HF Retro Game of the Year - 1993 - Vote in the Poll!

[KeithIsActuallyBad]

I voted Secret of Mana. Not the best game on this list, but it holds a lot of dear memories for me and is one of the best SNES RPGs on a system that churned out a bunch of excellent RPGs.

 

[Morbo]

Doom AINEC

Indeed.

 

[tacogeoff]

SimCity 2000 for me. gawd that game was amazing/addictive.

 

[member 157595]

Of the options in the poll, I decided to go with Kirby's Adventure. (although I couldn't help but notice a lack of love for Sonic CD)

Christ, I forgot about Sonic CD. My second-favorite Sonic game, behind only Sonic 2. I partially feel it's a bit overlooked because the Sega CD didn't sell all that well, but there were some good games on there.

 

[John Price]

Sim City 2000 was a pretty good game. The original Sim City was okay but Sim City 2000 was when things really started getting going.

Duke Nukem is interesting. The original 1 and 2 were for DOS. The one in 1993 was Duke Nukem 2.

 

[TheDoldrums]

No issue with Doom winning but here are some other memorable '93 games I played.

Daytona USA. The graphics at the time were INSANE when this was released in arcades.

SNES version of Aladdin was fantastic. Also a completely different game than the Genesis version.

Crime Patrol. Early FMV game on the Sega CD. I don't remember why but I played this a few years ago with an emulator. Hilarious.

 

[John Price]

Myst is also up there too. They used to have it on the library at school.

 

[Commander Clueless]

As much as I played SimCity 2000 (it was a lot), I probably played more SimFarm and SimTower. I think Tower was 1994, but Farm was '93 I think....

 

[WarriorOfGandhi]

thanks for bringing back these polls. I didn't do much gaming prior to where we left off in 1994 but I'm interested to see everyone's opinions as we go further and further back.

per the poll -- DOOM is most important, hands down, but for my vote the best was X-Wing. Just a really fun game from start to finish and still my favorite flight sim series ever.

Also a write-in for Bubsy, which was just awesome (and so brutally hard I only beat it once):

 

[member 157595]

thanks for bringing back these polls. I didn't do much gaming prior to where we left off in 1994 but I'm interested to see everyone's opinions as we go further and further back.

per the poll -- DOOM is most important, hands down, but for my vote the best was X-Wing. Just a really fun game from start to finish and still my favorite flight sim series ever.

Also a write-in for Bubsy, which was just awesome (and so brutally hard I only beat it once):

I generally don't play modern games so I'm speaking from a bit of bias here, so I don't know if I can say for certain whether or not games were harder overall when I was a kid, but I'm pretty confident when I say that they were less forgiving.

Since there was so much less volume of content and companies didn't want kids to rent the game (anyone else remember that?) and beat it in a weekend, penalties were often extraordinarily harsh for even minor errors. Gradius III in the Arcade was especially guilty of this, as was Battletoads. You often had to master a game in order to beat it. In the case of Gradius III in the Arcade, on max difficulty you basically did have to be perfect because restarting the game was sometimes preferable to respawning way back with no power-ups.

 

[member 157595]

SNES version of Aladdin was fantastic. Also a completely different game than the Genesis version.

Aladdin was such a bizarre case. It was common for licensed games to have both SNES and Genesis versions at the same time but it was very rare for said two games to be both 1) completely unrelated, and 2) good.

 

[WarriorOfGandhi]

I generally don't play modern games so I'm speaking from a bit of bias here, so I don't know if I can say for certain whether or not games were harder overall when I was a kid, but I'm pretty confident when I say that they were less forgiving.

Since there was so much less volume of content and companies didn't want kids to rent the game (anyone else remember that?) and beat it in a weekend, penalties were often extraordinarily harsh for even minor errors. Gradius III in the Arcade was especially guilty of this, as was Battletoads. You often had to master a game in order to beat it. In the case of Gradius III in the Arcade, on max difficulty you basically did have to be perfect because restarting the game was sometimes preferable to respawning way back with no power-ups.

well it's certainly no secret about that. I remember the new Prince of Persia released a few years back had a system where if you fell off a ledge the game just picked up you and put you back on the ledge, losing nothing other than three seconds of your life in the process. In the original Prince of Persia if you died you went alllll the way back to the very beginning of the game.

 

[SniperHF]

In the original Prince of Persia if you died you went alllll the way back to the very beginning of the game.

A lot of this was coin-op legacy design that probably wouldn't have been done that way if arcades weren't the primary exposure to video games for most of the developers of the day. There were certainly far more forgiving games in 89 on the market.

 

[Zodiac]

'The 7th Guest' deserves a mention.

Both The 7th Guest and Myst really helped popularize gaming on CD-ROM.

 

[Osprey]

well it's certainly no secret about that. I remember the new Prince of Persia released a few years back had a system where if you fell off a ledge the game just picked up you and put you back on the ledge, losing nothing other than three seconds of your life in the process. In the original Prince of Persia if you died you went alllll the way back to the very beginning of the game.

Yeah, I do not have happy memories of seeing the very first room of the game after getting pretty far. IIRC, the game didn't even have any kind of death screen or take you to the menu. You just died and were immediately taken to the start of the game. It seemed cruel.

I replayed it several years ago and had to find an emulator that supported save states because I couldn't take the lack of saving.

 

[Emperoreddy]

Mega Man X is most likely the best game in this list. Its about as well crafted as you can get.

 

[RandV]

Not really the best year for me, I picked Secret of Mana as that was my personal favourite.

I understand it's probably the right choice but I can't really get behind Doom, as with my circle of friends we started with Doom 2 so Doom just felt like a dated alpha version we never bothered with. I wouldn't really know the finer details of Doom vs Doom 2 though.

 

[member 157595]

well it's certainly no secret about that. I remember the new Prince of Persia released a few years back had a system where if you fell off a ledge the game just picked up you and put you back on the ledge, losing nothing other than three seconds of your life in the process. In the original Prince of Persia if you died you went alllll the way back to the very beginning of the game.

Jesus Christ, that's the gaming equivalent of a participation trophy. Can't hurt the kiddies' self esteem!

 

[McRpro]

The game I had the most fun with on this list is NBA Jam but Doom should win.

 

[The Macho King]

Syndicate was probably my favorite from that year, and probably holds up the best, but of the options I had to go with Doom.

 

[Osprey]

Syndicate was probably my favorite from that year, and probably holds up the best, but of the options I had to go with Doom.

Syndicate was awesome. I've been waiting for another game like it for 27 years (I couldn't get into Syndicate Wars). I'd love it if Firaxis were to take it and update it like they did with X-COM. There's a recent game called Satellite Reign that is supposed to be a lot like Syndicate, but I haven't played it yet.

 

[The Macho King]

Syndicate was awesome. I've been waiting for another game like it for 27 years (I couldn't get into Syndicate Wars). I'd love it if Firaxis were to take it and update it like they did with X-COM. There's a recent game called Satellite Reign that is supposed to be a lot like Syndicate, but I haven't played it yet.

There have been a few failed remakes that got stuck in development hell by indie devs.

There's this game called Vigilantes which - while turn based - scratches some of the syndicate itch, but yeah - it's never really been done justice.

 

[Frankie Blueberries]

I'll leave this open until Tuesday so it'll have been a week of voting.

Here's a rough list for the best video games of 1992:

• Wolfenstein 3D
• Super Mario Kart
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2
• Contra III: the Alien Wars
• Mortal Kombat
• Kirby
• Super Mario Land 2 (GB)
• Kirby's Dream Land (GB)
• Dragon Quest V
• Final Fantasy V
• Mega Man 5
• Streets of Rage 2
• Ecco the Dolphin
• Mario Paint

Any other recommendations? I have only played a handful of these games (Wolfenstein, Sonic, Super Mario Land 2, Kirby's Dream Land, Mortal Kombat, Super Mario Kart, Contra III, and Mario Paint) - so I could easily be missing some other great releases.

 

[K Fleur]

I actually did a replay of Link’s Awakening during quarantine. Still a really awesome game

 

[Frankie Blueberries]

Of the options in the poll, I decided to go with Kirby's Adventure. (although I couldn't help but notice a lack of love for Sonic CD)

I was on the fence about including it since Sonic was a huge franchise. I assumed most people didn't own a Sega CD and it wouldn't get a lot of votes just based on that fact, so that was my reasoning for omitting it.