The 2025 Desert Island Video Game Draft

[pdxKingsFan]

Thanks for reminding me that Roger Ebert was a giant dork.
like yeah, he got it on a number of films other folks missed, but he still also missed a ton himself.

 

[Padrino]

With the 105th pick in the 2025 Desert Island Video Game Draft, I select:

Control (2019)

Developer: Remedy Entertainment
Publisher: 505 Games
Game Director: Mikael Kasurinen
Musical Score: Petri Alanko & Martin Stig Andersen
Genre(s): Action-Adventure; Third-Person Shooter
Platform: PC

It's interesting to select this particular game while a decades-old debate has sprung up in this thread regarding the artistic merit of video games. Honestly, Control is probably not the best ambassador for any kind of "Video Games as Art" discourse, as it happens to be a game that borrows mightily from the language of cinema, the language of television, and the language of the New Weird. The lattermost of those influences is a literary movement focused primarily on how the strange intrudes upon the mundane. Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation is among the best of the New Weird's output, and the influence of Area X is felt all over Control's similarly shape-shifting Oldest House.

Elsewhere, the player will encounter cosmic horror parallel to the mind of H.P. Lovecraft, bits of the brutalist sterility of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the paranoid dream logic of Christopher Nolan's Inception, and the paranormal activity of Chris Carter's The X-Files. Apple TV's Severance could itself be called an influence on Remedy's Control, but for the fact that Severance came after, and Ben Stiller has claimed no relationship to the game. That said, if it's a show that does it for you (as it does for me), and you have yet to play Control, I would... heh... remedy that as soon as possible.

Now for the game itself: visually, it's as striking as they come. It has clear command of its art direction and the aesthetic principles that undergird it. Brutalism is the key design philosophy here, and it is compelling to witness how Control contorts its brutalist design to accommodate the "Altered World Events" that occur within the Oldest House. The House itself is not a static game space; it's a TARDIS of sorts, in that its interior defies the logic that its exterior suggests, and its constructed in the style of a Metroidvania, in that its map is rather large and loops back on itself in a number of clever non-linear ways as the player unlocks new opportunities to explore previously closed-off areas. Those opportunities often come in the ability to wield strange and mysterious phenomena.

Nominally, Control is a third-person "shooter" in which the player controls Jesse Faden, the newly-designated Director of the Federal Bureau of Control. Remedy have never been known for the depth or complexity of their gameplay systems. Interacting with their game worlds is sometimes stale and repetitive, and while Control hardly feels gloriously good to play, it does offer the power fantasy of being a telekinetic virtuoso, flinging all manner of destructible objects with crunchy, weighty satisfaction. That much never really gets old.

But, as a player, what you're here for is the Oldest House. You're here to explore this inexplicable place. You're here for its vibe, for its unknowability. It is best not to try to describe the events that lead Jesse to the Oldest House, and its best not to try to explain what the House is, or what the enemies contained within it are supposed to be. It's best for the player to work out for themselves what weirdness is occurring in this most liminal of spaces. In other words, it's a game that's experienced, and while not every idea here is original, if you've ever wanted to truly live inside something akin to an X-Files episode or one of the five dream levels of Inception or Annihilation's Area X, I'd give Control your best shot.

 

[Löwenherz]

Hey Desert Island drafters. Sorry I've been lagging. Bit of a crazy start to my week. I'll have to come back to flesh this out tomorrow, but with my next pick, I select:

Control (2019)

Platform: PC

This is high on my wishlist when I finally upgrade my computer.

Watched a review for this game when it was released and even though the critic was mostly lukewarm about it, as he subduedly explained the concept and showed game footage I practically yelled “Are you out of your mind? This sounds amazing!”

Excited for your take and write-up.

 

[Sluggah]

Control is legit.

 

[Spike]

Yikes!

 

[Spike]

I'll be back to wrap it up.

 

[Capt. Factorial]

View attachment 14035

Might actually be a better game than the original, TBH.

 

[SLAB]

Hey Desert Island drafters. Sorry I've been lagging. Bit of a crazy start to my week. I'll have to come back to flesh this out tomorrow, but with my next pick, I select:

Control (2019)

Platform: PC

Incredible game. Great pick.

 

[pdxKingsFan]

Might actually be a better game than the original, TBH.

It is. My jerk brother got to the machines first and guess which one he took? lol

 

[Tetsujin]

Madden NFL 08 (PS2, in my case specifically)


Why not a more modern edition of the game instead of one that came out nearly two decades ago? Well, I must admit that this is entirely a sentimental pick (sorta).

Back in the day, ya boy liked to picture himself as some sort of revolutionary GM and so, for me, franchise mode was king. I could spend hours, even days, simulating games and seasons and drafts and whatnot, not even really playing actual games but creating different dudes from my old high school football teams but with optimistically high ratings (Jacob Fatu was a fullback).

Madden 08 was the last game before everything switched to the next generation at the time (PS3) and had the last true “build your own franchise” mode in which you could replace an actual NFL team with your own team complete with choice of stock logo and stadium. To me, and this is entirely a sentimental thing rather than gameplay wise, this was Madden’s peak.

Who needs graphics and realistic sweat physics when you could have a whole 53 man roster of build a players wearing random ass stock jerseys?

Also John Madden was still on commentary in these games (might have actually been the last year he did voice over recordings for the game).

 

[Insomniacal Fan]

Well you can see what I like from my list... story, art, and music are the biggest attractors. I've played and enjoyed all sorts of other games too (and some of those picks might come up later) but when I think back on the experiences that have stuck with me, the "gaminess" of it is really secondary to how it's all presented. I like being able to play along but I guess I'm conditioned to respond to pictures and music and characters that take me somewhere I wouldn't otherwise get to go.

Roger Ebert said in the 90s that video games will never be art because they have nothing to say, and presumably at the time he was thinking about things like Mario Bros. and Tetris and not seeing any room there for a game to communicate ideas that aren't just "press this button now". But of course that's not even true because Mario Bros. has an aesthetic visually and musically which has proved to be hugely influential on culture. There are bands that try to create the feel of old-school video game music and there is a whole huge industry in selling the same style of Japanese cute-ness that permeates early Nintendo designs. Just because not everyone 'gets it' doesn't mean it isn't art.

But where I think Ebert really misses the point (because he probably never played games much or at all) is that the experience of playing something is different than just watching what someone else has made and presented to you. Even something as simple as Pac-Man is conveying emotions that are not easily expressed in other mediums. Those ghosts aren't just chasing Pac-Man around the maze, they're chasing you around the maze. When you make a mistake and go for one last cherry you didn't need only to see your avarice punished, it was you who made that decision and thus it is you who is responsible for that failure, and are now challenged to learn how to do things better next time.

It's the same message as the movie Groundhog Day -- a dramatic concept which references the classic arcade game practice of starting over from the same point each time -- and it's not spelled out for you in the same way, but it's almost more powerful when you get to make the connection yourself. And in it's tabletop arcade form, Pac-Man 2P has an "I Go-You Go" format which lets you cheer on your friends as they make more daring moves than you could pull off or laugh when they die in the exact same spot. It's life in microcosm. and all of this is essential to the experience of Pac-Man and it's why that game is still worth playing today.

Maybe I'm just stating the obvious here, but I do think we have transitioned to a period of time where non-interactive entertainment is getting replaced not just by games necessarily but by mediums where the viewer is allowed to participate in the experience. And I don't think it's ever going to go back to the way it was. We are all self-curators now, choosing our shows and watching them how and when we want to and building our own music playlists. I don't want to try to guess a percentage, but a whole lot of the content on YouTube is aimed at DIY minded folks who are watching those videos in order to do something with the information. Fix their car or cook their own pizza or start a side job as a DJ, who knows. Maybe all of the above.

So yeah... I fully agree. I think there's enormous potential in video games (and tabletop games) to make artistic statements which cannot be made any other way. By placing you -- the player-- at the center of the experience and responding to your choices by presenting you with other ones that game is allowing you to experiences motivations and emotions which traditional storytelling forms can only show you in an abstracted 3rd person form. There's no reason for anyone to feel that the label 'gamer' is a pejorative anymore.

I agree. It’s funny how generalized and, to a degree, pejorative the term “gamer” can be considering how diverse the people it attempts to label. I think for “non-gamers” the image that pops into their heads of what a “hardcore modern gamer” plays (if they know anything beyond Mario and PacMan) are World of Warcraft MMOs, Grimdark military FPSs, eSports RTSs, and one-on-one competitive arcade-style Fighters.

And I don’t like any of those genres.

FPSs make me disoriented and sick (which sucked when GoldenEye was all the rage). The first person games I do love have secondary mechanics beyond run and gun.

RTSs are too frantic. Love StarCraft though for reasons I can’t explain, and one Vanillaware game, more because I’m a fan of Vanillaware.

I have zero interest in playing strangers online in an MMO, and can’t bother to memorize button sequences and execute in real time to be anything but a button-masher in Fighters.

Yet, I’m a gamer - and it’s telling that even writing that makes me cringe a little.

I’m a gainfully-employed, home-owning husband and father who doesn’t fit the pervasive prejudicial negative stereotype of a basement-dwelling non-social ne’er-do-well “gamer” pwning noobs online (to use slang which ironically shows just how old and out of touch I am) … but who does really?

No one would ever accuse my grandparents of being “gamers,” but in addition to regularly enjoying Tetris-clone puzzlers that were extremely popular among casuals but somehow don’t count as being “gamer” games, they absolutely loved the sequel to Oregon Trail. After my grandfather’s first successful run to Willamette Valley, he printed out the summary sheet, and had honest-to-god tears in his eyes as he handed it to my grandma and talked to her about his adventure.

This medium has far more power and ability to evoke emotion as an art form than anywhere near the pitiful credit it is given. Many more people would be open to being labeled a “gamer” if it didn’t come with such negative baggage and there was a lot less gatekeeping.

Ebert's argument is commonly interpreted as him being casually dismissive of video games, but the reason he's still referenced years later, is because his criticism was incisive and salient. Straw-manning his argument leaves us all the more foolish.
What Ebert originally said, was that games will become art once they abandon things that make them games, the interactive elements. At that point they become cinema. He wrote this in various posts between 2006 and 2012.

Ebert presents a definition of art that is focused around the artistic vision of the creator. The argument is that anywhere there is agency, where the artist is letting the player inject themselves into the work, it is by definition not the artist's vision. Thus, video games are by principal, not art.
You and I can pick a different definition of art, base it on aesthetics or "cultural value" or some other thing, [for what it's worth, Kojima basically agreed with Ebert's definition](https://www.eurogamer.net/news240106kojimaart) But even if we plant our flag on another hill, his hill remains unconquered.

The question is not whether you can have art in a game, but whether the game itself adds anything to the art. Do the non-cinematic parts of the game have artistic vision? Looking at the list of games on our collective islands, I think that some are trying, but there's no definitive rebuttal since Ebert published. There's a *feeling* that there is an art form, but not enough evidence to prove it. I have no idea where things will be in another 15 years, but I'm hopeful that there will continue to be progress. It's good to try to do hard things, and I think Ebert presents a worthy goal.

---

The counterpunch that Ebert threw, also remains relevant "Why do gamers want video games to be considered "Art"?" There are lots of things people spend a lot of time on that aren't "Art", that aren't stigmatized.

I sometimes find myself wondering whether being a sports fan is a worthwhile use of my treasure and attention. The strongest justification I can come up with is that being a sports fan puts me in a common interest group with lots of types of people I wouldn't normally interact with in daily life. In the world where it's easier than ever live in a curated bubble, this seems like an important experience to seek out.

Maybe there's a value in noticing that whether we play our video games on a deserted island, a spare office in the suburbs, a palatial estate, or in a parent's basement, we all have something in common. Maybe that's enough to justify the time spent. And maybe even if that's not convincing, we can agree to not stigmatize people for how they spend their free time.

 

[Capt. Factorial]

With my 9th pick, I’m going to select a game that was the original entry for a franchise that’s already had four games selected - and I’m not saying it’s the best of them all, I’m saying it’s the only one I’ve played:

Final Fantasy (1990) - NES

Warning: Don’t watch this whole video. It’s four hours long! I just wanted to give you an idea of the game play.

Final Fantasy is likely the longest game I’ve ever completed. The game has a giant overhead map - in fact, the gamemakers went so far as to include a huge foldout paper world map and dungeon map with the game. I don’t know what we would have done without it. The play itself is turn-based combat, which wasn’t really a familiar thing back in the day for video games, though it did make things feel a lot more like D&D.

I mean, looking back on it, it’s basically D&D. Also, because of the turn-based combat, it’s one of those games that were a lot more fun to play with friends - aside from sports genres, multiplayer stuff was actually pretty rare for the NES so a lot of video game time was spent watching your friends play for half an hour, and then grabbing the controller when somebody died so you could play a bit yourself. Final Fantasy allowed you to select (and name!) four characters - so up to four people could play cooperatively without anybody caring too much about who had the controller.

It’s funny, I haven’t touched this game in over 30 years but I turn on that video and it all comes back to me - including the music. Good times, good times!

 

[Capt. Factorial]

With my 10th pick, I’m going to go back to the very first gaming system I had, and I’m going to take my favorite game from that old standby:

River Raid (1982) - Atari 2600

River Raid was a pretty standard shoot-em-up where you controlled a plane scrolling upscreen over a river where you shot helicopters and planes and ships and bridges while collecting fuel. That’s really all there was to it. But I played the bejeezus out of this game - so much so that I nearly had the Atari taken away from me when Mom had to ask me to turn the game off and come to the dinner table twice. Oops.

This was also the game where I learned a bit about how CRT televisions actually worked. See, if you got a high enough score in the game, you could send a photo of your screen off to Activision and they’d send you a commemorative patch. But the screen phosphors on CRTs have a really short duty cycle and unless you had a fancy (SLR!) camera you typically couldn’t do much about the exposure time back in the early ‘80s. I wasted a decent amount of film (recall, back in the day you had to pay for film…and development) on blank screens or catching just a small percentage of the screen before that project was nixed. I’m pretty sure I never got that patch. But I earned it, even so!

 

[Padrino]

Ebert's argument is commonly interpreted as him being casually dismissive of video games, but the reason he's still referenced years later, is because his criticism was incisive and salient. Straw-manning his argument leaves us all the more foolish.
What Ebert originally said, was that games will become art once they abandon things that make them games, the interactive elements. At that point they become cinema. He wrote this in various posts between 2006 and 2012.

Ebert presents a definition of art that is focused around the artistic vision of the creator. The argument is that anywhere there is agency, where the artist is letting the player inject themselves into the work, it is by definition not the artist's vision. Thus, video games are by principal, not art.
You and I can pick a different definition of art, base it on aesthetics or "cultural value" or some other thing, [for what it's worth, Kojima basically agreed with Ebert's definition](https://www.eurogamer.net/news240106kojimaart) But even if we plant our flag on another hill, his hill remains unconquered.

The question is not whether you can have art in a game, but whether the game itself adds anything to the art. Do the non-cinematic parts of the game have artistic vision? Looking at the list of games on our collective islands, I think that some are trying, but there's no definitive rebuttal since Ebert published. There's a *feeling* that there is an art form, but not enough evidence to prove it. I have no idea where things will be in another 15 years, but I'm hopeful that there will continue to be progress. It's good to try to do hard things, and I think Ebert presents a worthy goal.

---

The counterpunch that Ebert threw, also remains relevant "Why do gamers want video games to be considered "Art"?" There are lots of things people spend a lot of time on that aren't "Art", that aren't stigmatized.

I sometimes find myself wondering whether being a sports fan is a worthwhile use of my treasure and attention. The strongest justification I can come up with is that being a sports fan puts me in a common interest group with lots of types of people I wouldn't normally interact with in daily life. In the world where it's easier than ever live in a curated bubble, this seems like an important experience to seek out.

Maybe there's a value in noticing that whether we play our video games on a deserted island, a spare office in the suburbs, a palatial estate, or in a parent's basement, we all have something in common. Maybe that's enough to justify the time spent. And maybe even if that's not convincing, we can agree to not stigmatize people for how they spend their free time.

I was a huge fan of Roger Ebert's, and I remain a huge fan of his writing, but I do think he missed the mark on video game discourse. I would contend that, when the artist lets the player inject themselves into the work, it is precisely the artist's vision, because the artist has to create vectors for gameplay that offer intended consequences, and sometimes even unintended consequences, not unlike how great cinema gets interpreted and reinterpreted as film lovers find new resonances that the artist may not have considered at the outset.

A video game is not a landscape in which "all things are possible" for the player. Even the most malleable video game systems remain highly curated so that the player experiences what the developers want the player to experience. FromSoft may provide the player many routes through Elden Ring, but they cannot be said to lack vision simply because they've offered the player choices. Take one look around Limgrave and it becomes clear exactly how FromSoft wants you to navigate their game world. The same is true of Nintendo's Breath of the Wild. A very principled philosophy was applied to both of those games in pursuit of directing the player's pursuit of their own choices. The intensity of that vision is, in fact, so pronounced that it would require considerable effort to argue that neither of those games represents a strong artistic statement.

And all of that's before you even start breaking down specific elements of game development, like visual art direction, the crafting of individual game assets, sound design, musical composition, narrative structure, voice acting, etc. These may not be artistic elements that are exclusive to the world of video games... but so what? Cinema itself borrows heavily from the language of other mediums as it stakes out its artistic claims. Video games do the same.

 

[Mr. S£im Citrus]

I sometimes find myself wondering whether being a sports fan is a worthwhile use of my treasure and attention. The strongest justification I can come up with is that being a sports fan puts me in a common interest group with lots of types of people I wouldn't normally interact with in daily life. In the world where it's easier than ever live in a curated bubble, this seems like an important experience to seek out.

Without touching the rest of this debate, why would it even occur to you to need to "justify" being a sports fan?

 

[Mr. S£im Citrus]

With my 9th pick, I’m going to select a game that was the original entry for a franchise that’s already had four games selected - and I’m not saying it’s the best of them all, I’m saying it’s the only one I’ve played:

Final Fantasy (1990) - NES

I think the only thing I liked about FF1 over subsequent games in the series is the ability to "truly" customize your party, at least as much as possible within the parameters of a computer game... If you wanted to beat the game with four white mages... I mean, you're welcome to try...

 

[pdxKingsFan]

With my 10th pick, I’m going to go back to the very first gaming system I had, and I’m going to take my favorite game from that old standby:

River Raid (1982) - Atari 2600

River Raid was a pretty standard shoot-em-up where you controlled a plane scrolling upscreen over a river where you shot helicopters and planes and ships and bridges while collecting fuel. That’s really all there was to it. But I played the bejeezus out of this game - so much so that I nearly had the Atari taken away from me when Mom had to ask me to turn the game off and come to the dinner table twice. Oops.

This was also the game where I learned a bit about how CRT televisions actually worked. See, if you got a high enough score in the game, you could send a photo of your screen off to Activision and they’d send you a commemorative patch. But the screen phosphors on CRTs have a really short duty cycle and unless you had a fancy (SLR!) camera you typically couldn’t do much about the exposure time back in the early ‘80s. I wasted a decent amount of film (recall, back in the day you had to pay for film…and development) on blank screens or catching just a small percentage of the screen before that project was nixed. I’m pretty sure I never got that patch. But I earned it, even so!

I got a few Activision patches!

Xbox has a lot of these games on Game Pass now. Pretty fun to revisit.

 

[hrdboild]

Ebert's argument is commonly interpreted as him being casually dismissive of video games, but the reason he's still referenced years later, is because his criticism was incisive and salient. Straw-manning his argument leaves us all the more foolish.
What Ebert originally said, was that games will become art once they abandon things that make them games, the interactive elements. At that point they become cinema. He wrote this in various posts between 2006 and 2012.

Ebert presents a definition of art that is focused around the artistic vision of the creator. The argument is that anywhere there is agency, where the artist is letting the player inject themselves into the work, it is by definition not the artist's vision. Thus, video games are by principal, not art.
You and I can pick a different definition of art, base it on aesthetics or "cultural value" or some other thing, [for what it's worth, Kojima basically agreed with Ebert's definition](https://www.eurogamer.net/news240106kojimaart) But even if we plant our flag on another hill, his hill remains unconquered.

The question is not whether you can have art in a game, but whether the game itself adds anything to the art. Do the non-cinematic parts of the game have artistic vision? Looking at the list of games on our collective islands, I think that some are trying, but there's no definitive rebuttal since Ebert published. There's a *feeling* that there is an art form, but not enough evidence to prove it. I have no idea where things will be in another 15 years, but I'm hopeful that there will continue to be progress. It's good to try to do hard things, and I think Ebert presents a worthy goal.

---

The counterpunch that Ebert threw, also remains relevant "Why do gamers want video games to be considered "Art"?" There are lots of things people spend a lot of time on that aren't "Art", that aren't stigmatized.

I sometimes find myself wondering whether being a sports fan is a worthwhile use of my treasure and attention. The strongest justification I can come up with is that being a sports fan puts me in a common interest group with lots of types of people I wouldn't normally interact with in daily life. In the world where it's easier than ever live in a curated bubble, this seems like an important experience to seek out.

Maybe there's a value in noticing that whether we play our video games on a deserted island, a spare office in the suburbs, a palatial estate, or in a parent's basement, we all have something in common. Maybe that's enough to justify the time spent. And maybe even if that's not convincing, we can agree to not stigmatize people for how they spend their free time.

I think if you read the full extent of my argument, I did address Ebert's main criticism. I think all games are capable of being art not by becoming more like cinema (a linear format where the author presents a finished work to the viewer) but by remaining true to their origins as interactive media. I love cinema for what it is but Roger Ebert was quite simply a snob. Not a big deal, so am I and I'm sure we both have some redeeming qualities.

I also don't think I'm straw-manning the guy when he chose to call his essay "Video Games Can Never Be Art". He was a newspaper columnist so it's possible he didn't write the headline himself, but nonetheless it's archived on his website and he allowed it to be called that so I think it's fair to hold him to account for his own bold thesis.

Here's what he wrote in 2012:

Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form. (link)

I think he's already wrong. And that's not because I'm intending to convince you that there is one game we all can agree has reached the heights of Michaelangelo or Stravinksy et al, but because I know that playing a video game can impact the way I see the world and I know that playing a board game can, to take just one example, grant me insight into the dynamics of multi-factional conflict that I could not have gotten any other way. And what's more I also know that those insights only happened because of years and years of dedicated work on the part of the designers who made them with exactly those intentions in mind. If those types of experiences haven't happened for you than I'm sorry. They are out there and available if you have the desire to explore them.

 

[Padrino]

I was a huge fan of Roger Ebert's, and I remain a huge fan of his writing, but I do think he missed the mark on video game discourse. I would contend that, when the artist lets the player inject themselves into the work, it is precisely the artist's vision, because the artist has to create vectors for gameplay that offer intended consequences, and sometimes even unintended consequences, not unlike how great cinema gets interpreted and reinterpreted as film lovers find new resonances that the artist may not have considered at the outset.

A video game is not a landscape in which "all things are possible" for the player. Even the most malleable video game systems remain highly curated so that the player experiences what the developers want the player to experience. FromSoft may provide the player many routes through Elden Ring, but they cannot be said to lack vision simply because they've offered the player choices. Take one look around Limgrave and it becomes clear exactly how FromSoft wants you to navigate their game world. The same is true of Nintendo's Breath of the Wild. A very principled philosophy was applied to both of those games in pursuit of directing the player's pursuit of their own choices. The intensity of that vision is, in fact, so pronounced that it would require considerable effort to argue that neither of those games represents a strong artistic statement.

And all of that's before you even start breaking down specific elements of game development, like visual art direction, the crafting of individual game assets, sound design, musical composition, narrative structure, voice acting, etc. These may not be artistic elements that are exclusive to the world of video games... but so what? Cinema itself borrows heavily from the language of other mediums as it stakes out its artistic claims. Video games do the same.

As a sidebar to the argument I posed above, Alex Garland was recently tapped to direct an upcoming film adaptation of Elden Ring for A24. I am an enormous fan of Garland's work as a writer/director, but I have no f***ing idea how he is going to turn Elden Ring into a worthwhile film. Of course, I said the same of his adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, which struck me as an unfilmable novel, and while the movie departs from the text in a number of significant ways, it is an incredible work in its own right. So I have faith. Garland is one of my guys. But FromSoft's uncompromising artistic vision around the interaction between difficulty, death, and the will of the player cannot translate to "the big screen" by virtue of the nature of gaming itself.

This is the fundamental difference between the art of video games and the art of cinema. The interactivity is the point, and while games can utilize the visual language of cinema to aid their artistic direction, movies can't utilize the interactive language of video games in return. For his film adaptation of Elden Ring, Garland can certainly still burrow into larger themes about futility and ruin, but he can't create an interactive experience for the viewer that's entirely separate from the language of cinema in order to communicate those themes. Hidetaka Miyazaki can. Roger Ebert would have had to play Dark Souls a few times before his death to fully grasp this, I think.

 

[hrdboild]

With my 9th pick, I’m going to select a game that was the original entry for a franchise that’s already had four games selected - and I’m not saying it’s the best of them all, I’m saying it’s the only one I’ve played:

Final Fantasy (1990) - NES

Warning: Don’t watch this whole video. It’s four hours long! I just wanted to give you an idea of the game play.

Final Fantasy is likely the longest game I’ve ever completed. The game has a giant overhead map - in fact, the gamemakers went so far as to include a huge foldout paper world map and dungeon map with the game. I don’t know what we would have done without it. The play itself is turn-based combat, which wasn’t really a familiar thing back in the day for video games, though it did make things feel a lot more like D&D.

I mean, looking back on it, it’s basically D&D. Also, because of the turn-based combat, it’s one of those games that were a lot more fun to play with friends - aside from sports genres, multiplayer stuff was actually pretty rare for the NES so a lot of video game time was spent watching your friends play for half an hour, and then grabbing the controller when somebody died so you could play a bit yourself. Final Fantasy allowed you to select (and name!) four characters - so up to four people could play cooperatively without anybody caring too much about who had the controller.

It’s funny, I haven’t touched this game in over 30 years but I turn on that video and it all comes back to me - including the music. Good times, good times!

The ultimate punch line here is that Square chose to call this game Final Fantasy way back in 1987 despite it being the first and here we are 38 years and 20 some-odd sequels later and they're stuck with a franchise name that makes no sense.

 

[Mr. S£im Citrus]

With my 10th pick, I’m going to go back to the very first gaming system I had, and I’m going to take my favorite game from that old standby:

River Raid (1982) - Atari 2600

I was more of a [REDACTED] man, myself.

 

[macadocious]

I loved FF, Zelda was my first foray into the world of adventure games with overheard viewing and maps, FF took that to another level. Obviously they have just grown from there.

 

[Capt. Factorial]

I was more of a [REDACTED] man, myself.

I probably played that game too

 

[Mr. S£im Citrus]

I was more of a [REDACTED] man, myself.

I probably played that game too

This response has got to read differently for the people who don't have the ability to audit a post's edit history.

 

[pdxKingsFan]

This response has got to read differently for the people who don't have the ability to audit a post's edit history.

I didn't even bother to check just assumed it was another Activision game and Cap (like me) played them all.

Wild that in this time period if a game was made by EA or Activision it was must buy.

Now those are slop houses.

 

[Mr. S£im Citrus]

I didn't even bother to check just assumed it was another Activision game and Cap (like me) played them all.

Wild that in this time period if a game was made by EA or Activision it was must buy.

Now those are slop houses.

Activision did have some bangers for the pre-NES generation. [REDACTED] was also a classic.

 

[pdxKingsFan]

Not really wishing to continue the Ebert debate - but also noteworthy about those early EA and Activision games was they featured the designers massively on their packaging. The early EA games were even like gatefold album covers where the inside had artist bios, etc. There's a handful of designers that enjoy this level of notoriety today, and a few that bridged the gap (Sid Meier got his name included on the titles in the 90s if not before), but they really put them front and center.

 

[Capt. Factorial]

This response has got to read differently for the people who don't have the ability to audit a post's edit history.

I didn't even think to look. But yes, I played that game too!

 

[Padrino]

This is high on my wishlist when I finally upgrade my computer.

Watched a review for this game when it was released and even though the critic was mostly lukewarm about it, as he subduedly explained the concept and showed game footage I practically yelled “Are you out of your mind? This sounds amazing!”

Excited for your take and write-up.

Just wrapped my write-up. The reviews of Control are honestly pretty fair, for the most part. It's definitely another vibes game, like most of Remedy's work. If its aesthetic approach and conceptual framework call out to you, you'll likely give it a ton of leeway for gameplay that's not always super engaging or deeply varied. It's weird and mystifying and kinda cool and it just feels good to spend time in a game world that's so liminal and unusual, in the same way it can feel good to spend time in a Lynchian nightmare. Hah.

 

[Insomniacal Fan]

Without touching the rest of this debate, why would it even occur to you to need to "justify" being a sports fan?

The answer lies one sentence behind before the one you bolded. My treasure and attention are finite resources, I need to justify the investment to myself.