DKC2 for me. Such a great sequel.

I think we all know which game will take this. It's way too long since I played Chrono Trigger, not really sure how it ranks for me overall, but in 1995 it's on top.

1. Chrono Trigger
2. DKC2
3. Warcraft II

Suprised Suikoden didn't get a mention. I'm not a massive Suikoden fan or anything, but it would probably be my 4th pick.

OK, this is another really difficult year. I love Descent. As you said, the progenitor game of the 6 Degrees of Freedom genre and a great game in itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuMBYZrcQfU

But I also love Star Wars: Dark Forces, which is probably my most beloved FPS of all time. Another LucasArts game, which were really gaming masters back in the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgF9-C-hsL4

When we have games you forgot to list. Like Jagged Alliance. There was a third entry this year by the way. But I still love the original. It is turn-based strategy, but each mercenary has gotten a strong personality... very strong. Some dislike each other so much, they might shoot at each other instead of the enemy. So you should really read the file on each hire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Acro82SEdI

And finally we have the first entry in the Worms series. Again this is like Scorched Earth, but adds some quirky character in form of the worms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5o4ReqhcaY

Really hard choice, I love all four games. I go with Jagged Alliance here, because it is an outrage you didn't even list it.

Chrono is going to win by a landslide.

Man, I was thinking of choosing the "other" option for the first time and having to explain my choice as maybe Air Combat or something else and THEN I saw Chrono Trigger listed and I was like "Oh, but of course!" lol

I can't wait for the upcoming years with all my favorite PlayStation heavy hitters!

Chrono Trigger going to win this one I am fairly certain and I can appreciate how great a game it is but for what ever reason it never found a place in my heart like many other RPGs. I can objectively understand why it consider one of the greatest RPGs of all time but at the same time it just never been high in my personal favorite list.

Therefore my vote going to Other for first time as my pick of the year going too Suikoden which is a game that I am a huge fan of. I know I am probably going to stand alone in picking Suikoden over Chrono Trigger among people that choose RPGs but that my preference.

Outside those two Warcraft 2 I spent some hours on but I cant put it over those 2 RPGs, Descent was one of those games that at first wowed me but I grew board of it fairly quickly after that. Not really many other games from 1995 that stood out to me.

Worms was great. Loved that game.

Name a better theme song to the first level. One of the greatest games ever

Cultural Impact: I feel boring for picking Chrono Trigger, but I can't vote for anything else here. I mean this is great game selection filled with lots of brilliant titles, but one definitely stands out. Chrono Trigger offered such a flawless balance between freedom and plot structure, action and narrative consequence, strategy and fluidity, cartoonish fun and existential substance, and such careful attention to every audio-video detail, that its world feels alive in a way that's truly transporting and (ironically!) never seems to age. And Akira Toriyama's character designs? As far as I'm concerned, they're the best on the Super NES!

It may be worth adding that there's even a refreshing diversity of roles for the ladies to be found here compared to just about any other RPG out there at the time. When it comes to the girls / young women in your party, for example, you'll notice that they're not just characters who are built primarily for supporting roles as healers in battle, but also the likes of Ayla, known for her tremendous physical strength. You had a tech genius (Lucca) and one of gaming's downright coolest princess characters (Marle), rounding things out. It was refreshing! By that point in life I had started to notice those things. And frankly, the entire cast of characters, from Robo to Frog to the fact the game gives you a way to recruit Magus...it's just alchemy. It really is.

When I think of the term "RPG", Chrono Trigger is still one of the first games that comes to my mind. It's had that much of an impact.

Personal Faves: In addition to Chrono Trigger, I can't let this opportunity go without mentioning a couple of my personal favorites from this year that I fear would otherwise be missed.

First off, and this is completely a reflection of personal bias I recognize, but Chop Suey was a computer game that my first girlfriend gave to me for my 13th birthday that I still enjoy casual revisits to to this very day. It's an open-ended point-and-click game with no goals. It's just exploration and discovery for its own sake and it's pretty funny. The small town in this game kinda reminds me of the one I grew up and still reside in (minus the supernatural elements ). She said the two main characters, Lily and June Bugg, who explore the town in a mental haze after eating too much chop suey (hence the game's title) reminded her of us. Indeed their antics aren't too far off from things we might've done. Game's available online for free now here. And here's a "playthrough", which I have to put in quotations since the game doesn't actually have an end point.

And here is my favorite FMV game of the era, Solar Eclipse! Like I've said before, when I was first introduced to the concept of video games at a young age, my instinctive expectation had always been for them to be like a movie or a TV show you could interact with, to which end I'd initially been kind of disappointed by the technological limits of what was available. I always sort of retained a yearning for that type of experience though, to which end you won't be surprised to learn that I was initially a sucker for FMV games, including yep, Sewer Shark on the Sega CD, stuff like that. I was drawn to the concept until I experienced the execution anyway. The interactive movies available back then were just crap, like just in general. They were very lame B-movie material and the game play felt like a lazy tack-on nearly all the time rather than something narratively important. Wound up finding my "cinematic" gaming experiences in more conventional places back then instead (like certain RGPs and adventure games, for example). Solar Eclipse was the first big exception to that rule. This was an FMV game that had a real storyline and was also a full-fledged space rail-shooter much better than the likes of Star Fox whose game play turf it shared. Much of it feels like Star Fox but with real, adult human beings in place of anthropomorphic animals and it just felt cooler to me. Star Fox 2 may not have come out this year as promised, but hey, I got this instead! Here's the game that restored my faith in FMV games.

1995 I turned 21, 3rd year at university which I spend a lot in the computer room playing Frontier Elite First Encounters

It had interesting story lines to uncover next to the as always addictive trading game, working up to the big ships. Seamless landing and take off from planets never got old and thanks to time compression, just sitting on planets watching the sky change as in a time lapse video was magical. Also parking a ship in orbit, then accelerating time to see it circling around while all the planets move was amazing.
It had some funny glitches, auto pilot wasn't very smart and you could end up chasing a moon indefinitely as auto pilot just pointed the ship at the target, not on an interception course. And of course fighting in space with Newtonian physics just doesn't work. Realistic space fights have nothing to do with dog fighting and basically came down to pointing a beam laser at a target while they literally shoot by due to the speed difference.
But it was very cool to fly around space and to planets with real physics, using time compression instead of FTL, Supercruise or other physics breaking 'solutions' to enable space dog fighting. Of course hyper space jumps between solar systems were still in the game as the distances and theory of relativity are just too damn inconvenient to have any sort of interstellar travel without.

1995 also saw the start of the hugely popular Command & Conquer series.

The silly cut scenes is what made it so memorable, but that came with Red Alert in 1996 which pushed C&C to cult status.

I guess similar to Warcraft which become popular this year with Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.


1995 also birthed the Heroes of Might and Magic (spinoff) series, Civilization style turn based fantasy


1995 saw another amazing strategy game appearing with 1830

It was a faithful recreation of 1830 the board game, which is my all time favorite. I've played 1830 so much that no one wanted to play against me anymore. Naturally the game didn't stand a chance at the highest difficulty setting lol. I know all the moves in that game like a chess player. The limited inventory of tiles also being a part of the strategy. The PC game was so accurate we used it a couple times as an extra player or for keeping track of the money while playing the board game together. The PC getting an extra seat at the table to do all the menial counting tasks.

I actually didn't 'discover' this game until a few years later when I started making a PC version myself with a friend. We had the database all set up for 1830 and its sequels, board layouts and everything programmed in and were starting to work on the actual step by step game play. Then I saw it on the store shelves lol. It was only the first game (not the sequels) but was definitely discouraged from working on. The decision whether to continue was pre-empted by HDD failure, lost a ton including all my source code for 1830 :/


Adventure games kept going strong this year with Full Throttle


The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery


Phantasmagoria


The Journey Man Project 2: Buried in time

A great time travel adventure

and Discworld!!!

I loved this series. As a huge Terry Pratchet fan these adventures nailed the world building and humor. Discworld II released in '96 and Discworld Noir in '99, all great. Actually there was text adventure before these on the Spectrum, The colour of magic in 1986. I never played it.

Worms was a favorite back at home, My dad, sister and I played it every time we were all home

Just the perfect hot seat multiplayer game. I have played it with my kids as well, it's still just as fun!

Yet what made me turn my head and put Playstation on my mind was Wipeout

I didn't by a Playstation until a few years later, but it made get Wipeout for PC and instantly fell in love with the series. I won't vote for it yet because 2097 is my absolute favorite of the series thanks to the music track. I do hope PSVR2 gets a Wipeout version as well since the PSVR1 version was awesome.

However since 1995 is the actual year Descent released at retail, that gets my vote. It's one of my most replayed games. Yet it's a very hard choice between Descent and Frontier: First Encounters. Descent gets the nod as it has never crashed on my while I ran into a progression breaking repeating hard crash in First Encounters and was never able to complete one of the story lines I got invested in.