Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?

'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.'
'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.'
'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.'

I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different.
I chose the impossible. I chose...

Excellent choice and one I didn't even consider at the outset.

Excellent choice on Bioshock!! Stellar franchise!!

I take another game from 98, not necessarily one that I've put the most hours in to playing, but certainly the one I've spent the most time watching

Starcraft: Brood War

Write ups to come later today

Pokemon is definitely a strong pick. Bioshock I played on the 360 back in the day but i have no real memory of it other than it was dark and quite short and there was a big plot twist? lol

Fortnite...hard to say. I've played it like 3 times where i run around picking stuff up, fail to figure out how building things works, then get shot and quit. But i'm definitely supportive of very recent games and competitive online games being in the mix.

also I've just done a big ass write up of my game thinking that I was going next, which I now see I'm not, so McGlaven...please don't take [undrafted RPG] lol

I also have one of those lined up so dont steal mine :O

This may have gone a little high for my taste but it can’t be too bad if I still have it lying around. Totally on board with next two picks, was dreaming about both of them coming back to me.

Gotta give some love to that FF6 pick. That for sure would of been my number 2 overall. Beat that game at least 10 times through the years. Interesting how of my top 3 of all time only one have been picked so far.

Is there a timer? This has slowed down considerably lately...

A timer would be pretty anti-fun but does seem like we should at least be able to crank out a few picks per day... Making your pick and writing it up after seems acceptable to help move things along as well.

For me, playing Bioshock was a bit like going to the Opera.

My takeaway was “I get why other people think this is good, but I don’t really love it that much”

I think Bioshock has GOAT setting and ambiance. The world and people populating it were so well conceived, to a level normally found in top novels. Combining shooting and plasmids made for a great play experience but the controls were definitely the weak point and were the aspect that held up the worst upon replay. I remember reading an article a little while back that admonished Bioshock for removing the penalties for death, which I thought was decent at the time but can’t say i ultimately care when reflecting back on it. Definitely one of my favorite all time games.

PS I also enjoy opera

lol being able to take the best zelda game at #5



So with the N64 having brought Nintendo kicking and screaming into the 3D era, with SM64 having knocked that genre out of the park, the question was where's Zelda, the series which gave us standout games on both the NES and the SNES. We needed to wait a good couple of years, but then we got Ocarina of Time, which promptly GOATed. The thing is a masterpiece - it's ridiculously huge, handling parallel worlds seven years apart, and while the general plot is the same (Ganon may not be the nicest piece of work please handle a bunch of dungeons before getting rid of him kthnx), the execution is incredible - it handles the transition to 3D perfectly, and has such a ridiculous amount to explore outside of the main storyline. Still being broken apart today, it's a big game in the speedrunning community, although while any% was dead according to this seminal run:



it's since been beaten by sixteen people and a whole minute taken off from there, and the game is still actively run in multiple categories with randomiser hacks making things a fair bit more interesting. But enough about that, what about this:





RTS games had been around for a while, but they'd never really had the option to play as multiple, distinct races. Starcraft brought you that - all three of the options you have play completely differently, require different approaches against each respective opponent and has a level of balance not seen in any game before or since. Needless to say, that resulted in the game being played competitively and Starcraft effectively started esports - played professionally for nearly 20 years, it went away for a while but it's now back as big as it's ever been, with the metagame continuing to evolve to the present day

A selection of great plays from one year of the game:



Day9 breaking down my favourite game of all time:



We have planes! We have zerg rushes!



Decent series of videos highlighting the best of pro BW



Picks so far:

Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Starcraft: Brood War

For a few years, I had no access to a console but I had a maxed out iMac (2009 I think). I had access to only a handful of games without Starcraft being one of them. I played so damn much but barely made progress. One of the only games I quit because it was just too much for my brain to handle. I have a lot of respect for high-level players of it.

2005. Nintendo GC released Resident Evil 4 as an exclusive. While I had played previous entries and quite enjoyed them, I had no idea just what gaming bliss I was about to experience. This game took everything I knew about Resident Evil and flipped it upside down.

No longer would I be terrorized by hideous camera angles, hindered by a ridiculously restrictive inventory management system, or deprived of intense, exhilarating action.

I can still vividly remember the countless nights after my daughter's bedtime that I would sit on the edge of my bad, as far as that corded GC controller would reach, engrossed in the story and gameplay. I played through it twice, consecutively, and then moved on to new games, until...

Resident Evil 4 Wii is THE definitive version of this game. It was made for those glorious Wii controls. Actually being able to point at the heads of the Las Plagas and get that oh so satisfying headshot took what was already a magnificent game and made it better.

In addition, the Wii version contains all the additional content that was released. This included:

Seperate Ways, a condensed version of the main story that you play as Ada, and get to see the events unfold from her perspective.

Assignment Ada, a sort of side-mission that is seperate from the story but quite fun and probably 2-3 hrs of solid entertainment.

And lastly, The Mercenaries
An arcade style, timed shooter. You can choose from 5 different characters and 4 different mini-maps where the goal is to kill infected and get a ton of points before time runs out. It is absolute mayhem and it is glorious. The character "Hunk" is a fan favorite, and quite fun to play with.

Resident Evil 4 is an absolute treat for gamers. The atmosphere is genuinely creepy. The 3 main areas of the game have so much personality and are basically characters themselves. While it still has it's limits, inventory management is much better this time around, and the gameplay is just downright fun.

You might ask, "is it scary?" Trust me, you will know fear the first time you hear the chainsaw revving up somewhere near in the village or when you can hear the tortured breathing of a Regenerator


Resident Evil 4, especially the Wii edition, is a treasure that any true gamer should experience. And we can't forget about the merchant - "whattya buyin?"


Edit: F***ing lol me. I have never previously tried posting images on this forum and it is the least intuitive sh** i've ever dealt with. or I'm an idiot. Or a combination of the two. Yeah, It's RE4 but half my pictures didn't work even though I did the same thing for each embed. Argh. This is why I lurk.

Nice pick! I played RE4 for the first time relatively recently and was completely blown away by how good it was, especially because it was the HD remake and I was playing it well after THAT was released.

Images can be a pain in the ass; for longer posts I try to type them on my computer and then embed images using the Tapatalk app, which is much easier, though I don't really do video.

Any chance of 1 more late entry? I feel I can offer a unique perspective to the draft as a certified old whose 1st video game console was LITERALLY Pong. Also 3 of my top 4 have not even been drafted yet. don't care how you decide to handicap me as a late entry, just think it will be fun to add my 2 cents

So as I said, part of the reason I chose Tetris first is because I wanted to focus on games in terms of pure mechanics, design, test of skill etc. As a perfect example of minimalist, pure game. And I think conventional wisdom on the best games puts too much weight on story and not enough on gameplay (which is why I'm happy to see stuff like Fortnite in here even though it's not my jam). I also think that in general we overvalue games from the 90s/whenever we were young and that if you sit down to play e.g. Mario 64 for the first time as an adult, as I have done, it's merely...fine?

So, with that said, I would like to completely undermine all these points by picking a game where there are about a million things wrong with it and I don't care because I love it. Where the 'gameplay' involves walking around, pressing circle and choosing a list of attack options from a menu. Where the story is both the central part of the game, and also kinda dumb and often incomprehensible (and that's before taking into account the masterful translations like 'this guy are sick'). Where the blocky early 3D character models look extremely crappy and weird. But **** it. Love is irrational, and makes us do irrational things. I have never loved a game as much as this, and I never will again, and for that reason I pick









Final Fantasy VII

It's hard to overstate what it was like to play FFVII for the first time, aged 11-12, having never played any form of RPG before, huddled around an old 12 inch CRT in my friend's room. I honestly believed that after the escape from the Shinra HQ and bike chase to the edge of Midgar, the game was almost over (despite it having three discs...I guess I wasn't a smart kid). And then the shock of being released onto the world map and realising that the game was extremely not over, and there was a whole world of this, whole continents to explore, bursting with secrets and mysteries - and an infinite variety of things to do...

Breed and race chocobos in order to access secret magical caves on the furthest corners of the map? Nice! Find a hidden forest where you use frogs and bugs to do convoluted jumping puzzles in order to get some sweet items? Neat! Explore a sunken airship full of super powerful poison monsters in your submarine? Cool! A snowboarding section? A Road Rash section? A somewhat baffling tower defense game section? An MC Escher inspired labyrinth? Two basically unbeatable optional megabosses? An old man called Bugenhagen who runs a planetarium and can fly, for reasons never explained? A lengthy quest involving the main character dressing up as a woman in order to seduce a wealthy old pervert? Hell yeah baby, this game has it all.

The weapons/magic/materia/limit break system is fantastic and far superior to subsequent FF games imo. There must be hundreds of different attacks, spells, summons, items, limit breaks and enemy skills you can use to kick ass, and they're all pretty cool looking, with snazzy colourful animations, so to me at least the battles stay pretty fun throughout the 60 hours or so of game. It also incentivises the player to explore as much as possible, as there are tons of super rare items – powerful materia, ultimate weapons, level 4 limit breaks – that you can only obtain once, in one exact location, very often as part of an optional quest - so pursuing every bit of content in the game is actually worthwhile. The portentousness of the plot is also nicely offset by a consistent strain of silliness, humour and whimsy.



Plus the music! I could go on and on about the music but this is going to be very long already so I'll just say it's incredible, and does an amazing job of creating atmosphere and emotion, even though the limited capabilities of the Playstation mean that it's all this kind of strange MIDI synthesizer music. As with so much about FFVII, the things that are 'wrong' with it just make the game more endearing and charming and nostalgic.



So as for the story...you can kind of take it two ways. To me, the more you try and understand it, especially in disc 2, the more baffling it is. Something about clones, a guy called Zack, Mako energy, Jenova cells, Hojo, the Lifestream, the Cetra, black materia, huge materia, nine different guys called Weapon......etc.

But the real story is this: You're part of an environmental terrorist group who makes friends with a magical flower girl. There's an evil ******* trying to destroy the planet because he's emo about being born in a test tube or w/e. He kills your magical friend, and you and your mates go on a quest to get revenge, save the world, and ride chocobos. That's all you really need. For me the story really shines not in the world-saving main plot, but individual character moments and interactions. Like when you explore the caves below Cosmo Canyon and Red XIII discovers his father was not a coward who abandoned his family, but a hero who died to save it



Or Elmyra's story of how she came to adopt Aeris, and her husband who never came home from the war:



Finally, although the graphics are pretty rough looking in many ways, especially the character models, the background art and environments are still absolutely gorgeous and totally hold up.






Man, I love this ****ing game. I've been through it 6-8 times at this point, maybe more, and there's still plenty of things I've never done – beaten Emerald and Ruby, collected every Enemy Skill, gotten Lucky 7s, got Aeris's ultimate weapon and level 4 limit break on disc 1. And having spent this long thinking about it now I just want to dive in all over again. Get every item, master every materia, get a gold chocobo, crush Battle Square to get Omnislash and W-Summon, climb the pagoda with Yuffie, find Lucrecia's cave with Vincent, go to prison, go to space, crush the gold saucer basketball game, go on a date with Barrett, have a slapfight on the end of a giant cannon, get cussed out on live TV for being incapable of marching in formation, buy a $1.2 million house in Costa Del Sol that serves no purpose except to be a baller. I want it all. FFVII owns.

Awesome write up.

I think FFVII is my favorite RPG of all time, very close with FFVI and one Undrafted. The story depth is just so impressive. Where FFVI kind of ends the story narrative after World Of Balance and is kind of a side quest free for all, FF7 gives you an epic narrative story to follow and a ton of awesome side quests off of it.

Incredible depth, incredible story, awesome music. Great mixture of emotional moments and humor. Just a fantastic RPG.

Diddler, if you want to get in, go ahead and make two picks and we’ll add you in as #11.

Well because I’ve talked about the Holy Trinity of JRPGs I might as well take the last of the three remaining

Pick 2: Chrono Trigger

This game was incredible for a number of reasons.

One of the first JRPGs that I can remember that incorporated character and enemy positioning into the battle sequence

Pushed 16-but graphics to the limit and beyond

Broke the RPG mold in that it killed off the Main Protagonist, then had an optional quest to bring him back to life

The main Villain for the first 40% of the game can join your party

Multiple endings to the game with tons of side quests and Easter Eggs to find

With all of that said, the execution on this game was top notch from start to finish. It wasn’t as strong story-wise IMO as either FF games selected so far, but it incorporated time travel into the game and story in a way that didn’t really have to stretch the bounds of sci-fi believability.

I’ve happily played through the full game 6-7 times and will probably do it again in the not too distant future.

Zimmer’s Library

Super Mario 64
Chrono Trigger

Regular snake draft, so Sputnik gets two picks and it’s back on me

You stole my pick...

CT's pretty good but not my favourite SNES RPG by a long shot