Lurker > Johnbobb

it's weird that it keeps marking the MK vs DC fatalities as age-restricted when they're like the least gory of any of these

Yeah I still think team Ryu takes it

Yawgmoth

but whatever weird coincidence, I feel like a lot of the first round fights were less decisive?

Earl

it's been one of my most anticipated shows tbh

That will complete this tier, and from here on basically every game is one I think is great, which makes the tiers much harder to name. I have it broken into 6 more tiers, so next up

The "From Here On Basically Every Game Is One I Think Is Great But These Are The Least Great Among Them" Tier

106. The Witness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul7kNFD6noU

I have some mixed feelings on The Witness. At it's best, The Witness is a beatiful and sometimes genius puzzle game, where the entire world around you is itself a puzzle to be worked out. What seems like a fairly simple concept at first is soon revealed to be drastically more complex. There a very vague sense of lore to the environment around you, but it's pretty minimal and the game never pretends like the puzzles themselves aren't the main driving factor. Which, the puzzles are very creative and impressive, but sometimes it does get a little tiring just doing puzzle after puzzle without much to compel you further. Which sounds like a dumb criticism of a puzzle game, but it is part of what stops me from placing it higher.

105. Quadrilateral Cowboy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_IVvhSX2tY

What a weird fucking game. It's primarily a heist game, and the heists are navigated using a portable computer and hacking into cameras/alarms/etc. Think Watch Dogs, only much lower tech, with a bizarre absurdist story that's often hard to make any real sense out of, and characters that look like... what were those toys, in like the late 90s/early 2000s, where they were like action figures but made up of square and rectangular body parts that could be unattached and reattached together? Anyone remember what they were called? Anyway, they look like that. Weird game.

104. Bit.Trip Presents Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HI60A2oNmo

There are so many of these endless runnner games, but few get it as right as Runner2, which really nails that challenge of combining memorable style and visual pizzaz with easily graspable platforming concepts that are easy to learn but very difficult to do perfectly. Like most endless runners, it's very frustrating at times, but it lets you quickly launch back into your next run and keeps you addicted to trying to do everything right. And when you do, it's very satisfying.

gut says Ryu but I'm not fully sold

109. Superliminal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SX8XMwMw6Y

You're not Portal. You want so badly to be Portal, but you'll never be Portal. I dig the basic concept of using perspective to manipulate size, even if it does get a little repetitive lifting up an object and dropping it repeatedly to make it a different size. The game is fun even if it doesn't quite hold up to others in the physics-bending tongue-in-chief science lab genre.

108. Telling Lies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da63CPUkmRI

Telling Lies is the followup to Her Story, with a much more amibitious story piecing together live action video of several different characters. Like with Her Story, you only start with a limited selection of clips, but you can search for different clips using topics you overheard in previous clips, requiring you to pay close attention to the information you've learned. I don't think it hits quite the same way Her Story did though, with the more ambitious story making you feel a little less connected to its characters. Everything is ultimately tied around David, a man who has some sort of relationship with the other 3 women, but it also goes into some things regarding ecoterrorism that, while very interesting, get a little bit muddled.

107. The Beginners Guide
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBK5Jheu0To

Imagine if The Stanley Parable was trying to make you cry instead of laugh. That's The Beginner's Guide, and it is 100% successful at that goal, for better or worse. It's interesting because it very closely walks that line between the first-person puzzle game genre and being a straight art game. Worth a try if you like art games, but might not have the deeply satisfying gameplay you're looking for otherwise.

GANON1025 posted...

Dr Strange 2 is great so youre safe

Agreed

Tag

6

we can

I'm of the opinion "no shit" and "no shit, Sherlock" are distinct enough to count separately. Like "no duh" means basically the same as well, but it's still carries a slightly different tone to it

WazzupGenius00 posted...

Coming off of World of Goo, Little Inferno is one of my bigger disappointments in indie games, I can only think of one bigger off the top of my head which Im almost positive will be on the list later. Its just completely uninteresting to me.

What was it about Little Inferno that disappointed you?

I definitely liked LI more of the two at the time, but that was also 10 years and I havent' really played either since

114. Donut County
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWt1GPkfzkM

This is essentially the anti-Katamari, where instead of drawing everything into a big ball to make it grow bigger, you're drawing everything into a hole in the ground... to make it grow bigger. Think Katamari but with a late-Millennial/early-Gen Z sense of humor. It's cute and very fun but unfortunately very short lived.

113. Entwined
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv5SEynpCWQ

Pixelopus closing down fucking sucks. They were essentially a team of 9 college students funded by Sony, last about a decade, put out two very solid games, and then shut down earlier this year. I don't think Entwined was quite the success it was expected to be (I remember when it was first announced a decade ago, it was basically predicted to be the next Journey) but it was still extremely pretty and pleasant to play.

112. The Looker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvAJbmPHoHM

If you liked The Witness, go play The Looker. If you hated The Witness, also go play The Looker.

111. Machinarium
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwZBdWRSBRs

What would you call this art style? It's like, kind of a storybook Dr. Seuss style, but a little grittier and darker. It reminds me a lot of David Firth's later stuff. It's a point-and-click adventure where you play a tiny robot trying to do... something? It's the type of adventure game where half the time you only really seem to learn why you were doing something after you've done it. One of the coolest things about Machinarium was the way it handled hints and tips, because like more games in the genre, things are rarely straight forward. The tips make it more accessible to those not as tuned in to puzzle games while still not telling you the answers outright.

110. McPixel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0FLuVkk8UI

https://i.imgur.com/GHjdBC6.gif

117. Little Inferno
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0TniR3Ghxc

This game was a very particular sort of disturbing, the kind you'd find in a Roald Dahl story. You play as a child whose only source of entertainment (and survival) is burning all of his toys in a fireplace, gathering money from the burned toys (don't question it) and using that money to buy more toys and various objects to burn. The story comes in the form of letters sent by a neighbor child, who sends you presents and is also an arsonist. This is the type of simple gameplay that makes indie games so interesting. The lower budget often breeds creativity, and the act of burning things and seeing how they react in the fire is addicting.

116. Tacoma
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QrjsQaKG3c

Still far from the last of these first-person exploration games. This one has a lot in common with Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, but with a handful of much-needed improvements. You're still wandering around an abandoned area trying to find out what happened, only this time it's a space station (which is frankly a more interesting environment). You still get the story from remnants of previous events, only now they're told by AI hologram recreations. The character design is disappointingly not-existent, given that they all appear as colored vague beings, but the game still does a decent job at making you care about them and their stories.

115. Cook, Serve, Delicious!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtsWILfZhxU

Is Cook, Serve, Delicious! the best cooking game ever? Maybe not, but it's definitely in the discussion. The rate at which it throws things at you becomes insane as the game goes on, to the point that it seems almost impossible to make everyone happy... just like real food service! In fact, this probably feels closer to real food service than most other restaurant-running games manage to, and I know that because I was working at a Subway when this game came out. Some day I should go back and play the sequels.

There is so much that can be done with tomahawks that can't be replicated by most other combatants, so it's a shame when Nightwolf's aren't particularly creative

Barry is definitely in my top 5 of the past 5 years

Updated show ranking:

1. WandaVision
2. Hawkeye
3. Loki S2
4. What If...?
5. She-Hulk
6. Moon Knight
7. Loki S1
8. Falcon and the Winter Soldier
9. Secret Invasion
10. Ms. Marvel

1-3 are great, 4-7 are inconsistent with great highs and bad lows, 8-10 were bad

Not sure if Werewolf By Night should be included with these but that would definitely be in the great tier somewhere

I keep listening to albums and forgetting to vote or rank lately.

I did not go into this album expecting it to be like 70% singles I'd known for years

1. Bye Bye Love
2. Just What I Needed
3. Good Times Roll
4. My Best Friend's Girl
5. I'm in Touch With Your World
6. You're All I've Got Tonight
7. Moving in Stereo
8. All Mixed Up
9. Don't Cha Stop

Initial listen is done, I definitely enjoyed it but have no idea how to rank it

Chance in hell

All my troubles seemed so far away

Kenri posted...

I wish I could've liked Outland more. The gameplay was fine, I just wanted... idk, more depth? More of an actual metroidvania, I guess? I basically can't remember any part of it except the bosses, and I didn't even play it that long ago.

Maneater rules but I didn't realize it was indie.

Yeah, I definitely get that. I'm mostly going off of decade-old memories too, which is part of why I can't rate it higher. It's hard to say if it would still hold up

As for Maneater... I think? It's developed and self-published by Tripwire, but I haven't really played any of their other games and can't really account for their indie status. I've definitely seen it referred to as an indie game though

118. Runner3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6R5lHlTv3k

Look, there's more than one "run and jump" game on this list and there's ultimately only so much I can say about them. I always get stuck trying to be a perfectionist and in doing so take forever to actually push through the game until I'm burnt out on it.

121. Outland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0fAssuGXHk

Look, that whole "changing the color changes its tangibility" concept has been done a lot in games, indie games especially, but Outland is both one of the first times I remember it being done and one of the better instances. Outland stands out from the others by not just being about its hue-changing. That's a key mechanic, but it's also a solid action game with distinct art and combat. I feel like Hollow Knight was very inspired by Outland, particularly in it's fast-paced swordplay, even if Outland's platforming isn't necessarily on the same level.

120. Maneater
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCRmiOqUgYQ

I'm kind of surprised it took this long to make a Jaws video game. Wait, they made 4 Jaws games? Maneater is pretty blatantly exactly what it's advertised, with one of the main draws for me actually being how funny it was. There are so many easter eggs littered throughout Maneater, some of my favorites being a sunken Bluth banana stand and Pennywise hiding out in the underwater sewer tunnels. Chris Parnell narrates the game and is hilarious the entire way through. The gameplay itself gets bonus points just by managing to make what is basically an entire game as an underwater level still playable, even if combat is awkward at times and it wants you to collect S-K-A-T-E or whatever Tony Hawk shit it asked for.

119. Psychonauts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeQu0kkcHHA

Is Psychonauts an indie game? I feel like most Double Fine games are arguably indie games, though I specifically excluded Brutal Legend because it feels like it's much higher budget and on a bigger scale than most others by the developer. This is definitely roundabout where the line starts to get fuzzy. Apparently Playstation listed it as part of their indie collection. Anyway, all this is to say, it didn't click with me quite as much as it did with many others. It's fun enough, and it's creative and funny, but after all was said and done I could only think "yeah, that was good." It's creativity was definitely it's high point, but the gameplay of it never really felt like something particularly special.

This was the initial list:
Super Mario Bros.
Double Dragon
Street Fighter
Mortal Kombat
Wing Commander
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Resident Evil
House of the Dead
Doom
Alone in the Dark
Silent Hill
DOA: Dead or Alive
BloodRayne
Hitman
Yakuza: Like a Dragon
Postal
Max Payne
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
Far Cry
The King of Fighters
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Tekken
Ace Attorney
Company of Heroes
Need for Speed
Dead Rising: Watchtower
Gekyoban Zero (Fatal Frame)
Warcraft
Assassin's Creed

That hasn't been updated in years though, and it was originally going to be hosted by JONA who I don't believe intends on participating anymore.

Just in the last few years though we've had:

Tomb Raider
Rampage
Dead Trigger (which is apparently a Dolph Lundgren movie based on a mobile game???)
Pokemon Detective Pikachu
Sonic the Hedgehog
Monster Hunter
Mortal Kombat
Werewolves Within
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
Detention
Uncharted
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Dynasty Warriors
Five Nights at Freddy's
Tetris (arguably)
Gran Turismo (arguably)

I'd argue most of those would be significant enough to qualify (probably not Dead Trigger) so I think a very reasonable list of 30 movies could be made of these

Underleveled posted...

Did we ever end up doing live action video game adaptations? If not, I'd definitely participate when it comes up but in light of the last 24 hours, uh, we should probably wait and see what the release window for Zelda is.

We didn't, I think the person planning on running it changed their mind, but I think it could be a good one still

7

plasmabeam posted...

Has the Gauntlet Crew ever ranked Cosmic/Lovecraftian Horror movies (The Thing 1982, Annihilation, Color Out of Space, The Empty Man, etc.)?

Not as a list altogether (some may have appeared in past horror lists, I'd have to check) but that sounds like a very cool idea

I missed the last topic, but I definitely would've disagreed with that one. I would've taken AM over both though

Cioccolota

I don't think Cioccolota does anything that Candie wouldn't do, but I don't know that he has the imagination to think to do it

Fight the power

immediately followed by "stick it to the man" and "fuck the police" so there seems to be a theme

123. Runbow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24tvlbiijBc

Speaking of fast-paced, colorful, silly games: here's Runbow. It's Hue, but the color changing happens automatically, and quickly, as you're sprinting across platforms trying not to fall to your death. The more players you can get at once, the better it is. Seriously, this game is cheap and a bunch of fun with a group, especially a competitive group, although don't expect there to be any single-player content to speak of.

122. Monument Valley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh_4JJNULZ0

Monument Valley was something special when it first came out. I don't particularly care much for mobile games most of the time, but this succeeded by having an immediately distinct art style, a vaguely surreal story to tell, simplistic controls and interesting puzzles. There's been a lot of replicators since, but the original is still probably the best of them.

#104-126

"Games I Thoroughly Enjoyed But Aren't the Kind of Thing That Comes to Mind When I'm Thinking of Games to Recommend" Tier

126. Super Time Force Ultra
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyxrll5Bc-Q

I might not be a huge run-and-gun fan, but I do love me some goofy movie references and time travel shenanigans. The game has you collecting heroes from across time to take down a time-traveling super villain, sort of like an over-the-top parody of Chrono Trigger. So while you start with a few regular soldiers, you end up with a skate-boarding dinosaur, Mad Max, Leonardo Da Vinci, and a buff machine gun-toting "Dolphin Lundgren". I had the PS4 version, which also included that guy from Order: 1886 (remember when that game was gonna be the next big thing?), the guy from Journey (which transitioned shockingly well to a run-and-gun game), and former Playstation president Shuhei Yoshida, who attacks by tweeting at enemies. Every character feels distinct and fun to play as.

125. Brawlout
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LCY6xy28uc

Around like 80 spots ago I mentioned Bounty Battle, the indie crossover fighting game which got a bunch of hype, sucked, and then was abandoned. Brawlout is the opposite of that. It was very clearly Smash Bros. inspired in its gameplay and had an original cast of goofy characters, the cool thing about them being that unlockable costumes essentially made them entirely different characters with altered moves and aesthetics. The problem was, the game was just okay and the in-game currency unlockable system was absolutely terrible. But the developers took the many criticisms to heart, redid the unlock system from scratch, improved the gameplay, and added in more free content, including four new crossover characters. In the end it was a respectably fun party fighter that I got some good times out of.

124. Hohokum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSZ0cLRJWqk

Think Snake, but x1000 and with a much more interesting color scheme. And also not really like Snake at all, except for the fact that you're flying through the air as a weird worm thing. It kind of reminds me of LocoRoco in the way that it's just silly, bright and colorful without ever being anything much deeper than that.

I didn't realize how many self-destructing finishers there were

NFUN posted...

seeing Apotheon made me wonder if Luftrausers will be here somewhere

do they have a connection?

This is the biggest tier sorry

129. Erica
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28iBP_kkpdI

Another one I never would have heard of, much less played, had I not gotten it free on PS+. Making a fully live-action game in 2021 is wildly ambitious. You don't even press any buttons, just swipe up or down or left or right on your controller on phone. That being said, while it often doesn't feel much like a game, at least not much more than like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, I still enjoyed it. It helps that Holly Early killed it as Erica, and I legitimately don't think the concept would've worked without a great lead role. I'm a also such a sucker for a psychological thriller murder mystery.

128. Zen Pinball 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFBlrc8D1z0

It's pinball and it's fun. If I remember right, I think I had the Portal table, the 20th Century Fox animation tables, the South Park tables, and most of the Marvel tables.

127. Sound Shapes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfPbJE6XDxg

There should really be more rhythm-based indie games. Well, I mean, there probably are, and I just haven't heard of them. Maybe because indie games typically can't afford music copyright music licensing? Fun fact: Beck recorded three original songs for this game and never released them outside of the game, so you can only hear them in Sound Shapes (or in YouTube recordings of levels). The gameplay balances a fine line between extremely frustrating and extremely satisfying, but is overall a chill time.

and that finally concludes this tier

GavsEvans123 posted...

505. Annihilation (Cyrax, MK4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWb5dXR1v6s

I swear this just looks like he's laying a bunch of eggs

8.8

Idk why this episode stuck with me but it did

Ranger

132. Afterparty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoE7zAOtKuc

Afterparty is a game I went into with very high expectations after how positively received Oxenfree (which I may or may not have played) was. The concept of the game, in which two recently deceased friends find themselves in hell, and decide to try and escape hell by beating Satan in a drinking contest. Solid idea, interesting characters, and the game defines itself by a sort of Telltale-esque moral choice system, where every objective can be passed by one of two ways. The issue here is that the choices are largely morally grey, since, y'know, you're in hell, but the game doesn't recognize any of the choices as morally grey. There is specifically a right and wrong answer, which basically always results in sacrificing your own attempts to help out some demons. Only, other friendly demons will turn against you if you make the choice the game wants you too. Eventually you get to Satan, and there are two endings: you can beat him, resulting in the game just kinda ending without a real ending, or you can lose to him or choose to stay in hell, which is the true ending, to the point that you have to wonder why the game even has a choice. The story is cool, but the morality system drops the ball.

131. Fez
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q55RJ41hv4c

Fez is an extremely cool game mechanic with a pretty good soundtrack that I frankly can't think of much more to say about. It's very neat.

130. Apotheon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOvwpj0pw9A

Apotheon doesn't have the most unique gameplay, especially compared to some of the more interesting gimmicks and mechanics featured on this list. What it memorable gameplay, it makes up for with one the most memorable 2D art styles I've seen in a game, basing everything on ancient Greek artwork. It's also a very cool God of War-esque story of a mortal Nikandreos trying to kill the gods, and succeeding in doing so, with all of Earth left in ruins along the way, and Nikandreos taking over as the new god tasked with recreating humanity from scratch. Even though the gameplay wasn't quite my thing, and the game felt a bit dull at times, I feel like it would rank much higher for me if I'd played it more recently.

HeroDelTiempo17 posted...

I don't think we're going to see a token indie game for goty, the year has been too stacked for AAA

Yeah, this is how I feel, especially with Nintendo alone having a major Mario and Zelda in the same year

I'd say
Baldur's Gate 3
Spider-Man 2
Tears of the Kingdom
Mario Wonder
Final Fantasy XVI
maybe Alan Wake II, but I'm less convinced this takes it

There has literally never been a fighting game nominated for Game of the Year so I'm not betting on Street Fighter

133. That Dragon, Cancer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ZCaupyHhc

I don't want to rank this game. I don't even really want to talk about it. It's more of an art piece than it is a game, and a mostly well-made one. It's not on a technical level of many of the others on this list, but obviously that's not the point of the game. I don't particularly ever want to play this again, as frankly just thinking about it makes me sad.

135. Reus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmKlAlV9IpE

Reus is a really cool game that I want to go back and try out again, because it's been a long time. You play as four giants that can shape the landscape of the earth in four types of landscapes: forest, rock, ocean and swamp. And the goal is ideally to create a prospering society, but ultimately you can only change the land itself; you can provide to the humans but what they do with what you provide them is out of your control. It's a very cool game but unfortunately one I forget I've played half the time. They did announce a Reus 2 is finally coming soon so you can bet I'll be diving into that when it comes out.

134. A Little to the Left
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9ycFAixbBI

I think I discovered this one because of Tiktok? It's a very relaxing game that can be played entirely in an afternoon. In fact, that's exactly what I did. I threw it up on stream and spent a few hours chatting with friends while arranging simple household items to make them appear organized. Bonus credit for being incredibly easy to jump into and for being open on many of the levels for alternate ways of organizing (ex. when arranging books on a shelf, organizing by height, thickness, or color will all result in success).

I think I go Bill here but these matches are getting progressively more difficult. Johan is deeply fucked up but I think Bill is more ambitious in his evil

138. Grow Home
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR-4ZoDo_yg

So I might've fucked up with this inclusion. I was like 100% sure it was an indie game without looking into it, but on a second look, it's a Ubisoft game, developed by Ubisoft Revelations, the developers of The Crew, the Driver series, and a few Just Dances. But it was apparently also made by an eight-person team as an experimental project that was never intended for public release. So calling it an indie game is a stretch, despite feeling like an indie game. It's the concept of the awkward movement, this time by a robot just learning to walk, who needs to climb giant plants all the way up to its spaceship. It's a game full of frustration, but B.U.D. is such a lovable little guy that it makes you want to keep going. He's basically the little engine that could.

137. Crayon Physics Deluxe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9R1MYxK2C8

Hundreds of shitty mobile games have tried to use this same concept, but none have ever done it as well or as iconically as Crayon Physics Deluxe, which is equal parts cute, challenging and extremely satisfying when you see your first-grader-with-imagination contraption actually manage to do the seemingly simple task of moving a ball to a star. This game came out in 2009, when I was about 16, pretty much the perfect age to start appreciating the style and challenge presented here, and I ended up spending a lot of time playing through as a teen.

136. Pandemic II and Plague Inc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMxuZiS1mMU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO6zmD4Nd2s

Speaking of games that specifically appealed to 2010s teenager me. Including both here because they are quite literally the same game. Create a virus/bacteria/etc., stealthily spread it across the world and crank up the deadliness with the goal of causing mass extinction. These games definitely feel a little different past Covid.

ok devolver releases good shit