After much deliberation and talking amongst ourselves, the JIG collective has come up with its picks for the Best of Casual Gameplay 2006 and published the results, along with the voting results from you. It wasn't easy, and we did the best we could considering there were more games reviewed here last year than any one person could have played.
If you think you could have done better, then we want to hear from you. This site has experienced tremendous growth in its few short years of life, and it will require the help of a community of casual game players and reviewers to keep it going. I simply cannot do it alone.
So, my sincere thanks go out to each and every person that contributed to the site in 2006, whether by review, comment, or donation. Everything counts in large amounts.
Let's make 2007 another year to remember. =)
ARC and Tri-Arachnid were bad choices in my opinion, which meshes with the fact that they also received the least votes from the readership. The latter is particularly baffling, as its control scheme was innovative but miserable to actually use.
I agreed with most of the choices although, as the previous commenter said, I strongly disagreed with Tri-Arachnid. It was a really promising concept that simply wasn't done very well. Thanks for choosing one of my reviews as a winner, I really appreciated that (not that it had anything to do with me).
Is there any chance of pitting all 'User's Choice' winners against one another to get an ultimate JIG game of 2006, as in previous years?
Overall well chosen games but I have a few points to make:
1) agreeing with both Wulfo and Brandon i didn;t like ARC or Tri-Arachnid. I thought they were nice ideas, but just didn't work out.
2)Carrying on from point one, even though both those games scored the lowest votes you still picked them? why? I wouldn't think you would but the term "set-up" comes to mind.
3)Why didn't you pick the game with the highest votes? (This is not a critism, as with some games i can see why you did it, im just curious)
4)I agree with Wulfo in that it would be cool to have "THE ULTIMATE JIG GAME OF 2006!"
Sorry if you now hate me. I think you've done a great job, i just wanted to make my points made. Hope i didn't over-do it.
theprogram00
Selecting the "best" games is highly subjective. There will always be those that disagree. As I mentioned above, it was a difficult process because there were so many games reviewed last year.
We selected the winners with sound reasoning and without ever looking at the voting results. We believe it's best that way.
Popularity contests do not always yield the best candidate, and it shouldn't be about which game can get the most people to vote for it anyways.
wow, noone liked tri-achnid? that game was awsome!
to me, it was very unique. the three-legged character was hard, but fun to master, and i found the web-building very fun. it was entertaining to FINNALLY figure out just how to complete each lvl.
i would enjoy more lvls and/or minigames in this game!
Ruka K. hits on much of why I liked Tri-Achnid, even though it was somewhat a pain to play with my touchpad. For those who got past the odd, new control method, the game was an unique joy. Moving this delicate, young spider(ish) creature through alien levels was an involving experience. The sound sealed the deal.
On the other hand, for the Simple Idea category, I personally enjoyed Nest of Moai most. Its personality and "one more time" gameplay sucked me in (even though it was also not a good touchpad-user game). With that category, since the games are simply one basic idea, many of them will be hit or miss for people.
Oh and, theprogram00, no one here would hate you for expressing you opinions in such a manner :D Critique and praise are welcome here!
Where I disagreed with Jay (hate to say it, but I did):
Music: I voted for Sound Factory. It had everything A Break in the Road did, and more. It also had a more entertaining setting.
Platform: I voted for Fancy Pants because I happen to like Sonic-style games. Tri-Achnid had an interesting concept, but it ran slowly for me and was hard to control.
Simple Idea: Double Wires. It's a cool physics game, and ARC is definitely not an excting game.
Tactical: I voted for Combat Heaven. It really belongs in the Action category, but it was too good to pass up. Dice wars is still fun, though.
Note: None of this is intended to mean that the other games are bad. I just happened to like these games more.
can I just ask what the point was with us voting if you didn't even take that into account? I spent ages going through the process of voting and am a bit peed off that it was a complete waste of time!
EvilWumpus - it wasn't just me, it was a collective effort. There were some categories that I did not even contribute to because I had not played every game.
racci - was it really a waste of time? Your votes are displayed on every page and they provide noteworthy information for comparison to our choices.
I like Tri-Achnid, actually... although the movement was tricky to figure out at first, once I did it wasn't too terribly difficult. Although perhaps the fact that I refuse to use a touchpad on my laptop influences this. The movement challenge actually helped make the game more interesting, I thought, and as Ruka said, finally figuring out each level was great. I adored FancyPants and Mission in Snowdriftland too, though, which made it a difficult choice for me... I don't remember which one I picked... I like platform games.
man, I'm very happy that WaDF made it to the best of downloads, and the people who voted thought the same so it's cool. Kdice and Dice Wars are nice too.
Don't know what else to say! :P >_
wow...thought there'd be more love for Triglav. I don't generally like the RPG genre and I think I still ended up playing that one the most of any of the jayisgames games this year. (The 2 dice war games may give it a run for its money). Ah well...I liked it at least. (Didn't quite make it to level 50 though...think I got in the 40s somewhere)
Not a big fan of award shows, so the whole trying to force a square peg into a round hole for certain categories and only having 4-6 options wasn't quite as enjoyable for me as going through the entire list and checking 10 boxes as in years past. I'm sure the growth of the site has sort of necessitated the switch as it's probably less feasible to keep doing the giant list as a lot more games get featured...and hell it's nice to try something different occassionally, but it was a bit more burdensome to navigate through the nominees this way...with no guarantee a particular game would be an option to vote on. Just my $.02.
Still, I appreciate the effort all the JIG folks put in... I thought it was another great year of locating and reviewing high quality games, and I'm looking forward to what this year brings. Thanks again.
I agree with onyxw... I'd much rather have seen the full list of games broken up by category, and the readers' votes determine the best games. With the staff only letting us vote on some games, and then the "wrong" games winning (based on votes only), this was very anticlimactic.
HOWEVER, still love the site, and love you guys. Just some constructive feedback for 2007's round up.
I'm just wondering if the games that were submitted around December 2006 would be nominated for Best Games of 2007?
PS: Although I might have some disagreements with the voting, I did get to play some games that I didn't even see before! So cheers! <33
Another wonderful year with JIG! Thank you Jay, for the opportunity to voice our opinions on this year's best. I really enjoyed having an extra reason to play the games, and compare similar games to one another. I also enjoyed going back and playing the games that won after the votes were in, to see if I'd missed something. Hours and hours of fun! Thanks everyone at JIG for putting it together, and Kudos to all the game designers!
Thank you very much, java junco! Your kind and thoughtful comment is very much appreciated. =D
TTF - yes, anything posted that was too late to consider for Best of 2006 will be included in the Best of 2007.
possible solution:
make a second award, differentiate it from the editors' choice best-of awards, and give it to the games with the highest votes from readers.
also, i was actually pretty surprised that the readers' votes didn't turn out to be what determined the winners.
No one should be surprised as we clearly stated what we were doing and that it was different from previous years.
Popular voting becomes a contest more about who can get the word out to the most people to go and vote for his/her game than about what should actually win based on critical analysis.
I am very pleased with the way things turned out this year, and we will do it again this way for the Best of 2007.
maybe i'm an optimist, but the readers' picks seemed to make sense, without any ballot-stuffing or whatever.
and even having read that, it wasn't an unreasonable assumption.
I have tried for days to access the Results using the click link but to no avail. It just gives me the blank lovely blue wallpaper jay uses as a background and nothing else. Anyone else with this problem?
me - What click link? There is no click link in the blog post above. Here is the URL to the Best of 2006 feature article...
https://jayisgames.com/bestof/2006/best_of_casual_gameplay.php
If you are still unable to view that page, would you please let me know what OS and browser you are using? I am not aware of any problems on that page whatsoever. Cheers!
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