Reed Rothchild

Amazon right now Best Buy right now

https://www.videogamesage.com/blogs/entry/24-new-site-and-volume-ix-are-both-ready/

Many years ago I had this horrendously stupid brilliant idea: Why not "rank" ALL of the games? The Super Nintendo games. After all, I was rapidly accumulating piles upon piles of carts, and my compulsion to finish things meant I was seeing more of their content than most people. I've also long considered myself to be a pretty fair and even-handed critic. One who had enough of a frame of reference for all of "video gaming" that I knew what made up a good platformer, or a good RPG, and whatnot. I also love lists. All lists. It doesn't matter if it's the "Top 100 Games," the "Top 100 Saturn Games," the "100 Worst PC" games, or the "25 Best Japan-Only Games." If it's a list I probably read it. And probably went looking for more right afterwards. So eventually I said fuck it. I started breaking down my collection, and ordering from most to least favorite. I started stacking up the games I hadn't played yet so that I could figure out in what general range they would fall in. I started ordering games I didn't have, partially so I could find out how good they were. Eventually, I had played them all. Now I just had to write about them. 714 of them. Thoroughly. It was the sort of ginormous task that no-one else (as far as I know) had ever been stupid enough to attempt. Sure, there's SNES-a-Day and Questicle and the like. But those are all quick impressions of short play sessions. That wouldn't suffice for actually ranking everything. I couldn't rank The 7th Saga after playing it for 30 minutes. No one would listen to me explain why Ogre Battle is a top 100 game if I never finished it. So I wrote, and played. And played and wrote. For years. FINALLY, in 2017, I was ready. I busted out reviews for the worst 14 games, and threw it out to the public, unannounced, in an unassuming NintendoageAge thread. It probably got 300 views over sixth months, with reviews that were short and filled with barely coherent ranting. But I kept at it. For two more years. Slowly the list got chopped away, 50 games at a time. The writing went from incoherent to merely subpar. And I forced myself to start to obey the laws of grammar. A little. Then NintendoAge died. We all know that story. Luckily I had already set forth a plan to detach myself from the site, in case such a thing had ever happened. I had taken all of the raw xhtml from those posts, and saved them to my machine. Then, I spent painstaking months converting it over to html5, dressing it up with some css, and getting a new domain ready. So here it is. A new site. One that will remind you of your freshman year web design project. Or perhaps a geocities site from 1998. In any case, it will only get better as I have time to improve it. Thanks for reading. http://snesrankings.com Constructive criticism is appreciated. Hell, mean-spirited criticism is appreciated. ...and yes, turns out AWS is case sensitive with rendering images. So anticipate lots of broken links. And this will be the first time I've seen it on mobile, so assume that is super rough looking. edit: I somehow forgot to mention @Splain @spacepup @JamesRobot who pointed out my 10,000 mistakes. And in record time too: this was the quickest turnaround between batches, despite the two different migrations

(I excluded SNES to avoid spoilers) This is where gaming started in my opinion. Yeah, I'm sure Zork and Ultima are great games, and Robotron and Ms. Pac-Man are fun in short bursts. But this is why I'm playing video games 30+ years later. The first obsession. Still just as playable today. This might objectively be the greatest game of all time. There was nothing even close to this kind of intense, visceral experience when it came out, and most games still can't touch its insanely sharp gameplay. I was so desperate to find a way to play this when I was a kid, that I dreamt up ways to buy a Genesis and 32X. That's desperation. I somehow wasn't very aware of the N64 existence prior to its release. I don't have a great explanation for that, but somehow my focus was more on Super Mario RPG and other SNES games. Then I played this on a Sears kiosk. I'm not sure I've ever had more fun with a game than I did in those first ten minutes. Gamechanger. SNES was instant history, I needed this. When the hype train for this guy started rolling along, I get caught up in it. Those TVs ads, those magazine ads, that sublime cover art. Suddenly I needed to know about all of those Japanese RPGs I had been missing out on all these years. What were all those games in the back of GameFan? Should I get into anime and find more stuff like this? One day I actually sat in Barnes and Noble and looked through the ENTIRE guidebook. I didn't own a PlayStation. When it came out for PC I got the demo, and it promptly took down our machine. When the full game went on sale I bought that, and it took down our machine again. This game was the bane of my dad's existence. I didn't actually play through the game until several years later, and by then I had already played through VIII, and many other JRPGs and WRPGs, so the actual experience was something of a letdown for me. But I have never been so hyped about anything. When we finally upgraded our old-ass PC we got a Dell Pentium II. The games? Myst, Riven, Tomb Raider II, and this. I only vaguely remember mentioning this one to my dad, so i was pretty shocked that i got it. I then spent the first month mostly playing Tomb Raider II and the demo for Age of Empires. This game confused me. Then I sat down and gave it some serious time... Even today, this game puts most others to shame. The scope of the units. The balance to the resource management. The chaos of the battles. The GOAT soundtrack. I probably put 500 hours into this. In single player. In a game that has no storyline or real campaign. I didn't care. Hell, I played through EVERY SINGLE multiplayer map against the PC. Console games took a backseat for years after this. The Krogoth mission is still probably the greatest in the history of strategy games. The GOAT. I said it then, I say it now, I'll say it on my deahtbed. This game (and its sequel) are better than everything else. The storyline, the atmosphere, the tightly balanced gameplay, the intense violence, and crushing sense of doom and despair. I could probably only play this game for the rest of my life and be content. After this, I didn't have time in my life for subpar games anymore. Only the good ones would deserve my attention. Remember the first time you fought off the special forces? Remember the first time you shot down an Apache? Remember the first time you were afraid of the water? Remember how perfectly balanced the entire arsenal of weapons was? Remember how good Opposing Force was? Or Blue Shift? Or the demo, which was standalone? Before this game, titles like Jedi Knight were considered the greatest of all time. Afterwards, we could only look at other shooters and be like... The (other) GOAT. The story and atmosphere takes a slight step back from the first, but in its place is the greatest multiplayer in the history of the world. I wish I was playing it right now. I'd play it all day. I'd sell my entire collection of games in exchange for an online community that was as thriving as this was at launch. And don't even get me started on World War 2 Recon. This is a game where I had to force myself to uninstall it so that I would do other things in my life. Multiple times. In high school, spring, summer, and falls were basically endless marathons of football practices, football "optional" practices, football camps, and the football season. It's a grueling grind, where you're constantly in some sort of tired, agitated, and hurt state. But man, did I relax and unwind afterwards, in the dark, with epic RPGs. This was the epic-est. It didn't matter if I got blindsided by a 250 lb tight end (there were no safety rules back then), because at the end of the day I got to play this. The best RPG of the last ten years is Dragon Age Origins. And that's a slightly inferior Baldur's Gate III. In college I mostly retired my PC gaming (I couldn't afford to get a new rig so it left me behind). But I did have my PS2, and stacks of cheap games. This is the one that left the biggest impact on me. I normally find Japanese melodrama to be overly heavy-handed, or preachy. But this game strikes a perfect balance. I may or may not have teared up. Every other game was from years ago. This is the only modern title on the list, and for good reason. The Switch was a godsend for us busy parent types. I had been mostly relegated to getting my gaming fixes on handhelds, as getting any sort of quality time on my 360 or PS3 had become a thing of the past. When the Switch came out, the title that convinced me to get one was none other than Skyrim. People like to make jokes about it, but the ability to get a deep "Western" RPG on a portable console was extremely appealing to me. And after I finished it I looked for another one. Enter this game. Best described as a board game mixed with an dungeon crawling RPG, I became obsessed. See, I had also had to give up board games when my kids were born, because of time constraints. Now I could scratch all the itches at once. And this game has such amazing atmosphere, and unique gameplay, and a sadistic difficulty curve... it's to die for. Honorable mentions: Ikaruga Final Fantasy Tactics Castlevania Symphony of the Night Super Mario Odyssey Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey Grand Theft Auto San Andreas Star Fox 64 Skyrim Fallout 2 Katamari Damacy Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2

I'll think about it and type something up tonight. Probably gonna exclude SNES to avoid spoilers

Final bumpage

*not done at all

Save states for Super Tennis, or legit?

https://connect.gocollect.com/discussion/164448/na-snes-rarity-discussion/p17 The best I got right now

The NA one was moderately accurate once we went through it all a few years ago. The scores should all still be in a thread if we wanted to bother getting them

Jackson won't even make it to the end of the 3rd quarter this time

It was his recent Switch pickups, before he realized his dick was photo bombing from the corner of the pic

No, we will leave you IN

Shock therapy. Throw it at your wife and scare some sense into it. And your wife.

The Lion King. That only took a thousand attempts over the last five years

Mind like a steel trap. I've mentioned a lot of these in my rankings Friend A - Killer Instinct, Earthbound, Super Ghouls n Ghosts, Tetris Attack, SimCity Friend B - Total Carnage, Final Fight, Street Fighter II Friend C - Tecmo Super Bowl, Super Off-Road, Mortal Kombat Friend D - War of the Gems, Kirby's Dream Course, Yoshi's Island Friend E - Bubsy, DKC 2, Stunt Race FX Friend F - UN Squadron, F-Zero Friend G - Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III Friend H - Bulls vs Blazers I think I'll touch upon every one of those backstories as I get to them

Oh my fuck

3DS stuff on Amazon right now Bowser's Inside Story - $20 Persona Q2 - $20 Etrian Nexus - $25 Kirby Epic Yarn - $21

Niners could easily have been 11-0. Crazy turnaround

I'll keep tabs on it for fun. As a secondary mission.

I was until I saw the price.

If I got a million bucks, I'm sure a minimum of $200,000 would be tied up in upgrading to a new house. Then I imagine we'd put $100,000 into college planning for each of the boys Then we'd probably take a long vacation. Then we'd invest most of the rest. Then I'd probably treat myself to maybe $10,000 worth of shit. So I'd probably buy the stuff that's already on my radar, and finish off SNES, replace my missing PS1 and PS2 stuff, and so forth. Nothing too exciting. If I had $1,000,000 that I had to blow in the industry? I'd probably try to get as many good games as I could for older platforms as I could. All the good NES games, all the good Sega CD games, all the good Saturn games, etc. No sealed shit, no one-of-a-kind shit, nothing. I'm in this hobby because I love gameplay, and that's what I collect for the most part. Gameplay is king.

Yeah, my work has an on-site course. We play every day when it's nice. Did pretty well this year. Won the Masters tournament with a -22, and put up the longest drive during the team skins tournament with 370 footer

Amazon sale