Round 4, in which we kill

[This Old Neon]

Round 4, in which we kill

You can vote for 1-3 games in this poll. Vote carefully—you can't change your votes after submitting them. The #1, #2, and #3 ranked games at the end of the week will move on to Round 5.

1980 - Pac-Man - Arcade
1988 - Blaster Master - NES
1999 - Shenmue - DC
2002 - Dynasty Tactics - PS2
2003 - Viewtiful Joe - GCN
2004 - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - Multiplatform
2004 - Cave Story [+] - PC
2007 - Crackdown - X360
2008 - Left 4 Dead - PC
2009 - Demons Souls - PS3

You are encouraged to discuss your choices and your reasons for selecting the games you did.

[Turai]

Most games are either games that I dislike (demon souls,cave story, grand theft auto etc) or that I simply never played (Shenmue) so my vote pretty much defaults to Pac Man.

[Humphries90]

Dynasty Tactics is seriously underrated. Another Three Kingdoms game I adore.

Once I became good at it, I loved pulling off huge combos with my army, which in turn often resulted in the enemy surrendering. It was great just hoarding all of these officers. It kinda broke the game really but it was so fun. If memory serves me right, they fixed this in DT2 which is why I don't think it's as good (although back in the day I would have instantly told you DT2 was better).

Left 4 Dead. Spent so many evenings on my ancient computer/terrible internet connection, playing online with my group of friends. We even had a clan and became competitive at one point. I was the token joker though, making everyone laugh with my incompetence and commentary. Great times running from the Tank.

Edit: Forgot to vote for Shenmue!! If someone has a spare vote, can you help me out?

[VictorViper]

This is a tricky bracket, but I'm keeping it to two votes here. Viewtiful Joe gets one for being possibly the best single player brawler of all time. I'll keep my gushing short here, but I'll mention that I specifically avoided VJ2 because it was unnecessary and I didn't want anything to taint the experience this game provided. This is really something special and a great challenge to boot.

Left 4 Dead is quite simply the finest cooperative FPS ever made. Don't really know what else I need to say. Perfect. Represents one of my favourite gaming moments of all time... and that moment lasted more than a year.

[SkyPikachu]

Most games are either games that I dislike (demon souls,cave story, grand theft auto etc) or that I simply never played (Shenmue) so my vote pretty much defaults to Pac Man.

What don't you like about cave story?

[Kong Wen]

I can only cast one vote here, and it's for Demon's Souls.

This game was an epic 3-year journey for me, starting with playing through the tutorial and 1-1 but then being too terrified to continue (the game is the standard to which I compare other games when it comes to atmosphere), to picking up again the following October for one of From & Atlus's "world events" and cranking through the game, to going back even after that to fully complete the game (Platinum) and master its excellent world & character tendency systems. I even continued to log on after that to help people beat certain bosses as a shade and to gift some rare loot to people who needed it.

Dark Souls (which will be showing up here soon) is generally better, but one of the things I liked about Demon's Souls is that the server-based gameplay meant there was a lot more persistence to the messages and shades. Even a couple of years later, you could find tons of messages from players and summoning signs, whereas in Dark Souls things could get kind of barren at times. I also liked that Demon's Souls was less forgiving with its consumables (no Estus Flask here, folks), and I thought the hub world worked at least as well as the bonfire system (certainly in part because of the lore behind the hub world).

[Kong Wen]

Cave Story, Pac-Man, and Viewtiful joe will advance to Round 5!

[Sharecrow]

Poor Blaster Master . It was expected but still saddening.