@morecowbell24: Thank you! Man, there are some great Castlevania songs out there! That's one series that skirted around the edge of this list for a few reasons. But the short version is I very much considered it, and I do really like a lot of that music. Ultimately I like too much music to include everything :) Glad I got some of your favs though, the ones you call out are all amazing.
@mento: Haha, I gotcha! :) It is interesting how subjective video game music tastes can be though, and it's great that there is such a variety of great stuff out there now.
@zombiepie: I, um... hmmm. Let's say that while I don't hate Eyes on Me, it's not (anywhere) near the top of my FF8 list. Game has a lot of great songs, I don't know that I'd call that one of them ;)
@mento: What is this "subjective" you speak of? ;)
Thanks Mento! Of those you list, Undertale is the only one I've played enough of to have a good appreciation of the music, and I do like it a lot. It's among the handful of games that are "on the edge" of making this list, so there may be hope for it yet :)
@pabba: Thanks! It's a small dent, made by taking some shortcuts. But you do what you can to keep the backlog at bay ;)
I agree that the early levels of Unfinished Swan seemed the strongest, which is why I don't feel bad about dropping that one. Hohokum is the definition of aimless. I'm sure there are people who love that, it's simply not for me. If you already have it from PS+ there's no harm in giving it a shot, and you'll probably know very quickly if it's something you're into or not.
@mento: Thanks! After a first run this quick-fire approach seems to work for me. That paring down process you mention is always the toughest part of backlogs, which is kind of what I'm going for here. Almost every game on mine is already one that, in one form or another, I have heard good things about and have reason to believe it's worth trying (I can't imagine including every unplayed game on my Steam list...). Yet I still can't play them all, and I know that what clicks for one person may not click for another. So it's all about trying to come up with a way to find the Flywrenchs of the world :)
I actually did see the end of Unfinished Swan, and tried at least a little of every level. Once you get 5 balloons, which happens quickly, you can buy an item that lets you level select. I simply used that to skip a few stages here and there when I got tired of a certain mechanic/rules set. So I did see most of the game and its ideas, just had a few holes in the middle.
@frontman12: I... can you believe me if I say that was unintentional? ;)
@slag: Thanks Slag! I have read @mento's excellent May backlogs blogs over the years, and @dankempster has also done wonders with his "Backlogtober" blogs. Good stuff! I think we all try and find ways to tackle our backlogs the best we can... for those of us that really care about games, it's a never-ending struggle. And the sobering truth (which I have accepted and in some ways embraced) is that we will never play every game we want. But that doesn't mean we can't try to do as much damage as we can.
I admire the month-long backlog assaults that our blogging friends have managed... but I don't think I could do it. I generally have a finger on the pulse of new games, and when I do have an extended time to tackle a backlog item, I generally want it to be for a longer game (such as any of the big RPGs on there...) The smaller games generally get worked in between new releases when possible. This was an idea for me to try and get through more games in an extra short time-span; 9 games in 2 days is a good clip. It does require me to disengage from each game pretty quickly, as you noted, which used to bother me a lot too. But as I get older that gets easier, and especially in the sense of "it's literally the only way I can try a good number of these games". So far so good, I'd like to try it again someday :)
@slag: These 3 franchises are among my favorites as well, even if they don't command quite the same respect now as they used to. They're also probably among the best franchises for this kind of ranking, as they've all been around for about 30 years, with a dozen+ releases that have changed just enough with the times to make such a list interesting/meaningful. Not many franchises have that kind of a legacy, and it helps that these are franchises I have greatly enjoyed overall.
As for which FF games we rank, that's something we'll determine closer to when we do it. We won't be able to go nearly as deep as you would though :P None of us have played much past the main numbered entries, so we'll probably have to stick to those. Of your entire additional list, at MOST 4 or 5 of them multiple of us played, and all of those but X-2 are in the "too different to really fit" category. But we'll figure it out! :)
@slag: You're probably right about Mario 64 in the bigger picture, and there probably are plenty of people of all ages who consider it their fav. Sometimes hard to parse through anecdotal experience, that's actually something I'd love to see some hard data for!
I've played all the "main" Zeldas we plan to rank, and so has my brother. The others have played most of them, but are catching up on a few before we do that next month. I've also played all the "main" Final Fantasy games (I keep putting "main" in quotes because even coming up with the list to rank is something we have to determine ourselves), and believe it or not FF was the inspiration for this whole thing. My brother has been slowly playing through the older ones the past 2 years as a personal goal, and I made a somewhat off-hand comment that we should rank them all when he's done. One thing led to another, and here we are! So we will definitely do FF at some point, though probably not until early next year. We'll wait until he completes the series (he only has FF5 left), and at this point might as well wait to get FF15 in there too.
That will wrap up the 3 franchises we really wanted to do: Mario, Zelda, and FF. Those are 3 franchises we've all played a lot of, and they lend themselves to these kinds of rankings really well. Then we'll see if we're up for more and what other ideas we have :)
@slag: Aw, thanks Slag! I don't know that I expected anyone to actually listen to this thing, but I'm glad you enjoyed it! We've all known each other (in person) for a long time, and we get along really well, which almost certainly helps the conversational flow, despite some very differing opinions in some cases. We had a lot of fun with it if nothing else :) A few comments to your comments:
These kinds of rankings are always based heavily in the criteria used as you mention, and we decided to just go with our gut and however we felt about the games. This meant we could argue for our fondness of older games that were great at the time, but maybe don't hold up as well, as you noticed. This would be a very different list, way more skewed towards newer games, if it was 100% about execution by modern standards. We kind of had a little of every kind of argument somewhere in there though :P
I completely agree on the original SMB's importance, and that the farther removed someone is from playing it in 1985 the easier it is to lose sight of that. Someone on our panel tried to argue it down because it doesn't hold up amazingly well today ;) And while it may not hold up as well as the newer games, I think it's legacy is very much worth respecting, and it's certainly the most "important" Mario game by a good margin. I hope we captured that to some degree.
In retrospect I harped on the nostalgia bit a little too much for Mario 64... but I was also looking for any argument to try make my case for World ;) Mario 64 is an incredible game, but I also knew (before we even started) that I was outnumbered 3 to 1 for the top spot, so I tried to do whatever I could to give World a chance. That said, while I agree that anyone can recognize that Mario 64 is a great game regardless of age (and I do love it), I do think nostalgia plays a not insubstantial part in making it someone's personal #1. You yourself say you're a SMB3 person, and most people older than our group seem to go with SMB1, SMB3, or World. People my age go with Mario 64 almost unanimously (which I've seen my entire life). And you're probably right that younger folks go with Minecraft or something. Point being, at least anecdotally, I've seen a clear preference for Mario games based on age, and while that doesn't diminish how amazing and important Mario 64 was (almost certainly the most important behind the original), I think it's an important thing for us to consider when making this list. We were a panel of 4 people who were the right age for Mario 64, which made it feel like it was just automatically landing at #1 without discussion. I tried to do what I could with that :)
Anyway, thanks again for listening, really appreciate the feedback! We've already started planning for our next one, which will happen sometime next month. This time it will be Zelda, which will be... interesting. And is very ironic given this week's Bombcast, but for the record we started planning before that thing went live! ;) But I'm looking to it!
@nonesun: Very possible you didn't miss anything or do anything "wrong" at all, maybe Super Mario World just isn't to your tastes- totally fine! It's my personal favorite, but as I found out, no one else on our panel felt the same way ;) A few points perhaps worth clarifying though:
Super Mario World is short by modern standards, but was pretty large for games of the time. It was definitely bigger/longer than the NES Mario games.
A lot of the appeal of World is in, well, it's world. There's a lot of variety and secrets and hidden exits to find, so it's possible there's cool stuff off the main path left for you to discover. Or if you primarily enjoy "critical pathing" games, this structure may not be as appealing.
If you just played it for the first time recently, it's never going to feel as impressive as the 25 years of history behind it have built it up to be. But at the time it was amazing. It was so much bigger and more ambitious than anything else, the audiovisual presentation was a HUGE step up, and the control was spot on. That stuff becomes less impressive over time (as almost every game does), even though I personally think World holds up very well today.
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