Controversial Rankings
TurokI hate the emphasis on platforming and triangle collecting in Turok. It is "lives" based game filled with instant death pits and enemies that re-spawn seconds after you kill them. This means that you are always reloading your game to conserve your lives and ammo least you get stuck in an unwinnable situation. The game may have some cool death animations but you can never waste time watching them, as said enemy will often quickly respawn and hit you during its respawn invincibility. Most of the late game guns take a long time to fire meaning that they are much less satisfying than the ones in Doom. The final nail in the coffin is the fact that half of the game is taken up with first person platforming above instant death pits which is often so difficult that you have to rely on looking at the map in order to make jumps. All in all, I find Turok to be a game that fails both at being a satisfying shooting game and a platforming game. It is an extremely frustrating game, the technical achievements of which were eclipsed by Goldeneye, only 3 months later. Wonder Project J2I do like visual novels, but this game is so linear that it is very dull to play, despite the beautiful graphics and music. Most of the time you are wandering around, reading the same dialog over and over trying to trigger the next story event. After spending over 13 hours muddling through the story I was overjoyed to play the awful golf game The Glory of Saint Andrews.
Mario Kart vs Diddy Kong RacingThe debate about which game is better has been raging ever since DKR was released. Personally I think that DKR is better than MK in just about every way (graphics, music, story mode, difficulty) aside from multiplayer. The deciding factor for me is MK's rubber banding. In DKR you will win if you drive the best. You feel this excellent sense of mastery by being able to pull far ahead from the other racers. I think this is a sign of a good racing game.
Banjo Kazooie vs Super Mario 64
Obviously there would be no Banjo without SM64, and the freedom and speed of movement in Mario is much greater. But in terms of gameplay variation, mission objectives, move set variation, stage design, music, story, character design and writing I find Banjo and far more entertaining game overall.