LogFAQs > #939045890

I have a strong attachment to the last decade of gaming, as it's when I started having enough disposable income to waste on buying video games en masse. Of the 128 games in bracket, I've played more than 90; and seeing as I'm likely to finish top 10 on the leaderboard of this contest bar a massive Witcher > Zelda upset, I feel I have decent enough knowledge and instinct to take a crack at a Post-Contest Analysis.

I don't really have the heart or time for an Ulti-style PCA, ie go through every single match and write something about it. Too many of the matches were either too predictable, too boring, or too static to be worth it for me to try and say something about all of them (and salute to those of you who DO take on such undertakings!)

Rather, this is a PCA with a bit of a twist. Partially due to the Years Contest and partially due to my own curiosity, I wanted to put together a retrospective on how each year represented in Game of the Decade 2 performed holistically.

That may sound a bit esoteric, so let me list what I intend to do:

1) Provide a list of all the games that made the contest that were released in a particular year, ordered by appearance in bracket. I'm using the American release dates as reference, and I'm only counting full official releases; if a game came out in early access in 2014 but only received an official launch in 2018, I'm counting the 2018 release date. The only exception is Fortnite, as no one in the universe looked at its match and thought of anything but the Battle Royale version.

2) Provide a list of up to 8 notable snubs; I'm consulting Metacritic, sales data, and major cult classic status to decide what counts as a 'notable snub'; some Visual Novel on Vita that no one outside B8 played does not count as a 'notable snub'.

3) Provide a short two or three game list of that year's 'Headliners'; essentially, the games I think did best or stood out the most.

4) Provide a short two or three game list of that year's 'Busts'; which games underperformed RELATIVE TO EXPECTATIONS. I'm not gonna bag on fodder for being fodder.

5) Most importantly, provide commentary and analysis on each year. This includes the performances of the notable games, the different game design trends and genres that seemed most dominant, perhaps attempt to cross reference these results with the Years Contest (although considering that bracket included three whole decades, this might be difficult), and provide my overall thoughts on how the year did.

6) I'll give a letter grade to each year; either an A, B, C, D, or F. No pluses or minuses or anything like that, let's keep it simple.

I am not a numbers guy, so don't expect any hard number crunching or statistics. Maybe when the final x-stats are ready I'll come back to this and try to average them out or something, but for now I intend for this to be relatively lighthearted. Think of it as 8 parts PCA, 2 parts potential reference material. I have no idea if anyone will be interested in what I have to say or this particular formatting, but at worst this satisfies my own curiosity. If anyone finds it interesting or entertaining, all the better!

With the quarantine, I doubt this takes too long; I can probably knock out a year every day or two.

2010 will be coming up soon!

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