The 2025 Desert Island Video Game Draft

[pdxKingsFan]

Finally. Nearly every Souls-like had been drafted except the one that actually made it a genre.

By "nearly every" you mean Miyazaki's games? Because (admittedly maybe I just don't know any better) there's hundreds of non-Miyazaki Souls-likes out there now that range from pretty good to borderline unplayable, but I don't think many of those have been touched? I actually wouldn't mind trying some others out if they are actually good and offer some new mechanics. I also don't have a PS 4 or 5 and likely won't anytime soon.

 

[Löwenherz]

By "nearly every" you mean Miyazaki's games? Because (admittedly maybe I just don't know any better) there's hundreds of non-Miyazaki Souls-likes out there now that range from pretty good to borderline unplayable, but I don't think many of those have been touched? I actually wouldn't mind trying some others out if they are actually good and offer some new mechanics. I also don't have a PS 4 or 5 and likely won't anytime soon.

No, I was merely meaning it was kind of weird seeing Elden Ring, Bloodborne, and even Demon’s Souls picked early, while the game that explicitly inspired the hundreds of copycats you referenced and actually named the genre was floating in the aether until round 15.

It would be like if a bunch of Metroidvanias were picked without either a Metroid or Castlevania being among them.

 

[SLAB]

Finally. Nearly every Souls-like had been drafted except the one that actually made it a genre.

Pffft where’s the love for the OG Demon’s Souls?!

 

[Löwenherz]

Pffft where’s the love for the OG Demon’s Souls?!

Own it, but never played it because I was scared of it.

But regardless of Demon’s Souls vital place in gaming history as the predecessor, I think it was Dark Souls itself that really skyrocketed the series and genre into mainstream popularity.

 

[SLAB]

Own it, but never played it because I was scared of it.

But regardless of Demon’s Souls vital place in gaming history as the predecessor, I think it was Dark Souls itself that really skyrocketed the series and genre into mainstream popularity.

That’s 100% true. Demon’s Souls is weird. Dark Souls is just a difficult but a more mainstream & streamlined version.

 

[Spike]

So @Padrino timed out and, IIRC, @Spike is a school teacher... This could be a while.

Only because it's such a challenging decision.

 

[Spike]

My last pick is a game that I never really quite figured out as a kid, but lost a lot of quarters trying to do so:



I figure if I'm going to be stuck on an island, I might finally figure it out.

 

[pdxKingsFan]

My brother had it down pat and would go to the arcade and show off. I remember the cabinets that had a second monitor on the top so people could watch, and whenever people known to be able to consistently beat it would play it would always draw a huge crowd. I was able to beat it pretty consistently on Sega CD (I think that was what I had it on?) but I didn't like playing it in the arcade very much when so many other games were out there.

 

[Tetsujin]

Zoo Tycoon (PC/2001)




With my last pick, I’m choosing to go with one of the biggest time sucks of my youth, a game that was both fun enough at its base while still being incredibly easy to hack and mod (not to mention the incredibly easy infinite money cheat as long as you hadn’t built anything at your zoo yet). There is absolutely zero plot to this game and all the ‘tasks’ largely devolve to hiring enough maintenance workers and janitors so that your animals aren’t escaping their exhibits and guests to your zoo aren’t puking themselves because your zoo is covered in trash. But the dumb mods and built in cheats were enough to make me obsessively play this game pretty much every single day after I got home from school (yeah, I was not cool).

While most of my peers were into the Zoo Tycoon-adjacent Roller Coaster Tycoon or the also adjacent Sim City, ya boi was into the version of the ‘build your own’ simulator game most meant for kids. But this game still had its share of fun “why is this in a kids game?” Features, such as the ability to just pick up and drop guests into the lion exhibit or, my personal favorite, the ability to just set the animals free into crowds for some reason.

What this game will not give you is a sound understanding of the economic costs of running a whole-ass zoological institution or grapple with the moral complexity of placing wild beasts in captivity, even if a later expansion pack made most of those animals dinosaurs.

As an adult, I would probably last two minutes with this game before getting bored and or frustrated with it and quitting but for the sake of my last pick in this draft (and the fact I’d still have a good dozen plus other games to play on my island for the rest of my days) I’m good with this selection.

PS Please note that Zoo Tycoon 2 is not great and that this game is still also worlds better than Planet Zoo, which is apparently a similar game made by a different company. There was also apparently a remake but I haven’t seen any of that at all.

 

[Capt. Factorial]

Here it comes! Mr. Irrelevant!

I’m sure that everybody’s expecting me to pick a real knock-it-out-of-the-park game to close out our first draft in years…but,no, you’ve seen my selections up to this point…

Obviously, I’ve been very NES heavy in this draft because the NES is the system that got me through middle school and high school - it traveled with me to college where it lived on, largely as a Tetris machine, for another several years. Sure, I could pick *another* game for the NES to finish it out, but I don’t feel like there’s anything worthy remaining that isn’t basically the same thing as a game I’ve already selected, just in a different graphical wrapper. I’ve hit the arcade for (technically) two games, I’ve dipped into the Atari and Intellivision spaces to really hit my early childhood, I’ve picked two PC games, and I’ve only got one other system I can go to if I’m going to stick with something I’ve actually played.

After college I stopped playing video games altogether, and if we ignore a brief interlude with the NES Mini (which was really just a way to resurrect my long-dead NES) it stayed that way until about two years ago, when I bought a PS5 to play a specific, extremely popular game: Elden Ring. Honestly, it was time for me to widen my entertainment options, and the change in graphical power between the old 8-bit systems and the PS5 is, well, stunning to say the least. Elden Ring looked fantastic, but I found the game play difficult, and more importantly, stressful. I need to escape with a video game, not to get stressed out, which is why I kept going back to my first PS5 pick of this draft, Astro Bot, which has a lot less riding on every gameplay.

So, going with that low-stress vibe, I’m going to select a game that I only bought about two weeks ago (so during the draft!), and haven’t gotten anywhere near all the way through:

Stray (2022) - PS5

In Stray, you play - well, you play a cat. In a futuristic world, you have become lost in an underground city populated entirely by robots, and you have to find your way to the outside while helping out a companion drone that has latched onto you, looking for someone to help it remember its purpose.

But in terms of low-stress…it’s basically an exploration game. Being a cat, you can jump to a lot of places (both up, down, and sideways) that you might not think you could…but the cat is smarter than the person holding the controller - it simply won’t jump to its death. The robots are friendly. There are a few sections where you need to evade some enemies, but in general you can just chill, explore, find artifacts, take them to the robots who are looking for them, solve some “puzzles”, etc. Come to think of it, there’s a decent amount of Myst to this game - obviously better graphics (though TBH I’m not *completely* impressed). To this point in my playthrough the mystery is not quite as compelling as the one in Myst, but there’s time, and even if it never reaches that level of intrigue, so what?

Just a nice game to sit down and relax with. And, hopefully, a good game to end the draft with!

 

[Padrino]

Here it comes! Mr. Irrelevant!

I’m sure that everybody’s expecting me to pick a real knock-it-out-of-the-park game to close out our first draft in years…but,no, you’ve seen my selections up to this point…

Obviously, I’ve been very NES heavy in this draft because the NES is the system that got me through middle school and high school - it traveled with me to college where it lived on, largely as a Tetris machine, for another several years. Sure, I could pick *another* game for the NES to finish it out, but I don’t feel like there’s anything worthy remaining that isn’t basically the same thing as a game I’ve already selected, just in a different graphical wrapper. I’ve hit the arcade for (technically) two games, I’ve dipped into the Atari and Intellivision spaces to really hit my early childhood, I’ve picked two PC games, and I’ve only got one other system I can go to if I’m going to stick with something I’ve actually played.

After college I stopped playing video games altogether, and if we ignore a brief interlude with the NES Mini (which was really just a way to resurrect my long-dead NES) it stayed that way until about two years ago, when I bought a PS5 to play a specific, extremely popular game: Elden Ring. Honestly, it was time for me to widen my entertainment options, and the change in graphical power between the old 8-bit systems and the PS5 is, well, stunning to say the least. Elden Ring looked fantastic, but I found the game play difficult, and more importantly, stressful. I need to escape with a video game, not to get stressed out, which is why I kept going back to my first PS5 pick of this draft, Astro Bot, which has a lot less riding on every gameplay.

So, going with that low-stress vibe, I’m going to select a game that I only bought about two weeks ago (so during the draft!), and haven’t gotten anywhere near all the way through:

Stray (2022) - PS5

In Stray, you play - well, you play a cat. In a futuristic world, you have become lost in an underground city populated entirely by robots, and you have to find your way to the outside while helping out a companion drone that has latched onto you, looking for someone to help it remember its purpose.

But in terms of low-stress…it’s basically an exploration game. Being a cat, you can jump to a lot of places (both up, down, and sideways) that you might not think you could…but the cat is smarter than the person holding the controller - it simply won’t jump to its death. The robots are friendly. There are a few sections where you need to evade some enemies, but in general you can just chill, explore, find artifacts, take them to the robots who are looking for them, solve some “puzzles”, etc. Come to think of it, there’s a decent amount of Myst to this game - obviously better graphics (though TBH I’m not *completely* impressed). To this point in my playthrough the mystery is not quite as compelling as the one in Myst, but there’s time, and even if it never reaches that level of intrigue, so what?

Just a nice game to sit down and relax with. And, hopefully, a good game to end the draft with!

Stray is a lovely little game! Fun pick!

 

[Capt. Factorial]

And there we have it!

Step 2 (you mean we're not done?!?) is for each of the drafters to submit rankings to me. You should rank each of the eleven lists from 1 (You would MOST want on your island) to 11 (you would LEAST want on your island). Send these rankings to me by PM, and the results will determine playoff vote seeding. The top four lists will get first-round playoff byes.



The lists are found at the top of page one of this thread:
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3

The sooner I get a full list of rankings, the sooner we can start the playoff voting!

@hrdboild
@Insomniacal Fan
@Turgenev or @macadocious (you will need to decide who ranks, or perhaps come up with a joint ranking)
@Sluggah
@SLAB
@Warhawk
@Löwenherz
@whitechocolate
@Padrino
@Spike
@Tetsujin

 

[whitechocolate]

Nobody picked Mario 64. We have surely brought some type of curse upon us.

 

[whitechocolate]

R12.P12 (#144 Overall)
BUSHIDO BLADE
View attachment 14151​

Format: PS1
Year of Release: 1997
Developer: Lightweight
Genre: Fighting / Kenjutsu Simulation
Why I picked it: Achieving Flow State

I really only enjoy playing one fighting game (well two... it does have a sequel) and I think once I describe what this game is you'll understand why. Bushido Blade has no life bars. It has no button press combos. It does have a single-player mode but you can finish it in 20 minutes and it's not very challenging. It has only six playable characters and they all use the same moves. You have three different stances (high, medium, and low), three different attacks from each stance (high, medium, and low) and a button to parry and that's pretty much it. You can also run, throw sand at your opponent's eyes (if you have no honor) or hurl a throwable weapon at your opponent's head, though you only get one of those per match so you've got to go run and pick it up to use it again.

So there's a lot that this game is not. What this game is though is one very cool idea executed gracefully. It's a Japanese sword fighting simulation built around a one shot kill mechanic. Land a clean blow to your opponent's head or chest area and the match is instantly over, sometimes in mere seconds. Many of those strikes are so slow that they'll leave your character vulnerable for a full second afterward, which is an eternity in a one-shot kill combat game. So that establishes the basic gameplay pattern here -- you select a weapon and a stance and square off against your opponent. Theoretically this can all be studied and mastered like the game of chess. And also like Chess, the real game here only begins as you and a friend start to string multiple matches together.

View attachment 14153 View attachment 14154 View attachment 14155

Most early matches start out defensive as both players wait for the other to make a mistake first. Later matches get chaotic as the better fighter has started to dominate and the other begins to explore a range of gimmick moves to throw them off -- here's where you see a lot of running stabs, taunting, sand throwing, climbing walls and making your opponent follow you. This is the second big innovation in Bushido Blade -- rather than using a locked off level there is just one big 3D environment broken up into lots of smaller fighting locations. Each location is linked to the adjacent ones through loading screens so you can force an opponent to chase you through multiple locations before eventually fighting them on your terms where you have the geographical advantage.** And since the game is in 3D, there's even a first-person fighting mode but that's more of a novelty to try once and then ignore since the controls aren't precise enough to make it useable, in my opinion.

Though no single strike in this game requires more than one button press to execute, you can string together multiple moves once you learn the timing. Which is easier said than done because controlling your fighter often feels like you're an ice road trucker trying to maneuver a big rig downhill in a snow storm. And if you pick an enormous and heavy sword like the nodachi or the broadsword you'd better hope your first strike is successful because good luck parrying anything with a weapon that slow. While there is no life bar, you will get differing results based on where an attack lands. A strike to the arm will disable your arm, limiting you to weak one-handed flailing. A strike to the leg will cripple you, limiting you to an overhead strike from one knee as your only means of fighting back. Or worse you could lose both legs and then all you can do is roll around and hope to delay the inevitable.

View attachment 14156 View attachment 14157 View attachment 14158

The end result of all of this is a gameplay experience that has more in common with table tennis than most other fighting games. What you're really doing here is concentrating on your opponent's attack patterns and body language to tip you off on where they plan to strike next. As you exchange volleys and take turns parrying and mixing up your attack location, what you're also doing is learning your opponent's tendencies. That's where the real skill in this game lies for if you can channel Miyomoto Musashi and predict your opponent's next strike then you can become almost invincible.

So ultimately this is as much a flow state simulation for me as it is a fighting simulation. And while the second game has a lot more in it -- 20 characters instead of 6 and much more variety in fighting styles including dual wielding katanas and my favorite offshoot of Kendo/Kenjutsu: Iaido style where the katana is always returned to the scabbard and practitioners are taught to draw and strike in one motion -- all of this added complication does tend to get in the way of the Zen state. So I'm taking the original "it's never been done better" swordsmanship simulator here and I'm hoping in time I can train a monkey into being a worthy opponent I guess?

(**Technically this is only partially correct -- based on video reviews it appears that selecting the 2p mode disables the ability to run from location to location., which is disappointing but also may have saved friendships? I haven't played this in awhile so I forgot.)

Have you played Hellish Quart? I haven't played it, but watching it is entertaining.

 

[whitechocolate]

Nobody liked Virtua Fighter 5, but I know there are wrestling fans here, so here's a preview of VF6.

Some gameplay. Not Wolf, but it shows the detail of fighting animations. Wolf's move set will be amazing looking in 6.

 

[hrdboild]

Nobody picked Mario 64. We have surely brought some type of curse upon us.

I thought about drafting this as early as round 2. I mostly hated Mario games until I played Mario 64 and to this day think it might be the best video game I've ever played. It's in the top 5 at least. But I also haven't played it in 25 years and don't know that I would want to again. So it's in a weird place for me in a draft like this. I like the game but don't really want to play this type of game again so I would have been drafting it mostly to court votes and I ultimately decided not to do that.

For the record, the other Mario game that I enjoyed playing and would have considered taking was Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars on SNES. That game was developed by Square as a JRPG with a Mario reskin though and I have three of Square's games from the following year on my list so no real surprise there.

 

[hrdboild]

Have you played Hellish Quart? I haven't played it, but watching it is entertaining.

I had not seen this before, and yes I am interested! It reminds me a little of the early Mortal Kombat games with the heavy use of mo-cap for character animations. Definitely a try before buying situation though so I'll see if there's a demo version out there. A lot of other games have tried to incorporate a more simulation-minded approach to their swordfighting, but I've always felt let down by their control systems and most of them (especially the single-player only ones) have some version of a charged power up mechanic which breaks the immersion for me.

 

[Löwenherz]

Nobody picked Mario 64. We have surely brought some type of curse upon us.

A ton of historically awesome options slipped past as we all (myself included) went for more obscure personal favorites. Which I love to see! I can get a list of Greatest of All Time games anywhere, but reading how these connected with people personally is why these are so fun.

Hrdboild has only 4 games I’ve played at length, 2 of which I loathed, another 2 I played for maybe an hour, and otherwise a list of games I know but haven’t played or know absolutely nothing about. But his list ended up being among my favorites because of how well the games seemed to complement each other and the overall vibe of the whole he curated.

What does that mean? No idea! Except I can practically feel the enthusiasm and excitement for a kid in that micro-era discovering new favorites, and the modern equivalents that sparked some nostalgic joy years later when that kid had grown up.

 

[Mr. S£im Citrus]

Of the 154 games picked so far from the other 11 members in this draft I counted only 34 of them that I've played (and many of those only briefly). There are quite a few more that I've heard of and many that I would like to try but who has the time anymore? I can't even find time to watch a 2 hour movie these days much less play all the way through a game.

28 out of the full 180. And @Spike and @Capt. Factorial combined for 13 of them.

 

[Mr. S£im Citrus]

I've been waiting to post this: a list of the 15 games I would have drafted, had I been participating. I didn't bother selecting any alternates, so the games that were picked by the actual participants will be stricken through:

1. Civilization 4 (PC)
2. Final Fantasy 3(VI) (SNES)
3. WWE No Mercy (N64)
4. Super Metroid (SNES)
5. Street Fighter Alpha 3 (Dreamcast)
6. Mega Man X4 (PS1)
7. NBA 2K (X360)
8. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES)
9. Mega Man 2 (NES)
10. Final Fantasy 2(IV) (SNES)
11. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (PS2)
12. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
13. X-Men (Arcade)
14. Samurai Showdown 2 (Arcade)
15. Tetris (GameBoy)

 

[whitechocolate]

I would bet against these stats being accurate. Anyhow.

Selections

PC - 59

Arcade - 8

PS1 - 8
PS2 - 10
PS3 - 9
PS4 - 12
PS5 - 6

NES - 10
SNES - 12
N64 - 3
GameCube - 3
Wii - 3
Switch - 10
Switch 2 - 2

Genesis - 4
Dreamcast - 3

TG16 - 1

Atari 2600 - 1

Intellivision - 2

Xbox - 2
360 - 1
X1 - 2

PSP - 1
GB - 2
GBA - 1

Phone - 3