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Alright, here are some game reviews! I played a lot of games this year but didn't play all that many new games. In the rainy winter months I've caught up a bit on 2023 and am ready to deliver some spicy hot takes. ===== Honorable Mentions ===== X) Beat Saber Perenially one of my most-played games; a great way to get some fun exercise when it hasn't stopped raining for a week. X) Cassette Beasts A fun Pokemon-like with really nice music. I didn't play all that far into it but I enjoyed what I did play. X) Last Epoch Very solid early access ARPG; the campaign in particular is loads of fun and there are tons of viable builds. The endgame wears thin very fast but maybe they'll figure out how to fix that before full launch. X) Arknights Tower-defense gacha game. Had some fun with the gameplay and I enjoyed the story. Insane amounts of content. ===== Dishonorable Mentions =====  HOT TAKES AHOY X) Lies of P I'm over runbacks, slow load screens, and multi-stage bosses. I like the mix of parrying, dodging, and full-on aggression of the combat in this game but I cannot be bothered to fight a boss that unlocks new moves at half health and then, when killed, transforms into a second boss with an entirely different moveset that *also* gets new moves at half health. Actually, I probably could be bothered to fight such a boss if dying didn't result in a 20 second load screen followed by a 20 second runback. X) Hi-Fi Rush I hate this game. Uninspired platforming broken up by short fights where the game tells me I'm getting a "C" or whatever but doesn't let me retry for a better score (yes, I'm sure you can do so later in the game; no, I don't care). The fact that absolutely everyone praises this game like it's the best thing ever makes me feel gaslit. ===== Actual Top Ten List ===== 10) Baldur's Gate 3 I never got into BG1/2; my big loves from that generation of games were the Icewind Dale series, which I enjoyed for the strategic combat. BG3 has a big focus on story, but I'm not that interested in a video game fantasy story -- I'd rather read a book. The combat in BG3 is fine but everything feels so janky; in particular I really don't like the weird "turn-based but only in a bubble around you" behavior. That said, it's clearly a good game, I've had some fun with it, and I'm very happy to see their success overall. 9) Honkai Star Rail A fun turn-based RPG with enjoyable story and characters, though the end-game activities didn't capture me at all. I loved the absurd writing for the main character. A good time for the low price of free (unless you have a problem with gacha games, in which case the price is all of your money). 8) Orb of Creation An "idle" game where you never actually idle. Lots of creative solutions to getting past production challenges. I haven't played the latest version (still waiting for it to come out of beta) but the previous non-beta version was a very complete and fun game even though it lacked an ending. An amazing value for $5. 7) Everspace 2 The only decent space combat + exploration game to come out in a long-rear end time. It has plenty of issues and I didn't come anywhere close to finishing it, but it scratched an itch that no other game has in a long time so it's going on my list. 6) Hexcells Infinite I have played altogether too much of this puzzle game. It's still amazing to me that the game's creator found an algorithm for making actually-good Hexcells puzzles. I jam out a couple of these every morning with my coffee. If you ever enjoyed Minecraft but got annoyed that some of the puzzles required guessing, this is the game for you. 5) Monster Hunter: ICE I love MH:W and its expansion and wanted to do another playthrough but couldn't stomach rewatching the cutscenes. ICE (the Iceborne Community Edition mod) makes cutscenes skippable and fixes a bunch of issues with the expansion. It also tweaks weapons in ways I've found very enjoyable. Such a great chill-out game with friends. 4) Path of Exile The best ARPG ever made is the best it's ever been. I can only play this like for one season a year (because I lose an entire month when I do) but it's just so enjoyable when I do play. I love the complexity of builds and the fun of trying to craft some crazy item that only your weird-rear end build wants. 3) Outer Wilds I bounced off this the first time I tried it due to trying to brute-force what in retrospect were wrong solutions to puzzles. This year I tried again, got over the hump, and loved the game. Beautiful "little prince" universe with a touching story and great mysteries to uncover. 2) Celeste If I'm being honest this is actually my #1 for the year, but it's the third time I've played through Celeste and I wanted to give my top spot to something new. This was the year I finally beat Farewell (having previously made it to the last screen before stalling out). The game just gets better every time you play it and it feels SO GOOD to play. 1) Against the Storm A great concept executed well. Play the best part of a city builder over and over, with harder constraints as you get better. The Slay the Spire of city builders. I played a good amount of the game in early access then left off so I wouldn't burn out on it before release. The release version is even better and I've been having a great time getting back into it.
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Dec 25, 2023 22:43
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i played a whole bunch of video games this year. it was a weird one, where some of the things i really looked forward to (blasphemous 2, zelda TOTK, diablo 4) were major disappointments, but luckily there were lots of other releases to pick up the slack. i arbitrarily cut off my list at 15 because all those games were frankly too good not to mention. i've arbitrarily added pictures and gifs to certain games and not to others. honourable mentions: calcium contract night at the gates of hell lethal company max payne 2 age of wonders 4 against the storm caves of qud dark souls 2 (i replay this game every year and it was like 7 on my list last year, just goes to show you what a year we've had) HROT slay the princess returnal hylics 15 - Orbo's Odyssey  sometimes less is more. Orbo's Odyssey is a really strange little platformer that i finished in about two hours, including finding all of the secrets. it's incredibly fast and movement feels really good, with a completely discordant plot that i can best describe as 'family friendly Cruelty Squad'. the main antagonists in the game are 1) the protagonist's lack of arms (he's trapped in his boss' office and can't open the door) 2) cardboard cutouts of vampires that sometimes scream. sprinkle in some cosmic horror and hellworld capitalism and you got a stew going, baby. 14 - Sifu  i really love fighting games. Sifu is a single-player fighting game roguelike which escaped Epic Jail this year, in which the central gimmick is that every time you die, your character ages and then you get up and keep fighting through the level. this means that you can complete the game at 69 years old. the combat works mostly on the principle of countering, somewhat similarly to sekiro but with less wink wink nudge nudge player bias. positioning is super important, whether by moving around a lot, or by flinging enemies around, to avoid getting dogpiled by too many goons at once (just like on this forum). sometimes all-out aggression is called for, since if you can take out two enemies in the first few seconds, your chances are drastically improved. sometimes you have to play very carefully and defensively. however, just getting through the levels is often not good enough. once you hit 80 you die, and going into the second level at 79 years old after dying 40 times in the first level is a bad idea. you unlock shortcuts through the levels as you play them, and you will go back to your previous levels to try and die less, so you can start the next level with working knees. the roguelike structure works really well for this. but the game has no mercy. it will smack you around a lot. i wish it was longer, and the last boss is really cool but also has a dumb gimmick that penalizes you for building your character a certain way, but it's very good. really nails that feeling of getting destroyed and thinking that this is impossible, then fast forward 45 minutes and you're crushing your way through the same enemies that gave you so much trouble. 13 - Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising https://twitter.com/Excel_Breaker/status/1737694661106610660 (not mine) if this game had come out a few months ago it would definitely have been higher on the list, but i've only played it for about a week so here it is. unlike a certain game at number 1, this game is a lot more approachable and easy to play. it straddles the line between kusoge (lit. 'lovely Game', a term of endearment) and a technical and precise fighting game really well, with lots of universal mechanics and inputs across its many characters, all of whom feel very distinct from one another in gameplay and vibes, and all of whom seem to have their own flavour of ridiculous bullshit they can throw out. motion inputs are optional, with almost no downside for using simple inputs (direction + attack button + skill button but you lose 10% damage) and this means that switching characters to get a feel for them is really easy. there's a lot of deliberate design decisions to mitigate this, though, with a 'Bravery Points' resources you can spend to either break your opponent's block, to get very easy long combos, or spend to get yourself out of block stun when you don't have a fuckin clue about your opponent's moves, if they are plus or minus, if you're being frametrapped, etc. it also looks amazing, and it's just nice to play, with every character seemingly having unique intros with each other. there's a guy whose super is that he summons a giant lady who turns the game into a bullet hell platformer for the opponent for about ten seconds. there's a free version with a rotating cast you can try out, and i would really recommend it for anyone looking for an approachable but still exciting fighting game. lots of people playing it at the moment. 12 - OlliOlli i re-played this game on steam deck and it's the best. sublime, ultra-precise platforming at high speeds. no notes. they never managed to replicate the same level of gameplay in the sequels. the only issue i have with it is that there should be more of it. 11 - DOOM (1993) SIGIL 1 & SIGIL 2 i played both of these .wads recently and they are both exceptional. unbelievable that a 30 year old game feels and looks and plays this well. they are also very difficult but i persevered. shoutout to the steam deck OLED and the cyber demons for giving me a tan when the screen lit up my face in doom-death-red. ________ 10 - Astronarchs  this is a roguelike autobattler that is pure dopamine for my brain. something like 25 different classes that combine in really interesting ways, lots of items and upgrades and decisions to be made. it's terribly balanced, which i don't really mind, since you start climbing ascensions and gradually peel away strategies that don't work or are unreliable until you are a left with a nubbin of truly optimized little fellas and only the most degenerate strategies. but it boils down to lose because number not big. make number more big and win. 9 - Crash Bandicoot 4 this game pogs and hogs. i was a huge crash fan as a kid and this game delivered an experience that felt classic and modern at the same time. non-stop gimmicks that all felt cohesive and shook up the gameplay in interesting ways. hard, but not so hard as to be unreasonable. looks and feels fantastic. amazing environments. i know crash isn't for everyone but if you have any kind of nostalgia for it, you owe it to yourself to pick this game up. just don't try to 100% it whatever you do. jesus christ there's too much poo poo to do. 8 - Lunacid    King's Field-like from a solo dev. the gameplay is simple, and trivial to break once you have the appropriate weapon for an enemy, even if you limit yourself to melee weapons. but the vibes? immaculate. it's a game that's all about exploring and finding strange new corners of this world ('The Great Well', which outcasts and criminals and scum are cast into as punishment) and i think the game really, really nails it. every new area feels exciting and oppressive to explore, with weirdo NPCs and side-quests usually all hidden of in some corner of the map, and lots of secrets to find. in the first third of the game you might find yourself exploring a vampire-infested castle with cattle pens, where everything is way too hard to kill. well, you think to yourself, i'll try this other place i found, the accursed tomb. in there, you'll encounter invisible enemies, semi-translucent paintings that are impossible to kill without using your magic, but you persevere and delve into the tomb. you get hopelessly lost but stagger around lighting some ghost ovens and hoping not to die before you make it back to the bonfire (sorry, the crystal) so you can save and heal. you find an odd side path and make your way up some stairs into a tomb where you find the Vampire Hunter Sword. it does light damage. it's the first weapon you've found that does. suddenly, you are able to cut swathes through all of these enemies that seemed impossible to kill at first. emboldened, you delve further into the tomb, into the mausoleum. you explore, gathering up resources, killing stuff. suddenly a message on the screen appears: 'DEATH APPROACHES'. 7 - Demon's Souls (ps3, emulated on steam deck) fromsoft really have made the same game over and over. but that game? it's really loving good. i don't know if there is anything left to say about demon's souls at this point, but as a souls veteran, it's really interesting to go back to and play. the difficulty is wildly different from all the other games, with the levels and exploration being by far the biggest hurdle to overcome, and almost all of the bosses ranging from trivial to jokes. but the complete lack of bonfires in the levels gives it a much more oppressive feel than any of the other games. you are really, truly on your toes when you're 30 minutes into 2-1 and have three different paths to go down, one of which, you are sure, will lead to an elevator back. but that crystal lizard just beelined down this really innocent hallway and since crafting materials are so rare and limited in this game you think, what if i just went for it? it's also hilariously way more punishing than the latter games. the world tendency system punishes you for going into human form so you can have 100% health, which you need to use a limited resource for. but every time you die in that form, the world tendency gets blacker, and everything gets tougher. i didn't realise, and accidentally juiced up one of the only hard bosses in the game (flamelurker) and got hard stuck on him for a few hours very early in the game. in that sense it feels much more like a horror game than the later entries which have all moved towards more of an action power fantasy. i love the later games and i think sekiro and elden ring are the best of the lot, with the best boss fights, but it does make me wish for a game in the style of demon's souls. _________ games 6-3 are just ranked like this today, but on a different day, i'd change them around. these are the games that were truly incredible, sublime pieces of game design. they only fall short of the top two places because of personal preference. 6 - ARMORED CORE VI: FIRES OF RUBICON this game rocks. i really appreciated having the game be broken up into self-contained levels, and that the focus was so squarely on providing great mech-to-mech combat. the game, like sekiro, is kinda solvable in the sense that once you get good, there really isn't anything left that can challenge you, but the process of getting good against balteus, sea spider, enforcer, G1 michigan, IBIS, etc. was some of the most fun i've had in a game this year. the game also proved to me that fromsoft can tell a really good straight-forward story. instead of obfuscation and subjecting the characters to the teleology of the world, making them largely puppets, AC instead really goes in on trying to make you invested in its major players, and it really succeeds. rusty, G1 michigan, ayre, walter, snail, etc. - the game is bursting with these lively and idiosyncratic expressions of different points of view, but i never felt like i was making decisions for the sake of some philosophical abstraction. i did it because i wanted to for your sake, buddy. 5 - Pizza Tower everything i said about crash bandicoot 4 and olli olli applies here, but just, like, even more. i don't think any other game so smoothly ramps up the intensity and complexity of its gameplay like pizza tower until you get to the ludicrously fun final stretch. it builds and builds until it peaks and ends at the perfect moment. just writing this paragraph is making me want to replay it. 4 - SIGNALIS a lot of people have said a lot of things about this game and i agree with all of them. the gameplay is tense and interesting (i really recommend not turning off the 6 item limit, which is really central to the game's tension of choosing between weapons, medkits, tools, and key items) but what i found most impressive about it is the story. this is game that absolutely refuses one single reading of its story. it is a deeply personal story about love, promises, memory, identity, and commitment. it's a story about sickness and death and pain. it's a story about industry digging too deeply into the maw of the sleeper. it's a story about obsession and separation. it's one of these and all of these and i found its refusal to give an objective reading of itself really captivating. it never loses itself though. it never strays from being the story of elster trying to rescue her hot gf. but everything around that story keeps changing. all of the relational meaning is constantly in flux and you, the player, are flung into a state of utter dislocation. good poo poo. 3 - Etrian Odyssey 3 this game is really drat good. dungeon crawlers are so much fun and there are so few of them that are any good. i'm just praying they re-release the fourth game so i can actually beat it. i never did when i was a teenager and it hangs over me like a shadow. it looks back at me from the other side of my years on this earth and scoffs. gently caress you etrian odyssey 4!!! i'll get you one day motherfuckeeeeeer!!!!! 2 - Northern Journey     this game is here because it profoundly speaks to me. i love it. i wrote my thoughts about it in the steam thread a long time ago: quote:i recently finished northern journey and it's a rare treat. absolutely incredible adventure/FPS/walking sim/horror/metroidvania/etc. game. it creates a really evocative and cohesive world centred around scandi mythology, despite being pretty loving out there, or rather it's fully in line with how actually loving out there most scandi myths are, with some very unexpected, funny and memorable events. some janky ugly graphics and some text on the screen is all this game needs to do more to get you invested than a cutscene worked on by 100 people with paid hollywood voice actors. i stand by the above thoughts and if anything, the game has aged like fine wine in my mind. i am thinking back on the places it brings you to, the wildly unexpected twists and turns that feel like something straight out of a scandi folk myth, and i sometimes laugh thinking about the witches and all the mad poo poo they got up to. 1 - Street Fighter 6  i played the gently caress out of this game. i played it with my friends, i got to master rank online, and i went to locals and smoked some rear end like it was grass before i got rolled up and inhaled in one pull by people who are actually good. fighting games are god's gift to gaming. all other genres are the droppings of blank-faced glassy-eyed cows on the endless verdant fields where the fighting games frolic. EZ Top 10 List: 10 - Astronarchs 9 - Crash Bandicoot 4 8 - Lunacid 7 - Demon's Souls (PS3) 6 - ARMORED CORE VI: FIRES OF RUBICON 5 - Pizza Tower 4 - SIGNALIS 3 - Etrian Odyssey 3 2 - Northern Journey 1 - Street Fighter 6
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Dec 26, 2023 11:30
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Foul Fowl posted:1 - Street Fighter 6 god I wish I was even remotely competent at fighting games. they seem so fun unfortunately, quarter circle turns are the gaming equivalent of open heart surgery mixed with rocket science. alas
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Dec 26, 2023 11:43
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Darke GBF posted:god I wish I was even remotely competent at fighting games. they seem so fun you should give granblue fantasy versus rising (FREE EDITION) a try. it still has the circles ('technical inputs') but also has a skill button, which lets you have access to every special move without doing the circles (instead you do direction + skill button + [optional] attack button for different strength of special, no attack button means you do the light version). it's really good 
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Dec 26, 2023 11:54
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Darke GBF posted:god I wish I was even remotely competent at fighting games. they seem so fun You might've heard, Street Fighter 6 adds an awesome modern control mode. Doing quarter circles is an optional extra in modern, you can access special moves with a special move button and holding a direction on the d-pad. It's really well done.
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Dec 26, 2023 14:04
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Heavy Metal posted:You might've heard, Street Fighter 6 adds an awesome modern control mode. Doing quarter circles is an optional extra in modern, you can access special moves with a special move button and holding a direction on the d-pad. It's really well done. Yeah, SF6 is SUPER beginner-friendly. It has World Tour mode, which is basically the game saying, "Oh, you're new? No worries, mate! (takes you by the hand) Let's go on a fighting adventure that you can take at your own pace until you're comfortable and find a style that's right for you!". e: I suck cold poo poo at fighting games ( I still haven't successfully beaten Guilty Gear Strive's tutorial ) but I can handle this. xoFcitcrA fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Dec 26, 2023 |
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Dec 26, 2023 14:30
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oh yeah i forgot because i never used it but SF6 also had simpler inputs. biggest difference with granblue is that you have access to both ‘modern’ and ‘classic’ at the same time. i’m also trying to get more people to play granblue because street fighter already has so many players and i want the granblue community to thrive  e: maybe you have access to both in SF6 too but i’m 99% sure it takes away some of your buttons and options in modern
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Dec 26, 2023 14:36
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TIL about Lunacid, that game looks like the kind of thing I'd really enjoy as a UUW/Arx/King's Field enjoyer.Setec_Astronomy posted:6) Hexcells Infinite I think this was meant to say Minesweeper but please don't fix it.
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Dec 26, 2023 14:43
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I still wanna get Streets 6, but I used up my one allotted Christmas Sale Game purchase on Jedi Survivor
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Dec 26, 2023 14:46
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Streets 6 is so nice I bought it twice
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Dec 26, 2023 14:49
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Darke GBF posted:god I wish I was even remotely competent at fighting games. they seem so fun I am patently dogshit at fighting games (ask all the goons who whipped my rear end despite playing characters they've never played in for-fun random-only rooms) and I can say that either Granblue or Streets with their simple input options are God's gift to newbies like us. Like, you'll still get trashed starting out, but at least you can use the fancy dandy skills and actually try to incorporate them into your gameplan rather than flail around trying to do quarter circles and Z motions and stuff. Hell, Granblue's got a free edition that lets you play online and everything, might as well give it a whirl.
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Dec 26, 2023 14:52
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Foul Fowl posted:dark souls 2 (i replay this game every year and it was like 7 on my list last year, just goes to show you what a year we've had) Always nice to see more ds2 love, it's easily my favorite Souls style game. I've gone through it at least a couple dozen times including ng+ and I don't think I've ever taken the same route to beat a playthrough. One day I'll manage Darklurker as first boss... I really liked Sifu but agree that it could be longer. It's one of those games where "getting good" feels super cathartic. Arenas didn't really scratch my itch when I tried it but I was also out of practice.
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Dec 26, 2023 15:57
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hatty posted:Streets 6 is so nice I bought it twice Ditto. No cross progression though. Such an excellent game. Foul Fowl posted:oh yeah i forgot because i never used it but SF6 also had simpler inputs. biggest difference with granblue is that you have access to both ‘modern’ and ‘classic’ at the same time. You're doing god's work. The first version of the game didn't have rollback but had a great underlying system. Really want the second attempt to succeed. You cannot do modern and classic inputs on SF simultaneously fwiw.
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Dec 26, 2023 19:32
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Hello weary travelers. Let's talk about videogames. 2023 a hard goddamn year for me but dang if they didn't make some amazing games to play. First, let's do some honorable mentions: FF9: Replays of games will almost never make my lists but drat if this doesn't come very, very close to breaking that rule for me. Playing this game is just a little slice of joy for me, always and forever. Monster Hunter Rise: I've never been particularly into monster hunter, or hunting games in general. I gave this one a try during an NSO trial and it was good enough to get me to shell out on a recent sale. I had played almost entirely solo before, but now I'm hopping in and out of multiplayer games and the game has a delightful rhythm to it. I haven't hit the Sunbreak content yet, looking forward to it. Sea of Thieves: My IRL group of friends decided to try this out a few weeks ago, and it's becoming a regular thing for us. On our first play session we docked at town to get oriented regarding in-game vendors etc. Then I noticed that there was a lot of smoke... coming from our ship? We spent the next five minutes fighting fires, dying occassionally, and screaming into voice chat 'why is our ship an inferno!?!'. When the fire was gone someone suddenly asked into chat 'did... somebody leave a pork chop on the ship's stove?'. A+ game, would burn down the ship with abandoned food again. Xenoblade Chronicles X: With the imminent closure of the Wii U online systems, I wanted to replay this game while I could. The asymmetric multiplayer is really interesting, and the game will really never be as good when it goes. The main plot is barely there, but where it really shines is the world building, the side content, and the sense of creating and forming a huge community in New L.A. Hopefully a revival is in the cards within the next few years. Crisis Core: I was glad to have the chance to play the remaster before Rebirth comes out next year, which... yeah I expect that to place in 2024's top 3. Zach is the best. The game was good, albeit clearly a PSP game underneath a very good coat of paint. Now for the ranked list: 10. Pokemon Scarlet: My word, the freedom and flexibility in this generation was fantastic. The supporting cast is the best since at least Black and White, tera raids are a huge step up from raids in Sw/Sh, and the world's design feels alive and interesting. If future gen 10 builds on 9 as well as gen 9 built on 8, then the future of Pokemon is very exciting. 9. Super Mario RPG remake. An amazing game and a wonderful remake. They took a wonderful game and made it better across the board. I have some minor quibbles with some of their edits, but on balance the changes were for the better. I hope squat, funny Mario who is constantly pantomiming and tripping can come back again someday. I had forgotten the charm, humor, and personality on display throughout this game. And I finally beat Culex. Hell yeah. 8. Danganronpa V3. They made a trilogy, spinoffs, anime, and then just burned the whole thing down and walked away. I can't help but respect that. People either love or hate the ending of V3, and I am firmly in the former camp. 7. Live a Live. It's never anything but fresh. Every branch feels like a whole new game. They never wear out their welcome and they always iterate until they feel complete. It's like Squaresoft smushed half a dozen prototypes together that complemented each other perfectly. It's a game that knows exactly what it wants to be, thematically, and isn't shy about telling you. Amazing game. 6. AI The Somnium Files the Nirvana Initiative. I can't even be mad. The twist is so completely unnecessary, and the game is structured for the sake of creating the twist. But it's so well done in its ridiculous artifice that I have to applaud it. Also, it's a good plot, the somniums are fun puzzles, and the characters are great to see again. I can't wait to see what comes next. 5. Cereza and the Lost Demon. Platinum responded to the death of Scalebound by making it three times in the last four years, and hopefully they've gotten it out of their system. But this was easily my favorite of all their 'control two characters at the same time in combat' games of late. The art is gorgeous. The world feels small but busy - appropriate for a fairytale forest that should feel both confining and frighteningly open. The narration was strong enough to carry the game, and I was never less than charmed by the narrator putting on the Chesire voice. And the finale of the game, where Cereza learns to use Witch Time, was a fantastic moment. 4. Metroid Dread. The EMMI sections became a lot more fun once I realized that you're not supposed to stop and stealth. They're designed to home in on where you're sitting and then menacingly wander close to you. No, you're supposed to just blast across the level at full speed and then hide in a nook until they get frustrated, and then book it again. The counterattack was well implemented, the bosses are super fun and satisfying, and the exploration was fun and engaging. I can't imagine where they go with Metroid from here but I'm looking forward to it. 3. Super Mario Wonder. If I wasn't sold on the trailer, the musical number in the second level would have done it. It wasn't that long ago that 2D Mario had a bad stink from the rapidfire, samey New games, and so it was an unexpected pleasure to see a 2D mario so good it was nearly my GOTY. And it could have been, if there had been more postgame levels and more bosses. As it is, it still goes down as a contender for one of the best Mario games of all time in my book. 2. Pentiment. The goon consensus was correct last year. Pentiment is an astounding labor of love. Every time the game jumped forward in time was a moment of excitement, to come back to a place I was already nostalgic for and see it in a completely new light. Easily the best narrative and writing I experienced this year. 1. Tears of the Kingdom. Nothing quite like coming back to a fully established world in order to do it all again. Except, more so. I loved the flow of adventuring through the depths. I loved working out how to navigate up to and across the various sky island. I loved the freeform sense of adventure that was restored by the caves and wells, which felt more unknown and full of more possibility that the shrines and dungeons. You know what you're getting into with a shrine. But that cave? That cave could have ANYTHING in it. And then, there's that final boss fight. Every single part of it, perfection. Game are good y'all. 10. Pokemon Scarlet 9. Super Mario RPG Remake 8. Danganronpa V3. 7. Live a Live. 6. AI The Somnium Files the Nirvana Initiative. 5. Cereza and the Lost Demon 4. Metroid Dread 3. Super Mario Wonder 2. Pentiment. 1. Tears of the Kingdom.
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Dec 26, 2023 19:46
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ToxicFrog posted:TIL about Lunacid, that game looks like the kind of thing I'd really enjoy as a UUW/Arx/King's Field enjoyer. it's very good and also really cheap, without looking it up i'm gonna guess that it's like, ten pounds rn during the sale. FireWorksWell posted:Always nice to see more ds2 love, it's easily my favorite Souls style game. I've gone through it at least a couple dozen times including ng+ and I don't think I've ever taken the same route to beat a playthrough. One day I'll manage Darklurker as first boss... yeah i love DS2, i don't consciously replay it but it always ends up happening and the steam deck makes it even easier. i played a while you were partying i studied the blade build (dual wielding katanas) and they kept breaking lol. once i killed alonne twice it got even stupider with two swords longer than my character's body. without the DLCs i think it would be slightly better than DS1 and worse than DS3 but with the DLC it beats all of them. it always makes me want a game more in the style of demon's souls where they yeet the interconnected world altogether and simply let you teleport to a bunch of 3-5 hour dungeons. shulva and brume tower are the best locations in the souls series. possibly in the whole fromsoft catalogue but then they're competing with leyndell, stormveil castle, hirata estate, ashina outskirts and castle, the hunter's nightmare and the fishing hamlet... unattended spaghetti posted:You're doing god's work. The first version of the game didn't have rollback but had a great underlying system. Really want the second attempt to succeed. anecdotally it seems like it's doing really well and i'm really enjoying it though i'm still bouncing around characters and not really trying to learn anything beyond some really basic BnBs.
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Dec 26, 2023 19:53
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Foul Fowl posted:without the DLCs i think it would be slightly better than DS1 and worse than DS3 but with the DLC it beats all of them. Yeah, I always look forward to the DLC areas whenever I start a new run. Just a little bummed they don't get a ng+ treatment like the rest of the game. Conversely I thought DS3's dlc brought that game down; despite some cool ideas it really felt like they overtuned it to compensate for how easy most of the base game was. Might be a bit colored by the fact I ran through Ruined City for the first time at ng+4. I still ended up putting more time into 3 over 2 but that's because soul memory made multiplayer a pain in the rear end especially once DS3 came out. I much prefer everything else about 2 over the rest of the soulsborne games though.
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Dec 26, 2023 20:08
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Alright, Christmas is over and I don't have a reason to procrastinate on this. Here are my top 20 games of the year. Previous Posts: Games 61-41 Games 40-21. 20. Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak (7.4) - Monster Hunting Simulator - Was hesitating to buy this because the initial feedback for the DLC was really negative and included things like, "Oops your save file is gone!." This is still an issue for some according to a review as recent as October. I guess I got lucky because I never encountered it. Having finally bitten the bullet, I consider it a fine addition to the Monster Hunter franchise (as someone who's only played World, Iceborne, and Rise). Additions from the DLC include some more wirebug moves, the ability to switch out wirebug skill sets in the middle of a hunt (which I never took advantage of and it only ever got me in trouble but I can see the utility), and my favorite addition, the ability to go on hunts with your favorite NPC's! I'd been trying to hassle some of my friends to get into hunting monsters with me for a little while but it's a hard sell to be honest and they're not super into actiony games like this anyway. So, having AI companions in this game is a huge boon. I liked companions so much that I installed the Follow Me mod so that I could always have four AI friends with me on every hunt (the mod allows you to modify their damage scaling and monster health. The game doesn't become free unless you want it to). Weapon-wise, I started the DLC campaign off with the heavy bowgun and then swapped about halfway through for the Gunlance. The story is complete nonsense as always. 19. Hard West 2 (7.6) - Occult Western X-COM - You are Gin Carter, an outlaw who is currently robbing the infamous Ghost Train. While on this heist, you and your posse get your souls stolen by The Devil and you gotta track him down and deliver some Hard Western Justice. Something like that. Hard West 2 has a lot of great mechanical systems and they work well together while rewarding an extremely aggressive playstyle. The key mechanic is called Bravado, which refunds all of your action points any time you kill an enemy. With smart placement and some foresight, you can easily kill your way across an entire map in a handful of rounds (and there's a handful of missions that expect you to do that to receive bonus rewards). It's pretty sick and really satisfying when you can set everything up to completely wipe out packs of enemies before they can get a shot off. There are a lot of improvements from the first game in terms of mechanics and presentation. It's a much more polished experience. The story itself is decent though I thought most of the characters that can join your party to be sort of bland. 18. Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo (7.7) - Occult Mystery Visual Novel - Paranormasight is about a hodgepodge of characters engaging in Jojo battles to the death in the Honjo neighborhood in Tokyo. The art is gorgeous, the story and characters are well-written, and the entire mystery wraps up very neatly at the end. The soundtrack is also noteworthy. It's quite good. No voice acting, unfortunately. Not much gameplay or interactivity beyond piecing certain things together and a few dialogue options. It is definitely a visual novel. Sidenote: Paranormasight made me realize that I have a thing for women with bags under their eyes. Why?  17. Vampire Survivors: Tides of the Foscari (7.75)- Bullet Heaven DLC - It's more Vampires and more Survivors and more Weapons and more God drat Achievements and there ain't nothing wrong with any of that. This placed higher than the other DLC because I liked the characters and weapons more. - BREAKING NEWS: New Vampire Survivors DLC came out and now there's something called Adventure mode? I don't have time for this! 16. A Building Full of Cats (7.8) - Hidden Cats ... 15. A Castle Full of Cats (7.9) - More Hidden Cats - Both of these games are short hidden object games where every hidden object is a cat doodle and it's cute and takes about an hour to 100% either of them. Castle Full of Cats has some additional features and improvements over Building Full of Cats but they're basically the same game. 14. Armored Core 6 (8) - Hyper Robot Action Fighting - It's FromSoft, they make good and challenging games and Armored Core 6 is a good and challenging game. I only wish that it wasn't occasionally bullshit. Fighting multiple ACs at the same time was never a fun experience for me at any point. I would either get stun-locked and wrecked or I would get lucky and murder one before the other guy could kill me and then I'd be fine. And the reason why was... My one major gripe with the game: the ACS overload system. It's the only mechanic that matters. Optimal play revolves around stunning your enemy and then unloading everything else that you've got into them. This also highlights the second issue with the game, which is weapon balance. Energy weapons are (probably still are) underpowered. My first playthrough used dual Ransetsu-RF's and I had a blast with the game (except for a couple of fights). My NG+ run was energy-focused and I found it to be a lot more difficult and frustrating compared to my first playthrough. It really soured the experience for me because I expected it to be more viable. Some of this could be attributed to some of the remixing present in NG+ and selecting different missions... but then I used a pair of shotguns for my NG++ run and didn't have any problems with anything I encountered so who can say? Winner of Hypest Moment of 2023: I'm fighting the last boss of NG++, I've completely expended all of my ammunition, and I've ditched all of my weapons. The boss is down to maybe 5% armor points but I'm also in the red without any repair kits. I assault boost in and kick him into ACS overload. I start punching, and he recovers from overload and hits me to trigger my Terminal Armor, I'm still punching. I'm watching the countdown on my Terminal Armor tick away as I'm slamming my shoulder buttons. Right as my terminal armor disappears, there's an explosion that envelopes both machines, and the HUD disappears... "I always... envied you." It was neat. I was yelling and my cats hid themselves under the couch. 13. Citizen Sleeper (8.1) - Spacepunk Visual Novel - You play as an android that finds themselves on an old run-down space station called The Eye. You're also on the run from the corporation that created you. The beginning of the game is extremely stressful. This is appropriate because inside and outside of the game you're in an unfamiliar location, you're on a deadline because your condition is degrading (which leads to not being able to do as many actions in a day), and some schmuck named Ethan is blackmailing you. It's all very stressful... and then around the halfway point of the game, it becomes so trivial to regain resources that the degradation mechanic is more of a bother than anything else. Citizen Sleeper espouses itself as a TTRPG-like experience though I'd describe it more like a... worker placement type board game combined with a CYOA book. You get some narrative choices but nothing close to the freedom of an actual tabletop experience. The writing is good and I also liked the art style. 12. Ender Lilies (8.15) - Metroidvania - Challenging but not overly difficult, beautiful art and music (More Mili). Better than Hollow Knight, IMHO. 11. The Case of the Golden Idol + Spider of Lanka DLC + The Lemurian Vampire DLC (8.2) - Point & Click Puzzle Adventure - Quaint and novel, describing an unfortunate series of events surrounding the eponymous Golden Idol in a series of panoramas. The player has to pick out certain keywords, phrases, items, and names and put them together to figure out what's happening in a similar vein as Return of the Obra Dinn. Both DLCs are prequels, sordidly detailing just about everything that happens before the first game kicks off. Pretty stoked about whatever's going on with the Netflix deal. Good for them! And now, the top 10. The creme de la creme up at the tip top of my list for the year. The Top 10 for ease of reference: 10. Slay the Princess 9. Midnight Suns 8. Chained Echoes 7. Trine 4 6. Pokemon Scarlet 5. Cassette Beasts 4. Monster Sanctuary 3. I was a Teenage Exocolonist 2. Library of Ruina 1. Baldur's Gate 3 10. Slay the Princess (8.25) - Visual Novel - A visual novel with a simple premise and excellent execution. The artwork is beautiful (I want an art book so badly). The writing is very good... very Stanley Parable but with a bigger cast. The two voice actors do an excellent job with the myriad roles they play. Top 10 Routes in Slay the Princess: 10. Tower 9. Apotheosis 8. Fury 7. Damsel 6. Adversary 5. Razor 4. Prisoner 3. Spectre 2. Witch 1. Thorn 9. Marvel's Midnight Suns (8.3) - Card-Based Tactical RPG - Midnight Suns is a great game but holy crap it does not respect your time as a player. By that, I mean the Core gameplay loop is just so time-consuming. You go to the Forge, go to the Yard, go to the War Room, run around the Abbey, talk to everyone, do some favors, etc, etc... and then finally you pick a mission and actually engage with the combat, which is really fun and interesting. And don't get me wrong, the writing in the game is good. Surprisingly good (again, Marvel can't seem to advertise any of their games well... outside of Spiderman probably). I didn't mind reading/listening to dialogue. It's just the "day-to-day" rote activities that felt like they ate up a lot of my game time (and I'm not the kind of person that can Not do them). The game's graphics are probably its weakest quality. Characters models vary in quality quite a bit. Also, saw several graphical glitches, which I won't penalize the game for because it was always hilarious. Most notably, the final encounter with Crossbones ended with Captain America punching him so hard that he was stuck in a T-Pose until the next cutscene. Sometimes enemies will spin out and fall through the world after death. 8. Chained Echoes (8.35) - JRPG - It's a solid JRPG with some good crunchy mechanics that doesn't waste your time too much. Everything about it is above average but nothing about it really stands out either. Very B+/A- kind of game. I'm honestly a bit surprised that this stuck around in my top 10 but here we are. Its back half is stronger than its first half, they spent that time setting up the setting and the characters so it all pays off later. Fights get solved fairly quickly. Glenn's going to debuff the enemy, Viktor's going to buff the party, and then Lenne starts murdering things. Playing around with the other characters kept things fresh but my A-team was set pretty early. Sky Armors come back kind of late but they're not as fun as fighting on foot. It's a shame that there's such a huge segregation between normal enemies and Sky Armor enemies. I would have really liked to have a chance at beating those types of enemies while on foot like I did with Fei back in Xenogears. Beat the optional final super boss that turned out to be easier than some of the super bosses that you need to beat to access the final super boss. Felt like that was kind of weird. I thought that the ending was kind of a downer. Surprised that there isn't an alternate ending. 7. Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince (8.55) - Physics Puzzles Fantasy Adventure Platformer - Completed this in 4-Player Multiplayer. Extremely fun whether working together or against each other while solving puzzles. Everything is really intuitive and the number of mechanics and tools that you have access to ramp up very smoothly. An absolute blast to play. 6. Pokemon Scarlet (8.6) - Pokemon - Pokemon Scarlet's in a weird position of being the best Pokemon that I've ever played and it's placed lower than S/V adds a lot of good quality-of-life improvements to the series (or maybe continues to push them forward might be more accurate). Mechanically, it doesn't really add much to the series (not that it really needed to). Terastallizing is kind of neat but it feels more like a win-harder mechanic as opposed to something that could save you in a rough spot (which is how it's presented in the rival and gym fights). Structurally, the swap to the open world has been great. I really liked the multiple avenues of adventure with the titan pokemon and Team Star battles. Traveling around with Koraidon feels good. Having the Titans and Team Star stuff around the map is also pretty cool. Overall, hope this stays on as part of the Pokemon formula (Heck, let's do multi-region next, why not) This is probably the best-written Pokemon game. Not a high bar, but the character writing is legitimately good and the overall plot is decent. Nemona is a breath of fresh air to the rival formula and Team Star's deal kind of caught me by surprise (as well as some of what's implied with Penny which I never would have expected in a Pokemon game). Arven is a goober but his storyline was the one that actually got my eyes to sweat a little. *Insert generic note about Switch games being hampered by the hardware of the system that they are shackled to.* Addendum: there are definitely graphical glitches and shortcuts taken with the open world that are not the Switch's fault. Some of the music is pretty catchy. 5. Cassette Beasts (9.1) - Pokemon Isekai Metroidvania - For some reason, you wake up on a beach on an island inhabited by weird monsters and then you can gain the ability to turn into those monsters when they're recorded onto a cassette tape? You decide to become a Ranger so that you can investigate the island's mysteries and maybe figure out how to get back home. The biggest shifts in the Pokemon formula are: It's all 2vX fights, and you are always accompanied by a partner. "Trainer" involvement in combat. Your personal HP bar is just as important as your beasts'. Type advantage/disadvantage isn't a damage modifier, you can get buffs or debuffs that become integral to beating your enemies (as an example, Lightning Damage against a Metal type will make the target Conductive, which will force the target to take % damage whenever a Lightning attack is used). Monster Fusions, with a unique-looking sprite for each pairing of monsters (the DLC advertises 19,881 combinations). Bootleg Beasts, which have a type that's different than their base type. You can also swap moves out at any point from the menu. It's all very crunchy and strategic. The story is decent and the mystery behind the island and why you're there is compelling. The characters are mostly good. The music is catchy and each battle theme adds lyrics when you fuse, which is always worth bonus points in my book. Beast designs have more hits than misses. 4. Monster Sanctuary (9.2) - Pokemon Metroidvania - I wasn't expecting this combination of games to work out, but it does. While wandering around the eponymous monster sanctuary, you can bring one of your monsters out into the field. That monster grants an ability that allows you to bypass obstacles on the map. An early example includes a claw swipe that can tear through vines or break through walls. Monster collection becomes an integral part of being able to explore and progress through the map. Monster battles are 3v3 fights. Like Pokemon, you need to pay attention to elemental attributes to maximize the damage you do while minimizing the damage you take. Each monster has a pretty massive skill tree and every single one seems like they could be useful in the right team composition. Monsters also have equipment (which can be upgraded) and can be shifted into being light or dark (which generally comes with a very powerful passive ability), so this game is EXTREMELY mechanically dense. 3. I was a Teenage Exocolonist (9.25) - Deck-Building Life-Sim - Definitely the most queer game I played this year. I really enjoyed it! It has excellent writing and handles a lot of complex topics without being heavy-handed or overbearing (except when the game shits on capitalism which it is correct to do). It has a great visual aesthetic, really pleasant art, and fantastic use of color. The story is that your parents fled Earth and its capitalist excesses on a stolen starship called the Stratospheric. You, and most of your friends, were born on the ship during that journey. At the age of 10, the ship hits a wormhole and crashlands on your new home, the planet Vertumna. You play as your character for 10 years, from the ages of 10 to 19 and you have to figure out how to grow up and survive on a planet that isn't particularly well-suited for humanity. While you're doing that, you're also going to spend a lot of time with a literally colorful cast of characters who will grow up alongside you. Your ten years in the game are split into 13 months. Each month you can run around and talk to people and give them gifts and such and then you can perform one action for the month (it's very Princess Maker in that way). You can hit the books and get smarter, babysit or tutor the younger children to improve your empathy, play sports, and work out, or you can just do nothing if you want. Each of those actions has events and storylines tied to them. There's a lot of content to explore and I think you could do 3-4 runs of the game with very few repeat events. Then there's the deck building. Certain events are tied to skill checks and you perform these skill checks with a card game, the cards represent your memories of major events in your life. The card game is pretty simple. You get a random hand of cards from your deck and then try to meet or beat a target number by playing your cards. It's pretty much Rummikub. You want to make sets of matching colors or numbers or go for straights. Most cards also have modifiers, which can have a serious impact on themselves or other played cards. As an example, there's a card that changes all cards on its right to blue, which is a very powerful ability. It starts off really simple and then builds in complexity over time. 2. Library of Ruina (9.7) - Library Battle Simulation. - Mechanically, this game is very crunchy and there are a lot of moving parts that all somehow mesh really well to deliver a very thrilling and deep combat system. At its most basic level, it's a tactical turn-based deck builder. Rounds of combat are divided into a planning phase and an action phase. During the planning phase, you're told what action every enemy is going to perform and then you pick the actions of your party members to intercept and/or counter those actions. Then you hit play and everything plays out in a sort of initiative order. Link to a 40m guide to the basic combat mechanics As for the story, you're in the eponymous Library of Ruina, rising from the ruins of LoR's prequel, the Lobotomy Corporation. It exists inside of The City which houses over 7 billion people, is about the size of a small country, and is a nightmare dystopia hellscape of competing companies, gangs, mercenaries, and monsters. Mad science abounds. The Library contains books that possess knowledge. Guests are people who have been invited to the library, lured in by that knowledge. You command the Librarians, who test whether or not Guests are worthy of gaining that knowledge (through the universal language of Violence). Defeated guests become books and are added to the library's collection, which lures in more powerful guests. As I said with Limbus Company, I think the setting is incredibly interesting. The art took some getting used to but it definitely grew on me as I continued playing. The soundtrack is all-around excellent and covers a wide variety of genres from Smooth Jazz to Metal to Full-Blown Orchestral. Here are some of my favorites (don't read the comments, don't read the comments, don't read the comments, get ready for more Mili): Floor of General Works (Keter), Floor of History (Malkuth), Floor of Language (Gebura), Abnormality (1st Warning), Abnormality (2nd Warning), From a Place of Love, And Then is Heard No More, Gone Angels, Reverberation Ensemble, and more! With all that said, if you feel tempted to buy and play this game, then I have to tell you the following things: 1) The game is hard as hell. The difficulty spike is vertical. From the comments: "Library of Ruina is probably the only game I've ever experienced to contain multiple casual filters." 2) The game is long as hell. My playthrough was 128 hours, which is about average according to HLTB.com. 3) You have to read and you have to do math or you're going to have a bad time. One More Thing: There's a pretty good Let's Play for the game Here by TeeQueue. 1. Baldur's Gate III (10) - 5e D&D Turn-based CRPG - This is an excellent game and a giant middle finger to whoever decided to move the Dragon Age series away from its CRPG roots. I hope that person sits on an extremely uncomfortable chair. Played two runs of the game for a total of 212 hours. One was in single player and the other was a co-op run. We're looking to do something with mods in Honor mode, I'm sure it'll be fun. BG3 has won a bunch of awards and accolades and it's all well deserved. Larian Studios did a great job and they're continuing to do a great job with all the post-release work (the notes for their major patches are works of art). I don't think I can bring anything new to the table as far as saying positive things about the game so I'm not going to. From here on out, I'm only going to talk about things that I didn't like about the game. 1) Other than Jaheira, I don't think that the inclusion of any of the characters from the previous games added anything to the game. Minsc is the Deadpool/Harley of D&D and I hate it. 2) 5e D&D sucks. It's shallow and boring. It also has weird poo poo like Minsc only having 12 Strength because that's just how 5e Ranger PCs are built. The attribute distribution between classes is off too. There are four classes with Charisma as their primary casting attribute while there's only one for Intelligence (technically two with Eldritch Knight but I'm not counting that). 3) Illithid powers were poorly implemented. It would have been interesting if there were consequences to engaging with them but there aren't any. The game barely even acknowledges if you don't engage with the system. It's obvious why Larian would want to not Punish players for utilizing a major mechanic but you know what would encourage players to use the cool mechanic you put so much work into? Not having it be tied to evil soul-less brain-eating parasites! I don't care if you say that there aren't consequences, my character is not going to eat any tadpoles because it would be out of character to do so. Wrath of the Righteous did this same concept so much better in every way. Not just in terms of variety of the mythic paths you could pursue, but also in how the game reacts to those different paths (thinking about Trickster vs Lich vs vs Swarm). BG3 could have done a similar thing, the intro stays the same, you still start with the tadpole in your head, but then you can get in bed with different higher level beings to get your side-powers. The campaign isn't going to stop just because you don't have a tadpole in your head anymore. The Absolute is still conquering the sword coast and turning people into Illithids, that's enough of a reason to engage with them. 4) I want more companions. BG1 had 25 companions. BG2 had 16. BG3 technically has 10. Don't care how much time it takes or how much it costs, get more voice actors into mocap suits and start recording lines. Party size should have been 6. Only having 4 characters out is so limiting. I spent most of my playthrough with Astarion back at base and that was a mistake. It also made inventory management a huge hassle, though I hear that got addressed in the last patch. The first mods I install if I come back to the game will address as much of these points as possible. Sidenote on the mod situation with BG3, you'd think that having the ability to see tits and dicks in the game would curb the number of nude mods on the nexus but no I'm just dumb and naive like that I guess. 5) Having certain important and cool events tied to Long Resting was a silly idea. My Astarion never learned how to bite people because I only long rested... twice maybe thrice in Act I? I never saw the altercation between Lae'zel and Shadowheart either. Why not? Because the game tells you that you're on a time limit, you never know when the tadpole is going to take over, and then when you do long rest, you get a cutscene about how you feel like you're sick and dying because the tadpole is eating your brain. Yeah, I'm going to start being efficient with my time and never sleep. I complain because I care. I loved playing this game, I'll probably play through it at least two more times (Multiplayer Honor mode and Single Player Durge) and I want more games like it. Its biggest crime was not being perfect.
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Dec 26, 2023 21:57
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unattended spaghetti posted:You cannot do modern and classic inputs on SF simultaneously fwiw. You can in specific cases, for extra stuff. For example on modern you get the special moves that are on the special button, which for Chun-Li doesn't include spinning bird kick, opting for her other moves. But if you charge down up and any attack button on modern Chun, you can do a spinning bird kick. And you can do her quarter circle back stance thing, etc. Ditto with the quarter circle tatsu kick for Ryu and Ken. Stuff like that. Heavy Metal fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Dec 26, 2023 |
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Dec 26, 2023 23:14
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I've never posted one of these before, but I was inspired by reading through the thread. I tend to get really sucked into games and squeeze every last ounce of playtime out of them, so I don't know if I even played ten whole different games this year. As a result, I'm keeping this list just to five. 5: Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade Uh...yeah I will start off with a 20 year old game. I actually had played Binding Blade before this, in both its original flavor, and in the form of the very good ROMhack Project Ember, so this year was not my first time playing it. But despite having played Binding Blade a couple of times before, I actually hadn't ever played through on hard mode. Nor had I ever gone in the right village when that choice comes up, so I had never seen Elffin and his adorable bird friend before. And I had never gone the Sacae route before, so I finally got to see what all the fuss was about the nomads on that route. (Answer: There are a LOT of them, and why are they all so fast and so tough!?) Even though it's the first of the Fire Emblem GBA trilogy, and definitely the most janky feeling, Binding Blade is still really fun somehow. I love it every time I come back to it, and this time was extra special with the different routes and the differences in hard mode. 4: Splatoon 3 Splatoon 2 used to own my life, and now Splatoon 3 does. Splatoon 3 will own my life until Splatoon 4 comes out. The only reason it's not ranked higher is because it's a not a new game this year, or new to me either, so I pushed it down below games that I played for the first time this year. 3: Fire Emblem: Awakening  Ok, yeah, so after talking about a 20 year old game in number 5, I'm bringing up a 10 year old game for number 3. But in my defense, I had never played Awakening until this year. I'd heard good (and bad) things about it, but I was able to go into it mostly unspoiled and experience it with a fresh perspective. I thought Awakening knocked it out of the park in a lot of key areas. The story has some legitimately heavy emotional moments in it, which were set up well enough that they hit hard when they came. (I'm thinking Emmeryn and Basilio here for anyone who has played it before.) But then on the flip side, the game is also really silly sometimes. Some of the goofier supports were actually funny and made me Laugh Out Loud. And there are weird DLC maps where you're like, at the beach??? Because...??? I also really liked the cast of the game. I was familiar with Tharja thanks to her being all over the internet, and I assumed that she would be some boring, fan-service character. And...while she's not NOT a fan-service character, I would argue she's much more interesting than that. Lissa I knew absolutely nothing about before playing the game. She became one of my favorites. The same goes for Owain, and Gaius, and Frederick, who looked really boring at first glance, but is secretly one of the best personalities in the game. I also really enjoyed being able to build up characters with different skills and being able to make the second generation into unkillable, super soldiers. Building up units how I wanted was something I also really enjoyed in Three Houses, and this aspect of the gameplay alone gives the game a HUGE amount of replay for me. I'll probably have to play through it a couple more times before I'm satisfied. 2: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom I loved Breath of the Wild, and TotK took a lot of what I loved and makes it morererer. My favorite part of BotW was the random wandering around and finding stuff, and now TotK takes what was already there, and adds things like wells and caves and sky islands. And fighting enemies is more satisfying than BotW because you get parts to meld onto your franken-weapons to make them deadlier! And you can make machines that will (sometimes) drive straight! Or just strap a rocket to your shield and peace out of anywhere you no longer want to be. Plus, the ending much sweeter and more emotional than I was expecting. 1: Fire Emblem Engage This is a charming game where you take care of the bestest little guy in the world, Sommie.  Sommie is the guardian spirit of the Somniel, and there are many different activities you can do with Sommie. You can pet Sommie.  You can feed Sommie.  You can wander around and listen to Sommie's little footsteps behind you. In order to best take care of Sommie, there is an orchard in the Somniel where you can harvest fruit to feed to Sommie. Additionally, in between Sommie sessions, you can also talk to the other people in the Somniel and dress them up as Sommie!  And when you're ready, you can go on battling adventures with your friends from Somniel where you clear maps using turn-based strategic gameplay. But yeah, Fire Emblem Engage is a really fun game that I can recommend to anyone who loves Fire Emblem. I'm actually not going to say much more because I would be repeating some of the posts that came before this with the same praise. But to sum it up, the gameplay is just REALLY REALLY fun. The Emblem mechanic is amazing, and the gameplay just sails along in a totally satisfying way. Inu fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Dec 26, 2023 |
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Dec 26, 2023 23:24
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Hello, Games forum, I'm back again with another Game of the year list to input into your spreadsheets. Video Games has come out and given us another great thread for our posts. Video Games (the creative medium and industry) have figuratively struck gold this year; giving us more of what we want, what we did not expect and what we did not know could happen. Of course, the posters can't expect to play every game that exists, so we speak our limited perspectives for posterity. Here is my list and Merry Christmas! HONORABLE MENTIONS The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages (2001) Yeah, it's a Zelda, it's considered good by default. Lives up to the series standards with action and puzzles. Also, you get to be a mermaid boy. God of War 3 Remastered (2015) You get to be a big buff guy who is very strong and good at sex and kill your rear end in a top hat dad (for real this time). Final Fantasy 9 (2000) I still don't know how the card game works. de Blob 2 (2011) Your Blobberific pal now comes with a sassy cat-shaped robot buddy. THE TOP TEN 10. Tales of Arise - Beyond the Dawn (2023) Starting off at number ten, we have the return of the people's wholesome himbo, Alphen. It's been a year, he and Shionne should get married already! You can believe there can be an end to racism because he's so drat optimistic! It's gratifying to see visible improvements in the cities of the world because you helped out. 9. Sonic Frontiers (2022) Sure, Sonic was able to go fast before, but in this game he can go fast in any direction. Free updates for the game include literal Easter eggs, score challenges and an extension of the story where you are able to play as Sonic's friends! It's been too long! 8. Froggy's Battle (2023) The highlight of the Games for Gaza itch.io bundle, the game is a short rougelike that features a frog that truly lives for anarchy, for one does not need a greater purpose to shred. Attach items to make yourself stronger and skate in a loop. 7. Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot - Bardock (2023) Bardock, committing space genocide:  Bardock, being subject to space genocide:  6. Resistance: Fall of Man (2006) England is depicted exactly how I remember it: grey, cold and filled with ghouls. 5. Pokemon Alpha Sapphire (2014) The remake of the Hoenn region, reveals old favorites and new mechanical revisions. I love my fiesta amphibian. 4. Driver: San Francisco (2011) You see that car? You can drive it. A celebration of all the cool things you can do in a car. They have modeled interiors! And sometimes there is a passenger in the car that you have conversation with! 3. Resident Evil Revelations 2 (2015) Horror on a lost island. This game has spooks, but it also has got feels. An emotional story of fear, loss and re-connection. The characterization is spot-on here. 2. Ori and the Will of the Wisps (2020) Look, I really like owls; and this game has both a baby owl friend and a distorted owl villain. The movement actions and exploration feel great. The combat is greatly improved from the first game; you can bring the hurt with the heft of your humongous (by your small-scale standards) hammer. 1. Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line (2023) Yes, this is more of what I like and it fully succeeds at being that. Curtain Call was at 2nd place on my 2020 list and this game is an expanded and enhanced version of that gameplay experience on the television screen. It's got even more characters and songs! You can have Chaos and Garland (the human incarnation of Chaos) on the same team and have them team up to defeat the enemy Chaos at the Chaos Shrine.
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Dec 27, 2023 00:04
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Games of the year: 1. Rimworld - This game continues to suck me in every single year since I bought it in 2020, it's a true labor of love with the dev time continually releases patches and frankly just incredible DLC. It's also got one of the most active and vibrant modding communities around 2. Aliens Dark Descent - This perfectly captures the atmosphere of Aliens, several of the voice quotes are directly from that movie, and many of the voice actors are doing good impersonations of the actors from that film. The gameplay experience is outstanding, basically everything that I could want from a tactical Aliens game 3. Orcs Must Die 3 - The franchise took a long hiatus (?) but is better than ever, purestrain cartoon violence fun in here. Powerful recommendation 4. Cyberpunk 2077 - I finally got around to really playing this when Phantom Liberty got released, since by all accounts most of the major bugs had been ironed out. I like it! It doesn't feel like the wheels are falling off of the bus anymore, instead it feels like a solid game in an amazingly cool setting. 5. Elden Ring - This continues to be incredible as i slowly work my way through it. I'm looking forward to the expansion, which was announced but has no release date. There's a mod that lets you play with full coop, I know a lot of people aired that as a big regret so definitely check that out if you're interested in playing the game with a friend.
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Dec 27, 2023 00:24
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Special mention: Limbus Company The game that accounts for the highest number of my hours played in 2023, even though it only came out in March and I haven't touched it since July. It's not on the list because the developers have done some extremely unfortunate things to their employees, so I've stopped playing their games. 9. Death Roads: Tournament  Mad Max: Fury Road Chase Scene: The Game. 8. Total War Warhammer III  This game saved me tens of thousands of dollars from not buying and painting all those armies IRL. 7. My Time At Sandrock  A tremendous improvement over My Time at Portia in every aspect. 6. No Man's Sky  I've waited until 2023 to play it, and it was very much worth it. 5. World of Warcraft: Dragonflight  The remastered version of the award-winning expansion Heavensward of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, now with extra Blizzard polish and ducks. Lots and lots of ducks. 4. Caves of Qud  An incredible masterpiece of worldbuilding and design that I look forward to revisiting in 2024 (and hopefully finally make it past Bethesda Suda at least once...) 3. Chicken Police: Paint It Red!  Noir adventure with fantastic voice acting. 2. Persona 5 Royal  You know you've made a good game when people cosplay as your characters. You know you've made a great game when people cosplay as your UI elements. 1. Elsinore  Elsinore is my favorite game of the decade, and perhaps of the century. I do not foresee it leaving the first place any time soon.
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Dec 27, 2023 02:19
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Hi, I'm here to put some weird poo poo on the overall list because my backlog reached critical mass and I can only justify buying so many games. Pizza Tower and maybe BG3 got added to the Steam wishlist for when I can tear myself away from... well, I'll get there. 5. Diablo IV Diablo 3 is a game that literally rose from the dead: perhaps second only to FFXIV on the list of games that were pronounced dead on arrival and then managed to build back to something different and good. I'd pick it up every year or so for a weekend, get most of the way through the season, and then lose interest in marginal upgrades and move on. More so than PoE, which I keep trying and bouncing off of, it just felt good to hit a demon so hard its skeleton flew out and ragdolled off the wall. It's also a very, very different game from Diablo 2, which placed some weird expectations on Diablo 4. The weird thing about Diablo 4 is that it's kinda neither of those games. It's self-consciously grimdark in a way that Diablo 3 isn't, but it's also a much better story (even if Diablo doesn't actually appear in it at all), and Blizzard's cinematic teams do their usual excellent work. It certainly has more build customization (for better and worse) than Diablo 3, but most of that doesn't kick in until paragon points, which are largely post-campaign: it takes a lot of grinding to even engage that system at all, and even more to reach its full potential. (I gather that later patches have mitigated this somewhat.) Blizzard also made the kinda baffling decision to do the first season reset two months after release, so if you weren't fully committed you'd end up redoing a lot of the grind for Season 1. I honestly think they pulled off what they wanted to pull off. Is it going to have the return draw that D3 did for me? Probably not as often, at least, but I think it was worth it. 4. Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Randomizer 3. Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past Randomizer The two games I put the most hours into, partially because that level of chaos appeals to me on a personal level and partially in a vain attempt to grind my way into being good without doing any kind of focused practice (I'm probably top 100ish in both games and will be in the main tournament for OoTR for the first time next month). I feel myself burning out and take a few days' break and then my brainworms kick in and I'm playing OoTR again. I may have a problem. ALTTPR crosskeys might actually be the perfect rando race mode, and OoTR's hint system adds ways to make up time using your brain instead of your boomer hands. It helps that both of them are classics in their unrandomized form: the randomizers take most of the cutscenes out but the nostalgia factor of the Forest Temple or the Ganon reveal in OoT is still present. If you haven't run into this on a GDQ or something before: imagine that you took the 200+ item locations in both games and fed them to a logic algorithm which randomly shuffled them in such a way that the game can always be completed without (major) glitches (there are also glitched versions if that's your thing). And then you gave the same seed to multiple people and raced. And then you kept doing this for multiple years until memes happened, because it turns out not all checks are created equal and RNG is nothing if not cruel. I wouldn't have it any other way. 2. 30XX Pretty simple elevator pitch (Mega Man X, but it's a roguelite), and absolutely sticks the landing. Hit 1.0 this year after several years in EA. Sequel to 20XX, which was a less polished version of the same idea. Two main characters, who are very obviously based on X and Zero. 8 robot masters with procedurally-generated levels, then some endgame levels, and a bit of a metaplot that unlocks some bonus challenges and a "good ending". Not Hades level of story density, and the story itself is fairly skeletal, but you're not really here for the story anyway; you're just here to run/jump/shoot your way to victory. Also includes a non-permadeath mode (which generates the levels once for that save file and then lets you reattempt them if you die), and the usual roguelite difficulty-varying bells and whistles. Roguelites are well-trodden ground at this point, but one of the things that sets 30XX apart for me is that it's not really afraid of letting you break the game in a variety of ways. A swarm of followers that turns the screen into bullet hell for the enemies? A triple-tap charged shot that erases even the strongest normal enemy? A beam upgrade that dramatically increases fire rate but also disables boss iframes so you just train the death beam on the boss until it dies? The hilarious NG+ speedrun strat of creating an infinite money fountain that lets you get five of everything? Also, you can't have a Mega Man tribute game without an absolute banger of a soundtrack, composed by someone whose only previous soundtrack credits as far as I can tell are 20XX and, uh, Catlateral Damage. I love this soundtrack so much that I made a MSU-1 pack out of it so I could listen to it while playing ALTTPR. 1. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Yeah, yeah, everyone else has talked about this game. Something about BotW never really clicked with me: some of that was because I was borrowing the game and the Wii U from someone and felt compelled to push through it more quickly, and some of it is just an artifact of how I ended up going through the game (never going to Hyrule Castle until the very end), but some of it felt structural. TotK feels like it answered a lot of the things I didn't like about BotW: weapon fusing means that you have a much larger pool of decent weapons to draw from (because most of the weapon power is in your reagent inventory) and means there are more consistent rewards for combat as you fight harder enemies, the shrines and dungeons have more design space to draw from, and the final boss doesn't involve the two worst mechanics in the entire game. I'm still not particularly interested in 100%ing it, or even doing a whole lot of postgame, but the fact that it's there as a reward for further exploration is still lovely. Really, though, three things about TotK will stay with me for a long time. One is that Nintendo took BotW and bolted onto it the least janky physics engine I have ever seen in a video game. Seriously, you can do a lot of stupid poo poo with Ultrahand and all of it pretty much works. (Yes, I know speedrunners figured out how to break it anyway.) BotW already had a lot of instances where the game tacitly encouraged you to "cheat" and solve problems in an unintended manner or the "wrong" order, but TotK leans way into this: even the shrines, which limit your component usage, leave a lot of room for creative solutions. The second thing is that, in a game and series that takes its villain seriously, Nintendo actually put the loving health bar escaping the UI gag into the final boss fight itself. Like, if they did that with Bowser or King Dedede, everyone would smile a little bit because they're generally played for laughs. To play this with Ganondorf is a different matter. (I also got to see this way more than I should have, because I came into the final sequence without doing the travel medallion sidequest and burned through a lot of my healing getting to the final sequence, which meant I had to get a bit creative with yellow heart food. As with BotW, I maybe did not do this in the best order.) The whole final sequence is incredibly well executed, my own, uh, creative route aside. The third thing is Colgera. I am convinced there are two kinds of TotK players divided by the following question: when Colgera appeared, what was the first thing you tried to hurt it? (Bonus question: were you surprised when you found out the other answer?) If your answer was "arrows", I feel kinda sorry for you, because the alternative is having the game direct you to a 3D Sonic final boss as your first dungeon boss while a flute player goes absolutely berserk in the background. I remember thinking that it was clever of Nintendo to make an "intended" first boss that didn't require weapons, and to make you pass by the ice plates on the way to the dungeon to teach you the boss mechanic. Outstanding game design married to outstanding spectacle. Incoherence fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Dec 27, 2023 |
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Dec 27, 2023 02:34
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Rogue AI Goddess posted:1. Elsinore Not heard of this, I don't suppose I could get you to elaborate a bit?
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Dec 27, 2023 02:53
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xoFcitcrA posted:Not heard of this, I don't suppose I could get you to elaborate a bit? Time loop Hamlet where you play Ophelia, Hamlet's girlfriend who kills herself in the original play. Lots of reactivity and metroidbrainia stuff. Same Carnegie Melon team as Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher and a bunch went off to work at Riot.
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Dec 27, 2023 03:06
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fez_machine posted:Time loop Hamlet where you play Ophelia, Hamlet's girlfriend who kills herself in the original play. Lots of reactivity and metroidbrainia stuff. Okay, that sounds dope.
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Dec 27, 2023 03:31
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xoFcitcrA posted:Not heard of this, I don't suppose I could get you to elaborate a bit? It's a timeloop point-and-click adventure where you play as Ophelia trying to make her way through the four days of Shakespeare's tragedy. Whenever Ophelia dies or otherwise meets an unfortunate end, the loop restarts from the beginning, except that she retains the memories of all she saw and heard. What makes Elsinore stand out not only among other timeloop games, but among all games I've ever played, is the colossal depth of reactivity to what Ophelia can do with those memories. You can reveal any secret or plot twist to any other character at any time in the plot, and they will react accordingly, often setting off a chain of plot derails. Do you want to tell Hamlet the truth about his father's death on day 1? You can do that (and people will die). Do you want to save Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (who are a pair of lovely ladies in this game)? You can do that. Get rid of the queen and take her place? Prevent the invasion of Denmark by Fortinbras? You can do all that, and more. Speaking of characters, Elsinore fleshes out or adapts many members of the original cast and adds a few newcomers, such as a much younger Othello who has not yet made it to Venice, or Peter Quince from Midsummer Night's Dream. Ophelia herself is a woman of color, while several other characters are queer (some secretly, some less so). The writing does not shy away from discussion of race, gender, sexuality and class, and the game is stronger for it. Gameplay wise, Elsinore has a bunch of QoL features that greatly help with navigating the time loop, such as an event timeline that shows which plot events are likely to occur in your current iteration, and which have been derailed (or require derails to happen). It has some puzzles, but once you solve one, Ophelia will remember the solution in future loops and will be able to bypass it. If, like me, you have ever re-read a book and found yourself wishing you could give the characters spoilers on what happens next, then give Elsinore a try.
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Dec 27, 2023 03:36
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Rogue AI Goddess posted:Elsinore Well, hey. It's on sale for $4 on Steam right now. Purchased. I love this thread.
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Dec 27, 2023 03:45
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Incoherence posted:1. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom To be fair, they also give you like over a hundred arrows in all the crates in there, coming in packs of 5 way more frequently than any other area in the game, so I feel like that isn't an UNintended solution... yes I used arrows first what of it?
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Dec 27, 2023 04:06
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i dont really feel like ff16 belongs in my top 10 by any means but i want to give it an honourable mention for being a fun plot driven game with a competant combat system on top of it even though it is somehow a ff game without a party system so far
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Dec 27, 2023 04:19
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xoFcitcrA posted:Well, hey. It's on sale for $4 on Steam right now. Purchased. same!
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Dec 27, 2023 04:37
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Incoherence posted:
Okay I'll bite: what's the other way to beat Colgera? That's the wind temple boss right? I used arrows. Do tell me what the fun way is.
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Dec 27, 2023 04:47
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Silver Falcon posted:Okay I'll bite: what's the other way to beat Colgera? That's the wind temple boss right? I used arrows. Do tell me what the fun way is. dive-bombing through its weak spots
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Dec 27, 2023 05:20
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Hello, I'm an old goon who hasn't posted here in like 10 years. I can't remember my OG login info, but I always follow the GOTY threads. I played a bunch of games and am compelled to type words about a few of them this year. 5. Little Goody Two Shoes Germanic fairytale crossed with 90s anime visuals, what's not to love? An immersive sim / adventure game with no combat but lots of mini-games and some fun horror elements. Add in a dash of doomed (or not?) romantic choices and you've got a solid little game that more people should play. 4. Octopath Traveler II I wouldn't describe anything in this game as outstanding (except the music), but everything is very good. And all those very good things combine to make something amazing. Good stories and writing - elevated by the fun voice acting - and a combat system that encourages and rewards experimentation. And the music, all the music. I could listen to nothing but the OT2 OST for the rest of my life and be happy doing it. Firing up this game is like slipping into a warm bath. 3. Wo Long I am bad at the Nioh games, but still enjoy them. If I had posted in last year's thread Stranger of Paradise would have been my #2 game. And now we have Wo Long that tweaks and adds some new twists to the Team Ninja formula. Bigger "battlefield" levels, a greater emphasis on parrying, and a Three Kingdoms setting. Lucky for me, I love all those things and so, of course, I love Wo Long. I'll be playing the DLC well into the new year so it will probably be on my 2024 list as well. 2. Diablo IV Every bad thing everyone says about this game is true, and yet, I 've still had a blast with it and played it for 500 hours since it released. It feels like a mix of D2 and D3 with some bits of Destiny sprinkled on top. Anathema to some, video game nectar to me. It has the best campaign of the Diablo games, I dig the setting, and the demon clicking is as fun as ever. And you get a fun horse, that mostly works now! The seasonal gimmicks have also been fun so far. The only reason it's not my GOTY is because a super fun robot game came along and blew me away. 1. Armored Core VI Every time I sit down to play this game I get genuinely excited. I've played through NG and NG+ and am currently about halfway through NG++, and I don't want to stop. I love everything about this game. It is maybe the most "video game" video game I have ever played in my four decades of video gaming. I love zooming around as a robot in a hyper-capitalistic hellhole, fighting a faction one mission and then getting hired by them for the next. "It's just a job," after all. Sometimes I'm a quick robot with reverse-joint legs and light weapons, and sometimes I'm a literal tank with the heaviest guns and missiles available piled on my bulky frame. Either build is fun, as are the many in between those extremes. And much like other From games, any of them can work. The fellow pilots you meet are all fully fleshed out without ever seeing them outside of their mechs, and the overall story has enough twists and revelations to keep you playing for multiple playthroughs to see it all. And once you're done with that, there's S Ranks and Combat Logs to chase. That's plenty to keep you boosting and blasting, but there's also a whole PvP mode that's its own wild beast of a thing. Every part of this game compels you to master it, and the process feels good every step of the way. That is why Armored Core VI is my Game of the Year for 2023. Thanks for reading, now back to lurking.
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Dec 27, 2023 06:31
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Updated my list to add in Case of the Golden Idol at #8.
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Dec 27, 2023 08:35
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Alright, another year of gaming in the books! I'm starting to feel the need to upgrade my current gaming situation (definitely need a PS5), but otherwise I'm pretty happy with what I did get to play. I had so much fun making my list for last year (which can be found here if you want to mock it) that I actually made an effort to write down and record any notes I had on the games I played for this year's list. Problem is looking back at it now, some of the shorthand I used at the time has lost some (if not all) of its meaning as the year went on, so once again, I have to rely on how I feel about the games now instead of I felt back then. Which is probably for the best, really. I actually thought that I had my top ten for the year figured out by early November, but two late entries ended up leaving a huge impression on me and made it onto the list, knocking two games down into the teens. It's unfortunate for those games, but what can you do? Games released this year will be bolded. TOP TEN SPOILER LIST FOR VIDEOGAMES 10. Resident Evil Village 9. Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising 8. Powerwash Simulator 7. Rogue Legacy 2 6. Horizon Forbidden West 5. NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139... 4. Honkai Star Rail 3. Chicory: A Colorful Tale 2. Sea of Stars 1. Street Fighter 6 Now, onto my GOTY list! First, the games that didn't make it into the top 20. These aren't bad games by any stretch (the bad games don't even make it!), but they just didn't grab me enough to rate higher (or a description for what I think of them). So let's get into... (DIS)HONORABLE MENTIONS -37. GAL*GUNVOLT BURST (2018) -36. Legends of Ethernal (2020) -35. Humanity (2023) -34. Lake (2021) -33. Call of the Sea (2021, PS4 edition) -32. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (2014) -31. Axiom Verge 2 (2021) -30. Inscryption (2021) -29. Gabbuchi (2019) -28. Human: Fall Flat (2017, PS4 edition) -27. Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX (2021) -26. Mafia: Definitive Edition (2020) -25. Tails of Iron (2021) -24. Tchia (2023) -23. The Evil Within (2014) -22. The Callisto Protocol (2022) -21. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (2019) Huh, I imagine that there's a few games in there that people would argue should be higher, but hey, this is my list. And speaking of which, it's now time for.... HONORABLE MENTIONS -20. Untitled Goose Game (2019) - Geese are a menace to society, and I was glad to contribute to that reputation. -19. Unpacking (2022, PS4 edition) - a nice, calming game. I wish you had a bit more freedom with where you could put some things, but this game is very much the definition of a vibe. -18. Suika Game (2021-23, web browser edition) - I will break 3000 one day!  A nice twist on stacking games and 2048, and surprisingly addictive.-17. Genshin Impact (2020) - 4.0 dropped earlier this year, adding the land of Fontaine to the map. Not as impactful as 3.0 was for the game, but still, I'll never say no to more new content. -16. The Evil Within 2 (2017) - A marked improvement over the original and expanding it past being another RE clone. If I had played this in 2017 I might have rated this much higher. -15. Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom (2018) - Probably the best pure Metroidvania I played this year. -14. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (2018 English edition) - one of two Yakuza games on my list this year, they're basically the same gameplay-wise, but- -13. Yakuza Kiwami 2 (2018) - -Kiwami 2 is more refined, and slightly better written. Both are great though. -12. Dodgeball Academia (2021) - what a delightful surprise. Combines dodgeball with RPG mechanics and shonen sensibilities into a fun adventure game. -11. Kena: Bridge of Spirits (2021) - and just barely missing the top ten, Kena is an incredibly well-animated game with a surprising storyline and great gameplay. Whew! So many games already, and we're not even in the top ten yet! As I'm sure you may have sussed out, Dodgeball Academia and Kena were going to be in my top ten, but were knocked out in the last minute. What two games knocked them out? Well, you'll find out in my.... TOP TEN GAMES OF THE YEAR  (pictured, my grabbing your attention) 10. Resident Evil Village (2021) + Shadows of Rose DLC (2022) - Resident Evil 7 did a lot to pull me back into the survival horror genre after years of burnout with its tremendous atmosphere and the changes it made to the classic RE formula, and while RE8 doesn't add much to that, I still will gladly take more of this version of RE. I still love classic RE and what the remakes are doing, but I genuinely hope that RE9 will continue to explore first person horror (and also be scarier).  (pictured, a Wolf in sheep's clothing) 9. Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising (2023) - one of the late additions to the list and the first true post-SF6 fighting game (Mortal Kombat 1 was too far along in development to be truly affected, I think), Rising makes the original GBFV look like an incomplete game. Lots of people in this thread have already sang its praise and I don't have much more to add to it. It has a free edition! 2B is going to be a DLC character in February! Go get it!  (pictured, satisfaction) 8. Powerwash Simulator (2021) - the second of the late additions to the list, Powerwash Simulator is the kind of game I normally try to avoid; namely, work simulation games. Usually when I try something like Farm Simulator, my initial response is guilt; like, instead of playing a game where I mow lawns, maybe I should go outside and do some yardwork. My old man is a trucker, so the idea of playing Truck Simulator makes me think that I'm just role playing as my dad. Sounds cool when you're a kid, but when you're an adult I just go "well, I could just go ask my dad to teach me how drive his rig instead of playing a game." Powerwash Simulator got past that by just being a relaxing time. The initial barrier of "well I can do this irl" didn't hold up to "I don't own or know anyone who owns a power washer," so once I started playing, I could just do what the developers wanted me to do: to just turn my brain off and clean some poo poo. And it's satisfying as hell! It's the perfect game to veg out to; the most stressful thing you'll do in any given moment is hunt for the last speck of dirt preventing you from 100 percenting a given job, and even that is just merely annoying. There's no complicated tasks, no crazy adjectives to accomplish. All you gotta do... is clean. And relax. What a great game.  pictured, you and all your rear end in a top hat descendants) 7. Rogue Legacy 2 (2020) - Rogue Legacy was probably the last new game I played on the PS3, and as one of the first roguelikes I ever played, I was blown away by it. And a decade later, it's like I never stopped playing. Probably one of my most played games of the year, a Metroidvania-style roguelike will never not grab me.  (pictured, an rear end in a top hat) 6. Horizon Forbidden West (2022) - the game that its publisher decided that, hey, releasing around the same time as Elden Ring was a good idea, HFW is more Horizon goodness. Aloy remains one of my favorite modern gaming protagonists (her being in Genshin was what got me back into that game!), and the world she lives in is hopeful, dark, simple, and complicated all at once, and I loved getting to explore more of it. But much like its developers in releasing it, my timing of playing it in this year means that it's been overshadowed by other games. I suppose that's the series' fate.  (pictured, a hussy) 5. NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139... (2020) - having missed out on the original NieR and Automata, I decided to give this a go when it became available on PS Plus, and after several dozen hours of game time... I get why Automata is so beloved now, if this is any indication of its quality. Fantastic writing, great gameplay, and some of the best music in a game that I've heard all year all intertwine for an unforgettable experience. I will be playing NieR: Automata in the near future.  (pictured, a trash panda with their true love) 4. Honkai Star Rail (2023) - Hoyoverse continues to make fantastic games that just happen to be gacha games. You know how you feel about them by now, and if you don't like them, you don't like them... but if you don't mind them, then this is absolutely worth playing. A game that builds on Hoyo's success with Genshin Impact, Star Rail brings with it all sorts of QoL improvements that I've wanted in Genshin while introducing players to the Honkai universe while also being an incredibly accessible RPG that's easy to pick up and play. And the writing's fantastic.  (pictured, getting around in style) 3. Chicory: A Colorful Tale (2021) - This game made me cry. Chicory has a simple hook: the world's been stripped of color, and it's up to you to restore it. So with the help of your magic paintbrush, you explore the land in a Zelda-style romp, restoring color to everything you see while learning new abilities that allow you to reach new places and meet new people in need of color in their life. But that's not the real journey. Chicory is a tale about the struggle with imposter syndrome and the feelings of depression, rejection, comparing yourself with others, and the inability to see the good in yourself and in what you've accomplished, and in what others see in you... and trying to overcome that battle. It hangs heavy over the world of Chicory's black and white color book landscape as the main characters grapple with what it means to make art, and how to find satisfaction in that work. It's the struggle of the creative, and it hit hard for me, as someone who once had dreams of being one. This is maybe one of the most relatable games that I've ever played.  (pictured, a nostalgic feeling) 2. Sea of Stars (2023) - Like many people of a generation, Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite games of all time, and also like many of those people, I've been hunting for a game to hit in the same way. But it just never happened for whatever reasons, and so I was left wanting. Decades later, I finally played another game that did it. Sabotage Studio clearly has the same feelings about CT as I do, and set out to make a love letter to it... and they succeeded. They made a game that feels like Chrono Trigger while also retaining its own identity and adding a bit of modern flavor. And the writing is also excellent (I may have teared up a few times). Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely play this if you love classic SNES RPGs.  (pictured, best girl) 1. Street Fighter 6 (2023) - Street Fighter 6 is a true game changer. Baldur's Gate 3 is an incredibly important game that has raised the bar forever on AAA games (especially RPGs), but within its genre, I don't think it compares to what SF6 means for fighting games going forward. Capcom has established the new standard for fighting games, much like it did with SF2, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and SFIV, and if you want to meet them on their level, you now have to include: -great netcode -robust single player content (including a whole rear end Yakuza-style single player story mode) -arguably one of the most in depth character creators around (so vast that a BG3 dev jokingly said that they didn't want to go as far with theirs as Capcom did) -a slew of minigames designed to teach new players motion controls -control scheme options for both new and old, casual and experienced players, that allow them to feel like they're able to play the game the way they want to -an incredible mechanic system that gives players all sorts of options with how to deal with situations without dumbing it down, while also drawing influence from older SF games And so on and so on. You can already see how SF6 has influenced other games: GBFV: Rising (#9 on my list) was originally scheduled to drop at the same time as SF6, but was then delayed so they could add more content to the game (including a Fall Guys-esqe multiplayer mode). Tekken 8 has added an customizable avatar system and brought back Tekken Force mode, a beat-em up side scroller that was popular in earlier Tekken games. And it's only going to continue as developers have more time to see what SF6 gets right and doesn't get right. There now is a pre-SF6 period and a post-SF6 period, and we are now in the post-SF6 period. Anyways, there's a lot I can say about SF6, but it's been hours since I started writing this post and I need to get some sleep (not even sure if half my post makes sense at this point, lol). Street Fighter 6 is my Game of the Year
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Dec 27, 2023 11:17
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Bugblatter posted:I dunno, the rules specifically say you should have played the game this year. Metis is making a mockery of this thread. A mockery, I say!
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Dec 27, 2023 13:03
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It isn't necessarily good enough to go back and edit my list, but thanks to the thread for making me break down and get Forspoken since it's way discounted on Steam. I had been looking forward to it and ultimately avoided it for the cringe videos and mixed review scores, but totally agree with what people have been saying. It's a completely competently made AAA game, super fun to whiz and parkour around the world, and any eye rolling at some character dialogues is a super minor thing vs the rest of the game.
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Dec 27, 2023 16:11
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Always enjoy writing up these posts even though I maybe don't play the volume of games I did years ago, my lists are usually pretty scatterblast, generally have few new releases and always end with the same winner but here we go The Ten Videogames JBJ enjoyed most in 2023 10. Jumping Flash  Of course I've played this before, probably on a demo disc back in the 90's but I played this at like 2 am staying over at a friends house on his still running ps3, I recall being high as poo poo and stumbling through the whole game as an alternative to sleep, it was a nice little reminder of a weird and unique game that you can beat in 90 minutes and while it was part the ambiance of the situation, it was a great reminder of how games sometimes used to be 9. Bioshock Infinite  I ended up replaying Bioshock Infinite this year after picking up the DLC in a steam sale, I really enjoy the first 2 Bioshock games but hadn't touched Infinite since release. It's one of the most fantastical settings for a videogame and I like any plot that involves time-travel and multi-dimension hopping. It's not that great a shooter but Columbia is one of my favourite worlds in videogames and it was a fun game to replay while half remembering important plot points. 8. Stardew Valley  I still come back to this every so often, I switch between aimless meandering as a country lifestyle should be or intense wiki diving trying to min-max my progress. Either way it's a fantastic time and I would implore anyone who enjoys games and hasn't played this to give it a bash, even my missus who has played Tomb Raider 2013 and NCIS: The video game made this her 3rd video-game good time ever. 7.Castlevania 3: Draculas Curse  Bit of a running theme for me this year in that taking part in a speedrunning event called the NES big 20 gave me a new found appreciation for a lot of old NES games. I remember playing Simons Quest with my dad and getting absolutely nowhere but I wish we'd got Castlevania 3, the scope of this game for a NES title is insane. The music in the enhanced Famicom edition is great - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptgaCJSF7j8 - just a game ahead of it's time. 6. Punch Out  Again, a Big 20 game, I played this as a kid with my dad, I remember I could never get past the Great Tiger guy with his crazy teleporting punch, I don't think he could get much further but this was the year I finally managed to beat it start to finish, I'm not a boxing guy but drat man this game is so pure. 5. Zelda 2: The Adventures of Link  Same again, I had never played Zelda 2 before, I'm really not much of a zelda guy but I found this game so intensely charming, it helped that the version I first played was basically the last half hour but I went back and played more just to see that piece of the zelda timeline. 4. Super Mario Brothers 2  Yeah another NES classic, I played and beat this as a kid, I even remember excitedly running downstairs telling my mother to come see the ending. This was the year I probably put 50 hours into Mario 2 to speedrun it as fast as possible. I got down to 15:57 which, for context, is about twice as long as an actual good player, lmao, fml 3. Final Fantasy 8  I played this on the switch this year with all the cheats turned on and it was a great time, I got stuck on the Adel fight as a kid and didn't have a hope in hell of beating them, its such an interesting game the ways you can break it and manipulate the difficulty but it's also pretty fun to just Renzokuken every enemy. 2. Football Manager 2024  The only actual game from my list that was released this year, lmao, look if you know Football Manager you know and if you don't you'll probably never get it. An appreciation for sportsball is a must as is a penchant for starting at spreadsheets and following statistics. I probably hadn't put any real time into an FM game since 2017 or so but this was the year I fell back off the wagon. It's yer tactics mate. 1. Dota 2  I don't mind hearing the reasons people don't like Dota 2. Maybe they don't like competitive games, maybe they don't like any kind of multiplayer, maybe they don't like "endless games", maybe it's too hard, maybe they don't like playing games with a keyboard. They are all valid reasons to dislike Dota 2. Regardless I'm utterly blind to it, I think its the greatest videogame ever made and nothing comes close. Dota brained, fully, not even going to deny it. Abridged List 10. Jumping Flash 9. Bioshock Infinite. 8. Stardew Valley 7. Castlevania 3 6. Punch out 5. Zelda 2 4. Super Mario Brothers 2 3. Final Fantasy 8 2. Football Manager 2024. 1. Dota 2 JollyBoyJohn fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Dec 27, 2023 |
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Dec 27, 2023 16:29
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For my rankings I'm only counting games that I finished, which by my own personal criteria means games that I got 100% achievements for, or if they don't have achievements then I need to feel like I exhausted all of the content. "Forever" games aren't bound by these restrictions though. I've also arbitrarily decided to only nominate one game per genre. I'll shoutout some notable runnerups in a category if there were any. 10. DRAGON BALL XENOVERSE [Fighting; 2015; 80 hours] Hanging out with Goku is an enjoyable indulgence in nostalgia, doesn't matter how many dozens of times I've already seen the sagas play out. The achievement hunt is an awful grindy nightmare though. In short you need to get all of the special moves and equipment from the end of mission rewards, which requires you to first complete a mission in a specific way (usually by emulating how things went in the canon), which gives a CHANCE to extend the mission with an extra bonus fight, and completing that gives a CHANCE (very low) to get the mission reward. This double RNG check feels so much worse than a single check, especially with the possibility of failing the special ending requirements due to factors out of your control, like your AI partners killing someone off too quickly or whatever. It's just so many checkpoints where the game decides arbitrarily that screw you, on this run you're not going to get the drop you wanted. So many times I'd do the ending requirements 5+ times in a row and not get the bonus fight, then on the 6th time I'd get the bonus and finish the mission but not get the drop. Feels awful. 9. Blackwell Epiphany [Adventure; 2014; 8 hours] I'd been meaning to get around to this one for a long long time. This is the 5th and final entry in the Blackwell series, and to be honest I'd forgotten a lot of the characters and set-up of the previous games going into this, but it's mostly a standalone story and you can intuit any necessary background information. The puzzles were a bit worse compared to the previous games but the character interactions are what makes this series fun. Rosangela is an awkward dork and Joey making fun of her for it in the bluntest ways possible makes me laugh every time. 8. Shenmue I & II [Open World; 2001; 23 hours] Single app on Steam for the two of them which is why I've ranked them as a duology - I only played 2 this year though. It's no secret that these are possibly the single worst-aged games of all time, full of gameplay systems that heighten immersion at the cost of frustrating the player or wasting their time. I first played Shenmue 2 in 2001 with the PAL release, and 22 years have passed since then. In that time I've had a lot of life experiences that mirror Ryo's - I've moved to a country that is completely alien to me, struggled to survive as I muddled through its culture, and come across a lot of very good and very bad people. I've also learned Chinese in that time, making the game feel completely different now that I can read all the signs in virtual Hong Kong and understand a lot of the cultural nuance. I've even been to places like Man Mo Temple which feature prominently. Shenmue (1) got people thinking that the series was supposed to be a cultural immersion simulator for small-town Japan, but it's really a Travel Simulator. Not in the sense that it takes you to different places, but in the sense that it lets you experience the pressures of travel, and the joy of overcoming them, especially in pre-internet times. It's all about an overwhelming sense of being lost and out of your depth, making connections, having new experiences, inevitably saying goodbye to people, and then later having those bittersweet memories of people you've left behind and times gone by. I don't think any other game has even tried to invoke these feelings and so, if you think this is something you could relate to, the games are still worth trudging through. Ryo is drat lucky that everyone seems to be able to talk to him in Japanese and he doesn't have to learn a foreign language. Shoutouts to Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, strangely short for a Yakuza game, the full 100% took just under 30 hours mostly because you don't need to worry about the Completion List this time. I feel like someone didn't balance the Clan Creator achievements correctly however, as it's notably the only grind in the game. I believe the ending for Y6 was poorly received at the time (?), but even having not yet played later games in the series, knowing even the minimal amount of discourse around them tells me that the ending of this one doesn't actually matter in the slightest. The whole story has a little whiff of filler to be frank, like they wanted to make another Yakuza but didn't have a strong idea for anything for the core characters to do. Maybe they'd already decided to pivot out to Ichiban and the Judgement guy at this point but they felt they couldn't leave Kiryu behind unceremoniously. 7. Need for Speed Payback [Racing; 2017; 31 hours] The story started out alright but ends in a kind of weird place and with rushed pacing, didn't make a whole lot of sense to me at the time. The mission variety is great with the offroad drifting missions being a highlight, in a lot of them you can keep a drift chain going for the entire track and it's a lot of fun working out the proper racing lines to make that happen. I liked the relentlessly upbeat offroader character as well. Anti-shoutouts to the previous game, Need for Speed (2015), which I also beat this year. It has always-online DRM which can't connect successfully where I live so I had to use a VPN to play it every time. Half the time it just straight up wouldn't work and I had to abandon it for the day. Even if it did work, every 20-30 minutes the DRM would fail and it would force close the game, and then it would take 3 minutes to reload and pass the DRM check again. I don't know how or why I put up with that long enough to complete the campaign and all but one of the DLCs. Saying that, my current VPN feels more stable now, so I'm thinking of going back and trying to beat the ultra hard DLC challenges lol. 6. Sol Survivor [Tower Defence; 2009; 113 hours] I went on a big TD kick in the summer, putting 100 hours each into this, Defense Grid: The Awakening, Creeper World 3 and some others. I don't think many people would decide that Sol Survivor beats out all those others but for me it struck the right balance between pathing, strategy, and active mechanics. There's one other game that could have usurped this but I only started it in December and haven't quite finished it yet. It'll probably show up in next years list! (Although I think the Defender's Quest sequel comes out next year so that could be a close race). 5. Return to Shironagasu Island [Visual Novel; 2020; 9 hours] "Murder mystery in an enclosed, unescapable space" seems to describe a good 50% of visual novels lately, or at least the ones I've been reading/have my eye on. This one gets some bonus points for its relatively brisk space while still maintaining good characterization. I thought that one of the murder solutions was absolute nonsense until I looked it up and learned that actually invisible fire is a real thing that can exist quite easily in the real world. How is that not used in more murder mysteries? How is it not THE most overused murder mechanic in all of fiction? Shoutouts to Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony for being a great story, a great sendoff to the series, and for making nerds mad online. Additional shoutout to Higurashi When They Cry Hou - Ch.8 Matsuribayashi, the final entry in the mainline series. Some platforms release the entire series as a single application, but on Steam they are released on a chapter by chapter basis. If I were taking the series as a whole then this would have been my VN nomination, but I played on Steam so I'm only taking the final chapter into regard here. I felt that Ch.8 was so focused on resolving the mystery and exploring political dramas that it didn't have time to incorporate the horror elements that I found most interesting about the previous chapters. After finishing I did some reading around and *BIG SPOILERS* I was horrified to learn that Takano apparently commits suicide in the anime, shortly after the events of the book. In the post-game interview Ryukishi explains at length that just like how Rika is trying to create a world in which nobody has to be sacrificed for everybody to move on happily, the fictional world that he created should also end without anyone being sacrificed. While Takano loses in the story, she is still ultimately saved by Rika and could eventually live a happy and fulfilling life. He expressly did NOT give her any just deserts, which would have been an easy way to satisfy the readers desire for retribution, and instead took the much harder route of giving her redemption, because he believes that's something everyone deserves. I thought this was beautiful even though I'm not sure I agree with him. But then the anime decides that actually she deserves to die. Way to miss the point. 4. Record of Lodoss War-Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth [Search Action; 2021; 6 hours] Not a whole lot to say, it's a very short and straightforward game but that's all that's needed for an enjoyable experience. Special mention to Super Skelemania which is great for the exact same reasons - short and sweet. You can finish this one in an hour on your first playthrough. 3. HITMAN [Action; 2016; 56 hours] The first game from the new trilogy. I don't enjoy directionless make-your-own-fun games like Minecraft or Terraria or what have you so I was a bit wary about even starting this. The descriptions I'd heard about the game all described the levels as big open toyboxes with lots of ways to manipulate the people and environments. Luckily this game actually does have a lot of direction and goal-oriented gameplay in it, so it was a blast loading up a new level, picking one of the many available goals at random and then working out how to make it happen. Shoutouts to Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade and STRANGER OF PARADISE FINAL FANTASY ORIGIN. I enjoyed them both but I mostly found it interesting that when I was making my list, I put both Final Fantasy games I'd played this year into the Action category and not the RPG category. 2. BLUE REFLECTION [RPG; 2017; 25 hours] The joy in this game comes from how swept up you can become in its atmospheres and environments, many of which often feel melancholy or trepidatious without ever spilling over into outright sadness or danger, which lets the game tread a very fine line of letting negative, passive emotions flow into a player without that person losing their sense of safety and security. It makes sense that they would focus on this given that it's primiarly a game for girls, but as a man it's something that would have never even entered my consideration were I the one designing the game. Most of this effect comes from its OST, which is probably in my top 3 of all time. I don't think any game prior to this has made me put down a controller so that I could soak in the surroundings, yet it happened twice in this game - once while entering the school hallway the first time while [e: timestamps are broken on these, sorry, check the vid description to navigate to the right songs] I (sun) was playing, and again standing on the school roof watching the giant first boss coming over the horizon while Toshitake Hayabusa played. Every boss in the game has three unique themes each and they are all intense. I also found the monster designs conceptually interesting, they tend to be very crystalline and sharp and manufactured. A lot of games will use the concepts of horror or gore in their enemy designs to emphasize that they represent the antithesis of humanitarian ideals. This game rejected anything gory as that would have clashed heavily with their target theming, so I think the positioning of jagged crystalline enemies as the opposite of the flowing beauty of the heroines' magical girl aesthetic worked really well. Shoutouts to Persona 3 Portable. It was my first Persona game, and while I enjoyed it, I did feel like it was dragging at the end. I suppose that once the core concepts of "The important events take place once every full moon", "The game will last a school year", and "The player should do something every day" are in place then the length of the game is kind of set in stone, and for the developers to fill up all that intermediary space with interesting content is quite a challenge. 1. Dance Cube [Rhythm; 2013; Like 600 hours] Same GOTY as last year, it's a China-only arcade rhythm game that I've been playing for just shy of 3 years, and I still feel like I'm improving month-to-month. In fact I feel like I've grown leaps and bounds in the last ~3 months. I'm getting perfect scores on level 15 songs now. I passed 9th dan just this week! I honestly didn't think I would ever be capable of that. I've been playing long enough now that my individual song scores on the local leaderboards are surpassing the scores of those people who, when I first started playing, I regarded as godlike. A lot of those older players have moved away or retired or whatever now, so I guess to the newer generation I'm now one of the OGs who's nailing unthinkably difficult songs. --- I'm glad that everyone has enjoyed 2023 so much! I know that my tastes don't really match anyone else's but I was still surprised to discover that offhand I can't name a single game released this year that interests me. Maybe a couple of franchise entries in like Yakuza or whatever that I'll get around to eventually. It's fine though, I have decades of backlog with tons of stuff that I'm interested in to get through 
Lavatein fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Dec 27, 2023 |
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Dec 27, 2023 16:58
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