The most scientifically accurate list of selectbutton's favorite videogames attempted thus far. A double elimination tournament. During the nomination phase, posters were allowed to submit as many games as they liked, followed by a series of threads where users could vote & make impassioned arguments. Ties were settled with online matches of Melty Blood, although it is currently unknown exactly which polls this method was used for & who the players were.

Sometimes the top 64 is expanded and referred to as the top 85 or even top 108, and these additional games are referred to as “honorable mentions”.

The selectbutton top 64 was inspired by the Film Twitter community performing similar tournaments at the time. The original sb tournament organizer deleted their account, so some context and information has been lost (such as the thread where the rules/format of the tournament was decided).

~honorable mentions~

• Final Fantasy Tactics
  • Annetts (quoting Hiroyuki Itou): It’s meant to be enjoyed like a diorama, or a miniature garden: “ooo, what happens when I turn it this way?” And that’s also a big part of the cuteness factor. (laughs) Before you know it, you’ll be looking at the map and saying things like, “oh, I bet it would look cool if I put this guy up there…” (laughs)

• Deus Ex
  • Tulpa: It’s also a game made by people who had cultural influences outside of conventional nerd media. One of the main works that the game quotes is a little known philosophical sci fi novel by Olaf Stapledon, which is just such a deep cut that it reflects the game designers actually thinking about their world, and the political and philosophical implications of that world. It is also a game that tried to anticipate as many bizarre actions a player could take as possible, and write reasonable or at least entertaining consequences for those actions. My favorite was if you killed the bartender in that bar in Hell’s Kitchen, the next time you return to the area, someone else is behind the bar and shouts “free beer for everyone!”
    It is that kind of attention to detail that transforms these badly voice acted npcs into characters I can pretend are real. There’s just a palpable sense of discovery that I think is even better than the GB Camera’s many secrets (though I understand why the GB Camera won). One of my earliest memories of the game was finding a secret Majestic 12 base in the sewers of New York and only finding out that that was relevant to the game’s main narrative a dozen hours later. There are many one-off encounters that are later re-incorporated into the narrative that gives Deus Ex a potent sense of place.
    Deus Ex was made at a time when games like Deus Ex didn’t exist. I maintain that games like Deus Ex still don’t exist. DX was fundamentally new to video games, as it blended all sorts of genres and influences together into something different. It still remains relatively new, because many of the ‘immersive sims’ that came after aimed not to just produce as much interactive depth as technology would allow to a place and narrative, but to imitate Deus Ex and Thief. They may be smoother, generally more pleasant experiences, but they aspire to no more than imitation and iteration.
    Deus Ex had air vents because air vents exist in real life. Other immersive sims have air vents because Deus Ex had air vents. There’s a fundamental disconnect in design there, and it can be recognized by how something like ‘crawling through air vents’ is implemented. In the Eidos Montreal Deus Ex sequels, air vents are just a source of easy experience points, and they are one of typically 3 ways to enter the next room in a linear sequence of rooms that make up the non-hub areas of the game. They’ve been rendered into a video game signifier of Immersive Sim. Deus Ex had air vents because they are an architectural feature of real world spaces. They are part of the Nakatomi Space 5 of the setting. They are part of the fantasy of being able to trespass into spaces that aren’t meant for people to inhabit. They are a sign of the game’s aspiration to make a space that could be real, that could function in the real world.

• Metal Slug 6 (Bootleg of Metal Slug 3)
  • daphaknee: my favorite thing about metal slug 3 is that there was a version of it at an arcade cab in sunnyvale golfland called METAL SLUG 6 (metal slug 6 wasnt out yet) and the only thing they changed was that EVERYTHING, including the bosses died in one hit

• Resident Evil 4
  • tibyz: this is a good example of “body awareness simulator” to me. basically every action you do in the game is connected to some kind of sistematized ritual you go through over and over again at varying speeds

• Game Boy Camera
  • yarusenai: the game boy camera was the first truly accessible digital camera, and as someone for whom a primary motivation is the accessibility of both experiencing and creating art, it would take a lot to beat that. […] a heartfelt device meant to spread the joy of photography […]

• Sky Odyssey
  • yarusenai: i was reading wind, sand and stars by antoine de saint-exupery earlier today. it’s a memoir regarding his work as a pilot for an airmail company in the 1920s/30s. i stopped after only 20 pages or so because the visual imagery was too strong and beautiful for me to take very much of in one sitting.
    
    Thus, when Mermoz first crossed the South Atlantic in a hydroplane, as day was dying he ran foul of the Black Hole region, off Africa. Straight ahead of him were the tails of tornadoes rising minute by minute gradually higher, rising as a wall is built; and then the night came down upon these preliminaries and swallowed them up; and when, an hour later, he slipped under the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom.
    Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Swollen at their tops, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea. Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, circling round those giant pillars in which there must have rumbled the upsurge of the sea, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight toward the exit from the temple. And this spectacle was so overwhelming that only after he had got through the Black Hole did Mermoz awaken to the fact that he had not been afraid.
    
    another passage, regarding losing their bearings and going way off course, burning through their fuel and desperately trying to figure out where to land:
    
    But the airports one by one had been waking each other up. Into our dialogue broke the voices of Agadir, Casablanca, Dakar. The radio stations at each of these towns had warned the airports and the ports had flashed the news to our comrades. Bit by bit they were gathering round us as round a sick-bed. Vain warmth, but human warmth after all. Helpless concern, but affectionate at any rate.
    And suddenly into this conclave burst Toulouse, the headquarters of the Line three thousand miles away, worried along with the rest. Toulouse broke in without a word of greeting, simply to say sharply: “Your reserve tanks bigger than standard. You have two hours fuel left. Proceed to Cisneros.”
    
    it reminded me vividly of sky odyssey, one of my favorite video games (i recently passed along my english copy on here). immediately after reading that second passage i quoted, i put the book down and ordered a copy of sky odyssey of my japanese ps2.
    sky odyssey is so wonderful to me because it takes place in a small group of islands with isolated human settlements and remnants of ancient and abandoned human settlements. the terrain is very dramatic and riddled with canyons, caves, waterfalls, mountains, and all sorts of interesting things. there’s even a level that reminds me slightly of the first passage i quoted .
    obviously the game takes a lot of liberties with both geography and physics, but just reading a bit of st-exupery’s book made it clear that in some ways it’s not extremely far from the reality of what many people experienced. and what they experienced is so temporal, borne of not only their own lives but also the state the world was in during their life. no one will ever again have the experience of flying mail from france to south america, operating with only your visuals and manual instrumentation, carrying the thoughts and feelings and ideas of hundreds of people in your cargo and passing through a world above the clouds that very few humans had experienced at that point in time. even if you retraced the route in a similar aircraft, everything from the regulations to the scenery would be so, so different in 2016 than it was in 1930.
    and, just as an example, the first quoted passage is something i would love to have experienced. and i can’t. but maybe i can get a taste of it.
    fortunately, memories can be preserved and shared. obviously writing is one of the biggest ways – it’s how i learned about mermoz’s experience and how i’m sharing my thoughts on it with you. it can also be passed along visually – although it wouldn’t have been possible with the technology of the time, the experience can be preserved in a photograph. and there is nothing stopping anyone at any point from drawing, painting, etc. a picture or pictures of the experience, whether it’s the person who experienced it themselves or someone hearing about it.

• Metal Gear Solid 2
  • parker: what are the more open worlds of later metal gears when they are empty of anything close to experiencing the colonel breaking down and telling you to turn off the game console at 2am after playing the game all damn day other than a short interruption where your friends brought over their just newly released “the fast and the furious” dvd? what are more tools to play with (when it’s all just more ways to incapacitate enemies anyway), when instead you could be having your girlfriend constantly calling you in the middle of your special operations mission trying to get you to open up emotionally?
    metal gear solid 3 is such a boring safe choice they added a third person camera, aka “the coward’s camera” to the game for all the safety sally’s. the beginning of the end continued in mgs4 moving the shooting controls to the shoulder buttons. and no later metal gears feature anything like a scene of two bro’s doing an elaborate bro handshake in one’s attempt to cheer the other up over incest.
    metal gear solid 2 was released november 2001, two months after 9/11 and nearly twenty years ago. you crash through half of lower manhattan in a giant ship and fight the former president (who wants to liberate the u.s. from the deep state and the 1%) in the middle of wall street atop federal hall (next to the trump building). earlier when you meet the current president of the united states he greets you by sexually assaulting you. a tyrannical synthetic consciousness has evolved from the primoridial soup of american patriotism itself and wants to control society and censor the internet to keep people from going insane from fake news and conspiracy theories. one characters every line of dialogue is just stating how much she wants to die. her devoted simp who follows her around saying “yass queen” is inexplicably a vampire. in the middle of a tragic death scene a man suddenly confesses to having had sex with his step mother. every facet of the game is a response to being a sequel to metal gear solid. the tanker section is setup as a traditional sequel might be only to “kill” the protagonist early on. the plant section is a complete artifice designed to evoke responses based on it’s similarities to the first game. the game suddenly replaces the familiar solid snake with a surprise effeminate protagonist who is an uncertain, emotionally deadened, videogame trained dupe who is gaslit so hard by his commanding officer he is only able to finally reassert his hold on reality and own identity many games later after repeatedly destroying his own body and becoming a high heeled death machine wandering the earth, waging a personal war against memes and imperialist intervention in africa and the middle east. this is the game of our age if there ever was one. there could never be anything like it again. and was there ever anything before where someone could look back at a single piece of media from 20 years prior and see how it so specifically laid the track to the present like we can mgs2 now? who knows what we’ll be seeing when looking back at it another twenty years from now
  • shelter: it’s a dubious honor but mgs2 is the first kojima game with a textually-confirmed gay couple (vamp and the marine commander lol). raiden is noteworthy for being the only male metal gear character explicitly designed for straight girls to objectify (as opposed to for hideo kojima the homosexual to objectify). emma emmerich is the only character in any videogame i have ever identified with. on the other hand, true metal gear fujoshis always pick the ugly grizzled old men from worse games to ship because we are intelligent and refined.
    regardless of actual yaoi content mgs2 is the sexiest, coziest, comfiest, most asmr-inducing game ever made and i love to rotate it in my mind. all that amniotic water and meticulous schematic structure and back-and-forth ritualistic progression and precision stealth and long dulcet-toned codec calls and luxurious sound design and slick flawlessly color graded surfaces and architecture. its tight constraints relative to the “open” later games squeeze the most out of kojima’s design vocabulary. mgs2 makes me want to fuck.

• Mirror's Edge
  • username: Mirror’s Edge is a tremendous game that 100% got its main mode and side modes crossed up. The main story mode is a bit of a mess with awful combat and challenges that rarely require too much of the frankly impressive set of moves you are given to traverse the world with. The time trials have zero combat and require you to fully embrace your abilities to truly excel there.
    Sure you can just jump over a high fence, but that requires climbing over the top bit which slows you down. You can also pull your legs up to jump over lower ones cleanly. You can also wall run beforehand and leap off at just the right moment to actually push off the top of the fence a bit and pick up momentum rather than lose it.
    The time trials also reveal how clever the level design can be as once you are forced to get to learn the intricacies of your moveset you notice all these random bits that exist that you can actually use to get through a section much quicker, and the 3 star time trial times often require you to get your pathing through an area as optimal as possible.

• Final Fantasy VI
  • Broco: I feel like talking a bit more about FFVI. Here is one angle that’s always been one of the main sources of my enthusiasm: how FFVI redefined the JRPG town.
    The original town formula of DQ1 is that towns were places to buy equipment, get hints about the next place to go, and above all they were havens where you could rest after a brutal, attritional march on the overworld. As JRPGs evolved their overworlds became easier and easier – and without the march, there can be no haven. With their key role stripped from them, towns turned from a relief into a chore. When I ran into one in most early 90s RPGs, my heart sank because it only meant 20 minutes of talking to every NPC to trigger the next story flag.
    FFVI was the first JRPG that fully internalized the “town problem” of the genre, its philosophy is: “all towns must crackle with tension and surprises”. Right away it announces this by having you attack the game’s first town Narshe as a mind-controlled member of the villain’s army, then sneak around its cave system to escape it.
    The next town you visit you end up sneaking around in in disguise. Later in the game there is the bandit town of Zozo where you walk up tenement staircases full of random battles in between talking to NPCs who constantly tell you lies. There is the sinister emperor’s capital where you are clearly invited on false pretenses and where you know the friendliness is skin-deep. And there is the seemingly normal town that suddenly triggers a timed “house is on fire, go in and rescue people and take sidepaths to gather treasure if you dare” event in the middle of it.
    And that first town, Narshe? You return to it twice: the first time, it is a friendly RPG town you can walk around and buy things in as usual – and paradoxically this is interesting because you remember all the doors you couldn’t open the first time. The second time, it is a desolate ghost town where everyone has perished save one Moogle you can recruit into your party.

• Yume Nikki
  • haley: if most video games are empowerment fantasies, i think horror games are disempowerment fantasies–genre staples like limited resources and enemies that need to be avoided rather than fought directly are about taking power away from the player. yume nikki relies on a different, more fundamental disempowerment, taking away the player’s ability to reason about the effects of their actions. in one of the first rooms you can access in the dream world, there are these weird purple drooling guys–you go up to one of them and hit the action button and a distorted version of its sprite appears in the background. did that do something? why is it a thing? it’s an unsettling interaction. if the game was any more of a game–say if it had battles or traditional puzzles scattered throughout like other rpg maker games–it would take away from this sense of unfamiliarity
    random events abound, which is another way YN takes away the player’s ability to reason about the world. the uboa event probably wouldn’t be nearly so iconic if not for having such a tiny chance of appearing. YN is completely unconcerned with whether its content is seen, which is why the famicom glitch event is triggered by an unmarked tile at the bottom of a massive empty dragon quest dungeon… 1/3 of the time. cracking open the game in rpg maker reveals many maps extend beyond what the player can see. everything contributes to this sense of a world that does not exist for the player’s sake and refuses to yield its mysteries; haunted software.
    there’s just enough of a “plot” to inspire imagination, i think. e.g. playing a shut-in girl and looking on at an inaccessible picnic of the hawkish girls who chase you around in your dreams communicates a lot with very little
    there are more games along these lines now (beyond the numerous YN fangames obviously)–i think PT is probably the most famous at this point? but YN was one of the first and it has its own distinct aesthetic of short ambient droning loops, parallaxing void instead of floors, use of ancient mesoamerican imagery, and all the weird locales like the stairs of rising hands or the docks maze or the pink sea or the drawn world or or or–anyway it is pretty singular to me. also it’s one of the coolest things anyone’s made with rpg maker

• Ico
  • shelter: i think holding hands is feminist

• Sonic Adventure
  • morkitten: if we’re voting on the basis of music Sonic Adventure wins this whole voting proccess by default and I’m not even talking about the deliciously cheesy vocal tracks. The whole soundtrack is incredible and immense. There are so many great tracks even dedicated to like, incredibly small scenes or events that didn’t need to rip so hard, but they do.
    Why did they record a minute and thirty banger when Big manages to hook a fish?? A push-and-pull event that lasts for maybe 20 seconds at most?? Why does it have to go so hard??
    Does anyone remember where this insanely cool track plays?? Apparently it plays for a 10-second cutscene. The whole soundtrack is extra like this.

• Chrono Trigger
  • Tuxedo: When I was 12 my brother in law downloaded a bunch of Snes roms for me and I went looking for some of those pixel art Mana-likes.
    Chrono Trigger clearly stood out; it looked, sounded and felt astounding in every way (Toriyama art aside) There was no French translation at the same time but I HAD TO play it, so I grabbed a French-English dictionary and went through the entire game checking the translation of every three words. Then I replayed a bunch of times until I didn’t need the dictionary, and eventually moved on to other English games.
    I learned English thanks to Chrono Trigger and this second language was like the #1 sellable thing I had for a while, without it I definitely wouldn’t be here today (neither in my life nor on this forum)

• Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
  • parker: blue lives don’t matter

The Nomination Thread

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Part 11

Part 12

Part 13

Part 14

Part 15

Part 16

Part 17

Part 18

Part 19

Part 20

Part 21

Part 22

Part 23

Part 24

One Game For SButt To Play - a thread directly inspired by the SB Top 64

The bracket

The actual Excel file of winners

The actual Excel file of nominations

A Backloggd list of nominations (some do not have entries on Backloggd, check the description)

A Backloggd list of winners