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I always enjoy the lists – I read every post in these threads – but I know not all of you are about reading. You’re about gaming! So this year I thought I’d provide an option for those of you who may wish to engage with a top ten in the most gamer fashion: blasting demons. If you’d like to instead play my goty list in Doom 2, here you go: https://github.com/RelaxOD/doomwads/blob/main/gotyrod.wad I’ve tested it with gzdoom and if you have issues I don’t know how to fix them and likely would forget to do so. If you would prefer to just read like normal rather than playing someone’s attempt to learn doom mapping over an afternoon, here’s the normal list. Honorable Mentions Live a Live – This is a great remaster and I think along with the SaGa remasters and various smaller indie titles is hopefully pushing back against the perception that a JRPG ‘should’ be a dozens-of-hours-long epic. Haunting Ground – I really liked this one. I think Hewie sort of represents an interesting friction you see games really trying because it’s ‘wrong’ to have part of your toolkit be at least somewhat unpredictable in responsiveness. Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak – I still love Rise and Sunbreak is more Rise, so it’s good. It’s also pretty backloaded on its new stuff and I think it’s a little sparse in the overall amount of added monsters. Powerwash Simulator – One of the chillest times you can have. Walkabout Minigolf VR – One of the strongest cases for VR I’ve encounter this is just a straight up nice time to play. Plus there is a course based on the Labyrinth and I can go wave my putter at Hoggle. Also it turns out golf balls are inherently desirable objects and I’m compelled to find them all. TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge – This is a great beat em up but I haven’t decided if it surpasses Turtles in Time yet, or if my nostalgia for the latter is too great for it to ever do so. Pokemon Scarlet – A nice time and probably the strongest Pokemon in a while but still pretty flawed, both in expected-from-Pokemon ways and new ones. Triangle Strategy – A very good SRPG and pretty replayable, for my taste it’s kept from greatness by not having quite the amount of toys to play with as something like FFT. Kathy Rain – This game is pretty charming but didn’t quite stick with me as strongly as some other adventure games I played this year. Slice and Dice – This has become my phone game of choice and it’s so packed with unlocks and alternate modes I don’t see that changing soon. 10: Brutal Orchestra I like the whole vibe of this game. The art and music are good, and it’s occasionally even kind of funny. What I like most about it though is that I’m complete rear end at it. This game is laser targeted at the exact ways I’m likely to make a mistake. It does a great job of running the ‘this seems like a bit much → oh I see → got this solved’ curve. It’s entered my rotation of regular roguelites for the foreseeable future. 9: The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow Folk horror is a lot of fun, and I appreciate that this game approaches it with a real slow burn. It’s very well paced as both a horror story and an adventure game. It speaks to a great degree of confidence that the large part of the game is getting to know the village and it’s people. The best praise I can give a game like this is that it feels like it could have been released either now or in the golden era of adventure games. 8: Kuon I’m glad I finally got around to playing this. It’s unfortunate that this game was so rare prior to emulation because it’s really good – I think it stands up with the best of survival horror from this era. It’s hard to pin down a specific thing because there are so many little details and small choices that come together to make it feel unique. To focus on a small one: You save points being rivers you send a small paper boat down is an incredibly good choice. Functionally this isn’t really different from a save point in RE or Silent Hill but they just feel better blended with the overall world and little bodies of water being your sanctuary juxtapose well against the supernatural corruption occurring in the story. 7: Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin I love Final Fantasy and Nioh so by extension I love this dumbass game. In spite of it being bloated with loot that takes forever to matter and being just actually ugly and hard to look at in a few places I had a great time with it. This game feels like a remaster of something released to appeal to the Xbox 360 market, but the designers just couldn’t make themselves make a game bland enough for that to work. With the class system and gear there is a lot of options to play with, though it’s a shame that so much of it is really only meaningful late-to-post game. The notable exception is making sure Jack always has a fedora on like a real gamer. 6: Half-Life: Alyx In previous lists I’ve mentioned that I was heavily raised on Half-Life and it’s various mods. Despite their best efforts the games remain very dear to me. Getting a new, real game in this setting is a delight on its own and getting to play through it in full-length VR is a treat. I’m fairly neutral on VR as a whole – I don’t think a lot of what is available is compelling outside of the initial ‘oh that’s neat’ factor – but this is an exception. I was ready for a Half-Life skinned VR ‘experience’ but this is just a high quality, full-fledged for real Half-Life game. I hope that this game implies that Valve intends to actually try and put out a game now and then because I would hate to be done playing Half-Life games. 5: Norco Norco is a great adventure game on its own merits but the thing that really grabbed me – and stuck with me well after I finished it – was the authenticity of how modern rural/small town life is depicted. I’ve not spent much time in the region shown but I have spent a lot of time in rural areas not too far away and the people and places just feel right. The way the sci-fi stuff has worked its way in around the more normal modern stuff is completely believable, a near-future that knows about driving past small bunches of old homes with satellite dishes attached. Norco also understands how often organizations/movements can be powered by sheer dweebery. 4: Signalis I’m a complete mark for the safe room-item box-limited inventory style of the classic Resident Evil games. The loop of exploration, resupply, organize is like catnip to me. Signalis nailing it while also being beautiful and very confident in its storytelling decisions is tailor-made to appeal to me. If I had to choose one thing I really enjoy it’s the use of radio throughout the game. To me, at least, radio is an inherently haunting medium and I feel that it’s leveraged strongly here. I rarely both to seek out interpretations of a game, especially just after it launches, but it was pretty fun to do with this one. 3: Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Xenoblade 3 feels like the final project all the previous Xenoblade games were rough drafts of. I like the entire series but none of them come together as well at this one does. The combat system feels less bloated while still retaining the series trend of maximalism and the job system is just more fun to engage with than the teambuilding systems present in the older games. The story and characters seem to just be overall stronger too, avoiding the pacing pitfalls and duds to a much greater degree than the previous games. 2: Elden Ring I didn’t really enjoy the direction of the previous two games out of From. Dark Souls 3 felt like it lacked confidence in being anything but a series of boss attack strings to memorize. Sekiro was honed to a ridiculous degree and worked much better as an overall game but didn’t land for me – I preferred more going on than the katana parry rhythm game. I was skeptical about Elden Ring leading up to its launch, waiting to see if they things I liked about the earlier From games was going to be out of focus again. The glut of options present in Souls games – the potential for playing many different builds – was always my favorite part and it’s back in full force here. The fact that it’s beautiful and a joy to poke around in is a bonus. It is essentially Dark Souls 2-2 and that’s what I’ve been wanting all along. 1: Return to Monkey Island When I was a little kid and we got our first pc, in the time before having a pc in your home was too common, my dad brought one home. He sprung for a CD-ROM drive which came with 3 games: Loom, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe(this game never worked,) and The Secret of Monkey Island. From there my dad and I would confer on a regular basis over dinner about puzzles and discoveries. This is, aside from the original DOOM, the only time he would ever care about a video game in a similar way to me. The next four games in the series would also connect to my relationships with family members in weird ways. I love the original game and the entire series. Yes, even Escape which I think has merits in spite of itself. So it’s impossible to untangle nostalgia from my feelings on this game and, to be honest, I don’t think it is even worth trying. The expectations for this game were daunting. It had to bring Monkey Island back after a decade of dormancy, address hanging threads from at least one previous game, manage nostalgia from people like me, and be an entertaining adventure game in its own right. And they nailed it – it somehow balances its own history and the things it wants to say itself perfectly. It’s both fresh and pleasantly nostalgic but in way that doesn’t feel like it would be alienating to new players. Also the art style and ending are good and only my foes disagree. I spent most of the year sure that Elden Ring would sit at the top but Return to Monkey Island made me happier than any other game this year.
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Dec 19, 2022 02:43
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"Wow, goons are still innovating best of lists" followed immediately by "I made my list as a doom wad" is just incredible.
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Dec 19, 2022 03:42
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Relax Or DIE posted:I always enjoy the lists – I read every post in these threads – but I know not all of you are about reading. You’re about gaming! So this year I thought I’d provide an option for those of you who may wish to engage with a top ten in the most gamer fashion: blasting demons. If you’d like to instead play my goty list in Doom 2, here you go: https://github.com/RelaxOD/doomwads/blob/main/gotyrod.wad Oh my god
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Dec 19, 2022 03:52
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He's not kidding, folks. Go play DOOM II for the Top 10 list of 2022 games.
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Dec 19, 2022 03:55
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Relax Or DIE posted:I always enjoy the lists – I read every post in these threads – but I know not all of you are about reading. You’re about gaming! So this year I thought I’d provide an option for those of you who may wish to engage with a top ten in the most gamer fashion: blasting demons. If you’d like to instead play my goty list in Doom 2, here you go: https://github.com/RelaxOD/doomwads/blob/main/gotyrod.wad This is incredible
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Dec 19, 2022 04:06
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Relax Or DIE posted:I always enjoy the lists – I read every post in these threads – but I know not all of you are about reading. You’re about gaming! So this year I thought I’d provide an option for those of you who may wish to engage with a top ten in the most gamer fashion: blasting demons. If you’d like to instead play my goty list in Doom 2, here you go: https://github.com/RelaxOD/doomwads/blob/main/gotyrod.wad Well good luck to whoever has to follow this up.
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Dec 19, 2022 04:11
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I'm glad I'm not the only one who adored the Haligtree generally and the city at the base especially. Even now the run from the first grace to the one behind the Princess Bride castle courtyard scene is something I'll do just for fun to try out new weapons or builds or to top off my runes without getting bored shooting the bird.
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Dec 19, 2022 04:37
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Wittgen posted:"Wow, goons are still innovating best of lists" followed immediately by "I made my list as a doom wad" is just incredible. Earlier today at the Relax Or DIE studios.... https://i.imgur.com/TiRjivM.mp4
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Dec 19, 2022 05:20
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Jerusalem posted:Earlier today at the Relax Or DIE studios....
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Dec 19, 2022 05:25
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Jerusalem posted:Earlier today at the Relax Or DIE studios.... lmao
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Dec 19, 2022 06:01
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Jerusalem posted:Earlier today at the Relax Or DIE studios....
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Dec 19, 2022 06:43
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oh my god everything that’s happening in this thread currently is perfect
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Dec 19, 2022 07:22
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Relax Or DIE posted:I always enjoy the lists – I read every post in these threads – but I know not all of you are about reading. You’re about gaming! So this year I thought I’d provide an option for those of you who may wish to engage with a top ten in the most gamer fashion: blasting demons. If you’d like to instead play my goty list in Doom 2, here you go: https://github.com/RelaxOD/doomwads/blob/main/gotyrod.wad What the gently caress is happening right now
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Dec 19, 2022 07:27
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You guys Relax says there is a secret Rarity room. Someone please find it and tell me what mean things he said about me
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Dec 19, 2022 07:27
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Oh man, I love these threads. Time for a lovely high-effort post! Honorable Mentions: Slice and Dice  Fantastic casual strategy game. You get five heroes, each of which has six possible moves per turn, represented by a D6. Different classes of heroes have different sides. Each turn of combat has you roll the dice up to three times, locking in moves and their targets, and everything plays out once moves are locked in. It's got some depth and some tactics to it, but super easy to pick up and explain, and a session usually finishes pretty quickly. Backpack Hero  Imagine a deck-building game like Slay the Spire, but instead of a deck of cards, it's a bunch of items that you have to fit Tetris-style into a backpack? Combat is literally clicking items in your pack to make attacks or build up defense points; some items care about where they are (e.g. a helmet gives extra defense if it's on top of armor, gloves want to be on the left or right sides), some weapons damage items next to them when swung, etc. It's still in active development, but it's got promise. Wolfstride  At its core, it's just a visual novel with some minigames, about a group of retired bank-robbers coming together to honor the dead by becoming... a professional mecha combat team. The writing is merely okay, but it gets carried by having a fully voiced cast (a rarity for indie VNs, especially with some of the high-profile VAs present), and the mech combat parts are actually pretty fun. DRAINUS  Terrible name aside, it's great that people still make shmups like this in 2022. --- The Actual Top Ten: 10: Heavenly Bodies  It's QWOP in space, with goals: Left/right thumbsticks waggle your arms around, LT/RT close or open left/right hands, and bumpers kick your legs. It's broken up into a few short-ish levels, each of which has a list of tasks to accomplish: wrenching on things, managing airlocks, unpacking things from crates, etc. You've got the usual physical comedy aspect of zero-G and lovely controls, bouncing off walls and flailing and looking for handholds and leverage points. Having short achievable goals to do ends up making it fun in small doses, instead of just feeling hard for challenge's sake alone. Fairly short for it's price -- finishing the main story on normal difficulty took ~8 hours -- but a lot of fun. 9: Metal: Hellsinger  Straightforward FPS rhythm game with a metal soundtrack -- firing guns on the beat deals more damage and earns you more points. If you like metal, this is an easy sell: Mikael Stanne, Tatiana Shmailyuk, and Serj Tankian growl at you while you blow things up. If metal isn't your thing, you might still like it; it's a lot like Bullets Per Minute, but with fixed levels and leaderboards instead of procgen content. The one caveat is that it's VERY short -- finishing all levels (both main and optional "Torment" side challenges) on the second highest difficulty took five hours. 8: Blasphemous  High-difficulty 2D Metroidvania with an extremely awesome but creepy pixel-art style summed up as "Spanish Roman Catholic Guilt: The Game." It's beautiful, and challenging but satisfying. The controls are polished, the bosses are hard but telegraphed and fair, and there's a ton of collectibles and other bits to do. ~25 hours for 100% completion. (FYI, if you picked this up after launch and haven't touched it since, consider trying it again with the new DLC, which adds new bosses, NG+ and an alternate True Ending. Also, a sequel is now in development for 2023.) 7: Deathloop  What if Dishonored had replayable levels and a meta-puzzle? Deathloop is "Groundshog Day" in the 1960s with more murder. Each day is split into morning/noon/afternoon/evening, and for each time period, you pick one of four locations to go to, each of which has varying content based on time of day and how far you've progressed in a metaplot. Your goal is to kill eight different people in a single day, and the bulk of the game is planning that out: through trial and error, figure out who is where during the day, and how you can encourage people to be in the same spot at the same time so you can kill several of them in one shot. It had a Souls-esque multiplayer component where other players invade your game as a competing time-looped character, trying to kill you (or at least prevent you from carrying out your murdered), but it didn't really work well. The single player content holds up though. 6: Cult of the Lamb  Pretty sure everyone's familiar with this one. It's a cartoony world inhabited by cute animals and insectoid eldritch gods who slaughter them. As the last living Lamb, you're given immortality by an Ancient Imprisoned God and tasked with creating a cult to gather power, defeat the lesser gods that wiped out your kind, and release your god from its prison. The game alternates between a small community sim (give your worshippers tasks to accomplish, keep them fed and happy, etc.) and a Binding-of-Isaac-like dungeon crawler. There's about 20 hours of decent game in here, a bit more if you're interested in grinding out all the "get everything unlocked" achievements. It's fun at first but wears out its welcome fast. (And TBH I don't think this game will age well. The Internet had a giggle at cute lambs murdering people and brainwashing followers into eating poop for a bit, but ultimately I suspect there are both better sims and better 2D brawlers out there. They made a really good attempt at merging the two, though, which is why I ranked this so highly.) 5: Ghostwire: Tokyo  A mysterious fog rolls into Shibuya, turning everyone it touches into spirits and leaving behind only piles of clothes. You play one of the few survivors, now sharing a body with a paranormal investigator, and try to find out what happened and combat hostile spirits now running wild around town. On one hand, this is your bog-standard Bethesda action-adventure collect-a-thon: run around a gigantic map, do a million sidequests, fight baddies, get bored about 40 hours in and make a beeline for the end of the story. The mostly magic-based combat is novel but not that good, and once you unlock a bow, you'll probably do 99% of your combat with that afterwards. On the other hand, it mixes in bits of horror, weirdness, and just generally nails a sense of alienation that's rare in this genre of game. The story and mood manages to carry what is mechanically a somewhat clunky game. (It feels like they made the bulk of the game in 2020, and then spent two years polishing the graphics, which are admittedly outstanding.) 4: Horizon: Forbidden West  Picks up where Horizon: Zero Dawn left off, with Aloy heading west in search of a backup for the GAIA artificial intelligence in the hopes that it might stave off a collapse of Earth's ecosystem. The story is considerably more competently portrayed this time around, even if it's partly spent establishing that Aloy is a gigantic dork that tries to do everything on her own. Overall it's a significant improvement on the first game. The combat has some highs and lows -- you've got a lot more strategic options to use, and the formula of "shoot armor plates / weapons off, plink at soft squishy weak spots" still works. But they've handled a power creep problem by adding a lot more enemy attacks that temporarily stun you, and being juggled for 5-6 seconds at a time can be really annoying. If you're the type of player who wanders around finding random poo poo to do, looting everything, and getting around to the plot when you're good and ready, it's got about 100 hours of content, and you'll be dramatically overpowered by the time you finally do the story missions. If you follow the missions more tightly, there's probably about 60 hours here, but some of the late-game fights might be frustratingly hard without top-tier gear. 3: TUNIC  Fantastic homage to Zelda, with a low-poly isometric visual style, and some beats from Souls games. The main gimmick is that as you play, you unlock pieces of the game manual (which looks like an NES game manual from the 80s); however, all the game content and all of the manual is in a made-up language, so you have to intuit directions and solve puzzles based on context. Often, you've got no idea what to do, and just wander around seeing what you can get access to and where you might find the next item. Some of the optional puzzles can be extremely obtuse, especially if you're going for the Golden Ending, and the final boss on the normal routes is impressively hard. Some of the combat in general needs good reflexes. But I still strongly recommend it, just for the experience of exploring a weird space and being entirely adrift in the environment. 2: Pokemon Legends: Arceus  I've been playing this stupid series since you shoved it into the back of a grubby gray Game Boy, and I honestly thought I was done with Pokemon games in general after Sword/Shield. But Arceus honestly managed to breathe some life into what felt like a stale property, enough for me to go full Living Pokedex on it. The graphics aren't great, but they get the job done, and the gameplay is surprisingly polished. About my only complaint was the sheer amount of running around needed, up until you get the ability to fly. 1: Vampire Survivors  For starting out as a $3 kusoge with reused Castlevania sprites, this has probably been my most revisited and frequently played game this year. Sure, I've probably sunk more hours into H:FW or Destiny 2 -- but VS has been the "put on Youtube and brainfart and throw bibles at enemies and watch numbers go up" game that's delivered the most bang for buck of any game on this list. It's not demanding, it's simple, it's fun. And, to be honest, it's basically kickstarted a genre. There's a ton of successors now -- Rogue:Genesia, Brotato, Spellbook Demonslayers, etc. -- that suggest that they've actually found a novel space in gaming to be explored, rather than being just a one-off great game.
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Dec 19, 2022 07:35
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someone tell me how to play a doom wad
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Dec 19, 2022 08:47
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Relax Or DIE posted:I always enjoy the lists – I read every post in these threads – but I know not all of you are about reading. You’re about gaming! So this year I thought I’d provide an option for those of you who may wish to engage with a top ten in the most gamer fashion: blasting demons. If you’d like to instead play my goty list in Doom 2, here you go: https://github.com/RelaxOD/doomwads/blob/main/gotyrod.wad Holy poo poo GOTY thread never fails to deliver
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Dec 19, 2022 09:02
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Metis of the Hallway posted:someone tell me how to play a doom wad I'm hoping someone will do a Let's Play 
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Dec 19, 2022 09:08
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Does this mean someone can now put a goty list in their goty list?
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Dec 19, 2022 09:15
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Metis of the Hallway posted:Does this mean someone can now put a goty list in their goty list? gotyception 
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Dec 19, 2022 09:30
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Honorable Mention: Coral Island Coral Island is an early access Stardew-clone (yes I know Stardew is itself a Harvest Moon clone, but the Stardew-clone is its own beast) with a lot of promise. It looks great, plays great, has some great environmental themes and features a lot of Indonesian cultural influence. I’m super excited for whenever it releases! 10. Lacuna Lacuna is a compact cyberpunk detective game that punches above its weight. The mystery is a straightforward murder spiralling into interplanetary conspiracy. The real beauty of this game is the way it handles deduction: it provides all the data points, then allows you to make your conclusions based on the evidence you have gathered. The story reacts depending on how good a job you do as a detective. Jump to early conclusions based on insufficient evidence, and you could easily plunge the solar system into war. Sometimes there is a correct answer, but sometimes your choice is a matter of personal ethics. I took a chance on Lacuna based on its appealing pixel graphics and a very attractive sale price, and it really paid off. An absolute hidden gem. 9. Pokemon Violet  I don't know why the multiplayer sandwich making minigame works like this but it's incredible Honestly, I was planning to skip this generation. I like pokemon, but I’m not crazy about it, and a game has to look pretty good for me to buy it at launch for full price. But then I found a deal for $20 off, and well, I can’t pass up a bargain! And thank goodness I did, because this is the most fun I’ve had with a pokemon game since I was a little kid heading to Johto with a level 99 Quilava and nothing else in my team. The performance varies from poor to outright terrible, but zooming around on my big dragon friend collecting monsters and helping out my friends more than makes up for it (though in an ideal world, we’d have both). It has the best writing, both for plot and characters, of any pokemon game in my recollection, although the gym leaders are probably the most lacking of all the characters. A flawed but very fun experience. I even ended up basically playing it twice after I accidentally deleted my save transferring to a new switch! 8. Night in the Woods.  I’ll be honest, I played this right at the start of the year and I can’t really remember much of it but I do remember really enjoying it. Here is the single sentence I wrote in my document for keeping track of games I play each year (very sporadically updated): quote:good. Makes me wanna cry. Too real. Mae is so annoying in such a great way. There you have it. 7. No Man’s Sky  one of my cool ships Why, it’s another open world game widely criticised at launch for lack of features! Is this a theme for my list this year? (No.) I spent a good month of my life this year going crazy over this game. Fixing up my ship… Building a base… Flying to new planets… Trading in for a bigger and cooler ship… Learning languages… Buying an even bigger and even cooler ship… Travelling to new galaxies… Getting a GIANT ship for FREE and then learning I could have gotten an EVEN MORE GIANT one if I had rejected that offer, but learning to live with my decisions… This game really has it all! Then I kinda burned out on it and started seeing how repetitive a lot of the procedural generation is. Still! Space is cool! 6. Rune Factory 5  A game marred by serious performance issues – wait hang on did I seriously make this an unintentional theme? Do I just love games with terrible launches? I need to reflect. Anyway, Rune Factory 5 is a game about farming, beating up monsters, and marrying an insane succubus. RF4 remains the peak of the series, and the transition to 3D was pretty rough for this one, but as with pokemon, for me, the formula just works! 5. Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes  me when I see Dorothea Arnault in Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes I’m a big Fire Emblem fan, and Three Houses is up there with my favourites in the series, so I was extremely excited at the announcement of this Warriors spin-off with an alternate universe spin on the story of Three Houses. I’m no expert on Warriors games, but the button-mashing combat is clean and simple fun. None of the three routes have anything approaching a satisfying conclusion to their stories, but the character writing was excellent and I ate up all the expanded background and politics of Fòdlan. It’s pinpointed at people who are already fans of Three Houses and wouldn’t work for anyone unfamiliar with it, but that just means it was perfect for me! 4. Triangle Strategy  my screenshot folder for this game is almost entirely conversations between the gay general and the gay princess It’s really important that you know that after you beat this game, the menu music changes to an orchestral theme with a woman dramatically singing “TRIANGLE STRATEGY”. I’m listening to it right now as I write this entry. There is no more glorious reward for finishing a game, and I hope it convinces you to give TrianStrat (as the true fans call it) a chance, even if nothing else does. I don’t think I need to write anything else, frankly. 3. Sable  Sable is the story of a young girl participating in her post-apocalyptic desert society’s coming of age ceremony called ‘The Gliding,’ in which she travels across the desert on her hoverbike, solving problems for various communities along the way and ultimately choosing what path she wishes to take in life. To sum it up in crass pop-culture terms, Sable is Breath of the Wild’s exploration meets Star Wars desert planets. There’s no antagonist, no end of the world scenario to prevent; Sable is a journey of discovery that will have you delighting in simple beauty. It’s an utterly gorgeous game, and if anyone reading this list were to take only one recommendation away, I would want it to be this one. 2. Pentiment  sorry just needed to brag about how good i am at cutting out cookies In Pentiment, the 16th century journeyman artist Andreas Maler finds himself investigating the murder of a noble in a Bavarian abbey – and much more besides. Comparing Pentiment and Lacuna is an interesting exercise. Both games allow you to gather evidence and come to your own conclusions, then let you live with the consequences. In Lacuna, however, you will eventually find enough evidence to bring you to the correct answer if you just look long and carefully enough, but Pentiment is not so kind, forcing you to accept your lingering doubts. The questions are thornier, and though the stakes are lower (interplanetary war vs a single life) they feel far more pressing due to the excellent writing. None of this is to say Lacuna is a badly written game; Pentiment is just in an entirely different league. The community of Tassing is written with such care and depth. You truly get the sense that all these characters have their own inner lives; indeed reading the thread for Pentiment after playing through will show you just how much more of each character you may have missed. The game brought me almost to tears seeing how the people of Tassing changed over the course of the story. Pentiment is an entirely unique experience as a video game and I hope to see more writing of its calibre in the future. 1. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles  The first half of the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles ranked first on my list last year and I enjoyed it so much I endeavoured to stretch the second half out over as much of this year as possible. Being able to dip back into the story of Ryunosuke Naruhodo and his companions throughout the year made me enjoy the game even more, since it’s a very wordy game and reading on my switch for long periods of time makes my eyes hurt. TGAA is Ace Attorney at its absolute best, veering from slapstick comedy to moving tragedy at the drop of a hat. Although I adore the cast of the original series, Ryunosuke and Susato immediately became my favourite attorney and assistant, with very little competition. The story came to a strong conclusion, and I’m sad to say goodbye to my 2022 tradition of picking up the game to play a half hour at a time. I’ll end my list with a question: Is there a more perfect character in gaming than Susato Mikotoba? Short form: 1. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles 2. Pentiment 3. Sable 4. Triangle Strategy 5. Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes 6. Rune Factory 5 7. No Man's Sky 8. Night in the Woods 9. Pokemon Violet 10. Lacuna
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Dec 19, 2022 11:27
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Rarity posted:You guys Relax says there is a secret Rarity room. Someone please find it and tell me what mean things he said about me  secret room found.
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Dec 19, 2022 12:11
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An Actual Princess posted:
GOTY OF THE YEAR
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Dec 19, 2022 12:19
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Thread over, this is the true GOTY
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Dec 19, 2022 12:24
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An Actual Princess posted:
HOLY loving poo poo  Metis, what did you play Sable on? The only reason I haven’t started it yet is because I understand they still haven’t fixed the performance issues on console.
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Dec 19, 2022 12:43
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An Actual Princess posted:
Oh my loving god
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Dec 19, 2022 13:09
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It's giving serial killer's love shrine
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Dec 19, 2022 13:12
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An Actual Princess posted:
 God bless this thread.
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Dec 19, 2022 13:18
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morally, the Ace Attorney trilogy is compilation of games so to be consistent I'm going to need you to pick one game from it to give your point to. If I don't hear from you it's going to the first one
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Dec 19, 2022 18:14
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The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is two games, do we need to redo the 2021 thread
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Dec 19, 2022 18:18
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First came out in the West as a double pack so it's fine, we had this exact conversation last year
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Dec 19, 2022 18:21
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seems pointless to try and make people split up a game that has only existed outside of japan as a single title
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Dec 19, 2022 18:22
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I assume both Pokémon games get counted together?
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Dec 19, 2022 19:00
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Also the nature of the Great Ace Attorney games as essentially two parts of one story.
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Dec 19, 2022 19:31
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Regy Rusty posted:I assume both Pokémon games get counted together? Yes I'm not an animal
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Dec 19, 2022 19:35
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They’re called Pokémon LegendsArceus and ScarletViolet right
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Dec 19, 2022 19:36
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My list 1. Fortnite No-Build 2. Elden Ring 3. Vampire Survivors 4. Horizon Zero Dawn 2 That is it. Bless video games
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Dec 19, 2022 19:53
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Escobarbarian posted:Metis, what did you play Sable on? The only reason I haven’t started it yet is because I understand they still haven’t fixed the performance issues on console. I'm not Metis but on PS5 it's a bit glitchy. Pretty often my character and nav wheel disappear when traveling long distances and don't reappear until I get off the bike. The fishing minigame also barely work and locks up the game half the time. Performance is OK, I don't think it's sticking to 30 but there's also no combat or danger so I don't mind it much
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Dec 19, 2022 19:59
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Captain Invictus posted:I'm currently running 1.18.1, before the deep dark was added(which apparently sucks from what I hear about people interacting with Wardens) This is excellent, thanks!!
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Dec 19, 2022 20:15
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Didn't play as many games as I'd like this year, so I'm going to do a top five, plus a bunch of runners-up in no particular order. First, the runners-up. These are all games I played, enjoyed, and would recommend, but don't have such strong feelings about that I want to put in the mental energy to rank them. - Subnautica Below Zero and Axiom Verge were both solid sequels that did not quite rise to the heights of their predecessors. - Hardspace Shipbreaker runs out of new things to show you before it runs out of storyline, and it felt like there was missed opportunity for more variety in ship designs (especially small ships), but dismantling starships and shoving them into the furnace is still a nice relaxing way to pass the time. - Apotheosis X is a fun and stylish Marathon campaign that, like all Marathon projects, is somewhat undermined by the jankiness of the Aleph One engine, especially when compared side to side with gzDoom. - Cloudpunk is a...dystopian parcel delivery simulator? Good writing, gameplay could get a bit monotonous. Now the actual top five. 5. Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun I was initially wary of this because it cites Commandos as an inspiration, and I absolutely hated Commandos. But I got it for free and decided to try it out and it ended up being one of my favourite games of the year, completely redeeming the "real-time stealth tactics" genre for me. A lot of this, I think, comes down to careful level design; you can usually pick one character to address the challenge at hand and park the others somewhere hidden and out of the way, and the moments that require simultaneous action let you queue up an action for each character and execute them at the press of a button -- which has some limitations and is not as flexible as active pause, but it's adequate. The game also expects and indeed encourages you to lean on the quicksave, repeatedly testing and refining each move until you pull it off perfectly, which is good because there are a lot of ways for things to go wrong. I do think I enjoyed the midgame most, where the levels are complicated enough to require serious thought and gradual unpeeling but still have some margin for error; the last two levels I felt were a bit harsh. 4. The Void Rains Upon Her Heart This is a perennial favourite even though it's not finished yet. A roguelite shmup about depression, social anxiety, and hugging monsters, it's a game I never would have tried if someone hadn't gifted it to me and I'm so glad they did. If you're not an experienced shmupper it makes for a very gentle introduction, and if you are you can crank the difficulty up very high. This is probably going to be in my top five every year until it's finished and I finally complete all the story branches -- which, considering how much the dev feature creeps, may not be until 2025. 3. Ashes trilogy (Ashes 2063, Dead Man Walking, and Ashes Afterglow) This is two and a half games of rock solid post-apocalyptic FPSing in the gzDoom engine. There are some RPG-y bits, especially in Afterglow -- wandering around town, buying ammo and upgrades, chatting with people -- but overall it still owes more to Doom than to STALKER and you will spend a lot of time tearing around ruined cities and overgrown subway systems shooting raiders and mutants in the face, with occasional spooky interludes and mellow downtime. It won two Cacowards -- one for the Afterglow campaign and one for the soundtrack -- and richly deserved both of them. 2. Hedon Bloodrite My other gzDoom-based fave from this year, it was a really close call between Ashes and this. The gunfeel is exquisite, the levels are visually and technically stunning and, especially in the second episode, owe much to Looking Glass's sprawling, nonlinear work in Ultima Underworld and Thief, and while I found the OST more of a mixed bag there are some absolute bangers in there, including some tracks from Alexander Brandon, the composer for Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex. My biggest gripe with it is that some of the later levels (Paradise Lost in particular, with its multiple interconnected levels and many widely scattered objectives) suffer a bit from figuring out where that thing you saw half an hour ago and now need to backtrack to is; being able to leave notes on the map would, I think, entirely solve this issue but gzDoom is, sadly, not up to the task. 1. Vision Soft Reset  I am a sucker for both metroidvanias and games that do cool things with time travel. Timespinner and Touhou Luna Nights both had a go at this, the former with macro-level Chrono Trigger/Oracle of Ages style "switch between past, present, and future to solve puzzles" and the latter with micro-level slow, stop, and rewind powers that are used to excellent effect to deal with both enemies and environmental hazards. Comparing them to Vision Soft Reset, however, is like comparing an LED flashlight to a fusion bomb. The basic premise is that your character can see the future. On the micro level, this means you can see ghosts of incoming threats before they actually appear, leading a very stylish combat flow where you are dodging attacks before they actually manifest. On the macro level, this means that whenever you load an earlier save file, the save you were just on retroactively becomes "a vision of a possible future", and while the physical state of the world -- doors, switches, enemies, etc -- gets reset to where it was when you made the save, your character's mental state -- including map completion, access codes, and suit abilities -- does not, allowing you to learn things in the future and use them in the past. The game gradually accumulates a tree of all the saves you've made, allowing you to rapidly flit back and forth between possible timelines, exploring potential outcomes of different actions and bringing knowledge gained in one into others. It's a very short game, but it's also a master class in how to integrate time travel fuckery into your game at a fundamental level and easily my favourite game of the year.
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