majormitch

@therealturk: I agree with a lot of these points. The fourth wall breaking definitely hurt the story they were telling up until that point, which was the main thrust of my piece, and that story needed better closure. But you lead into another point I was tempted to get into here, but didn't to keep the blog length down: if they want to change the story from the original, they could just change it without making a big fourth wall breaking spectacle out of it. The fact that they did make the simple act of saying "hey we're going to change the story" such a big deal makes me think they are more interested in the meta ramifications of those changes than they are in the actual story they are ostensibly telling. It has me a little worried about future parts, but ultimately I can't fully judge this whole thing until we see where it goes. But the character focused story they started telling (which is the story I preferred) needed closure, and that's a bummer.

@arcitee: True, it's possible Zack isn't still alive. My read of that scene was that the story has changed such that he did live, if not in the primary timeline then at least in an alternate one. Comparing that scene directly to the equivalent Crisis Core scene shows him living at least a little longer, and also why show that scene in Remake unless Zack has some role to play going forward, as he should be dead already? But you also hit on one of my main thoughts/concerns coming out of Remake: we'll have to wait and see on a lot of things, because they left it so open. I feel like only once we see where this all goes can I fully judge/analyze this first part.

@slag: You're welcome!

Yeah, once I noticed that wins were not transitive between years, I settled on what amounts to a "round robin" style format and compared every year to every other. That did lead to ties, and my tiebreaker method was fuzzy at best, and I resolved them on a case by case basis. The most common method was looking deeper into how close the ties were, as not all wins are equal when you dig into it. Sometimes a year scraped together a number of wins by the slimmest margins, so I would prioritize that lower compared to a year that had the same number of wins, but its wins were more clear. Numbers-wise I could kind of make this comparison based on "average rank" across its seeds. For a given year, each of its 5 seeds was ranked in a list of 29 games, and you can basically average those 5 ranks to get a sense of how consistently strong a year was. Again, it's all a bit fuzzy, and the margins on all of this were incredibly slim. And ultimately there were still at least 3 or so spots where I just had to go with my gut on the exact ordering, as no amount of looking at "data" would give me a perfect answer.

My program is in java. I'm not really a programmer by trade, but java is one I have just enough experience with to make it an easy one for me. What I did was so simple I have to imagine you could do it in any language or spreadsheet. There's no formula, it simply performs the process I wrote in my example above, just expanded across all years, so I didn't have to do that manually. And now if I make any changes to the seed rankings, or add in a new year (as I will every year), I can run that instead of spending a couple hours counting it all up manually.

@slag: Mentally I had already replied to this, haha. Shows how scattered my brain has been this past week...

I have no idea if 1998 or 2003 had a big jump in number of games released. I don't think I played drastically more games those years than the ones around them, more that the quality of the games released in those years were better for me. Which is to some (probably large) degree about my own tastes and age as much as anything. I mean, there probably aren't a ton of people out there who loved games like Gladius and Top Spin (both 2003) as much as I did, haha.

Sure thing I can give a "quick" example, hopefully this is the kind of thing you're looking for. I'll list out 3 years, from the 3 different ranking methods, and show how they compared: 1997, 2001, and 2013. Firs thing I did was come up with my top games for each year and their seeds:

In bold I highlighted what the 5 "seeds" are for those 3 years, based on the inflation method I came up with and described up top. Note that the pattern is different for all 3 because they fall across the different break years (1998 and 2003). That's also why I only needed a top 5 for 1997 too. Then I rank the "seeds" based on my preference, which for me was ordered like this:

So from here I compare each pair of years in a "best of 5" type of matchup. With just 3 years it's easy to eyeball and see. I actually wrote a quick program to give me the results with all 29 years in there.Anyway, for these 3 years the results are:
1997 beats 2001: 1997 wins at the 1, 2, and 4 seeds, where 2001 wins the 3 and 5 seeds.
2001 beats 2013: 2001 wins at the 1, 2, and 3 seeds, where 2013 wins the 4 and 5 seeds.
2013 beats 1997: 2013 wins at the 3, 4, and 5 seeds, where 1997 wins the 1 and 2 seeds.

So in this case, we have a rock-paper-scissors result from these 3 years where each had 1 win and 1 loss, which was surprisingly common. In this example 1997 dominated the top seeds, 2013 dominated the bottom seeds, and 2001 was fairly central across the board.

So, take this approach but expanded across all 29 years, haha. Then I could see what years had the most "wins" over other years, and all sorts of other metrics. There were a number of ties, and it's all kind of messy in some ways. But as I said up top, there's no perfect solution, and this worked for me!

@ntm: Ha, Oddjob was cheap! Mario 64 really wowed me too, and in the long run it's certainly the better game and the one I like better too. It probably looked more impressive too. But at the time, there's was something extra special to me about GoldenEye due to the fact that it was the first real FPS I played, and it was on a console no less. I think that made it stick with me in a wholly different way. (Side note: Mario 64 is also an all-time fav that I will write about someday as well.)

@lestephan: Honestly, I think I probably remember the campaign a little more fondly than the multiplayer too, but both were hugely important factors in my fondness for GoldenEye. The campaign objectives are something that shooters still don't really do (outside of direct follow-ups like Perfect Dark), and they gave that game a unique vibe that I appreciated. I actually thought other FPS campaigns were boring for a while after GoldenEye/Perfect Dark because the campaigns had much less dynamic objectives. Eventually I found other things to appreciate in FPS campaigns, but I still miss the objectives idea.

It's interesting the trajectory of how visuals of the N64/PS1 era were received. At the time I think a lot of people thought they were impressive for just seeing stuff in "3D" for the first time, but there were also people like you who weren't that impressed. Then as time went on and those visuals didn't hold up, more people seem to admit that, yeah, that era just didn't look that great, haha. Especially coming off the SNES which had great art that could have gotten even better had they stuck with it like you say. But I think we're almost circling back around in a weird way; I for one have always had fondness for that N64/PS1 era and what it represents, and understanding the limitations they had at the time makes me appreciate what they were able to do even more. And even their sparseness and abstraction can have a place, where everything isn't "realistic" and high fidelity. It was certainly an interesting time for games if nothing else!

@wollywoo: I think you're on to something about GoldenEye landing as a more "Mature" game for people who had mostly been on consoles to that point. Especially for Nintendo kids (like me) who grew up with the NES/SNES, the leap to a 3D game where you shot other human beings (a lot of them too as you point out!) was a big jump in that way. So it stood out, even if the graphics/controls were rough, and have aged even worse.

Oh man, I definitely agree that part of the joy for me with the campaign was that level of mastery. I too played levels over and over just to get better at it, and once I could beat a level on the highest setting, I still enjoyed running them because of how good that mastery felt. (Not that I was ever all "that" good, but mastery by my standards at least.) You point out Control, which was definitely one of (maybe the) toughest level in the game due to how hard it was to protect Natalya. I remember trying and failing that level so many times on the highest difficulty, experimenting with the best places to stand to protect her, and eventually figuring it out and beating that level was one of those early gaming feats I remember being proud of. I enjoy overcoming things like that in games I like, so that was a good feeling for me at the time. Fun stuff :)

@slag: Thanks! The early 90s would definitely have better representation if I had access to more consoles and games (including the PC) during those years. I really only had the SNES (and a little Genesis) for a while, and that can only go so far. Many of those years would almost certainly bump up a few spots if I had access to more back then. But it is what it is, and in a subjective list like this that's fine, and also why I tried to be fully transparent about such things. I certainly don't claim to be an equal judge of all years. I am happy that at least some of those early years (in my case 1992 and 1994) ended up in the top half after my adjustments, so they weren't a total wash.

The cutoffs of 1998 and 2003 emerged purely from looking at the data, not any theorizing or anything. When I first started making this list, I had no inflation at all, which heavily favored later years. Then I started messing with where and how to account for that, and no matter how I sliced it, 1998 and 2003 were always big jumps in depth. Even the final list has those years at the top, so they still weren't handicapped all that much, haha. I tried all sorts of other approaches, but those were the 2 years that made the most sense when looking at how it affected the results.

If I were to make a guess as to how that happened, I'd say both of those years were a couple years into their respective console generations, when they really started finding their footing (I think the middle of generations are often the most exciting times). And then perhaps those generations were the 2 where games kind of 'exploded' the most, at least for me. I think making cutoffs at console launch years would handicap those years, because launch years often have less impressive games (especially nowadays). I also think that, based on all the data I looked at and experiments I tried, that the quality and quantity of games I play has not drastically changed that much in the generations since 2003. While yes, the indie scene exploded and there are a lot more games in the 2010s, I specifically can only play so many. And that number has stayed relatively flat. If anything it has gone down in recent years. The late 90s to early 00s is where I personally expanded my reach a lot I think.

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! :)

@colonel_pockets: @azlamorlandu: @slag: Ahh thanks! It was a fun and different thing to do, glad you find it interesting! :)

BioShock is a good video game.

@nodima: Thanks for sharing this story. Our experiences around the games we play I think can affect our memory of them as much as anything. That's worth remembering.

And, I mean, Glenn's pretty cool too :)

@csl316: I always wondered how Cross would have been viewed had it not been in the same franchise/universe as Trigger, but rather its own standalone game. It was very different, and at the time people wanted to make the comparison, and judged it for being different. But I often liked it for its differences, not in spite of them. And I agree about the visuals, soundtrack, combat, story, etc.

@zeik: That's always been more or less my take. The execution of Cross may not always be "perfect." But it's still extremely good, and much more unique and willing to take risks than Trigger, which I found pretty straightforward by comparison. Cross is definitely ballsy, like you say, haha. Trigger is also a very good game, but I agree it's not nearly as interesting to me as Cross.