Mento

@manburger: That's a relief. There's been plenty of great games to come out of that label and they deserve to stick around and not be tossed in the giant pit from 300 along with Batgirl and everything else Warner Bros. has determined will never see the light of day.

@bigsocrates: I've been IGNing it for a while, huh. The natural result of only finishing (and then reviewing) the games I'm enjoying. I got more explormers coming next month, at least. Playing one right now even. So incorrigible. (Deadly Tower definitely has that PS3 energy, agreed.)

@chamurai: It's probably more due to the fact that Tetris doesn't really age, and those two in the top 20 are some of the best Tetris variants I've ever played. A lot of these early polygonal games haven't held up too well, either because they're too graphically primitive or because many genres were breaking into 3D for the first time and dealing with the concomitant growing pains, so a constant like Tetris fares better than it otherwise might.

Bigsocrates is right that the system was super strong with its first-party library compared to everything else, and my decision to elide anything already on NSO is really highlighting that. Kinda ended up turning the whole exercise into a sorta scrub league of all the system's underappreciated also-rans. I'll still stand by those top twenty being bangers though.

@manburger: Awesome. Wishlisted immediately. I gotta do my due diligence more often when writing these, huh. Especially if I intend to do more detectiving.

@manburger: Thanks!

Too bad Race Drivin' was US only, it's harder to make a racing game pun out of Genesis. Maybe "Start Your Engenesis"?

@chamurai: Wow, was not expecting that. Especially considering, as the comments on that video are quick to mention, they still haven't done Smash Bros or Donkey Kong 64 yet.

Guess this means I can scratch Extreme G off the list too.

@ben_h: "One in One" would've certainly been a lot easier on my sleep schedule, I'll say that much.

Ghoulies is fine. It just put me through the wringer so I'm happy to also dunk on it.

@bigsocrates: Am I getting counter-fooled? Is there an Uno reverse card in play? We're talking about a game where, after you defeat the final boss, there's a timed sequence to rescue all the prisoners you've been spotting and you only get one chance (because, and I quote, the key stops working after thirteen minutes or it blows up or something) and if you fail this sequence then the game ends anyway (after it calls you a loser) and you can't repeat it.

It's like at some point I forgot that Rare also invented Battletoads. They're all psychos.

You got two explormers in here and the roguelike survival game is what strikes you the most like a me game?

There was a time where I subsisted almost entirely on shareware and demos but I've got such a massive backlog of fully-built games these days that I don't think I'll ever be enthusiastic for demos again. That said, NextFest is always a cool zeitgeist-y way of getting eyes on new Indies (which traditionally struggle to get much attention outside of Direct/State of Play sizzle reels) and I do appreciate that so many demos come out now that let you carry your progress over, as it's a smart way to retain players curious enough to check it out.

Hope you get better soon, Zoop.

@manburger: Oh wait, is it not showing up? I'm the only one allowed to edit anything, but the idea was to give folks a quick overview of all the games that have been featured so far. Easier than manually putting links into the blog every time I mention a previously-covered game (or keep updating that enormous table of links to previous entries). I could publish the document, but for some reason that removes all those useful (?) little notes I keep adding.

Edit: Ah, I think I fixed it. So it was just private this whole time, huh. Whoopsy.

Heck yeah, Frieren. I'm guessing the second reason it didn't make many "best of year" lists is because it's still only half done? Very few anime shows were as pretty as Frieren (or Trigun) this year, that's for sure.

The stuff about the demons of that world is real interesting because they're not actually people but predators that have adjusted their hunting techniques over millennia to better entrap humans. That they're human enough makes us feel sympathy for them, which makes them that much more effective at homicide. But I guess your point is that we really only observe the human (and elf) perspective and maybe there actually is more to them than being really devious maneaters. It reminded me of Parasyte a little; the way those creatures could possess an intelligence high enough to converse with us and remain undetected while also being so singleminded about exterminating mankind.

Shout out to my fellow Paranormasight freak. I'll admit to only rating it highly because it was one of just two games of note I played that year, but still. Hope it finds a bigger audience before Square decides the sequel should be written entirely by AI to save money. Poor, poor Portopia.