Ghost in the Shell all the way. I think the magna and anime(s) already have a well understood reputations, but the GITS games on the PS1 & PS2 deserve more nods as fun little gems. Great time to be had for the superfan who wants to experience everything, even if the anime franchise is clearly the apex.

My non-answers that don't qualify because I like 2-out-of-3 and haven't experienced the 3rd: Star Wars & James Bond 007 are both good film+game franchises in my book, haven't read any of their printed works. Lord of the Rings has great books and films, but I haven't played any of the games.

After that, I basically got nothing. Castlevania needs a comic book -- maybe it already has one? Turok needs a movie. Doom has all 3, but the comic and movie are cheesy-fun at best so it's not going to be anyone's "Triple Threat". It is interesting though how Doom has garnered a distinct cultural relevancy/cultural memory in those two mediums despite that.

A thread for examining the new games of June! Share your personal picks, interesting curios, and not quite there possibles...

.

Did you discover some small game that not everyone knows about?
Share that and let us know what it is about!

Already know a thing or two that interests you?
Make a list (or a swanky desire index) of your interests and/or possibles!

Don't know what's so great about an upcoming game you keep hearing about?
Ask here!

Don't follow gaming news that closely and just want to passively see what BigGames™ people care about?
This is the place!

~

Thread concept:

The basic idea is to list new games that you are interested in, as well as games you are potentially curious about or want to give wider attention to. You can briefly describe them or ask other people to help fill you in. The hope is that regular threads like these can act as a collective filter/discovery mechanism to help people decide what is worth checking out.

"New games" means any new title that is being released or ported this month in any capacity (not "backlogs/what you are playing this month"). The angle here is sharing your anticipation and promoting game discovery (as opposed to sharing comments about a first playthrough in progress - that belongs elsewhere).

.

• If you want a handy list that covers most of the major upcoming games of the month, here's one text list. Feel free to post other lists or list videos that you find useful.

• Final request: If you are the first person to mention a game please provide (at minimum) a short sentence description. (If it is a very big AAA release though, then don't worry about it.) This is a good convention that makes the thread more useful as a discovery mechanism, and especially helps out anyone who doesn't follow the news as closely as you.

I've gotten into making let's plays myself! I wish it was easier to say simply "hey, I make let's plays" (i.e., in the present tense), but it's the type of hobby that is easy to get sidetracked from when you don't want to finish all the editing. Here's my stuff:

1. Let's Play Legend of the Mystical Ninja. I'm generally more proud of this one (o^-’)b
   Youtube Video

2. A playlist for "Let's Play Actraiser: Japanese and European versions." (low audio quality, one long video for each)

3. I also made a short, combat-focused Mirror's Edge video with no commentary. It was created because at the time I was having lots of fun just replaying levels over and over to free style them. It's obviously not something I would expect many to be into though *shrug*

A thread for examining the new games of May! Share your personal picks, interesting curios, and not quite there possibles...

.

Did you discover some small game that not everyone knows about?
Share that and let us know what it is about!

Already know a thing or two that interests you?
Make a list (or a swanky desire index) of your interests and/or possibles!

Don't know what's so great about an upcoming game you keep hearing about?
Ask here!

Don't follow gaming news that closely and just want to passively see what BigGames™ people care about?
This is the place!

~

Thread concept:

The basic idea is to list new games that you are interested in, as well as games you are potentially curious about or want to give wider attention to. You can briefly describe them or ask other people to help fill you in. The hope is that regular threads like these can act as a collective filter/discovery mechanism to help people decide what is worth checking out.

"New games" means any new title that is being released or ported this month in any capacity (not "backlogs/what you are playing this month"). The angle here is sharing your anticipation and promoting game discovery (as opposed to sharing comments about a first playthrough in progress - that belongs elsewhere).

.

• If you want a handy list that covers most of the major upcoming games of the month, here's one text list. Feel free to post other lists or list videos that you find useful.

• Final request: If you are the first person to mention a game please provide (at minimum) a short sentence description. (If it is a very big AAA release though, then don't worry about it.) This is a good convention that makes the thread more useful as a discovery mechanism, and especially helps out anyone who doesn't follow the news as closely as you.

A thread for examining the new games of April! Share your personal picks, interesting curios, and not quite there possibles...

.

Did you discover some small game that not everyone knows about?
Share that and let us know what it is about!

Already know a thing or two that interests you?
Make a list (or a swanky desire index) of your interests and/or possibles!

Don't know what's so great about an upcoming game you keep hearing about?
Ask here!

Don't follow gaming news that closely and just want to passively see what BigGames™ people care about?
This is the place!

~

Thread concept:

The basic idea is to list new games that you are interested in, as well as games you are potentially curious about or want to give wider attention to. You can briefly describe them or ask other people to help fill you in. The hope is that regular threads like these can act as a collective filter/discovery mechanism to help people decide what is worth checking out.

"New games" means any new title that is being released or ported this month in any capacity (not "backlogs/what you are playing this month"). The angle here is sharing your anticipation and promoting game discovery (as opposed to sharing comments about a first playthrough in progress - that belongs elsewhere).

.

• If you want a handy list that covers most of the major upcoming games of the month, here's one text list. Feel free to post other lists or list videos that you find useful.

• Final request: If you are the first person to mention a game please provide (at minimum) a short sentence description. (If it is a very big AAA release though, then don't worry about it.) This is a good convention that makes the thread more useful as a discovery mechanism, and especially helps out anyone who doesn't follow the news as closely as you.

This was fun, thanks for running this! I like the fact that this voting game/community participation game doesn't encourage people to make spite moves, and just play sincerely. About halfway through I was predicting the final round would be Portal 2 vs Mario Galaxy, and I felt really smart until I wasn't :P

I like 5 point scales when I think about scores for personal scoring, but I can see why a published review would use more points. That said I'm the type who believes a score doesn't have a finite resolution, it just gets progressively harder to judge how you feel about it the more decimal points you try to add (and what actually goes into the score, how much weight to give specific feelings, etc.). Even a 5 point scale can feel like you are inconsistent with yourself sometimes!

Here's why scores with a large number of points is appealing:

A lot of people like the idea of ranking all the games (or all the movies, etc) they've played, in order from best to worst. If you do this even part way, you end up with so much ordered data that it is easy to appreciate the idea of an absolute score on even, say, a 100 point scale. This is because once you imagine a few anchor points in your list where you think an "80 game" would be, or a "90 game" or a "50 game", etc. then you can get a good estimate of any game's score by applying a little subjective judgement for how far between the two nearest anchor points it lies.

There's an interesting side subject here on scale types: [1] [2]. Ordering a collection of games (ordinal scale type) is simpler in terms of information content that giving them all score (interval and ratio scale types). With an ordinal system, the only meaningful operation is less-than, greater-than, and equals. However, a score system will usually be interpreted, at minimum, as an interval system. This means it is meaningful to talk about numerical sums and differences: a 9.0 game is not only better ("greater than") than an 8.0 game, but also this difference the same interval of quality between an 8.0 game and a 7.0 game.

I watched a good chunk of the presentation. I'm immensely skeptical about the potential of playing games via streaming a video feed. The shine of the presentation did however do a good job of reminding me that there is an under-served market for this. Obviously, that market has all these caveats carved into it, but because I'm so negative about this stuff I found it noteworthy that I had positive visions associated with the concept.

OK -- all that said I'm still skeptical about this specifically because there was no talk about what it will cost the consumer.

If streaming your games isn't cheap, there is no market for it.

It's not that people "don't have access" to the non-streaming local hardware option, it's that they don't want to buy it. Or they have the hardware but don't want to buy every little game just to sample everything.

If you have the dough, you can play whatever games you want. Money obviates the need for buying a worse substitute. And if Stadia is too expensive for what you get, there would be no reason someone would pick it. The service would obviate itself. I know there was talk about doing big server side calculations with more GPUs than presumably a regular console would not match, but I'm saying that is/will be a small part of the selling point.

If Google wants the public and those GDC developers to think this will be successful (obv. the two are related), they should have given cost information even if they don't have the final price per month or whatever.

Assuming we had the cost information (and the "what you get" information, like the ownership question and what games are available), the next level of skepticism is whether this business can thrive. @Axel, you said you doubt Google expects it to blow up, but I'm still concerned about where that line is. I don't really know, but I feel there must be a point where not having enough users makes the business unprofitable. Cost per user might be too high, getting licensees onboard might be too hard, etc. if the company doesn't have enough scale or, in the case of things like servers, customer density.

I know Netflix works and is successful, but I think it is a mistake to use this as the fount of optimism. Ironically, the fact that games have such a high ratio of "hours of entertainment per dollar" means that substituting the local hardware model with "hey, we'll send you each hour of entertainment using servers and bandwidth" is inherently that much more expensive than movies.

How are the developers being compensated is another tier of skepticism. I've been seeing this tweet linked around:

The Nintendo Switch is only 2 years old, so I'm not that surprised those two games didn't make it to this round.

Goldeneye has turned into the king of getting conditional/backhanded respect. Screw that. I'm on team Goldeneye all the way, god dang it! It's as great as it ever was. Or almost as great. Whatever. Where's Brandon? He'll back me up.