This Old Neon Forum

Welcome to the #BGE2020 Elimination Round of 256!

Each game is seeded based on its performance in the two opening rounds of pools. Every game in the Upper Bracket has defeated multiple other games in 1-on-1 polls to get to this point. These are still the best of the best.

Polls are updated weekly, typically on Sunday or Monday. Check back throughout the week to make sure you don't miss a vote!

HOW TO VOTE

This is easy. You only get one vote per poll. The game with the most votes wins. In the event of a tie, the higher seed advances, so don't get complacent!

SotN is one of those games that I enjoyed quite a bit but still seemed monstrously overrated to me. Can't really explain it, it just didn't really do it for me the way it obviously did for most. I certainly won't begrudge its advancement, but it also doesn't need my vote, and I haven't played its opponent, so I'm abstaining.

Interesting match-up.
SOTN is an action game with RPG elements, and very influential - an entire genre wouldn't have "vania" in it if it didn't exist. But it's also kind of unsatisfying in some ways because it's very easy and much of the interesting armory is locked behind rare enemy drops.

Star Control II is an excellent game that's a combination of strategy, exploration, adventure, and action. It has very little handholding and it's easy to run out of fuel early on if you're not careful. You also have very little in the way of hints to go off of, especially if you don't fully explore the solar system. As you explore more and more of the galaxy, you have to extract resources from planets as you go - another action game that has consequences for the strategy/sim part of the game. Finding the right kinds of planet can yield a lot of useful elements or bio-data.

I'll have to think about this one a bit.

Niahak wrote: ↑17 May 2023 14:42 SOTN is an action game with RPG elements, and very influential - an entire genre wouldn't have "vania" in it if it didn't exist. But it's also kind of unsatisfying in some ways because it's very easy and much of the interesting armory is locked behind rare enemy drops.

Star Control II is an excellent game that's a combination of strategy, exploration, adventure, and action. It has very little handholding and it's easy to run out of fuel early on if you're not careful. You also have very little in the way of hints to go off of, especially if you don't fully explore the solar system. As you explore more and more of the galaxy, you have to extract resources from planets as you go - another action game that has consequences for the strategy/sim part of the game. Finding the right kinds of planet can yield a lot of useful elements or bio-data.

I love Star Control II, mainly via very distant nostalgic memories, and like Clay mentioned in his comment, SotN is far from my favourite or most personally impactful Castlevania games. It's not even really the first action exploration platformer to include RPG elements—we have some Monster World games, Popful Mail, and Faxanadu (to cite only a few examples) as earlier examples. But it did represent a very good pivot for the series which (I believe) had an impact even outside of its genre(s). We've got stats and levels in sports games now. Actually, I want to see random loot drops in a hockey game lol

Not trying to talk you into voting either way; your comment simply sparked some reflection.

Kong Wen wrote: ↑17 May 2023 16:18
I love Star Control II, mainly via very distant nostalgic memories, and like Clay mentioned in his comment, SotN is far from my favourite or most personally impactful Castlevania games. It's not even really the first action exploration platformer to include RPG elements—we have some Monster World games, Popful Mail, and Faxanadu (to cite only a few examples) as earlier examples. But it did represent a very good pivot for the series which (I believe) had an impact even outside of its genre(s). We've got stats and levels in sports games now. Actually, I want to see random loot drops in a hockey game lol

Not trying to talk you into voting either way; your comment simply sparked some reflection.

Yeah, we're unfortunately in territory where your reply actually makes the vote harder, because Star Control II is a weird genre mesh that is mostly dead (the closest recentish game I can think of is Space Rangers II, and even that's different since it's randomized vs designed - and that's ~15 years old). Maybe some of the more recent space-sim games that I haven't played or read up on are like it. But because it hasn't had the long tail that SOTN had, fewer people have looked back to SC2 to appreciate it. I'm a sucker for an underdog.

It's looking like my vote is unlikely to sway this race either way, though.

If you read my reasons for voting for SC II in earlier weeks, you already knew how I was going to vote. SotN is a great game but it's not got the grand scope that I love so much about SC II.