Jeff Gerstmann's NES ranking project - where he plays a handful of NES titles for a half-hour to an hour or so each in an effort to work his way through the entire library and rank it based on his experiences - has been a highlight of my week ever since he launched it a few years ago. It's brought a spotlight to underappreciated or to-me unknown games and has inspired me to try out, replay, or put a mental "to do" stamp next to several titles. It's also been neat to go to the various reaction threads post-episode and read everyone's takes on or memories of a given title. (If you're new to it, this fan page, which features an up-to-date ranked list complete with links to each ranked game's segment, might be of more use than Gerstmann's playlists.)
I should note that Gerstmann's opinion, though he's well-played and usually an interesting listen, had little to do with my choices. Sometimes it helps: I really enjoyed the proto-emoji match-three or four or six or seven unlicensed puzzle game Krazy Kreatures, which offers friendly visuals and demands a satisfying level of quick thinking and which Jeff liked as well. It can be tough to know how a puzzle game handles without hands-on experience, so personal impressions are a big boost there. But one of the other games I played to completion, for example, was LJN's Jaws, a sea-themed shoot-'em-up with a friendly aesthetic. It has dumb, Atari-level score attack-ish gameplay but breaks it up into bite-sized chunks with level-by-level objectives and a simple power-up system. Runs amount to a comfortable 30 minutes or so, and the dang thing can be completed, capped off with a smile-you-SOB confrontation, which gives a feeling of satisfaction. It's extremely simple, and Jeff ranked it as appropriately middling, but it shows how very primitive gameplay can be more enjoyable married to fun graphics and mechanics just a little further up the evolutionary ladder. It's the type of curiosity that's not remarkable enough to merit extended conversation or accolades but which might pique your interest for a few painless runs if, say, someone's playing it for a ranking project.
Seeing some titles again sparks personal memories that prompt reexploration - such as Mickey Mousecapade, one of those games, like Rygar and Wizards & Warriors, that everyone on the playground just knew for no discernible reason and that enjoyed a healthy life on the rental circuit despite lacking a point of marketability (Mickey Mouse didn't have widespread popularity in the 80s). I wanted to put it to bed again to see if there were anything to the damn thing after all these years (no, not really). Sometimes I want to try out a title for myself that Jeff seems to have given short shrift, such as the action RPG Conquest of the Crystal Palace, which looks polished and seems to have a good deal of thought behind its mechanics and friendly, Clash at Demonhead-ish visuals - and, well, this very post was spun off of a forthcoming write-up of my feelings on replaying Final Fantasy after Gerstmann panned it to hype up his own childhood favorite of Dragon Warrior. The upshot is: I've been using Jeff's project from a variety of avenues to discover titles I would like to play myself, and to seek out opinions and memories from other players, not just Jeff.
My experience doesn't seem to be typical, though. Ranking projects like this used to refer to their results glibly as "scientific," and while that used to be understood commonly as a joke - since, you know, rankings are by definition opinions and therefore inherently unscientific - both the rankers and their audiences seem to have come to take this label seriously. For example, I remember one YouTube commenter on the Little Nemo ep lamenting that since Jeff didn't like the game, his own experience was considerably dimmed, with another commiserating about having the blindfold of nostalgia (any positive feelings about a game from one's own past experience are inevitably labeled as "nostalgia") lifted and seeing the light of objective truth that was Jeff's indisputably-correct opinion. That was an early ep, and this has problem only gotten worse with time: on both the subreddit and the ResetEra thread, most of the personal takes and memories I mentioned enjoying have been crowded out with tired jokes bleating the "science!" meme and rigid insistence that Jeff's experience is the only valid one.
(An aside: People in hobbies such as gaming are extraordinarily bad in noting when a joke has run its course. Most seem convinced that if it's the 512th time a joke has been made, that just means it's 512 times as funny.)
Part of this attitude, I think, is just audience identification with the streamer's opinion. Identifying with and agreeing with a streamer's frustrations in playing a title, or championing the things they champion, is considered a basic show of support - just common courtesy. It's born of a pure feeling, the desire to support someone whom you like and who entertains you, but I don't think it's wholly healthy (you can enjoy somebody's content and not agree with every single thing they say, you know - and you're not obliged to give voice to every point of disagreement). Plus, it seems to be carried to an extreme nowadays: to take watching the streamer's experience of the game as equal to hands-on experience, to defer to the streamer to a degree that their experience is taken as the only experience. Obviously, you can learn a good deal about a game by watching it, and as observed here, most if not all of us have titles out of which we've gotten a great deal of enjoyment solely through LPs and such. There are many ways of enjoying a game - watching tournaments or challenges, chat votes on in-game decisions, watching others (be it chat or streamer) react to the developments of a familiar title - that can be had only secondhand. I think it's also good to keep in mind, though, that in most cases, watching isn't a 1:1 substitute for playing and engaging with a game yourself, and engaging with a title yourself, with an open mind, can also be valuable. (I am again reminded of the Obscuritory article on the trouble with getting people to attempt to engage with games on their own terms instead of automatically engaging on them with contempt and as fodder, prima facie ludicrous and contemptible, for derisive incredulous react material. Unfortunately, I'm not finding the exact story I recall, but this article, and this linked story by game dev Nathalie Lawson, cover some of the points.)
Another part of it, I think, is particular to the current moment, where it seems more common to equate having tastes or opinions that are different from those of one's friends with insulting them. It's a particular danger with Gerstmann's project, as the diehards who populate the discussions of material from Giant Bomb alumni are particularly strident in this mindset. (Frankly, it was encouraged by Giant Bomb in its dying days, when the personalities were on edge from numerous, then-unvoiced offscreen stresses and would take it out on the fans, who then would blame the negative among them for their heroes' irritation and encourage lockstep fealty. It wouldn't help, since the real problems were offscreen, but it led to a vicious cycle of blame, where more and more fans were driven away by imagined slights and failure to adhere to impossible behavior standards until only those diehards were left.) For example: How many Mega Man 2 vs. 3 forum battles have you read in your lifetime? Well, read this: perhaps the first message board discussion of the topic ever in which most everyone pretends that no one likes 3, that everyone hates it and it's never had any supporters ever. This is all because Jeff believes that no Mega Man games at all - in the original series, the X series, the portable titles - should have been made after Mega Man 2.
I seem excessively negative toward Gerstmann's project and the attitudes of absolute correctness I perceive, I suppose. I do think it's been a net positive. I also think, though, that it'd be better if more viewers were open to playing the games themselves rather than parroting "science!" memes.
