Game of the Year

de Maistre said:

nomination=Darklands

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Good call.

Ashurdan said:

vote= Mortal Kombat, I mean come on, it, along with some other games is the whole reason we have the ESRB now.

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This. Just this. Not going to even bother with paragraphs becuase this quickly sums up the points.


Link to video.

This moment changed video game history in ways few other games will ever hope to achieve. Also MK1 Sub-Zero is still the boss of Mortal Kombat, screw the younger one.

Well I'm not 100% sure everyone got their votes in, I see a lot of nominations, not many votes. Should we close the 1992 voting yet? I was going to. Right now MK would win. Oh here's mine.

vote=Kirby's Dream Land

Maybe it's not as influential or gameplay revolutionary but it launched arguably nintendo's third or fourth most recognizable character franchise. Obviously everything mario is first, and zelda second, but I'd put kirby right up there with donkey kong and mega man franchises for popularity/recognition.

If everyone's done voting we'll move on to 1993!

Well, i think it cant be any other but Doom for 1993. Hard to think on a more influential game. So i vote Doom obviously.

However some more nominations for other great tittles:
Cannon Fodder
Myst
Jaguar XJ220
Day of the Tentacle
The Settlers
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands
X-Plane (not a game exactly but well...)

Thorgalaeg said:

Well, i think it cant be any other but Doom for 1993. Hard to think on a more influential game. So i vote Doom obviously.

However some more nominations for other great tittles:
Cannon Fodder
Myst
Jaguar XJ220
Day of the Tentacle
The Settlers
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands
X-Plane (not a game exactly but well...)

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Myst and Doom make interesting bookends to two whole eras in gaming history I think.

civvver said:

Well I'm not 100% sure everyone got their votes in, I see a lot of nominations, not many votes. Should we close the 1992 voting yet? I was going to. Right now MK would win. Oh here's mine.

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MK winning such a rich year in games as 1992 would be a really sad, sad fact.

Anyway, I think people are waiting for the "official nominees" before voting

I think you should post the nominees in this page as well, for those who have not yet voted (iirc i did not vote, but probably won't cause i am not that fond of MK and Lure of the temptress won't win anyway )

Akka said:

MK winning such a rich year in games as 1992 would be a really sad, sad fact.

Anyway, I think people are waiting for the "official nominees" before voting

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Nominees are on the front page, I don't think I missed any... Also you can vote for something not nominated, just nominate and vote for it at once. The nomination process is not any sort of official procedure, it's merely informative to get us discussing the merits of different games. There have been several posts where someone nominates a game and next post another guy goes oh yeah I forgot how good that was! Nominations are our opportunity to brainstorm basically.

Star Control II is the top game of 1992 on VideoGameGeek (the link goes to a page where I set the date range from 31/12/89 to 1/1/94. This range was to avoid a problem with some games only having the release year set but not the month or day.) Mortal Kombat isn't even in the top 10 of 1992 on that site.

Other results from VideoGameGeek for years discussed so far:
1990 - Super Mario World (which would have been my vote)
1991 - Zelda: A Link to the Past (but my vote would be Civilization)
1992 - Star Control II (I don't have a vote for this year cuz I haven't played any of the nominees enough to make an educated vote )
1993 - Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle (Never heard of that game)

More Nomination= for 93 in addition to Doom, Myst, and others mentioned before:
Master of Orion
Zelda: Link's Awakening
Secret of Mana
Super Street Fighter II
Star Wars: X-Wing
Mega Man X (Dec. 1993 in Japan, Jan. 1994 in NA)
SimCity 2000 (VideoGameGeek and Google tell me this was released in 93 but Wikipedia says 94)
Mortal Kombat II
Sam & Max Hit the Road

For 1993 i will vote for Secret of Mana.

(but first let's agree on 1992...I have no vote to cast on it).

Only game for 1992 I've played is Wolf 3d so I guess I'll go with that.

Doom is an auto win even going up against SC2K. It's the whole reason for multiplayer gaming on PC and consoles. No Halo, no CoD, no BF without Doom.

This is getting seriously confusing people.

i vote MK II for 93' then.

Rub'Rum said:

This is getting seriously confusing people.

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Cus we had very few votes for 1992 so I left it open. I guess I'll go ahead and close it now, doesn't seem like we're getting more. This way we can get back on schedule, keep making nominations and discussing the game merits until next friday 9-20, then we'll vote and post results the following friday.

There's a lot of great titles from 1993. I loved link's awakening. Just as much as link to the past. I thought the story was incredible a really cool break away from the usual tri force stuff. Mega man x is the best mega man title imo, the first to present all the mega man suit upgrades. Going to be hard to choose. I'm not a big doom fan but hard to deny it's influence.

I abstained from voting 1992. No good choices..

1993 - It's either Doom, Day of the Tentacle or Pirates! Gold for me. All great in different ways. I guess it's the year the PC took over after the Amiga. Do we have any criteria for choosing the games?

Uh... Day of the tentacle is from 1993? It surely looks a lot worse than Secret of Mana.

At least it looks better than the original "Maniac Mansion" though

Kyriakos said:

Uh... Day of the tentacle is from 1993? It surely looks a lot worse than Secret of Mana.

At least it looks better than the original "Maniac Mansion" though

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I bet the storytelling was of higher quality in DotT...

Link to video.

Wolf3D/Doom didn't age very well, but they pretty much were game of the year for several years for several years in the 1990s (I was gaming then, being indoctrinated by gamer magazines, which we actually went to bookstore to buy----no bona fide internet other than niche dial-up networks). I have to give tie/2nd for every single turn-based Microprose title in the 1990s. Although when X-COM 1 came as a demo diskette it pretty much was the most amazing thing on PC at the time. And SM's Pirates 1 was pretty much game of the year when it arrived ('88-89 I think).

There were so many good games and home computer 'platforms' back in late '80s and early '90s, imho the true golden age of home computer gaming*, that it is probably impossible to pick a game of the year. It's just that some of those games aged well to the late 1990s, and were re-made at least once, so in retrospect they are game of the year, today.


*Although its hard to say there are really clear epochs of gaming. People had TRS-80s with tape drives playing some silly games that beat the pants off of stuff on the Atari 2600, and were making games much earlier. I don't what would be Silver-Gold-Platinum ages. For me the best games were late '80s to early '90s until the cartridge console systems were temporarily better for gaming until expansion video cards (SVGA adapters, I guess) were common.

And then there were the legit indie games distributed on Usenet. Basically the self-published rogue-like games, like NetHack. They kept being patched multi-year.

Loppan Torkel said:

I abstained from voting 1992. No good choices..

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What ?


Anyway, let's go for 1993.
Doom here is a no-brainer. The game basically defined the FPS genre.

Still, there is several other good games (Dark Sun, The Chaos Engine, Frontier, Lands of Lore, Days of the Tentacle, Master of Orion, Myst, Sam & Max, The Settlers, Secret of Mana, Space Hulk, Strike Commander, Syndicate, Transartica, Ultima Underworld II), but it's tough to fight a legend.

So my vote goes to Doom, and my special nominations go to Frontier and Ultima Underworld II..

I never liked the FPS genre, and haven't played doom either. Of course those old titles were very important due to having a 3d world (or something like that) but as actual games they are not to my liking.

The original Settlers was a nice game and i liked the road system it had (like the old warcraft) but it looked very poor next to older strategy games like Utopia.

So my vote still is for the great Secret of Mana