Got it, So "Margin of Victory" and the "Eye Test" served as tiebreaker criteria along with "average rank". Not unlike how College Football considers this stuff for the CFP. Makes sense given your sports background and the RR format.
Makes Sense to me that you'd need to do a sanity check and over rule the bracket occasionally given this.
Java might as well be Greek to me, so it still sounds impressive to me haha
Cool beans, thanks again! The reason I've asked is I figure I'd like to try my hand at using your methodology and I want to make sure I use it as consistently to how you applied before I do my own variant I've been toying with for 2-3 years very sporadically.
I'll enjoy doing it and I figure you might enjoy seeing somebody else's list using your criteria. Might just be us two! but hey that's enough for me haha
And yes, comparing head to heads for every year did take a LOT of hours, haha. I originally started just having a ladder that years moved up, but once I realized the comparison is not transitive, I had to do them all. At that point I basically ranked all my 1 seeds, then all my 2 seeds, etc. So I had 5 lists of 29 games, and once those were in order the head to head results were already there. Giving them a numerical score would have also taken a long time too, haha, as I would have had to come up with a scoring method that was consistent across time. I think I eventually realized with this project that there are a million ways I could do it, they would all take a lot of time, and none of them would be perfect. As a perfectionist that was a hump to get over, but I got to a place I was happy with. And that's why I tried to make the process transparent, it is messy! :)
Thanks for the in depth explanation man!
that makes a lot of sense, there's always going to arbitrary cutoff lines and you gotta make decisions somewhere. I wonder if there to way to know how many releases a given year had. It'd be interesting to see if 1998 and 2003 saw not just a quality increase but also a total released game quantity increase too.
It's interesting to me that 2003 was so distinctively one of those years for you, I certainly feel it was a great year for games, but it's not one that immediately would have jumped to my mind as being a landmark one. Tho Gen 6 was such a consistently strong generation, there doesn't seem to be a clear consensus on what is considered the best year unlike say Gen 5 with 1998. I haven't really decided which year from that era I think is the best, it very well might be 2003 for me too by your metrics.
Do you have a quick and dirty example you can share about what you did after ranking all the 1's and 2 seeds etc? I don't want to make you work hard if it's a bit of trouble.
Just curious to see what it looked like in practice,. I'm still fleshing out my own inferior method, but I'm curious to see what my list would look like if I just applied your methodlogy
I think this achieved the desired goal of mostly accounting for inflation, even if the early 1990s still struggle a little more than I’d like.
I think a large part of that is also influenced by the necessity of having a depth of knowledge of multiple systems in the 90's (and 80's). It's hard to have a complete picture without Sega, Turbografix, Commodore 64, 3D0, jaguar and especially the Arcades (which was where all the cutting edge still was) etc etc. Some of those systems had very few great games, but even one or two contributors deepens the bench a lot. Games were so much more expensive back then, and the majority of gamers did not control their own finances, so in a way not having knowledge of more than 1 system's library is probably more accurate to how it felt tho, so it's hard to say what a truly fair picture is.
fwiw 1991 might be the year where your opinion and mine likely differ the most. Part of that is undoubtedly due to age and access, but I do think you can make a credible argument that 1991 is up there with 1998, a given PS2 year (take your pick) etc as a candidate for being the greatest of all time
Then for 2003 on, the 5 seeds are the number 1, 2, 4, 7, and 10 games from my top 10 lists. How I came up with these exact numbers was a series of thought experiments and trial and error. For me and my gaming history, 1998 and 2003 proved to be two clear inflection points in the sheer number of good games I played, so I knew handicaps needed to ramp up in those year
Interesting! I like how you spaced out the pics, that seems fair. I'm kinda surprised by the picking of 1998 and 2003, I was leaning towards a more strict generational cutoff (i.e. the years new hardware debuted), but perhaps your picks are better because perhaps the number of titles didn't immediately follow suit.
I feel like you probably also make another cutoff around 2011-2 or so because that's when the indie game scene really seemed to explode and the number of titles enlarged dramatically again
Finally, once I had my top 5 seeds for each year, I simply pitted every year against each other in a “best of 5” matchup. I compared the #1 seeds to each other, then the #2 seeds to each other, and so on, deciding which game I liked better between each of the 5 seeds. The year that won at least 3 of the 5 seeds emerged victorious between the two years, and once I had done that for every pair of years, I had ample data to rank this list.
Oh wow, so you did head to head matchups for everything? That had to have taken hours. Probably kinda fun tho! Did you consider just giving every game a numerical score and comparing them that way?
Kinda makes sense to me to gamify the ole backlog, since we're gamers to begin with. :) I'm pretty pleased with how the results have improved over time here for me. Feel like last year it finally really started to payoff
Ever since Steam more or less created this problem for me by having so many free and ultra cheap games it's been surprisingly difficult for me to end up not feeling satisfied with what I've played out of my backlog and what I haven't.
Maybe at some point if I get this refined and simplistic enough, I can make a version that can help other people who might have the same issue I've got.
@bobafettjm: Yeah hard to feel bad about that. Sounds to me like you priorities in proper order. Congrats on the promotion!
I really envy your ability to revisit games! That's something I struggle to make myself do, but I always feels really glad when I have
Funny you mention Dungeons of Dredmor. That was the second quick look I ever watched at GB and the first game I bought because of a Quicklook. I never came close to finishing that game, it's pretty hard! But I did enjoy the couple hours I spent messing around with it
@bobafettjm: makes a lot of sense. So almost like your own person game tasting event! I got some buddies who get together once a month and basically do that as a group. The "host" brings 6-10 games and as a group they play each one for 30minutes to an hour, taking turns on who plays.
I'm sure you've played enough stuff by this point in your gaming career that you can get a pretty good idea of what a game's about just from a single play session anyway.
Hope the work situation change for you is something you consider to be a positive for your life though!
Hunh I thought Sword Art was a turn based JRPG franchise. Shows you what I know about the series
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