost Trick can do well (it won't, it's almost certainly gonna get blown up in the next round) and that compels some people to check out Ghost Trick, that would be a fantastic outcome. Everyone's personal best lists of the generation are going to differ greatly from these collaborative ones, so it's the passionate defence of the outlier that interests me much, much more than the popular game that didn't offend anybody.

This is the heart of the issue though, those are your definitions for what makes something "Game of the Generation". Others may not share the opinion that simply doing something different means that a game deserves a spot on this list, especially as you admit, the game had some pretty glaring flaws.

See, I figured this was the "GB's community's favourite game of the generation", or at least that's the impression I got from the initial thread. I don't think it's possible for so many different people to arbitrarily decide which game was the most influential or unique, because even then that probably depends on what kind of games you like.

That said, under either category, I'd probably still take Ghost Trick. It was an incredible experience on a platform that didn't have as many of those as the home consoles. It's a tightly-structured game with some real personality to the characters. I enjoyed Heavy Rain, but the gameplay didn't feel that advanced from what Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy achieved, and the characters for the most part weren't as strong as I would have liked to have seen, especially given that game's heavy focus on story. A lot of them felt a little cookie-cutter (it actually almost hurts me to say that, it's really too strong of a phrase, but we're nitpicking here).

A closely fought contest but Ghost Trick manages to solve the case first and wins with 54% of the vote and 601 votes cast.