[BlyGilmore]

Hard to believe it has already been a year since the last time we were talking about matching up sports video game titles from today and yesteryear to see who would win bragging rights as the best ever.

For those of you who don’t remember, last year we pitted 64 video games head-to-head bracket style – letting members of the OS community vote on match-ups to decide which title would move onto the next round.

This year we’ll be following roughly the same format, with a few tweaks to hopefully produce some better results.

One big change we’ll be making is to eligibility for games. Any titles from the 2009, 2008 or 2007 season of video game will not be eligible for the tournament (games not using the year naming convention need to have been released before July 1, 2006 to be eligible). Similar to the Hall of Fame in most major sports, this allows the voters a chance to take a break from the game and really start to think about how it has held up over time.

Once we get closer to actually casting votes, OS will also be offering some guidance on the kinds of factors voters should be taking into consideration. This was requested last year by a number of members of the community and is something we hope makes the decision making process clearer.

How the brackets will be created is also going to change this year, based on the results of the last tournament.

First, last year’s champion NFL 2k5 is not eligible for the tournament. Starting next year we’ll be having a “Tournament of Champions” and crown a grand champion (it will be interesting to see how the champions hold up compared to each other over time).

Second, any games that meet the new eligibility requirement and won a match-up last year are automatically re-nominated for this year’s tournament. They will also be seeded according to their results last year (i.e. teams that made the final four will be one seeds), with last years seed being used as a tiebreaker.

The other seeds will be determined by this thread. If you have a game that was released before July 1, 2006 please make a post here nominating it for this year’s tournament. Games that lost last year are eligible to be nominated again this year, and you are free to nominate as many games as you’d like. The list of nominations will be then picked apart by the Operation Sports staff and brackets will be announced in a couple of weeks.