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a highland song definitely deserves more time than i put in it, it's a beautiful game with lots of cool little events to find, and trying to match map snippets to the geography of peaks you don't recognize is a really neat mechanic
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Dec 24, 2023 06:34
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Belgian Waffle posted:Well, I'll say the obvious thing that everyone else is saying: 2023 has been an insanely good year for gamers (I would say for all of gaming if not for all the layoffs). It's ridiculous! Where are the rest??
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Dec 24, 2023 06:47
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Ohh, A Highland Song is by the Heaven's Vault people? That's a must-play for me now.
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Dec 24, 2023 07:13
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:God, what a showdown. It shall be engraved upon your soul! The hardest thing was deciding where to place those two 
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Dec 24, 2023 07:54
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Hadlock posted:Where are the rest?? I'm currently typing out my #11 (New DLC dropped, so I had to play through that real quick) while guzzling a concoction of coca cola and coffee. Thank you for looking out, though. I appreciate it!
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Dec 24, 2023 08:20
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it's such a shame robot entertainment tried to pivot the orcs must die franchise into a moba with Unchained and failed spectacularly, leading to an underwhelming orcs must die 3 when they tried to pick up the pieces Unchained left them. I wish they'd just have kept Megamanning it and churning out near-identical sequels with slight improvements and additions each time instead, because the formula the first two games created was basically perfect for it.
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Dec 24, 2023 08:46
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Honestly next year might be even BETTER for JRPGs. FF7 Remake Part 2, Eiyuden Chronicles, Saga Emerald Beyond, Unicorn Overlord, Vision of Mana, the Suikoden 1+2 remaster, the Paper Mario Thousand Year Door Remake, Yakuza 8 and Metaphor Refantazio......I'm sure there will be some more that haven't even been announced yet!
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Dec 24, 2023 09:30
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fridge corn posted:The hardest thing was deciding where to place those two I mean, you chose wrong and I forgive you...but that's two hella great games in an epic face off and I really think your wonderful write-ups did them justice. Congrats on the year-long project, goon, you are legend.
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Dec 24, 2023 10:34
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TimberJoe posted:#1 – Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice this owns
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Dec 24, 2023 10:34
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buddychrist10 posted:Honestly next year might be even BETTER for JRPGs. FF7 Remake Part 2, Eiyuden Chronicles, Saga Emerald Beyond, Unicorn Overlord, Vision of Mana, the Suikoden 1+2 remaster, the Paper Mario Thousand Year Door Remake, Yakuza 8 and Metaphor Refantazio......I'm sure there will be some more that haven't even been announced yet! Granblue Fantasy Relink is also looking pretty good if you want more of an action bent on things.
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Dec 24, 2023 12:44
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Never done one of these before but every year I read everyone elses and wish I did. tldr list 1.Dwarf Fortress 2.RE4 Remake 3.Pizza Tower 4.Subnautica 5.FF7 Remake 6.Project Zomboid 7.Factorio 8.Zelda Tears of the Kingdom 9.Kirby and the forgotten land 10.Hitman Assassination Trilogy Honorable Mentions: Mario Wonder God I wanted to like this game a lot more than I did. Keep meaning to come back and finish it off, but I honestly don't know if I will. All the promise of a creative renaissance for 2d Mario has already been better achieved by Mario Maker 2 (and I am including the developer made levels). What we got here feels very unfocused to me. It does though have the biggest banger of all (mario game) time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_mpmH_bsT8 Mount and Blade: Warband: I got in to this very recently and really wanted to put it higher on my list as there are a lot of things about it that I love, perhaps it will appear on my list next year when I really have the chance to dick around. I have never played the vanilla game because I had already read about mods that sounded way more interesting, and I have only so far got around to playing one of them: Brytenwalda. The ost composer of Brytenwalda needs a loving medal for the dystopic and grim atmosphere that they have leant to this utterly bleak mod about real life english peasants. I also played mount and blade: Bannerlord because I got fomo and wanted to see if it added any depth to the core formula- so far my only takeaway is that it lacks all the atmosphere and soul of warband. Perhaps one day when the mods catch up I will be back. Pikmin 4: I really liked this game. I had only ever played the first, and from the short amount of Pikmin 3's demo that I played I found that it lacked the elegance and simplicity of the first game. In my mind the strength of the Pikmin idea is that it is a paired back RTS with a more naturalistic interface, and the more characters and doodads that are introduced, the further away from that initial idea it gets, and the more gamey it feels (and consequently the more I start to compare it to contemporaries in the genre[s... RTS and puzzle platformers I would say]). Saying that, once I learned to take it on its own terms I found Pikmin 4 to be a very moorish collectathon with some very lovely (if a little linear) level designs. Caves of Qud: This got put on my radar by the #1 in my list, and I have the feeling that it will perhaps appear very high on next years list once I get my teeth in to it (and once it reaches 1.0). As it is I have put only a few hours in and I have that feeling of really only scraping the surface of a particularly spicy meatball. The aesthetics and music alone are out of this world. I will be back. Baldurs Gate 3: Very conflicted feelings on this one. DOS2 is in my top 3 all time games and is, in my opinion stronger in every way possible. I am british and grew up with Warhammer(and WHFRP) as opposed to D&D and as such, as someone with zero nostalgia for the setting and rule system, it feels bloated and bland. DOS2's aesthetic and world took some getting used to, but it didn't take itself too seriously. The whole thing had a bit of a Terry Pratchett vibe to it which was very endearing. Each area felt like a puzzle box, coupled with incredible encounter design and a very expressive and deep combat system. Like when I think about other all timers for me, what they all have in common is that there are certain levels or sections that I think about often and that I know inside out- they feel like home, and I look forward to revisiting them again and again. DOS2's encounters all feel like that to me. So far in BG3 the whole thing feels too cinematic and, as such, less immersive. I like the feeling in DOS2 of playing around with this puzzle box, boardgame like system- in BG3 the whole thing feels more organic and modern. The combat/class system to me feels incredibly finicky and I am yet to find anything like the interesting synergies that I had going in DOS2- I mostly breeze through encounters using a mixture of basic attacks and actions, and the whole thing feels quite forgettable. I am willing to accept that I am playing it wrong, and am planning to start fresh next year and try to take it on it's own terms a bit more. [As a bonus complaint, I hate the 'horniness' of the game. It is pandering to a certain type of internet attention that will age like milk, and it also feels, dare I say, problematic. Like jeesus, my middle aged, fugly, gnarled halfling has hardly said a word to any of you and you are all looking to bang him on the first night we spend together. Not to be a party pooper but it just feels completely off given what is at stake]. and now my list: 10: HITMAN 3: This probably would be higher but i only just started playing it yesterday. I have had a few run ups on the post 2016 Hitmans back on the PS4 and it never really clicked because I played exclusively offline (personal brainworms about online locked content) and thus never experienced any progression. I liked the level design and atmosphere a lot, but it felt more like an adventure game to me, rather than the expressive sandbox everyone said it was. Now I am playing on PC and 1)my brainworms have subsided in recent years 2)I found out that I can just mod the game to include all the progression offline anyway. Now I see what everyone was raving about and I am having a loving blast- every time I am running through a level I am scheming about how I can approach it differently next time with all the knick knacks and doodads I am unlocking. I found perfect settings on the steamdeck too, and it feels really cool to pick up and play. 9: KIRBY AND THE FORGOTTEN LAND I had never played a Kirby game before but picked this up because I Mario 3d World is my favourite Mario game and the aesthetics looked fantastic. The game is piss easy but seeing what new thing each level had in store was a wonderful experience, and playing with different costume loadouts was really fun. The game also has a very charming level of jankiness to it, and is not afraid to get a bit weird! as mentioned, I never played a kirby game before and had, as such, never encountered the tradition of them having wild jrpg endings where you kill gods 8:ZELDA TEARS OF THE KINGDOM: I played breath of the wild but, tbh, never rated it much. I liked it well enough, and I liked how alive and interactive the game world felt, but I hated the lack of biomes/dungeons and in the end got bored of bonking goblins with fragile sticks! Picked TOTK up on a whim and woof- I don't think I have ever been so instantly taken by a game. It seemingly had everything that I was missing from the original with the addition of special abilities that felt actually fun to use, and less gimmicky than the original. I found the underground to be genuinely creepy, and the new enemy designs really fun. I weirdly dropped off almost as hard as I initially got sucked in- no specific reason though, and I am sure I will be back next year. 7:FACTORIO Another one that definitely deserves I higher spot, but with only around 15 hours of game time I have barely scratched the surface. Still I can already see that this is endlessly compelling, so much so in fact that this is the only game I have ever stopped myself playing because I was having too much fun. Seriously, I could feel myself looking into the void of addiction and nipped it in the bud. I will certainly give in at some point and am very much looking forward to doing so. Also worth mentioning is that this game looks and sounds wonderful- has all the charm from the golden age of pc gaming pixel graphics and a killer OST. 6:PROJECT ZOMBOID I am a massive Walking Dead fan (right up until it gets poo poo pretty sure this is objectively the infamous Negan main character culling scene) and have been looking for a game that gets across the similar feeling of scavenging around in the Zombie apocalypse. Everything else I have tried severely over complicates things with all kinds of special infected and other action gameplay systems etc, but Zomboid loving nails it. All the gameplay complexity is funnelled into detailed simulation and systems that lead to really interesting and expressive player decisions. Started playing this with an old friend this year and it is so much fun scrambling around making hair-brained schemes to try and get out of sticky situations. 5:FF7 REMAKE Not too much to say about this big dumb game. As a child of the 80's and 90's the original FF7 was a big one for me and this remake always felt completely pointless to me- the original is perfect as it is and its dumb graphics and prog/ post twin peaks midi score are all part of its 'more than a sum of its parts' magical equation. Eventually I caved after someone was singing its praises at a new years eve party of all places and I am glad I gave it a pop. I never clicked with the battle system but it was everything I want from a AAA experience- big and bombastic with a good momentum. It is 1 million percent not canon according to the only authority that matters, me :op. The scene where Aries and Tifa are escaping Don Corneos mansion to the ecstatic Eurotrance BANGER brings actual tears of joy to my eyes. Everyones best girls fighting nobley hand in hand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d9rSM79U3A 4:SUBNAUTICA I never finished this game, but only because I found it too scary. But up until I found it too scary it was one of the most magical experiences I have ever had in gaming. It really is one of those games that benefits from going in blind and figuring things out for yourself so I wont say much more apart from: if you have not played this yet and enjoy exploration and light survival mechanics then you should give this a try. 3:PIZZA TOWER Woof! This was not at all on my radar but I don't think I have instabought anything with quite so much force and speed as when I caught wind of it. 1) I am a massive Wario Land fan and just days before finding out about Pizza Tower, I was lamenting the lack of recent entries in the series. 2) The aesthetics speak to me very directly (I used to, in fact, be a visual artist and made artwork that looked very very similar). I grew up with the golden age of nicktoons and cartoon network and also the golden age of bullshit maskot platformers and Pizza Towers somehow takes the best bits from all of them. It is simultaneously the best Warioland/Sonic and Earthworm jim game as well as utilising countless aspects of other platformers to make something that is completely unique. The real master stroke here is taking health out of the equation and leaving up to the player how much they care about their score (saying that, the bosses had me saying A LOT of swear words). loving wonderful stuff, and one of those that I know I will come back to every year. 2:RE4 REMAKE A really rare example of an OG game studio who actually understands what is special about their IP. Seriously, compare this to how Konami treats their IP's and its loving laughable. I was one of the naysayers who thought this was a pointless exercise of gilding the lilly- but gently caress me, they pulled it off. The original is not my favourite Resident Evil, that honour goes to 2, but just like they managed with that entry they have created something which is objectively better in every way (apart from the unobjective ways reliant on nostalgia, which are arguably more important). I usually get put off by this level of difficulty but RE4 always felt fair and successfully kept me on the edge of my seat. 1:DWARF FORTRESS BUGGER me! I am sitting here writing this as a middle aged man, wearing a Dwarf Fortress hoodie customized with metal spikes that I bought from Fangamer, despite my wife loving hating it because it makes me look like, quote, a "topshop punk"- I don't care, even if I need to push away the only woman I have ever truly loved, it will be worth it because i simply must express how much this game means to me in the clothes I wear! What to even say about this game (is it even a game? YES!!!). I had always looked on from afar as people talk about all of its deep and impenetrable systems with intrigue, but, and I am not ashamed to admit it, I was put off by the graphics. Despite that, until about 3 years ago I was mostly a console gamer and was not yet accustomed to the pleasures of sandbox and other system heavy/ graphics light games. I played Xcom 2 back on the PS4 (and many times since on PC) and what I really loved about that game, as well as its wonderful tactical gameplay, was the emergent storytelling that occurred from having your own little crew of customizable guys interacting with the tensions of a solid set of mechanics. I spent quite a while searching for this feeling again before eventually stumbling across Kenshi and Rimworld. I had relatively brief, but intense (in the case of Kenshi I played for 6 hours straight and never again lol), affairs with both and loved the fact that this was the ONLY point of the game- these games are designed with emergent storytelling in mind, and all the interlocking systems exist exclusively to create interesting situations for your guys to come up against. This was right around the time of the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress and the wonderful new graphics persuaded me to give it a go. This game has ruined most games for me now (obviously not true when you look at the rest of my list, but you get the point) in that it has created an unreasonable expectation for a level of freedom that quite simply cannot be matched. The amount of depth in this game, and the way it reveals more and more of itself to you every time you explore a new one of its systems is staggering. I have played for many hours this year and i am loving terrible at it. I barely understand how the most basic systems work, and yet as I write this now my mind is racing with ideas for new fort gimmicks or engineering problems I want to get stuck in to. truly GOATED, and therefore deserving of #1 this year (and probably next year). If you have even the slightest bit of interest in DF and have been put off by people saying how hard it is to understand- do not loving listen. At its core, and certainly with the new tutorial/ UI improvements, it is a relatively simple game that only gets deeper when you want it to.
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Dec 24, 2023 13:44
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moosferatu posted:7. King's Quest 1
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Dec 24, 2023 14:03
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buddychrist10 posted:Honestly next year might be even BETTER for JRPGs. FF7 Remake Part 2, Eiyuden Chronicles, Saga Emerald Beyond, Unicorn Overlord, Vision of Mana, the Suikoden 1+2 remaster, the Paper Mario Thousand Year Door Remake, Yakuza 8 and Metaphor Refantazio......I'm sure there will be some more that haven't even been announced yet! Yeah seriously. I think my astrological calculations were a bit off
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Dec 24, 2023 14:04
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This year I’ve been finding that I appreciate games that simply have a definite ending and don’t feel the need to be my forever game, so while in past years my lists have usually been dominated by thing like MMOs and live service games this year I’m letting them take the back seat. I feel kinda bad that I don’t have pictures for every game on this list, but eh. Let’s start off with honourable mentions: Street Fighter 6: It’s a great game, I just wasn’t feeling in the mood for fighting games when it came out and I never got back to it. I do want to go back and complete World Tour mode at the very least. This isn’t the game’s fault, it’s a me problem. Sorry! Honkai Star Rail: Decently fun turn-based JRPG, but the way the writing quality took a dive a couple of patches into the game along with some real bad gacha luck meant that I quit a couple of months after release. Them’s the gacha breaks. World of Warcraft: Dragonflight: I got back into WoW with Dragonflight after hearing a lot of good about it on expansion launch, and I did in fact enjoy myself a lot. I went in with the mindset of comparing how stuff played differently between WoW and FF14, thanks to now being a veteran 14 player (the last time I had played WoW was before I started 14), and it’s interesting just how similar tanking felt between the two MMOs, to be honest. Unfortunately I flew too high too fast in terms of juggling alts because I wanted to try out as many tank classes as I could, and I burnt myself out a bit by the time the first major patch hit. Add on a new FF14 patch and I didn’t get back to it. Still, I heard it’s still doing pretty well in terms of improving QOL every patch, and I might come back to check things out in an expac or two. Stuff I own that I’ll get to in 2024: Chants of Sennar 13: Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker My forever MMO. This is low on my list not because I think the recently released content is bad or anything, it’s just that 2023 has probably been the year where I actually played a fuckton of single-player games and I want to give more focus to them on my list. What has been released this year has been pretty fun to clear, and the story’s been decent even though it leans very heavy on the FF4 references (one I haven’t really played myself), and I’m glad that there haven’t really been any real grindathons released because like I said, a lot of other games to play this year. Decent story, fun fights, great music, what more can someone ask for? 12: Old School Runescape Leagues Ok, so Runescape, that MMO that everyone loved in primary school. Old School’s a branch off a 2007 backup that’s been getting its own independent updates, and Leagues are a semi-regular 2-month long event that’s just about giving players what basically amounts to a legal private server. Crazy powerful buffs and increased experience/drop rates and a long checklist of tasks to complete for points were the perfect combination to keep my lizard brain thinking about this game that hit all my nostalgia points for a solid month straight before I burnt out. Getting levels I could never be arsed to get and fighting bosses I was never strong enough to in the main game was really fun and scratched all the itches. What a beautiful month of raw frenzied Skinner box munching. 11: Holocure I’ll be honest, I mostly checked this out because of the vtubers. It’s a fun (and most importantly, free) spin on the bullet heaven genre, and if I ever have 20 minutes to burn I might as well tear through an idol-themed stage while I’m at it. Character design in terms of gameplay is inspired with each character feeling distinct from every other even when they have similar theming, and the vast array of weapons and passive effects and how they combine and interact have been a joy to mess around with. There’s even a farming and fishing side game for when you’re feeling it. If you ever need to zone out to a sea of bullet effects and flashy colours for 20 minutes, this is the game for you. 10: Pokemon Radical Red  Pokemon, we all know it. I hadn’t played one in years and this year I had the sudden urge to try a Pokemon romhack, specifically one that was basically just a vanilla game but updated with new mons and mechanics (I really did not want to have to read the story and writing of non-vanilla romhacks). After some searching around looking for recommendations I decided to try out Pokemon Radical Red, a romhack of Fire Red that advertised itself as mostly a difficulty hack. For some added challenge I decided to only use mons that had my favourite type, Poison. And so began a harrowing journey of figuring out actual high level pokemon battle strats even on Easy mode. There’s a lot of quality of life additions to the romhack that let you skip the catching and grinding portions of your average pokemon game, which I wasn’t super invested in, and instead lets you fully engage with the battle system, which turned out to be really fun! A bunch of mons got rebalanced and it was really fun breaking out an old favourite of mine like Arbok and seeing it destroy a Deoxys in a boss battle. Pretty much every battle was a devious puzzle for me to figure out with my limited pieces thanks to my self-inflicted restriction, and it was cool to rotate mons in and out of my team to see what worked and what didn’t. My Nidoking, Crown, however, got to be Ol’ Reliable and pretty much never left, getting to show off just how much of a king he was by taking out legendaries left and right (did I mention that sometimes trainers just have legendaries for no reason?). What a workhorse. Here’s to you, Crown. I’m already pondering what type my next monotype run will be (probably Bug). I can highly recommend this romhack if anyone really wants to engage with the battle system of Pokemon. 9: Arknights Pretty much the only gacha game I’ve stuck with long term. A new year means a whole bunch of new events, most of which build on previous ones and which give new looks at this, what, 4 year old game’s huge cast of characters. Most of the year’s events have been pretty fun reads, but there’s one in particular that stood out to me (and not just because of its length because goddamn that was a long read): Lone Trail. The setting has never really been shy about mostly being expies of real-life countries, and the American equivalent in Columbia is no exception. Most events set in it have been somewhat-veiled looks at concepts that people like to associate with America a lot like for-profit prisons or the scientific establishment’s willingness to prey on the desperate poor. This event’s all about the relationship between science and the military-industrial complex, alongside a lot of questions about why people do science in the first place and what it’s worth in a world with much looser ethics than ours (or around the same, depending on who you ask), all wrapped up in a sublime NASA-chic retrofuturistic aesthetic. Kinda funny how in a year with Starfield I feel like a gacha game got that specific aesthetic down a lot better. The story itself was great, with great banter between the characters and actually touching moments as characters reflect on how science has affected their lives and motivations, for better or for worse, whether they were rescued walking superweapons born from the depths of scientific malpractice or whether they were one of the foremost geniuses of their generation who dreamt of touching the sky. The music is great, capturing the essence of the era by essentially crossing Interstellar’s soundtrack with some high-energy beats to get players going while figuring out the maps. The gameplay continues to be pretty fun, with every event introducing some (usually interesting to work with) gimmicks, never so hard as to require pulling out the credit card for the latest gacha hotness (hilariously a lot of the time the new banner character doesn’t work particularly well with the new event gimmicks) yet still enough for my brain to feel satisfied every time I clear a challenge map. 4 years in and I still think it’s probably one of the best gachas on the market if you’re into tower defense and a lot of reading. 8: Case of the Golden Idol I was gonna save this one for last year but I decided to try it out after I wrote up this list and was hooked. A very atmospheric artstyle and score, and some good brainteasers and puzzles that scratch my Obra Dinn itch. There's only one issue: it's too drat short. I finished it and the two DLCs in like, nine hours. But still, it was a very fun nine hours. Definitely worth the price IMO. 7: Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane A charming Ace Attorney clone set in a world with (thankfully) consistent magic and you use that magic to solve cases? Hell yeah, sign me up. It’s probably one of the best games inspired by AA to come out, with solid writing (though even the game devs admit that the writing only really finds its footing by case 3, and I concur) and characters that I actually like, and most importantly, crimes that I actually found interesting to solve. The dynamic between the eponymous main character Tyrion and his assistant is different enough from Phoenix Wright and his assistant(s) in AA that I didn’t feel like the game was aping its inspiration, and the supporting cast weren’t slouches either, though I do feel like you can definitely feel the Kickstarter-funded budget at times. The music’s great with a mostly jazz soundtrack, varied enough to not get grating, and the high-energy tracks for the courtroom got me going as good as any of the equivalents from AA proper (though there was one track that plays during evidence presentation moments that really got on me after a while, but I mostly blame that on me taking too drat long to figure stuff out). Overall, if you want a solid Ace Attorney clone with magic (well, more magic than in the actual AA games), that has great writing and characters, and that puts its limited budget to great use, I can highly recommend this game. Hell, pick it up full price, it’s not that expensive and it’s worth it. I look forward to any future sequel from the team, and hope that it hits the ground running after the fantastic run-up that was this game. 6: Hi-Fi Rush Yeah, everyone’s talking about it, I don’t have that much left to add. I’ve never been great at either character action games or rhythm games and yet I immediately started having a ton of fun in this game that’s a mashup of the two genres. It helps that staying on rhythm isn’t required to actually play the game at all (outside of some platformer puzzles), being just a damage boost in combat, and eventually I found myself hand-slapping and foot-tapping to the beat as I beat up robots willy-nilly to a killer soundtrack that’s pretty much the perfect mixtape. Also the game is funny, incredibly so. Just perfect comic timing and quips and the occasional fourth wall break that doesn’t belabour itself. The cast of characters are fun, your team has good development over the course of the story, and they get their funny moments without having to break character. Never have I laughed more at someone getting their head bonked against a doorway as someone else tries to carry their unconscious body around. 5: Ghost Trick Remaster I never did play the original Ghost Trick release, whether on physical or emulated, so this HD remaster was my starting point and I absolutely loved it? Loved the characters (best boy Missile), the story gripped me, the art and music were pretty much perfect and the remaster elevated them instead of butchering them. The puzzles were fun to figure out and sometimes the game throws a curveball of a new system at you to make things interesting. There were a couple of puzzles that took me a while to figure out but it never got to the point of being frustrating. Maybe the game’s a bit short compared to a blockbuster, but hey, short and sweet is great these days, and the ending was especially sweet. If you haven’t played Ghost Trick before, I can highly recommend this. 4: Octopath Traveller 2 I’ll be honest and say that I haven’t finished this game yet, it being a huge game and it being a busy busy year, but I’ve finished half of the playable characters’ storylines and am about halfway through everyone else’s. The gameplay systems and vast world are enough for me to rate it highly in my list of games though. I haven’t played a turn-based RPG in a while, and it’s fun learning just how exactly to break the system over my knee and throw out insane amounts of damage every turn like any other good turn-based RPG. I never did play Octopath 1 but having been told about which QoL bits in 2 weren’t present in 1, I think I can say that it’s definitely a step ahead. I enjoy the character interactions and especially like the new dual-character major sidequests but I do wish there were a few more opportunities to see the cast interact more. Also last but not least, the soundtrack is a solid 10/10 with not a single limp tune. Pretty much a perfect RPG OST. 3: Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising https://i.imgur.com/1yKo4QE.mp4 As I type this I am currently fighting the urge to go play this game. This game only came out like a week ago and I’m already starting to have dreams about it. I am terrible at fighting games and yet I feel the need to keep jumping into ranked and get my rear end kicked. If I’m really lucky I’ll do the rear end kicking instead. Who the gently caress knows, I certainly don’t. Even if I lose I can slowly feel myself incrementally getting better and better, inch by inch, as whatever stupid bullshit timing or counterplay or something burns itself into my unconscious memory so that I can maybe perform it again the next time I run into that poo poo (and I will, I definitely will). Also I earn progress towards some ridiculous cosmetics and poo poo even if I lose so hell yeah my road to looking obnoxious as hell continues. Also sometimes I can pull off some hype-rear end poo poo like in that clip above. I didn’t play the original release of Versus but I can say that Rising has been incredibly newbie-friendly even for someone who’s pretty much a complete beginner at FGs. The simplified inputs system is intuitive and I can spend less time learning technical commands and flubbing inputs and more time actually figuring out when to use specials (and flubbing inputs anyway but in a less bad way than technicals). I’ve only really played one character so far, so that’s what, 1/28th of the cast? Haven’t gotten very far into story mode either. And then there’s the Fall Guys side mode. Suffice it to say that I’ve barely even scratched the surface of this game, and I’ll probably be playing it for quite a while. It also has a pretty generous free edition, so it’s worth trying out if you’re the slightest bit interested. You’ll have fun even if you’ve never really touched a fighting game before. I know I did. 2: Final Fantasy XVI I’m a big fan of the CBU3 team at Square Enix thanks to their work on FF14, and when I saw that they would be making the next mainline single player Final Fantasy I was right on the hype train from the start. The hype grew and grew with every trailer and playthrough and hell, I got a PS5 just for it. And then the game came out and was my hype worth it? Yeah I’d say like pretty much 90% of my hype was warranted. Firstly, the game is beautiful. I was happy to just find a spot and sit there for 10 minutes to take in the sights. Secondly, the English voice work is top tier. Ben Starr plays the perfect Clive, and it’s pretty impossible for me to separate the character from the voice. Clive’s just one of the most likable JRPG protagonists in recent memory for me, looking like an edgelord on the surface but a kind man with his own issues underneath. There’s a subtlety to the voice work and the writing and the acting for him that just gets across who Clive is perfectly. The rest of the cast aren’t slouches either, with Ralph Ineson as Cid, Stewart Clarke as Dion and the late Stephen Critchlow as Byron all giving top tier performances as well (not to say that the rest of the cast are bad, those 3 just came to mind first). The story’s fun to follow along with, with the beginning being more dark fantasy before transitioning over to a more classic FF “kill God” plot that manages to keep the thematics of the first half going instead of fully abandoning them. I do think that there’s a few moments where the plot gets sluggish, and Jill was very underutilised, but I think the high points of the story make the game worth it. Speaking of the high points, my god. Every single Eikon battle was an absolute feast. Just some cracked-rear end Asura’s Wrath bullshit going on while the composer Soken is just going all out on some of his best works to score the fights. The earlier Eikon battles are a bit one-note because they’re mostly tutorials but by the Typhon fight it’s all just Italian chef kiss perfetto, no complaints. The Titan fight is insane. The Bahamut fight is probably the best Bahamut fight in the entire Final Fantasy series. The final battle is filled with insane classic JRPG spectacle and bullshit (positive). Even the recently released mini DLC’s final boss was spectacularly insane. They pretty much put an Armored Core boss into a Final Fantasy and made it work, kicked rear end. The battle system against regular enemies is pretty fun too, just blasting out Titan counterattacks and Bahamut laser beams and Zantetsukens out your rear end at some random bandits to really show them who’s boss. Never gets old. Is it a perfect game? No. Is it exactly like the other Final Fantasies of yore? No. Is it a good game? Hell yes, I’d say it’s great. If you have a PS5, I’d say it’s worth checking out. If you’re on PC, it’s worth the wait. Get in there and Clive your heart out. 1: Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon  The pulsing of the Coral engine. The whining of the boosters. The G-forces pulling at you as you quickboost to avoid a laser beam. You can pretty much feel it all as you play, tearing a trail across Rubicon’s skies. https://i.imgur.com/Lrok9RO.mp4 I have not played an Armored Core before this game. Hell, I haven’t really played many FromSoft games in general. I was worried I wasn’t really going to click with this game. But goddamn. Hell yeah I clicked with it. I’ve spent like 60% of my playtime in the garage making pretty mechs and working with the emblem system to make an Armored Core that screams “me!”.  I platinumed the game, getting S-ranks in every single mission, working my rear end off to beat missions/bosses as fast as possible and with as little damage taken as possible (gently caress you Snail Balteus).  https://i.imgur.com/cH8hLIA.mp4 I had insane amounts of fun unlocking new pieces for my mech and putting together the right robot for the job. So much fun and I hadn’t even touched PvP, which is its own beast.  But what really put this game at the top of my list, what really kept me thinking about this game for the several months since it released, wasn’t really the customisation or the gameplay (amazing as they were). https://i.imgur.com/irRHpXR.mp4 It was the story, the characters, the themes. I thought about Handler Walter, the person in charge of handing you all your missions and who seemed to not care about you. He had his secrets. I thought about V.IV Rusty, my trusty buddy, who always came in to save my rear end, always dependable. He had his secrets. I thought about Ayre, the Rubiconian Coral wave who was just a voice in your head, helping you out and guiding you during your missions. She too, had her secrets. “Cinder” Carla, “Chatty” Stick, V.II Snail (bastard), G5 Iguazu, G1 Michigan, “Middle” Flatwell. An incredible, memorable cast, and I didn’t know any of their faces. All communication is done via voice comms. All the story is from mission briefings and mission chatter. Noone ever shows up outside their mech. There’s never a single screen showing their true face, just their mech’s head. At this point, you can argue that their AC is their true face, and hell, you’re not wrong. There’s a surprising amount of characterisation in how a character’s AC is built, what parts it uses, what parts they swap out between story beats. But the real work is all in the voice, and it helps that the entire cast of voice actors are putting out some of the best performances of their lives in this game, for both English and Japanese dubs. There’s just an incredible amount of emotion and personality in every voice line, and it needs it thanks to the faceless nature of the game, and it works out. Just an absolutely phenomenal performance by everyone on the cast. https://i.imgur.com/wJituuB.mp4 And then, there’s the story and themes. I’ll focus on the themes more because I feel like this is the real meat of the game and what it’s trying to say. The main question that the game tries to ask can be summed up by a couple of quotes. “It’s just a job, 621” and “There’s no greater threat than power without purpose!” What is your purpose here on Rubicon? Just here to make money so that you can buy your way out of being a merc? Or will you find something more fulfilling along the way? Throw yourself into corporate politics? Help the locals out in their resistance? Discover more about Rubicon’s past and the Fires of Ibis that consumed it in the past? Choose your path, any path, but you should at least choose. FromSoft’s obsession with fire symbology is pretty famous even for someone like me who hasn’t played many of their games, and considering that the title of the game literally contains the word Fires it’s safe to say that it rears its head once more. This time it’s related to the three possible endings of the game (that you’ll see all 3 of if you go for NG++ anyway). Each ending corresponds with a different aspect of fire and what it symbolises. Fires of Raven shows fire in its most destructive aspect. You burn an entire star system, after all. It is simply dead, no rebirth, no rise from the ashes. What you did made you a monster, but if Walter and Carla were right, it was worth it. It was worth the destruction. Liberator of Rubicon is fire as a symbol of hope, a sole lantern in the dark that sparks a bonfire (in a positive way, not a planet-burning way). And in Alea Iacta Est, fire takes the form of a catalyst, the forge that promises to remake humanity, with you as a Prometheus figure who steals the fire of Coral Release from the realm of Allmind and changing all of humanity and Coral in the process. That’s just how I see it though, and really it’s just a secondary theme that I wanted to waffle about a bit. If there is one weakness of the game, it’s the soundtrack, which isn’t bad but it is kinda understated. It does have some absolute bangers like Steel Haze (Rusted Pride) though, so that’s good. And hey, the rest of the game is pretty much perfect, so I can’t fault it too hard. I’m glad I decided to take the leap and try out Armored Core 6. A choice I made in the dark that ultimately turned out to be worth it.  Let’s go. We’ll chase the clouds above Rubicon. Quick list 10: Pokemon Radical Red 9: Arknights 8: Case of the Golden Idol 7: Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane 6: Hi-Fi Rush 5: Ghost Trick Remastered 4: Octopath Traveller 2 3: Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising 2: Final Fantasy XVI 1: Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon Ibblebibble fucked around with this message at 08:34 on Dec 27, 2023 |
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Dec 24, 2023 15:48
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Another year has come and gone and I've wondered what the hell is up with the passage of time being fast one moment and slow the next. It's maddening. Anyway, I have spent a lot of time playing video games in between looking for meaningful work and assisting my family. I don't have a whole lot to say and I stuck with a lot of old games, but I do have at least a few new ones. 10. Death Mark It's a game about being marked for death (wow) (whoa) because of a curse and your job is to figure how how to not get killed by that with the help of some other poor folks in the same situation as you while you go around solving some supernatural incidents. You can end up dead during investigations mainly because of poor decision making, but there's also timed conversation sections where at least one choice is an instant death, so you can't be asleep at the wheel. You can also resolve the incidents by saving the main instigator or by destroying them, but it's clear which is the preferred choice considering the kind of game this is. As an adventure game, it's pretty neat. As a horror game, I have to play during the day because I am but a humble baby in the body of a man. (There's also a chapter with spiders, and gently caress that lmao.) It gets weirdly horny at points, though, but those points are far enough between that it's probably a non-issue for some. I'm also told there's a sequel, but I was not particularly jonesing for that since I think the ending's fine as is. 9. Spyro Reignited Trilogy I did play this as a child and so, this was more because of wanting to have a good time. I'd say the new team did a good job capturing the essence of the old and I had a blast doing the things I never bothered with back then, which was mainly getting 100% on all 3 games. They're still very solid platforming games and have stood the test of time. Shame we'll never get another one that's good, but what can you do, right? 8. Fight'n'Rage I spent a lot of time on this cheap game because its combat system was very straightforward and the variety of paths to go down was good enough to keep playing on higher difficulties to see how far I can take it. As a beat-em-up, I enjoy it a lot and it's pretty much in the top 3, easy. It's drat impressive for being a mostly one-man job (someone else handled the music), and I'll be curious if the creator is going to make a follow-up at any point. 7. Sonic Colors Ultimate As the one game of this series I will readily go to bat for despite the flaws (as I assume the average Sonic fan has one they treat in this specific way, but that's beyond this and I don't give a poo poo aside), I was a little worried that they'd gently caress it up with an updated re-release. And well, they kind of did, yeah: I don't like the new Wisp and I think the alterations to the levels to accommodate for this are annoying as hell, and the load times on PS4 are rear end. But it's still a really, really good game and you can make Sonic wear funny print shoes with silly auras as he sprints. 6. Trials Rising I picked this back up after a long break when I stopped back in 2019 and having a better understanding of how the physics works and all the little tricks they expect out of you in order to handle the extreme difficulty tracks, I have to say that it stresses me the gently caress out but in the fun way. The feeling of beating an especially obnoxious track and getting the gold is a good one. I know what my limits are, though, and I won't be getting all of the things because there are just some things I don't want to grind several hours on in order to finally get the one. But it's a good mirror to find out just what you're willing to tolerate in the pursuit of victory and when you just want to walk away. 5. Deep Rock Galactic I can dig up dirt and kill bugs while shitfaced both in-game and irl if I so choose. It's good and has stayed good, and god willing, the new stuff will be good as well. Bosco is the greatest, now and forevermore. 4. Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 HWU1 was basically my favorite driving game from last year and this game blows that out of the loving water, it's insane. The fact that you can make your vehicle jump and side-swipe other vehicles really changes everything, and they made the money-and-upgrade grind not suck. If it were possible to get the old tracks back in here with the new ones, that would be peaches, but that would just be the cherry on top of this masterpiece of racing. 3. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty The system differences between this and the Nioh games did trip me up for a while, but being able to jump and also deflect every blockable attack ever made it stand out. There's also been updates to add more martial arts moves to your weapons, along with the addition of whips and long swords. Also getting to pal around with some of history's heroes while also kicking their asses in duels for their poo poo rocks. The Lu Bu fight is the greatest boss fight of 2023. 2. Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space Wrow, a mobile video game with microtransactions. Anyway, now that that's out of the way, I started this back in 2019 and then I stopped months after, and it wasn't until recently this year when they ran this catch-up campaign as the global server is going to be updating alongside the main JP one that I got off my rear end and knocked out most of the main story and the writing is just so drat charming and earnest and funny and stupid and saddening that I'm glad I picked this back up. I do intend to finish the rest of what's currently available before the next major update, but this game's twists are really something special and re-reading old scenes with new information will make you go, "drat you, Kato, you can't keep getting away with this." 1. Let It Die They finally added in armor transmog and a new area after several years. I'm more amused at the fact that this game has outlasted others that have been made during its tenure while this refuses to go offline, including the lovely BR that these same devs tried and failed to get off the ground. I don't know what it is about this game that has such a death (lol) grip on me, but it is oddly compelling and I have already sunk in so many hours into the post-game in the pursuit of excellence. It's really just the ultimate "gently caress around" game and I fully expect this game to make it to 2026 just fine. Da list on its own 10. Death Mark 9. Spyro Reignited Trilogy 8. Fight'n'Rage 7. Sonic Colors Ultimate 6. Trials Rising 5. Deep Rock Galactic 4. Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 3. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty 2. Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space 1. Let It Die A Bystander fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Dec 24, 2023 |
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Dec 24, 2023 16:05
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Science_enthusiast posted:4:SUBNAUTICA Subnautica is one of my all-time favorite games, please power through and finish it! I don't even know where you gave up, I'm guessing either surprise encounter with a Reaper, Crabsquid, or the Jellyshroom cave which all do a great job at never making you want to go down there ever again, but it is absolutely a game worth knuckling down and seeing to the end.
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Dec 24, 2023 16:06
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Ibblebibble posted:9: Pokemon Radical Red I have been playing Radical Red using a bug monotype and while having extremely buff Ledian is amazing I think I probably chose wrong with my overall team. They really should call Easy Mode "Less Hard" Mode instead because man it kicked my rear end so much. I'm at the Elite Four now but I took a bit of a break to recuperate from the mental strain of figuring out how to win most fights. Quiver Dance/Victory Dance buff spam seems to be the way to go though. I don't have a way to deal with entry hazards, terrain, or weather, so I just have to hit them harder than they can hit me, y'know? It's fascinating what goes through the mind of intense competitive-focused Pokemon people. I don't think I'll ever truly get into that mindset, but it's fun to pretend I belong for a little bit. A Bystander posted:2. Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space One important thing I forgot to mention in my own placement of Another Eden is that it was the app that got me to give up social media forever. Why stare at Twitter when I can play an RPG on my phone instead? I'll always respect it for that.
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Dec 24, 2023 16:25
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Captain Invictus posted:I implore you to finish the game. not only is the story actually decent, but the finale is solid too. in my opinion, Subnautica is one of the most "face your fears" games ever made. thalassophobia is no joke, and Subnautica triggers it like no tomorrow, but I think it is a good enough game to warrant pushing past the fear. The progression you make and the technology and vehicles you unlock eventually leads to building up the ability to take on those threats, and it is so, so immensely satisfying. that on top of some of the later biomes being incredibly beautiful, in particular the underwater tree housing the ghost leviathan egg in the massive cavern had me speechless when I first encountered it, and also putting a grappling hook arm and a drill arm on my Prawn Suit and rodeoing a Reaper Leviathan while drilling its brains out and it constantly tried to get to me until it died was one of the most gently caress YEAH moments in a game in years for me. Sold! Ok i will. I cant really remember if I am honest but I was maybe 15 hours in. Just writing my summary made me want to dive back in though.
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Dec 24, 2023 16:42
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Alxprit posted:I have been playing Radical Red using a bug monotype and while having extremely buff Ledian is amazing I think I probably chose wrong with my overall team. They really should call Easy Mode "Less Hard" Mode instead because man it kicked my rear end so much. I'm at the Elite Four now but I took a bit of a break to recuperate from the mental strain of figuring out how to win most fights. Quiver Dance/Victory Dance buff spam seems to be the way to go though. I don't have a way to deal with entry hazards, terrain, or weather, so I just have to hit them harder than they can hit me, y'know? Oh I wouldn't pretend that I'm an intense competitive-focused Pokemon guy either, I completed it on easy mode lol
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Dec 24, 2023 16:49
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I feel guilty for forgetting IXION, a sort of Frostpunk in space, one of the most difficult and atmospheric games I've played in years, with a fabulous soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhTXyUERugQ Apparently they've fixed a lot of the bugs and balance issues that made me drop it, so I'll definitely be picking it up again.
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Dec 24, 2023 17:00
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:I mean, you chose wrong and I forgive you...but that's two hella great games in an epic face off and I really think your wonderful write-ups did them justice. Congrats on the year-long project, goon, you are legend. Thanks man. In all honesty I do think Valkyrie Profile is hands down the better game and but I'm a coward who had a stupid amount of fun with Octo2 and wanted to rep it hard. VP is an experience that will stay with me for much longer tho What a wild year its been 
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Dec 24, 2023 19:33
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 wowza
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Dec 24, 2023 20:02
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Ibblebibble posted:Oh I wouldn't pretend that I'm an intense competitive-focused Pokemon guy either, I completed it on easy mode lol Of course, same here - or at least, an inevitable-perhaps clearing on easy mode anyway, if I ever get back around to it. Mostly I just enjoyed the novelty of a romhack already having Paldea Pokemon in it. It doesn't even feel like that should be legal.
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Dec 24, 2023 20:13
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I don't play a lot of new games I realized. Therefore I am going to make an honorable mentions list even though I can probably barely fit 5 games in my actual top games of the year (I dunno I started writing this before compiling a list) ~~~~ Honorable mentions ~~~~ X. Magic Arena Played for 5 years now, still crack. Not the best year for MTGA in my mind as someone who only plays drafts, no terrible draft formats but none that super gripped me either. The Innistrad remastered set in spring really saved it though. X. Total War: Warhammer 3 I started one campaign when it launched, got 40 turns into an Ogre campaign, and never picked it up again until it got Immortal Empires map released last year. Because of that I have put far more hours into it in 2023 than in 2022. While there is still an absolute aura of 'what could have been' for this game, in particular after an awful fall season for it and CA in general, it's still a really good game that hits the spot just right for me and I come back to regularly. X. Path of Exile Completing my trio of crack games I play forever, the newest league has been a ton of fun. Having played this for what feels like a decade (but is only 8 years) now, I really don't have much to say about it. Looking forward to PoE2. 1. Disco Elysium Most of my Disco Elysium playthrough happened through December 2022 with only a slight overlap in January, and therefore I can only put it on my honorable mentions list this year. It would have made #1 last year, or in most years I played it really, if I was posting in these threads. ~~~~ Game I wish was game of the year ~~~~ Where is the Elden Ring DLC Miyazaki, where is it? I swear to god you better deliver in 2024. How can you do this to me. ~~~~ OFFICIAL GAMES OF THE YEAR FROM ME, THE POSTER WITH AN UNFORTUNATE USERNAME ~~~~ 5. Spellforce: Soul Harvest My 5th top game I played for the first time in 2023 and I didn't like it all that much. Really struggling for spots here. To be fair, I don't really think it's a game that does much wrong. But putting about 10 hours into the campaign before quitting, it just also didn't really have much that pulled me in about it. Gameplay, design, story, art-direction...it's all competent but unexciting. The character builds weren't super fun to play with either. Overall the only game on this list I thought was mid. 4. Total War: Three Kingdoms A little late to the party with this one, but I snapped it up on sale. I enjoyed it alright, but I realized I wasn't really vibing with it all that well. Small things like recruited units needing to replenish, or sieging being impossible to autoresolve even with ludicrous advantages rubbed me the wrong way. I didn't put a lot of time into this game and I could see it going up in my estimations at a later date for sure. 3. Pokemon Emerald Rogue I have been on-again-off-again addicted to playing Pokemon romhacks for a couple years now. I usually play regular difficulty hacks of the main series games - often as nuzlockes or similar for extra challenge - since very few original hacks have worthwhile difficulty curves or Pokemon availability, not even getting into custom sprites and all that stuff. Emerald Rogue is definitely a different kind of hack to either of these types, and one that I found generally quite fun and engaging. I prefer to play it straightforwardly with as little meta-upgrades and extra help as possible for each run - but you can certainly get a lot of fun out of maximizing those aspects as well. Overall I think it's definitely worth trying for anyone that enjoys playing Pokemon at least in part for the battles or playing with weird team compositions. My main issue with it is that it doesn't feel like the money aspect of its roguelike elements are well balanced. Because you can sell all the items you find, and because they are valued so differently and have hugely varied usefulness, a run can be made super easy by finding a bunch of evolution items that sell for 1000s each and are never useful for you so you don't need to hold on to them. Now, these runs will still be tough once you get to the last couple gym leaders and the E4...but it takes a decent while, and I often find before that during the midgame or even from as early as the first gym fight with the right encounters and items it kind of spins its wheels. 2. Little Goody Two Shoes A niche game with very strong thematic presentation, a cool and engaging setting and plot and lovable characters. I found some of the gameplay a little bit tedious and unintuitive, and it's also not really my genre, which is why I'm not placing it even higher. But a lot of the core gameplay was pretty fun, and I really enjoyed the story framing and the retro-anime style overall. Also, the characters flirting are very cute. Speaking of, the characters probably determine if you enjoy the game or not, since it's very relationship-centric both regarding the romance elements but also just the MC with the town in general given the mechanics and story conceits. Some of the names are also pretty funny if you know absolutely any German lol. 1. Baldur's Gate 3 I really enjoyed this game. Baldur's Gate 2 was my third ever game on PC, after FIFA 99 and Age of Empires 2. It has made me somewhat sad in the past few years to realize that all three of these games are ones that no longer hold up for me despite my incredible nostalgia. I no longer really enjoy FIFA games, and haven't played them much since I was a kid really. I tried getting back into Age of Empires 2 a bit about a decade ago when it got a variety of Definite Editions and the like - after having spent three years absorbed in Starcraft 2 at the time, I just couldn't get into it. And while of the three the IE games have held up the best, it still feels a bit clunky to play through these days. Plus, being the game most reliant on atmosphere, story and writing of these three, the fact that I scoured this game clean as a kid and could recite half the dialogue just makes it feel a lot like retreading old paths for me. And as a person, I rarely go back and rewatch, reread or replay games. I have games - like mentioned above - I play over and over for years, but I don't do this with traditional linear games really. Lucky for me that Baldur's Gate 2 got a great sequel after all these years then. Not a true sequel in most ways, but a curious one that rather than sell itself on dumb nostalgia-bait instead makes the canny move of waiting until the final act of three before really deciding to tie its story and characters back to the previous games in the series. To be frank, I have still not finished this game and seen all the connections it has with its precedessors - I ran into a few bugs in act 3, decided to put it down and wait for fixes, and suddenly 4 months have passed. But I have no doubt I will come back to it and continue loving every second. I also have to give credit to Larian for this game. I played Divinity: OS2 and my experience until I quit about 30 or so hours in was one from really enjoying the game to not really liking it at all. I played it around launch and I know it has had a lot of updates and changes since, so I imagine it's a better game today, but I can only review what I played back then. And what I played was probably the RPG with the worst character progression system I have ever played. From the incredibly bland stats that reminded me most of Diablo 3, to itemization and loot which was GENUINELY the worst I've ever seen with any random weapon a level higher than whatever you were using - even if you had an epic weapon with all the right stats for you - being an upgrade, to the spells and abilities that actually were pretty good...but where you got all of the regular ones and IIRC most of the special resource-using ones by halfway through the game and didn't have anything to look forward to or change up your approach to fights from that point on. The skills were alright though. But combined with the story and characters getting less engrossing by the time you leave the second huge area in the game, it completely ground me down and made me drop it in short order. At the time I would have rated it a 6/10 overall. In BG3 they have done the opposite in many ways, and added a lot of great tweaks and extra cool stuff to the basic 5E framework they're using. Even just simple things like their fairly basic itemization system with different kinds of charges or buffs that you can build around is a great idea, and they don't seem afraid to make some changes to 5E class abilities or progression in order to improve the feel of things either. I still felt that by levels 11-12, classes and abilities were starting to get a little predictable and homogenized for my tastes which is a general issue I have with 5E - a system definitely designed for lower-level play that has little to offer once you start looking at double-digit levels - but that's not Larian's fault. And it's not exactly worse than something like the clusterfuck that its competitor Owlcat has to deal with with their PF1E games at double-digit levels either. Consider that I am a person that loves playing Path of Exile for the character building aspect of things and it shouldn't be surprising that I'm the kind of player more suited to the latter though. But Larian have definitely shown a lot more savvy and good design with BG3's gameplay than I was expecting before going into it based on my previous experiences with their games. Hopefully I will play some more games I haven't played before in 2024...
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Dec 24, 2023 20:35
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Listing mine out quick because I have some time before christmas prep. May come back and add pics and further thoughts, we'll see. honorable mentions to: 12. Foundry Virtual Tabletop as I finally got to play Pathfinder and D&D with some good friends this year. 11. Steam Tabletop Simulator - our go to for weekly get togethers. Mostly Spirit Island and Dune Imperium though we finished up some Lord of the Rings Journeys in Middle Earth campaigns earlier this year and played some Gloomhaven: Crimson Scales before our tabletop boxes of Frosthaven turned up. It works as advertised and is a godsend because my friend group lives hours away from each other and we don't get together as often as we used to or would like to. Top 10: 10. Diablo 4 - solely because I really liked playing once through the campaign and their cinematics are rad as usual. I've been unable to muster up any interest in alts or the seasonal play though. 9. Solasta: Crown of the Magister - we tried this early on in the year and burned out a short way in, but we came back after finishing BG3 and enjoyed it much more for all its janky charm. It's no BG3 but it scratches some of the same itch, with some interesting takes on subclasses and with the rules being a bit stricter by default. 8. Aliens Fireteam Elite - one of us dropped out as his potato of a laptop wouldn't run it, but a buddy and I went on to finish once through the campaign and DLC. It was a fun if repetitive low budget bug hunt with decent graphics and some funny modifier cards shaking up the action. We finished in about 10 hours but there was more gameplay without story if you just want to shoot bugs with some friends and slowly improve your characters and systems. We clocked out once the credits rolled on the plot. 7. Across the Obelisk - a fun casual fantasy coop somewhat of a roguelike. We had a great time 3-4 playing this every so often and building up our characters. Some good and funny cartoony art and interesting gameplay where it is engaging but still chill to play after work. 6. Honkai Star Rail - As a few others mentioned this one peaks early with the ice planet and has been dragged out way too long on the worldship. I'm curious to see if it will pick up steam again with the next planet in 2024 or if it is just going to be that way now that they have to string out the content. Some of the monthly content is still good and funny. I really like a lot of the music and some of the side missions have had real punch. I like this better than its sibling Genshin Impact because as a turn based game its less work as you can automate much of the busywork and farming. 5. Marvel's Midnight Suns - I beat the game January 2nd so I'll count this because I liked it more than most other games I played this year. You the customizable character Hunter wake up in a tomb and team up with the X-Com guy's favorite superheroes to beat up demons and paramilitary forces while trying to stop an Elder God. You died the last time, hopefully this time will go better. Loved the story, disappointed it won't continue. I've been putting off the DLC for another run later rather than be done with the game. I liked the card battles, though some of the characters were a bit too overdesigned and weren't as fun for it. It had a lot of Buffy and Persona in its dna. RIP another marvel game undeservedly bites the dust. Bring back this, Marvel Heroes, Avengers Academy, not you Marvel's Avengers though I did like the main story, and so on. I had to ditch Marvel Future Fight pre-emptively though it seems to be chugging along still. 4. Cyberpunk 2077 - I reinstalled with patch 2.0 after dropping out after the intro at release. I didn't get the expansion yet but really enjoyed my time in Night City. Great style, music and action setpieces. I'm looking forward to Phantom Liberty but the base game was so long with so much to do I needed a break, and I wasn't even 100%ing everything. I was in kind of a malaise after finishing, especially after the ending I picked. 3. Spirit Island - The app version on steam by Handelabra. You play as whimsically named spirits with a lot of creativity and style, using your wakening strength and the help of local natives to kick invading settlers off of your island. We'd alternate between this, the actual tabletop version my friend has collected, and the tabletop simulator version. This one is more automated, which can screw you over but also takes a lot of the work out of playing it. We did end up playing this version most of the time. The music is great and the sound effects are good (except for a few of the Horizons spirits which are too repetitive and annoying imho). It's easy to learn and very hard to master. We've got a group of 4 with 2 of us that play a different spirit every time and 2 who are superglued to their favorites (Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds and Ocean's Hungry Grasp). We're really excited for the Jagged Earth expansion to be rolled out next year, though it is so huge they are breaking it into chunks to sell separately. 2. Misericorde Vol 1 - Not really a game since you just read it and listen to the music. Both the text and soundtrack are very well written by one person dev Xeecee and the art is minimal but with a ton of character. There's a murder at a monastery and the Superior doesn't think the suspect did it. So she goes to the main character, who is an Anchoress. The only nun who couldn't possibly be a suspect since she was locked in her cell as a spiritual mentor, which is where she met and fell for the presumed victim visiting her unseen. The anchoress is let out and told to join the rest of the nuns and secretly find out which one of them is the murderer. I'm looking forward to part 2 which is hopefully due this year. 1. Baldur's Gate 3 - Great graphics, gameplay, music, story, characters. A masterpiece really. It had its issues early on as expected but they didn't bother me as much as some. It was also a bit dark with somewhat unlikable characters even after a few revamps. Not much to say that others haven't. bagrada fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Dec 24, 2023 |
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Dec 24, 2023 22:44
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bagrada posted:Listing mine out quick because I have some time before christmas prep. May come back and add pics and further thoughts, we'll see. Where did 9 go?
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Dec 24, 2023 22:48
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A Bystander posted:10. Death Mark I would actually highly recommend you (and anyone else interested) play the sequel, Spirit Hunter NG. It's standalone and features a different curse and different characters. In general it's also better written and is less horny in a creepy way (in every sense of that phrase). Also the main character is autistic-coded and their hyperfixation is fighting which is kind of funny. edit: also apparently Death Mark 2 is coming out soon. But seriously, NG is just plain a much better game than Death Mark and I would recommend it without reservations to anyone interested in a horror adventure investigative game. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Dec 24, 2023 |
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Dec 24, 2023 22:51
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TheMathyFolf posted:Where did 9 go? Thanks for catching that, I forgot one so I shoehorned it into the middle and fixed the numbers.
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Dec 24, 2023 23:19
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Need to go through this thread and read more lists! Apologies for not having done that. Wrote this all out this morning, what a year for games At the end of last year I started writing down (on Backloggd) which games I finished which has made compiling this list so much easier. 2023 seemed like a really great year for games! The majority of my list is not from this year though. Also I decided my list only contains games I "finished" (for whatever definition of finished I felt was good enough :P ) so it doesn't include some big hitters that I also did play and agree were amazing like TOTK and Mario Wonder. Anyway, onto the list! 10 - Immortality I played this near the start of the year, one of the first games I played through on the Steam Deck. Having never played a Sam Barlow game before I didn't full know what to expect (but knew he liked messing with the player's head). I really really enjoyed this! The overarching story you come to discover honestly didn't blow my mind that much, but the 3 movies you get to watch pieces of over the course of the game were the most enjoyable thing. Watching the actors really act out a scene, or watching them acting to mess up a scene, or watching them acting practicing a scene was really interesting and I just think the amount of effort that went into this whole thing was really great! A great little gem that devoured a couple days of my life, definitely deserving of a place on this list. 9 - Sam & Max Hit the Road My wife had never heard of this game (or Sam & Max at all) and I brought it up as something we could play together. I let her play through it and gave some hints when some of the puzzles got pretty obscure. One of my favourite games since childhood, it still really holds up! The puzzles aren't always very clear but the absurdity and fun the game has makes up for it completely. One of the best point and click adventure games that everyone should play. 8 - Sackboy: A Big Adventure Another game I played with my wife. We started this last year (and I think I might have even put it on my list...) but finally beat the final boss this year. Great little action platformer. Controls so much better than any of the LittleBigPlanet games (which I still do love though haha). There's a nice variety in the levels, and playing dressup with Sackboy is fun. Fun alone but so much more fun in co-op. 7 - We Love Katamari Reroll I played both of the Katamari remasters this year. I had never played We Love Katamari before though! What a brilliant sequel! I didn't really know how they could follow up the original without it just feeling like more of the same but they introduced more gimmick levels with different rules to spice things up in between your classic Katamari "get really big" levels. I really do love Katamari a lot and I blasted through this in a couple of days because it's just so addictive. 6 - Resident Evil 4 (2023) I'm still not sure whether I prefer the original RE4 or the remake more. I think they both excel at certain things and it's really difficult to choose between them (thankfully we can all still just play both! :P ). In the end though, this is still a really really great game. Controls great, the shooting feels really good. Seeing all the setpieces re-imagined almost 20 years later was really cool. I love Resident Evil as a series a whole lot and will play any new one that gets released, so it's no surprise this is part of this list. 5 - DROD 4: Gunthro and the Epic Blunder 18 or so years ago I got super deep into DROD (thanks to one of my older brothers). Turn based action puzzlers with silly little stories. The puzzles are some of the best you will find in games. As a kid I think I was generally too impatient to try figure things out, but now 18 years later with a lot more experience I had an amazing time figuring out the challenges in this game. If you're interested in checking out this series than I think this game in particular is the best starting point now. It has a really good learning curve, while still introducing some of the more complex features/puzzle elements they added in the more recent games. DROD will always hold a place in my heart. 4 - The Case of the Golden Idol This game and its two expansions released this year are all absolutely incredible. Beautifully grotesque dioramas telling stories of greed (all centred around a Golden Idol) in which you need to figure out logic puzzles given the information you can see from one (or a few) moments in time. If you are at all interested in logic puzzles, or just puzzle games in general you NEED to play this game. So excited for the sequel next year! 3 - The Last of Us Part II I'm a big fan of Naughty Dog games. The original Last of Us was a game I bought day one, enjoyed thoroughly, and still think has one of the best endings in games. When Part II originally came out it was not a great time and so I chose not to play it as I thought it would just make me feel more depressed than I already did. Early this year after getting a PS5 I decided to finally buy and play through it and I think it was the right time now. A great story of revenge (and the pointlessness of it). The switch-up halfway through the game is played really well in a way that seems frustrating at first (why would I want to do this!) but allows the game to give more depth to all the characters. A devastating game that just keeps getting more devastating. I really hope they can leave the story as it is with the ending of this one. 2 - Lies of P I have loved Souls games ever since importing a copy of Demon's Souls because of the thread on this forum! Lies of P is a very blatant ripoff of From's formula, taking cues from Bloodborne and Sekiro, and it pulls it off perfectly. A very linear experience, it gives you a good series of challenging levels generally ended off with some really fun boss experiences. The story was so much more interesting than I expected it could be, and the weapon switching system (which allows any weapon's blade to be given any move-set by being placed on any other weapon's hilt) is super interesting! I'm happy more developers are creating really great games in this sub-genre and really doing them justice. Can't wait for the DLC and also for the sequel which is teased with a brilliantly stupid post-credits scene. 1 - Red Dead Redemption 2 At the start of December, number 2 on this list was going to be my number 1. With the release of the GTA6 trailer I thought maybe I'd finally give RDR2 a chance since I had never played it. The first RDR I played through about half of (I remember getting up to Mexico?) and so I had no memories of any characters except John Marston. Although GTA5 has a greatly realised world I think the story was incredibly weak, Rockstar's parodies of modern society are really quite lame in the end. Something about the 1899 setting of RDR2 I think allows them to be much more grounded in their storytelling (although there are still some silly things going on). Arthur Morgan's tale is really well presented. People give poo poo about Rockstar games just being the same kind of mission over and over (drive somewhere, shoot someone, rinse, repeat), but I don't really mind it when the story is so well presented, that's really what I'm here for! A tragic story with a surprisingly positive ending, it really affected me quite a lot and I think it might be the best story that Rockstar has told. Arthur and John are two great characters, and their growth through this game is really interesting. This was definitely the best game experience I had all year and I'm happy to have finished the year off with such a banger! Can't wait to see what 2024 has in store for us all Short list for ease of counting votes: 1 - Red Dead Redemption 2 2 - Lies of P 3 - The Last of Us Part II 4 - The Case of the Golden Idol 5 - DROD 4: Gunthro and the Epic Blunder 6 - Resident Evil 4 (2023) 7 - We Love Katamari Reroll 8 - Sackboy: A Big Adventure 9 - Sam & Max Hit the Road 10 - Immortality
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Dec 24, 2023 23:53
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Rad list! Sam & Max, talk about cool.
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Dec 25, 2023 03:20
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10. Far Cry 6: enjoyed way more than FC5, almost entirely as a result from you as the main character having an identity and agency in the story. Yes the actual world itself in 5 was likely better, but I cannot stand modern games that don't give the protagonist a face and voice and personality (though I understand that sometimes 1) that's the point 2) leaving them more of a blank slate is ultimately easier and more inclusive) 9. Chants of Sennaar: I'm a huge fan of puzzle/exploration based games, this had such a minimalist vibe while still having a detailed world and story 8. Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope: fun, funny, made me smile every time the rabbids make noises. 7. Talos Principle 2: if you release a puzzle came on Steam that involves any kind of laser redirection as a central mechanic, there's a 80% chance I'm going to buy it. Some of the original Talos game puzzles really annoyed me, but this one was rock solid start to finish and I liked the fact you weren't alone in the world any more. 6. The Roottrees Are Dead: didn't know about this until I read it in this thread earlier this week and rushed through it in a day. Same joy of success as when you nail a Return of the Obra Dinn scene. 5. Spider-man: Miles Morales: life-long comics fan, and this plus the first game are some of the best comic games ever. The amount of pathos and genuine heart they pack into these is amazing. I'm a PC gamer so I'm running a year or so behind on these, just have to eagerly await for 2 to eventually hit PC and I'm sure it'll be on my list at that time. 4. Case of the Golden Idol: For reasons some other people mentioned, this may surpass Return of the Obra Dinn as my favorite game of this ilk. The mystery and story were super engaging, and the central mechanic was a breath of fresh air. I would play new chapters of this game forever and HOLY loving poo poo because making this list was making me recheck Steam I saw a news item from earlier this month that they announced a full sequel!!!!! 3. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective: I only got turned onto this because I saw a friend posting about playing it on Twitter. I never played it way back when but I do like the Ace Attourney games. Perfect execution, a tight story, and kept me guessing until the end when the entire game just delivered and then some. Missile . . . you waited for us  2. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: not a lot to add beyond whatever others said. 10/10 game to me  1. Baldur's Gate 3: around 35ish years ago when I was probably in first grade, I played Pool of Radiance on PC (on DOS ...) with my dad. I sat with him and mainly watched him play, but I got to help as time went on and more importantly got to mess with the translation wheel. We then played Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades, and another few gold box games each time me getting better at playing it on my own. Eventually when Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 came out, I was on my own. I've played Neverwinter Nights, Planescape, Icewind Dale, Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin, any isometric CRPG I could get. They all immerse you in another world and that more than any other kind of game or series takes me back to that feeling from when I was first playing computer games. I feel a little sad though because it's over, and I rarely replay RPGs. People talk all the item about replayability the game has but . . . I play all alignment based games as lawful good, it bothers me being a dick even if it's to fictional characters if it's in the context where there's a choice involved. I'm always saving the cat from the tree, helping the town, doing my best to be good because that's what I want to put into the world. I'm not going to do a playthrough where I let the grove burn and don't reunite the lovers who've been torn apart by forcers beyond their control. Maybe some dice rolls will change but I'd be making the same decisions. But . . . maybe I'll do it just to romance someone else  Baldur's Gate 3 is a crowning achievement in the genre, 11 out of 10 because it goes up to 11. It shows what a company can do when they put in the work, release when a game is truly ready, and--most importantly--have faith in their customers to get what they're putting out. We have had a decent trickle of games over the past few years , but now the rise of D&D and Let's Play podcasts has let things seep back into the the public consciousness even more. It may have been on the upswing but the last 5-10 years still seems like a famine when you compare to the early aughts. I am hoping Baldur's Gate 3 signals a return to feast, and I've got my placemat and silverware all set for it!
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Dec 25, 2023 03:31
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5. Diablo 4 It certainly isn't the best game of the year. It isn't the most polished, most innovative, or the most value-for-dollar. But it was good enough that I ended up not feeling dirty about paying for early access and blowing through the surprisingly long campaign. Playing solo, I managed to play enough to get 2 characters to lvl 80 or so before I dropped the game. Tried to play it with friends but the experience wasn't great and we quickly turned to.... 4. Deep Rock Galatic There isn't much to say here other than the fact it is a fantastic game for a bunch of middle-aged gamers to hook up on Discord and blow off some steam every week. Dig up minerals, blast bugs, and save your wage slave rear end by sprinting back up through the way you came before the drop pod "leaves with or without you". At first glance, it would appear to be some repetitive grinder of an FPS with procedurally generated missions and a stylized but rather basic graphics presentation, but me and 3 other buddies are having a blast unlocking new weapons and blowing up new bugs as we keep delving deeper into the asteroids. The best part is when you exercise the "no dwarf left behind" policy and rescue your straggling friend's rear end and get on back on board with 2 seconds before blast off. 3. Citizen Sleeper  Guess I am late to the party but I did get a chance to play this in 2023. There are a lot of things I don't like about the actual game but the writing, music, and ambience did a good job keeping me engaged. Mechanically, I feel there are a lot of issues. Seemingly sold as an RPG survival game at the start, the core mechanics of having to maintain food and repair your "sleeper" robot body becomes far too easy, far too quickly. The daily rolling of dice and assigning them to complete tasks become a chore by the time you exit the early game where survival is essentially guaranteed and you are really just trying to min max tasks to earn currency or do repetitive tasks to advance the storyline. Where food and repairs are a pressing concern and the basis of the game in the 1st hour, by the 3rd hour it is an unenjoyable impediment dragging down the pace of the story. I understand what the designers were going for here - time management to force potentially difficult decisions - but somehow it feels unfulfilling and tedious. So much so that I only completed one playthrough and couldn't stand to deal with grinding down another path because you can't save when you reach branching storyline spots (really guys?). Thematically, I enjoyed the over-the-top depiction of capitalism run wild (more maybe it isn't so over the top). Even an ardent believer in capitalism like me isn't blind to the issues the game points out. The one-sided presentation did get a chuckle from me though when I ran across the hippie commune where you could earn food for free with no negative downsides regardless of how terrible a dice roll you assigned to that task. The characters woven into this dystopia somehow feel real though and carry the game. People start off stand-offish, each trying to make it to the end of the day without getting killed or disposed of by the corporate overlords. But as you earn their trust, the writing takes over and they somehow feel real, even though there is no voice acting or cut scenes. The soundtrack by Amos Roddy is superb and right up my alley. I really enjoyed his work in Kingdoms: Two Crowns and he doesn't disappoint here. He seems to be an expert at painting desolate landscapes with his music yet leaves you feeling hopeful about the entire thing. The musical cues complement the writing and do a great job of summoning the right emotions when the writing calls for it. I ended my run blasting off to a new colony with a mechanic and his foster child. It was a bittersweet ending that was good enough to cement this game, with all its mechanical flaws, as one I will remember for some time to come. Maybe I will return in 2024 and try some of the DLC stuff I never got to. 2. Company of Heroes 3  Company of Heroes 3 is yet another AAA game that could have used another 12 months in the oven. RTS is hardly a genre which has enough fans to support a failed launch and CoH 3 sadly fell flat on its face. Yet for all its problems be it the lacklustre UI, graphical downgrades, boring single-player campaign, and a pitiful selection of multiplayer maps, I ended up spending over 250 hours in the game according to Steam. A lot of it was spent idling while matchmaking was doing its thing but CoH3 ultimately delivers on the Relic RTS experience - fast-paced combat focused on tactics rather than "macro" and resource gathering. I played a shitload of this game in March and April before dropping it due to a lack of content and a collapsing MP player base. I returned however, as of patch 1.4, and replays are finally here on an official basis rather than a tedious hack, a half dozen new MP maps are out, and the lacklustre graphics and sound have been overhauled. Sadly despite a small bump, the player base is still very small - barely enough to keep MP alive in my opinion down to just 2.5k concurrent players on weeknights when the launch saw 10k online at any given time. Hopefully, these numbers improve. Relic and Sega desperately need a win and the core micro-focused gameplay is adrenaline-pumping and of superb quality. Unlike Dawn of War 3, there is actually a really good game to be had here. Too bad they hosed this up and left the game behind the 8 ball. If you want to join in, there is a Discord server where people hook up to play team games. 1. Cyberpunk 2077 - Phantom Liberty  It took the release of patch 1.6 in September of 2022, a span of nearly 2 years after release, to make CP 2077 realize the potential that was locked in its story, characters, and world-building. In the 2022 version of this thread, I named it one of the best games I played that year and I meant it wholeheartedly. However, it took the only major expansion pack this game will receive for it to showcase its ceiling and deliver an experience which surpasses their Witcher 3 efforts. The DLC gave the team at CDPR a chance to tell a more tightly woven story with bigger setpieces, in both action and storytelling and updated the core RPG elements to fully enable a wide plethora of builds that offer interesting options rather than offering mainly boring percentage increases to certain weapons or play styles. No effort or expense was spared to build an immersive world and fully integrate the DLC into the game. The new boss battles (and re-tuned base game encounters) offer a chance to use the new skills and one of the DLC highlights is an in-game performance by Grimes as Dizzy Wizzy complete with a light show. Spectacular stuff. The storyline is woven so well into the main game that if no one told you what the DLC was and you never played CP 2077 before, it would be difficult to tell what was DLC content and what was base game content other than noticing that an area contained seemingly higher quality and more involved quests. The new ending also completes the thematic choice offered by Dexter Deshawn's question posed to the main character at the start of the game - 'go out in a blaze of glory or live a quiet life'. Keanu Reaves returns to voice more than just bit parts, Idris Elba was a stud, and the rest of the cast as a whole turns in a decent to great performance. The game still looks great on a technical level whether you have a raytracing GPU or not. CP 2077, while suffering an unforgivable launch, is now a beacon for what AAA gaming should be. A graphically spectacular game, complete with dozens of hours of unique storytelling and missions, and a deep and rich narrative supported by excellent world-building. I look forward to seeing what CDPR has for the future. I eagerly hope I will get to revisit Night City one day. 
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Dec 25, 2023 07:22
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Science_enthusiast posted:Never done one of these before but every year I read everyone elses and wish I did. I hope it brings you joy that I didn't know they put out a DF hoodie until your post, and now courtesy of my fiance I have a Christmas gift arriving in mid-January probably  bovis posted:
Hell yeah! I never really heard of Sam and Max myself but somehow got all the telltale ones in a bundle, and near the beginning of the pandemic my now-fiance and I played them together over discord similarly with him giving me hints. We should check out Hit the Road now I think of it, so thanks for the inspiration!
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Dec 25, 2023 08:14
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It's been a year of ups and downs for me. I finally defended my dissertation in May and part of how I got through preparing for that was finding any spare time here or there for some JRPGs. I missed out on a really cool trip I won an award to attend due to COVID in September. Then spent the first half of December with the flu. In contrast, it's been a really good year for games though! Games I bounced off of in 2023 Starfield. I played about 4-5 hours of this. I got hopelessly lost on one of the first planets which just seemed to be a bleak empty wasteland. I then wandered into a high level zone apparently and a bunch of level 20+ bandits killed me. Ok I did something wrong. I realize that my ship instead of landing at the way point had landed every so slightly next to the waypoint and went there. Killed like a half dozen guys and then went to the home base where people talked my ears off for hours about their society. I quit and never looked back. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I do not like crafting in video games. I do not like games where I have to rotate and position objects in 3D space. I played 20 hours and spent the vast majority of it looking for crafting ingredients, crafting, and positioning objects. I gave up. It would have been a better game to me if they had just released BOTW 2 with no new systems just new content. I know that's a hot take. Alan Wake. My friend group is obsessed with Alan Wake 2. Having never played the first one, I decided to give it a try. After 3 chapters, I was done. There was absolutely no complexity or thought to the combat. Just shine my light and then shoot while walking backward. If there's a group, throw a flare. Use bigger guns on tougher enemies. I love Sam Lake's writing but man I am just going to watch a youtube video of the story. Games I am playing now or look forward to playing in early 2024 Vampire Survivors, Death Must Die, Halls of Torment, and other Survivors-like games Octopath Traveler II Elden Ring DLC come on please From Soft The List! 10. Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga. This is a Fire Emblem/Tactics Ogre crossover with you being able to choose the formation and composition of the squad accompanying each leader. The story really rules too putting a bit of a spin on the classic Fire Emblem-style Chosen One formula. I've found the NPCs are pretty neat even though they're all just bundles of JRPG/anime tropes. They do an excellent job varying the missions between the genre conventions of attack, defend, rescue, etc. and giving you lots of options in how you build your squads. I still really have no idea how most of the battle system works except that guns and heavy armor seem to be the best choices for the most part, but I had a blast with it anyway. I loved building squads of dragons with like one heavy armor guy to just tear enemy squads to shreds. 9. Elden Ring. My top game of 2022 returns! I had a lot of fun early on this year doing some interesting challenge runs including a daggers-only run which really forced me to learn a lot more about enemy attack patterns than my usual caster build which gave me the privilege of just running away. You really learn to appreciate how well-designed the bosses are in that even when you are wielding daggers, there are always opportunities to exploit. It's also amazing how every single run, I find something new in this game. Every single dungeon and area has a new nook or cranny with an item I hadn't seen before. I am super excited for the DLC in 2024 and will easily sink another 300+ hours into it when it launches. 8. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker. It's been a relatively quiet year for Final Fantasy after the furor around Endwalker's launch. Many of my FC are taking breaks, even extended ones. Still I thought the MSQ wrapped up quite well and Zero was a great addition as a guest star in the story. The side content has been wonderful as well. The alliance raids were interesting, if not quite as challenging as Shadowbringers' or Stormblood's. I enjoyed min-maxing my Island Sanctuary as well. I am very excited to find out what they bring for Dawntrail. TWO DYES. 7. Diablo IV. The internet has been a place of a lot of capital D Discourse about whether this game is good or not. Blizzard of course fumbled the first patch of the game pretty badly which set a very pessimistic tone the month after launch. Subsequent patches have shown an effort to give the community what they want. Ignore all that drama and just play this game if you like action RPGs. They managed to find a balance between the slower paced D1 and D2 and the "invincible superhero darting across the screen and everything instantly dying" of Diablo 3. I had a ton of fun playing this with my friends. I am sure there is a reason why I am mathematically wrong to enjoy this game that a 40,000 word Reddit post will explain why it's not as good as D2 or POE but I don't care. 6. Fire Emblem Engage. Who doesn't love anime waifu rock-paper-scissors chess? Though a bit of a step down narratively compared to Three Houses which used a school setting to put a twist on the story that every Fire Emblem follows, Engage has the best battle system of any Fire Emblem game by far. The addition of Emblem rings that allow you to buff a character's weakness or turn a glass cannon into a glass cannon but like a really big cannon. I actually played on hard mode this time for my first playthrough which I don't normally do and I found it quite challenging. There was one battle that I had to reset like 5 times because I just could not get my units into good positioning and they would get slaughtered. The characters themselves are good but not great. I still think the high watermark for characters might have been Awakening which had my favorite art style as well, but I enjoyed the story and had a lot of fun overall. 5. Super Mario Wonder. The level that turns into a musical though. The most fun 2D Mario since the SNES days. 4. Final Fantasy XVI. You can pet the Torgal! And also Cid rules in this one. And the voice acting is just amazing in general. Also I really enjoyed the story even though it was very clearly written in an era where Game of Thrones was still considered good! The switch to a Devil May Cry-inspired combat system had its ups and downs. I do wish they had found more ways to implement some more RPG systems into the game, but I did find a lot of the fights were pretty fun and the game loves to throw new twists at you. The Eikon Battles that can be: a 2D fighter, a twin stick shooter, a schmup, and other genres all mixed seamlessly into a longer fight. They've said one of the issues with porting to PC will be that they can't do as seamless transitions between boss phases like they can do on the PS5 and I can totally see how that might change the impact of some of the fights. Some of the boss battles have 5 or more phases and can take more than an hour! But since they switch genres so fluidly they rarely feel exhausting. 3. Slay the Princess. You are on a path in the woods. At the end of that path is a cabin. In the basement of that cabin is a princess. Your job is to kill her. Those are the opening instructions for this game. Whether you follow them is up to you. I can't say much about how the story unfolds from there without spoiling it, but it goes places. Your choices matter in this game. They are the only thing that does. There are so many branching paths to explore and each choice has a consequence. I have three different friends who I have sat down with this game and watched as they became enraptured and played for hours. It's hypnotic. 2. Personal 5 Royal. I played through this game 100%ing it and earning the platinum trophy in May 2023. It was my second biggest accomplishment that month (behind graduating). The story is so good. You love all the characters by the end. Also The Royal storyline rules and shows the perfect example of how a lawful good person can be a villain. I love all the characters so much, even Morgana and Ryuji whomst I will not take any hate for from the internet. DO NOT TALK poo poo ABOUT MY TUXEDO CAT. The Royal content makes the original game into a perfect ten, though it makes the game quite a bit easier. I was able to max out all confidants super early and I created all the endgame personas that let me like triple cast MYRIAD TRUTHS the first turn of combat. 1. Baldur's Gate 3. In my life, I have been a paid professional dungeonmaster for 4E and 5E. I am listed as a playtester in multiple D&D sourcebooks. I am on some sort of WOTC email list for beta testing upcoming content. This is all to say, I play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons and I know the game pretty well! Baldur's Gate 3 comes the closest to capturing the feeling of actually playing in a tabletop roleplaying game of any game I have ever played. I did two single player playthroughs: a tiefling bard and a drow paladin as well as two multiplayer as a githyanki monk and a githyanki fighter (I like jumping). This game does not get old for me. I played 400+ hours and I will easily put another 400 into it in 2024. Easy to copy and paste list: 10. Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga 9. Elden Ring 8. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker 7. Diablo IV 6. Fire Emblem Engage 5. Super Mario Wonder 4. Final Fantasy XVI 3. Slay The Princess 2. Persona 5 Royal 1. Baldur's Gate 3
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Dec 25, 2023 16:14
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Arist posted:1) Hitman: World of Assassination[/b] Thx; you inspired me to try the Feelance mode. I loved the base game. I thought the series was done for with the 2013 release, but Hitman 2016 1-3 are a goldmine; have only played the main levels though. For games in 2023, my #1 is Talos Principle 2, for combination of beautiful level design, technical beauty (probably the best graphics/lighting of any game I've played), inspiring outlook, and puzzle design. If feels... relaxing. Also, for some reason, I really want to read about 3d-printed concrete... Dominoes fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Dec 25, 2023 |
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Dec 25, 2023 16:43
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I started playing Case of the Golden Idol after I wrote up my list and it's going a lot faster than I expected so I might have an addition to make in a couple of days once I finish these DLC cases.
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Dec 25, 2023 17:20
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Ibblebibble posted:I started playing Case of the Golden Idol after I wrote up my list and it's going a lot faster than I expected so I might have an addition to make in a couple of days once I finish these DLC cases. HOLY poo poo I'm in the exact same situation!
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Dec 25, 2023 18:44
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just grabbed the final DLC and look forward to playing myself. Golden Idol is already my top game so i dont see this lowering it in my eyes lol
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Dec 25, 2023 19:41
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Here's a general list of the (new to me) games that I have played this year, with the ones in bold being ones I have completed. FE: Engage Lil Gator Game Hi-Fi Rush Metroid Prime: Remastered Chained Echoes I was a Teenage Exocolonist RE4 Remake Octopath Traveler 2 Dead Space Remake Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Theatrythm: Final Bar Line Cyberpunk 2077 Age of Wonders 4 Pikmin 4 Final Fantasy 16 Baldur's Gate 3 Detective Pikachu Returns Star Ocean 2 Remake Super Mario RPG Remake The Talos Principle 2 Against the Storm (I think I beat it? All my seals are at prestige difficulty so it sounds like i'm on post-game content now") Overall... A pretty good year for gaming! I think the selection of games that came out caused a few moments of introspection, a few moments of rediscovery of things that I loved, and a few moments that made me think "Man, I love video games". Other Mentions Remakes Of Already Good Games (Star Ocean 2, Super Mario RPG, RE4, Dead Space, 7th Guest VR, Metroid Prime) In general, I enjoyed each of these games an equal amount. Because for each of them they're remakes of games that were already pretty dang good, and probably didn't even need to be remade. Dead Space was already a pretty dang good game. Original RE4 still feels pretty dang good to play and the Remake is really just kind of a marginal improvement on it. Super Mario RPG was already a classic that is finally playable on newer generations of consoles. Star Ocean 2 is probably the only one of these games that I hadn't played all the way through before. But really, all of these games are still really good games, and you can't go wrong playing any of them. Will future years hold more remakes of games that probably didn't need it? Yeah, that's pretty likely. I'm still the sucker that bought all these games and am enabling all of this behavior. Best TTRPG I made the switch to - Pathfinder 2e Running TTRPGs is a lot of work, and somehow I found a system that makes it feel like no work at all. Combat encounters are easy to design and adjust on the fly to account for missing people. There's a FoundryVTT module available that does all the heavy lifting on math and rules enforcement so that there's no miscommunication on how a rule is intended to play out. I went from being able to run one game every other week to being able to run two games simultaneously with this system. It has its faults, for sure, and can sometimes be a little bit too plodding when it should go for streamlined, but making the change has been really good for both my mental health and for the amount of fun that I have when actually playing the game. Best Trainwreck - Silent Hill Ascension  What if Silent Hill was a lovely D-list soap opera. That's about it! I've been staying plugged in for a couple of weeks now to catch up on Ascension indirectly and everything I have seen of this is a big trainwreck that it's hard to look away from. I love seeing just random blurbs and side characters that they introduce like berry guy and random detectives. I know that the creators have said multiple times that this thing isn't written by AI, which I think is probably a testament to how bad the writing is that every episode feels like "Nothing, Forever" but with a coat of Silent Hill paint on it. Seriously, in all of the hundreds or so of scenes that are already out there, nothing happens in nearly any of them. It's all plodding along for "Hm, should I confess my feelings to this character?" or "Oh no, a silent hill monster appears! Anyways, about *that event* that happened *years ago*" (with no mention as to what that event actually was) ==TOP 10== 10. Lil Gator Game  This was a pretty dang good exploration adventure that resonated a lot with me with its message about the creative process and playing with others. Probably what I identified most with was the fact that there's a character who more or less functioned as a rules arbiter of the game, but was so bogged down with work and other responsibilities that the game itself wasn't fun for them anymore. It reminded me a lot of playing a DM/GM in TTRPGs for some reason. I think apart from that, the game controls exceptionally well and does a really nice job of giving winks and nods to other notable games of the past generation. For example, you get to do a L.A. Noire style interrogation on someone who doesn't think they're cool enough to hang out with the cool kids. The game just oozes charm and fun at every opportunity, and it felt like a shame to not include it on my GOTY list this year. 9. I Was A Teenage Exocolonist  It's hard to talk about this game without going into spoilers, but it's very much a game that you're kind of expected to fail at your first go around. As the title states, you play as a teenager on a colony in an alien world that very much does not want the colony or your people to be there. It's simultaneously an exercise in frustration at how little control you have over the events around you, and surprising just how much control you do end up having on what can happen. Colonists can live or die depending on what your character ends up learning through your life, and you can shape the way things play out through cascading events that you don't realize how important they are until you bear the full brunt of their consequences. (Early-game spoilers) This is probably most especially apparent when one of your potential best friends dies very early on in the game and the consequences that cascade from that. But then (post-game spoilers) You learn how to prevent it, and can do exactly that on subsequent runthroughs. So much of the game relies on this sort of knowledge that it kind of ends up being pretty fun trying to attempt a perfect run. 8. Against the Storm  I've sunk probably a hundred or so hours into this game, and it is simultaneously the chillest city builder and probably the most stressful city builder; depending entirely on what season you're in and what location you're playing at. Did you just step foot outside of the capitol and you're getting your first settlement off the ground? Take your time, figure things out; there's no "real" time limit to this game anyways. Are you trying to reforge a platinum seal and it suddenly hit storm season? well gently caress you you better plunge all of your resources into the abyss in the hopes that your villagers don't just up and leave (or die). So many elements of city building are very modular- from population you have, to the specializations you choose, to the environment that you're in, to even the buildings that you construct, are so modular that every game is a practice in trying to make a working economy from the elements that you're given. And then you get to seals. I love the tension that seals add to the game because The environment itself feels so eldritch and inhospitable that there's such a time pressure to get it done and get out of there. I've only cleared up to gold so far, and they do kind of give you an edge with the extra traits you get for fulfilling the eye's requests, but the fact that the trees all look like dead people and blood flowers still keeps me on edge. It's probably my ultimate "chill and watch something" game. 7. Final Fantasy XVI  This is the part of the list where I think 'Yeah, if those other six games didn't exist this would easily be a #1 GOTY contender", and it feels kind of weird to put FF16 at #7. It's an incredible character-action game with some incredible combat, fantastically cinematic moments of gameplay, and a pretty intriguing story for the first two thirds of the game. I think what ultimately puts it so low on my list is that last third; You end up going to a place so desolate that a lot of the strong writing and interesting environments the game had just turn barren. At that point, the game kind of feels like a checklist of sidequests you need to clear off before getting to the grand finale. I don't think any of it was particularly bad, but it wasn't as engaging as the first 2/3rds of the game. Also, a bit of a personal gripe but I hated that (full game spoilers) Jill kind of gets thrown to the sidelines as soon as Clive sleeps with her. Also, it's really lovely that Jill, as an eikon, never won a single eikon battle in the entire game. Really, her whole character deserved better. All of that aside, FF16 is still a fantastic game that I'm looking forward to revisiting when the DLC comes out. Every Eikon fight in the game has been some of the most cinematic and epic experiences that i've seen. 6. The Talos Principle 2  What if religion and history, but robots? The Talos Principle 2 has been a very chill and unique puzzle experience that picks up directly where the first game left off. The Talos Principle 2 does something very interesting in that it explores the space of veneration of the past and the trepidation of going into the future. It takes a look at the ending of the first game and fast forwards a little bit to ask "What would that society of robots look like?", while presenting you with an intriguing environment to explore. There's a constant debate between the characters you meet about how to not replicate the mistakes of their predecessors, and none of them agree on what's right for society. Is there a limit where they should just stop growing and wait out their remaining days until they die? If they look outward from their city, are they doomed to ruin their world as their predecessors did? The game explores these questions with three metaphysical AIs that you encounter throughout the game; Pandora (more or less stating "stay in your loving lane and don't gently caress things up again."), Prometheus (stating, "gently caress yeah, the world is ours for the taking"), and the Sphinx- not outright stating anything but asking you what you think the right thing to do is. Of course, the puzzles are there, and some of the mechanics have been interesting, but the puzzles are more or less a break from the questions the game asks. I loved The Talos Principle 1, and I loved the Talos Principle 2. I hope I love the Talos Principle 3 whenever that comes out. 5. Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom  I kind of love open world games, and I love open world games that aren't afraid to pull their punches when you wander into an area well above your weight class. Tears of the Kingdom is one of these games and does such a good job of it my wife and I reminisce about different parts of the game where we were exploring around when we stumbled onto something serious. In order these stories are (Middle of the Map) Finishing the tutorial island and wandering around for a solid 6-10 hours completing shrines and the like until we went to the main town and got the paraglider. (Top left) Wandering around the Rito Village area and using batteries and rockets to get enough lift and unlocking the air temple before we did the quest to find the sage. (Top Middle) Trying to find our way into the Korok Forest by land, by air, and then finally by the underground and fighting the phantom ganon inside woefully underprepared and then finally (Bottom Middle) Stumbling our way through the clouded area in the bottom center of the map only to find the hidden spirit temple before the main quest brought us there, using the world map to have a general idea of where we can go. I think that's kind of an aspect to open world adventures that I love- the emergent gameplay that occurs when you have so many interconnected and well designed systems that coalesce into so many memorable moments. Tears of the Kingdom is all of these, and no two playthroughs of this game are going to be the same. The spoilered sections that I listed above might be things that you experience in your game, or you might experience something completely different. Tears of the Kingdom was such a good sequel to Breath of the Wild that i'm kind of happy and sad about it. I'm happy because it's a gameplay style that I'm excited to see more or and see the teams involved expand on them, but a little sad because i'm going to miss that classic zelda experience. Hopefully future games will be able to mix the two a little bit more, but I wouldn't blame them if they wanted to expand more on the open world aspect. 4. Pikmin 4  I'd be lying if I said that I always had a fondness for the Pikmin franchise. I have played a good majority of the Pikmin franchise thanks to the influence of my older sister but I can't ever really say that I enjoyed it; I enjoyed the premise of it; the time limit coupled with the strategy involved in collecting ship parts/treasure was an interesting idea, but I loving hated how it controlled. Pikmin 4 did a fantastic job of remedying this with the introduction of Oatchi. No longer do I need to worry about not taking the optimal path through a narrow passage and all of my pikmin drowning. I think Oatch is only the tip of the iceberg at how well the developers honed in on what was good about the first three Pikmin games and cranks them up to 11. Dandori Challenges were some of the most fun i've ever had playing a Pikmin Game. The post-game where you get to play as Captain Olimar and more or less replay a version of Pikmin 1 was also pretty drat good. Other Pikmin games had me thinking "Well, i'm glad that's over" by the time I was finished with them, while this one had me wanting more. 3. Octopath Traveler 2  Before I go too far into this game, I have to say that I bounced hard off of the first Octopath Traveler game. I thought the first game had some pretty fun gameplay but with some absolutely loving boring storylines- having started as primrose and collected just about every character, it seemed like everybody was some mix of "aw shucks gee gosh darn, better go milk the cows!" with their call to adventure being little more than because they're bored (Primrose being the exception). Enter Octopath Traveler 2, where playing Agnea's story... felt a lot like the same as Octopath Traveler 1. But Traveler 2 succeeds where 1 fails by having a wide variety of tones to the potential stories available, with some of them matching your typical call to adventure, to something more grimdark, to something that's just about the meaning of being a star. I think the more varied writing, coupled with improvements made on 1s engine, as well as the fact that the game isn't afraid to let some moments just build and build to an absolutely incredible payoff easily puts this game into my top three. I would recommend this game to anyone with a fondness for JRPGs, especially if they fell off of the first one for any reason that isn't "I didn't really like the gameplay." I was a little shocked with how much of this game resonated with me, how much of it I enjoyed, and just how dang fun it was. 2. Age of Wonders 4  Age of Wonders is a series very near and very dear to my heart, and I think the thing that I most appreciate about it is that Triumph Studios always makes an effort to change up the formula every title. If they wanted to, they could have made AoW 2 3 & 4 just be AoW 1 with a fancy new coat of paint and... probably fade into obscurity. But they didn't, and the fact that AoW 4 dives fully into "you get to play as a god-like figure, create and shape your people and lead them to victory" makes it all the more enjoyable. I think that this series has always had a very high fantasy feel to it - the first game having 12 playable species (that were... mostly the same until you hit T3), and 4 does a great job of expanding on that aspect of things by making everything about your civilization that customizable. You choose what kind of form you want your people to have (Are they goblins? Mole people? Humans?), how their civilization functions (are they magical? industrial? barbarians?) as well as so many other aspects that it's very difficult for any two civilizations to be the same. I sank a lot of hours into this game. A lot of hours. My wife and I joke that this is a game that we play if we want to fast forward through a day because we will typically start playing at around noon and then check the clock and it will be 6:00 or 7:00 PM. The game has only improved since its release, and I hope that it's able to get a second round of DLC as time progresses; the ability to create our own civilization has us replaying a bunch, and it's great to take a gimmick and try to adapt your playstyle to it as the game progresses. I would love to see them to be able to expand on that a bunch, but I don't think Triumph Studios has ever done wrong on a game release. I'm always going to be excited for whatever their next title ends up being. 1. Baldur's Gate 3  Hoo boy, I was very hesitant about this game as soon as I heard it was announced. After playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 I got to hear that Larian Studios was making a video game based on 5th edition D&D. Having grown up with the original Baldur's Gate games and trying out early access as soon as it came out I thought that this game was going to bomb or be mediocre at best. I am so loving glad they had the liberty to make changes to the system to make the game run better in tabletop (looking at you, bonus spell restrictions, jumping rules, and the monk class) but also that they had the freedom to be like "Oh, yeah, so you're a monk, you get this extra bit of dialogue in these places. If you're a dragonborn, you get some extra stuff in these other spots. And if you're both? Well then at this one point in the game you'll get a little something extra to say." And it's like that for every class and race combination in the game. Granted, not all of those dialogue moments are unique. I don't think they're all that exclusive, either; I think one of the special monk dialogues I got to see again when I was playing a cleric on a different playthrough (as more or less a synonym option; it had the same effect and bonus but was worded differently). But they do achieve the goal of making every moment feel unique to your character, which is what TTRPGs and some RPGs should be about. I think BG3 succeeds incredibly uniquely in this regard; a lot of interactions do have the feeling of being personal to your character. Companion interactions can achieve this as well (and a lot of the companions are very well written, while others are less so). There's a special magic to a game that isn't afraid to record a few extra lines of dialogue because you decided to play a wild magic sorcerer and thus can talk about the time you accidentally teleported yourself into the middle of a wedding. I think BG3 succeeds far beyond any other game (including Wrath of the Righteous and BG 1 & 2) in this respect. There are moments where I think it does fall flat (Act 3 spoilers) Sarevok, Viconia, which can be attributed to a lot of things. The final product, however, filled me with such a sense of wonder and magic that it got me thinking "gently caress, I love playing video games." and got me to play through the original trilogy (well, Quadrilogy) again. I hope Larian Studios gets the chance to expand on it, or put some of this magic into the next Divinity game that they end up making. Abridged List 10. Lil Gator Game 9. I Was A Teenage Exocolonist 8. Against the Storm 7. Final Fantasy XVI 6. The Talos Principle 2 5. Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 4. Pikmin 4 3. Octopath Traveler 2 2. Age of Wonders 4 1. Baldur's Gate 3
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Dec 25, 2023 19:49
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Here, have a short list. 6. Against the Storm - I love base building and that's pretty much the entire game here. A perfect game for a certain sort of person. 5. Citizen Sleeper - I only gave this game a try because it kept showing up in last year's GotY thread. I beat the game in one sitting and I nearly cried at the end. Not bad for what amounts to a fancy choose-your-own-adventure book. 4. Resident Evil 4: Remake - I'm in the camp that felt like this game didn't need a remake. But here it is anyway. Good thing Capcom is really, really good at re-making Resident Evil games. 3. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - Another helping of Breath of the Wild? Don't mind if I do! 2. Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon - I don't have much patience for anime nonsense and I think mechs that zip around like spaceships with legs dangling off are stupid. Yet here I am having a ton of fun with a mission based mech game that plays all that stuff straight. The game has an excellent sense of spectacle and walks a fine line between cool fun scenarios and "oh come on". I still think the mechs with tank treads for legs are dumb though. 1. Baldur's Gate 3 - It's true. This game is amazing and will surely dethrone Fallout: New Vegas as the game nobody will be able to shut up about for the next decade. A new era of 6 hour video essays is dawning.
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Dec 25, 2023 22:13
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