Best of the Best

Man, that was a fun martial arts movie…
Anyway.
Perverse Access Memory: WISH 99: Best Genre RPGs

Pick three to five genres and name the best RPG for that genre. Why do you think it?s the best? What makes it better than others? What are its downsides?

Supers
…by which I mean spandex and speeches. Honestly, I’m not sure I can speak with any kind of authority on this anymore. I played alot of Champions in college. BESM has alot of the same flexibility of character design with fewer of the built-in design flaws, so that’s probably the current ‘winner by default’, though I wouldn’t want to run it. I’d really like to check out MURPG — it looks very cool.
Sci-fi
I rilly rilly liked the ‘d20’ (not the current d20, but the GDW d20 system) version of Traveller. I’m going to have to say West End’s d6 Star Wars system, though. Great game.
General Occult Weirdness
It think you could take Unknown Armies and use it for just about anything in this genre. I also think that providing players with a concrete list of skills and available obsessions and so forth that ‘fit’ the specific sub-genre you’re aiming for would help tremendously in making the character’s feel more like custom-fits instead of Gurps adaptations.
That said, for certain kinds of stories, either Sorcerer or InSpectres (depending on the story) will take Unknown Armies out back and beat it like a narc at a biker rally.
Fantasy
Hmm. Depends on the specific sub-genre. For sword-and-sorcery in the Conan vein I’d take Sorcerer in a flash. High Fantasy? Hmm. I think with the right group Donjon would be amazing, but that’s a heavy caveat. I honestly think HeroQuest might be the answer here.
Gods and Monsters
… by which I mean games like Amber and Nobilis and what-have-you. Right now, I’d have to say Nobilis has the best objective system, if not the most accessible setting. I’m currently working on something I might personally like better than that, though. We’ll see.
Thing I’d like to do:
After reading the example of character generation for a whole group in FATE, I’d like to see someone use it to do a good Dragaera game.