Welcome back to our Best Year in Gaming March Madness bracket competition! On Saturday we finished off our Sweet Sixteen, and now it’s on to the Elite Eight, with two more matchups today before we head into our final four. Yesterday we watched helplessly as 2004 pounded the crap out of 1991. Meanwhile on the other side, 1997 handily sailed past 2002, showing off that yep, our Patrons are just a bunch of PlayStation mall goth weebs voting for big swords and brooding, blonde-haired anime boys.
Today we’re on the Western half of our conferences with another pair of matchups.
1993 vs. 1998
Today we’re headed back to the Western Conferences for our final matchups of the Elite Eight. It’s a tough set of matchups today to narrow things down. Let’s dive into them.
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On the other side, you have Magic: the Gathering, the first and still arguably the greatest, collectible card game of all time. On top of that you can add a stellar slate of 16-bit releases, including Secret of Mana, Star Fox, Virtual Fighter, Mortal Kombat, plus the second edition of Warhammer 40,000, which really turned the game into the more army-based wargame we all play today. Third edition might have been better, but it was built on the bedrock of second edition.
1995 vs. 2011
In a large upset, 1995 took down 2023 in the Sweet 16 round of our competition, either signaling that 2023 was overrated or, more likely, that everyone in the Goonhammer Patron Discord is of the specific age to think that the best years of gaming were all between 1991 and 1999. Much to think about.
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1995 continued to push past strong competition to make the Elite Eight, thanks to the strength of some of the best SNES games ever made (Chrono Trigger, Seiken Densetsu 3, Yoshi’s Island), some strong early PC releases (WarCraft and Command and Conquer combined to basically create the modern RTS genre), and both Necromunda and Settlers of Catan on the tabletop. On the other side, 2011 has Dark Souls, and while it has a number of other strong games it’s basically coasting right now on the sheer volume of FromSoft perverts who are single-game voters. Yes, there were some other good games that year, like Skyrim, Portal, and Dead Space 2. No, they don’t really matter to the Dark Souls crew.
