The winner of the 3D Years tournament is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time!

Second place goes to Super Mario 64 and third place goes to Half-Life.

Thanks for participating! The next tournament in February will cover the Millennial Years from 2000-2005, including the PS2, Gamecube, Xbox, Dreamcast and GBA.

Remasters, Remakes and Ports

Starting in this generation, remasters and remakes increasingly become a part of the video game landscape, so I thought it would be a good idea to talk about if we want any rules about them.

I was considering a rule that remasters, remakes and ports can only be nominated if they have some significant changes from the original game. This would allow games like Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, Persona 4 Golden, Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver, etc. but disallow things like Virtual Console ports. The downside to this is that nominations could be flooded or dominated by games that are more associated with previous generations, like Ocarina of Time 3D.

An alternate rule would be to disallow remakes and remasters entirely, but that could potentially cut out some significant games.

An alternate alternate rule would be to have no rule, allow everything, and let voting sort it out. Let me know what you think.

Pre-Eliminating Popular Games

Something that’s come up in nearly every round is the idea of eliminating “consensus” games from the tournament entirely, perhaps introducing them as a final bracket at the end. For example, in this round that would have involved removing Ocarina, SM64 and others from the tournament on the grounds that they are too popular and tend to stomp lesser known games.

I don’t want to do this, and I wanted to address why.

The primary reason is that all of these tournaments are run roughly the same way so we can compare the results and do a meta-tournament at the end. It wouldn’t make sense to remove popular games from upcoming tournaments when I happily allowed SMB3 to win the 8-bit tournament.

The second reason is that this is the first series of video game tournaments run on this site in particular. We don’t have prior results from this site to work from, so I’d have to eliminate the top games as decided by GameFAQs tournaments or something, and their taste does not necessarily match up. Case in point: Final Fantasy VII, which would almost certainly be considered a “consensus” game that should be removed, actually got kicked out before the quarterfinals in this tournament. I’m reluctant to make decisions about running this tournament based on other sites’ taste. Such a rule would make much more sense if we decided to run these tournaments a second time.

Finally, I, personally, think it doesn’t accomplish all that much to pre-eliminate popular games. It’s intended to be a fun popularity contest, not a real survey of the greatest games of all time. If your favorite PC game gets stomped by Zelda, it doesn’t mean your game is bad, it probably just means less people played it and you get to be a Gaming Hipster. I understand, some of my all-time favorites have barely even made it out of nominations, and that’s going to happen even more in the upcoming years. Please keep writing posts about the games you love, though, even if they don’t have a chance; that’s the best part of running these tournaments 😀