Colossal Game Adventure: February 2026 Nominations Topic
We are up for another round of nominations for Colossal Game Adventure, Tildes' very own retro video game club!
These nominations will form the ballot for the next round of voting, in which will we choose the next SIX games to play after March's Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls).
Nominations for CGA do not start fresh each time. We rollover the top 50% of nominations from the previous round, and we decay their vote totals by 30%. So, many of the previously nominated games are still eligible to win in the upcoming voting.
Procedural Details
Nominations will be open for 48 hours from the time of this posting.
Anyone can nominate. You do not have to have previously taken part in CGA in order to participate.
Anyone nominating in this topic will be added to the CGA notification list if they're not already on there (unless you request otherwise).
There is no hard definition for "retro." Choose whatever you feel fits that label.
Games that have been nominated in the past but were cut are still eligible for nomination again. They do not get "locked out" of CGA.
Voting will follow in a separate topic, and I will also be trying out a "lobbying" topic this time around to see how that goes. More on that in the comments.
Nomination Process
Everyone has the ability to take one (and ONLY one) official action for the nominations topic.
EITHER: Boost a rolled-over title.
This will add 3 points to the title's rollover points from the previous round.
You will also be able to add points to the game during the voting round.
The purpose of this is to limit new nominations if there are games already in the list that strongly interest you.
OR: Nominate a new title.
This will add a new game/arcade special to the ballot.
An arcade special is a group of shorter/smaller games meant to be played together.
Any new title starts at 0 points.
Nomination Formatting
Please do the following:
Bold your action (boosting/nominating).
If nominating, please link to your title on MobyGames. (You do not need to do this for boosting since the links are already in the list.)
Examples:
Boosting a game:
- Boost: Lode Runner
Nominating a game:
- Nomination: Portal 2
Nominating an Arcade Special:
- Nomination: Windows in the 90s
Minesweeper
Chip's Challenge
JezzBall
It is recommended (but not required) that you share why you are nominating/boosting a particular game as well.
Rollover Titles
| Game | Rollover Votes |
|---|---|
| Arcade Special: Back in a Flash Bloons Tower Defense Line Rider Motherload QWOP Stick RPG |
22 |
| Sid Meier’s Pirates | 21 |
| Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow | 20 |
| Another World | 19 |
| Metroid Prime | 19 |
| Descent | 18 |
| Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals | 17 |
| StarTropics | 15 |
| Arcade Special: Behind the Wheel Lego Island Rally-X Sega Rally Championship |
15 |
| Crystalis | 15 |
| The Colonel’s Bequest | 15 |
| Threads of Fate | 15 |
| Beneath a Steel Sky | 15 |
| Metroid | 14 |
| Arcade Special: Scroll Lock-on Einhander Ikaruga Paradroid Raid on Bungeling Bay Thunder Force IV |
14 |
| Tetris | 13 |
| Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist | 13 |
| Tony Hawk’s Pro-Skater 2 | 13 |
| JSRF: Jet Set Radio Future | 12 |
| Lode Runner | 12 |
| Arcade Special: The Grue That Binds Border Zone Twisted! Zork |
12 |
| The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past | 12 |
CGA Announcement: The nominations topic for the next 6 months is now up. Please read the topic text to see how it will work.
I specifically limited options this time around because I feel like last time we got a little flooded. I think focusing our efforts a bit more is a step in the right direction. Hopefully this isn't TOO limiting, but if it turns out that it is, we can always swing the pendulum back in the other direction.
I'm also going to use this topic to talk about some potential changes I'd like feedback on. Let me know your thoughts.
Change #1: Moving the Remove Cartridge topic from the 20th to the 28th.
The 20th has felt pretty early to me, month after month. I originally set that date to give a longer runway for conversation and to separate it a bit from the Tildes Book Club discussions.
There's not a lot of overlap in participation between CGA and Book Club, so the latter feels like a non-issue. Also, 10-11 days (for most months) feels like TOO much runway for discussion. I'm thinking it's better if we push it back.
The only month this really crunches is February. I originally didn't want the Remove Cartridge topic to step on the next month's Insert Cartridge topic, but now that we've done several months of this, I feel like the two can coexist pretty easily.
Change #2: Adding a "Lobbying" topic prior to voting.
Once all the nominations are available and boosted points have been tallied, I think it would be a good idea to have a short topic where people can really sell other people on choices and lobby for their favorites.
It doesn't work well in the voting topic itself because comments like that get relegated to replies (because we have to keep the top level comments clean for the script). Also, doing full lobbying within the nominations topic can feel a little early since it's not entirely clear what all the choices would be.
I know I personally edited my final vote probably five or six times last time simply because I kept getting swayed by other people, so I think having a designated space to talk it out beforehand is good. I also think this gives a better chance to smaller, lesser known games. Someone passionate about one can really sell everyone on it.
My current thought on the rotation would be:
Anyway, let me know if you have strong feelings on these. Also, feel free to use this comment as a place for any meta discussion about CGA itself: feedback, ideals, celebrations, frustrations, etc.
Notification List
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If you would like to be added or removed from the Notification List, please PM u/kfwyre.
I agree with moving the Remove Cartridge topic, sometimes it definitely feels too early while other times it feels late. Depends on the game's length, really. Maybe we can have February's on the 25th though? (Also, we should probably make sure February has short games with super easy setup in the future.)
Thanks again for taking the time to organise all this, @kfwyre!
I love the idea of a lobbying topic. But I do wonder, are 48 hours and 24 hours enough for topics? Can or should we assume that everyone who is interested will visit Tildes that frequently? I myself don't typically check the website daily. Sometimes less than once a week. But maybe I'm an outlier.
My brain is a bit scattered right now, so the text of this topic is not processing for me.
However, I just wanted to say thanks for putting all this work in on the CGA @kfwyre. I haven't been a great participant, playing all the games, but really only making decent progress in two of them, but I've been looking forward to the new games every month and at the very least giving them a try and reading others thoughts and opinions on them.
Thanks!
Also, the tl;dr for this topic is:
Either add 3 points to a game already on the list.
Or nominate something new.
That's it!
Nomination: Red Dead Redemption
I got to thinking about the first RDR after this recent post about RDR2. I hadn't played it in over a decade, if the timestamp on my last save file is to be believed. Honestly it's held up very well. Mechanically it's simpler than RDR2, but that game is so... much... that it's kind of refreshing not to have to manage everything. It's gorgeous for its age, with fantastic art direction and sound design. The voice acting and mocap are top-notch too. I think John Marston is a more likeable protagonist than Arthur Morgan. The ludonarrative dissonance is still an issue — you're slaughtering people by the hundreds while carrying on like an upstanding do-gooder (if you choose the Honor path). Still a great game. I love all the side content like the stranger quests, the treasure maps, liar's dice, horse races, and so on.
Feedback on proposed changes:
Change #1: I support the date change. Removing the cartridge so early in the month felt weird to me, so doing it on the 28th feels better. Maybe a couple days before that in February, but we've already done it this month so that's a year away before becoming relevant again.
Change #2: I like the idea of a lobbying round. I'm not convinced it would be materially different from just voting, but I'm down to try it! It might help mitigate some of the first-mover advantage that nominations posted earlier in the thread have. (I assume that's a real problem/imbalance, but haven't actually looked into it to confirm.)
Boost - Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Between the very recent death of Shutaro Ida and the announcement of a new Castlevania, what better time? To me it's the cleanest entry of the Metroidvania series style - learning up lessons from SotN in a pocket-friendly format, but never missing an opportunity to make a lofty castle with a slew of customization. Secrets around every corner, excellent bosses, propped up by a dream team of IGA, Ayami Kojima, and Michiru Yamane putting out some of their best work.
Nomination: Maniac Mansion
Was going to boost Another World, but it has a lot of points already so I figured might as well drop this nomination. Might be more fun to save Maniac Mansion for closer to Halloween though. Also, it might be good to use as part of an Arcade Special since it can apparently be completed in about 5 hours.
Speaking of Arcade Specials, should we talk about potential combinations? What should be the criteria for an arcade special? Should we have some way to suggest whether a nomination—whether a new one or one of the roll overs—should be added to an Arcade Special?
I feel like some games are short enough to merit being combined with other games. At the very least, Tetris can easily be tacked onto something else. Another World, which I plan to lobby for, might be another good one to combine with something else since How Long to Beat says it can be beat in 2 and a half hours. Looking it up, I beat it in just under 2 hours, but I did use a guide because there's a good bit of backtracking and trial and error.
It may also be a good idea to have some alternative to games with more tricky setups, like Racing Lagoon this month needing to have an English patch. And the extra steps needed to setup CD ROMs compared to Nintendo ROMs... And also the gameplay being 30+ hours... Yeah, it probably shouldn't have been the February game.
Actually, that gives me a thought: what if some months have the option to "revisit" games? Have a short game as the main game of the month, and then have a previous game as an alternative option. E.g. Another World, and Racing Lagoon. Might be better to consider and try it in the third round when there have been more games played, but just putting it out there.
Nomination: The Genesis of Treasure
Gunstar Heroes
McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure
Dynamite Headdy
Alien Soldier
Light Crusader
My pick for the nomination thread would be the strong lineup of Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games developed by Treasure, a studio formed by ex-Konami staff who left to escape the company's creative restrictions. Their early work set a new standard for inventive, high-energy gameplay that still feels fresh and challenging today. Honestly, it's easy to imagine PlatinumGames following a similar path if they'd existed in the 90s or early 00s.
Getting into Treasure's early catalog isn't hard at all. Every one of their international releases is on a single platform, and running them doesn't take much effort or hardware. If you've got the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack or the (now-delisted) Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics collection, you can access almost their entire lineup, except for McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure and the Japan-only Yu Yu Hakusho Makyou Touitsusen.
That's the origin story of Treasure in a nutshell. I'll be posting previews for each of their five Genesis titles in the lobbying thread soon!
Nomination: Space Rogue
I will tell you why in the lobbying topic. But in short: it's a major game that was highly rated at the time of its release and sits at an interesting juncture in the history of space sim gaming, yet is largely forgotten now.