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2023andMe Don't really know how to start this off, I guess it's worth reiterating that this year really did have something for everyone: heaps of groundbreaking indies, AAA smashes and flops, AA surprises, underdog victories, great DLC, multiple smash hit fighting games, hype shadowdrops, successful live service launches as well as many live service open graves. There were more good games released than any one person can discover and play in 365 days, and more people fired in one year than just about at any time in the industry's history. The great delayed COVID development tsunami finally smashed over us all and we get to pick through the debris throughout the entirety of 2024. In past years I've managed to play a big chunk of notable games from the year whereas in 2023 I had to be more selective due to time, mental state, exhaustion, etc. So it's fair to say that there are at least half a dozen notable games from this year that I will probably be getting to late and listing in 2024 instead. I've also just been trying to go a bit outside my own box and not rate things as high based on pure thrill, bombast, or prestige chops, but moreso on whether a game made me feel good inside, or was cathartic in some way, because otherwise I've been feeling pretty sad, spent, and a bit over the hill. So here are games which helped me defy that dark aura in 2023 and helped me deal with the swirl of emotions, or just kill a little time between work days. Thanks in advance if you gonna read this tl;dr poo poo, thanks to VG for all the effort that goes into hosting, and thanks to the community for always being cool as gently caress. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- MISC -  You've Been Here Before...I revisited numerous ongoing titles in 2023 to fill in the blanks or simply to reaffirm my affection. Obviously a big one is TLOU Factions, which I logged upwards of 100 hours in this year playing with goons weekly, and will continue to do on a limited basis going forward even though the dream of Factions II is officially done and dusted. I also helped a friend through some master rank quests in Monster Hunter World: Iceborne, a game that has ranked on my GOTY list 3 of the last 5 years, and put in some time starting a new run of Elden Ring before summer. However, the actual winner of this unranked category is: Titanfall 2 Hours played = 826 / 46 in 2023  Some Respawn engineer accidentally removed the chewing gum from a network port on a server stack and all of a sudden we're matchmaking again! Playing this in 2023 is a good reminder of how much we took for granted in 2016. They simply don't make multiplayer games like this anymore. Welcome back, pilot. The Love Affair That Wasn'tGonna leave the category blank this year because there were very few games that I bounced off of or had real negative feelings about, and almost everything I took the energy to play I also ended up completing. There were a few freebies I downloaded that I knew I wasn't into in under 15 minutes flat, but that's kind of a different thing. ...But For The Lack Of Time; There's Always Next Year!Star Ocean The Second Story R Hours played = 1  I hyped myself up to go out and grab a disc on release, installed it, and subsequently ignored the game due to the end of year rush. What I played so far is gorgeous, charming, snappy, everything a good remake should be. I think this will be a perfect game for next May. 2023's Fall From GraceMetal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 Hours played = 14  The Master Collection picks up the mark of shame this year. I played MGS1 off of this collection and while it reaffirmed how loving goated those first 3 games are it is utterly shameful to release such classics in this poor of a condition. If you are resolute on getting this particular package it appears that the PS5 version has the fewest number of issues, but honestly let this post be another sad reminder to never give Konami any loving money. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- PLAYED, LIKED, AND CONSIDERED The following games aren't necessarily in a hard order, but I suppose if pressed I would say that the farther down you scroll the closer a game probably came to making the top 10 list. - ## OlliOlli WorldHours played = 12  Fun skating game that's hard as nails. Very cool in-house art style and humor. This was a title that I just did the bare minimum in to see all the levels and never got good at. I skate-or-died, but mostly died. ## Bomb Rush CyberfunkHours played = 10+  Spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio that I was extremely hyped for. It has a similar energy and style, along with some great mechanics and a phenomenal soundtrack. It also has some real design flaws that continue to nag at me. I'm glad I got it and I intend to finish it up early next year but there's a part of me that now just wants to play actual Jet Set Radio. Luckily, Sega seems to have taken the bait. ## Resident Evil 4 (2023)Hours played = 25  Similar to my time with the original Resi 4 this was just a one-and-done for me. I had a good time but I enjoy the remakes of 2 & 3 quite a bit more. I will admit that Survival Horror is not a genre which grabs me all that much, but Resi 4 was also sort of a weird outlier of a game for me, one that I respect for its innovations but am still not really into. Still, no real overt negative feelings here. My dumbo outsider's take: both versions of this game have different merits. ## Blasphemous IIHours played = 32  The best series of castleroids outside of Castlevania itself, SOTN being on the shortlist for my favorite game of all time. This sequel delivers more of what you'd expect if you've played the first, gorgeous pixel art, beautiful music in a style all its own, and tough, gore-fueled gameplay amid fantastic/weird scenery and relentless body horror. The innovations to gameplay from the first are a mixed bag imo, some better and some worse. The bosses are a bit of a downgrade while the level design has gotten a bit better. No big complaints here. If they make a third one I'll buy that poo poo, too. ## Live A LiveHours played = 30  A remarkable, experimental 90s RPG brought back to life. Insane amount of character and charm, totally iconic soundtrack, and an open ended structure that pays homage to many other games and genres. In the end it's a bit disjointed, sort of an anthology of mini-rpgs that doesn't fully come together. But man is it ambitious. Kudos to Square for bringing this one back out of obscurity. ## Dead Space (2023)Hours played = 19  A better breed of Survival Horror. I definitely enjoyed my time with this game even though it's also kind of another one-and-done. The setting is fantastic, full of dread and cruel industrial novelty, and the sound design is some of the best I've heard in the last few years. I've seen enough of the original game to know that they did some pretty major overhauls to the structure of the world in order to ensure it all connects in a way that makes sense, and Motive deserve a lot of credit for staying faithful to the original vision that everyone remembers while also making it look (and feel) impossibly good. You know what, maybe I'll even come back to this one in a few years. ## The FinalsHours played = 24 (open beta) / 12 (release)  Anyone who knows me also knows how much I gush over the Mirror's Edge games whenever I'm given the opportunity. Well, a bunch of former Mirror's Edge/Battlefield devs made a Mirror's Edge rear end looking F2P live service shooter (those cursed words) with Battlefield rear end environmental destruction, and they finally put it out just a few weeks ago. I've logged several dozen hours in it over the beta period and into the full release and yeah, the server side technology underneath it all is extremely loving cool and the art style is very Swedish. I think it's a bit barebones on content at the moment but from what I can tell the game is already a hit with broader audiences, and you know what...good for Embark. Hell of a debut title. ## Horizon Forbidden West: Burning ShoresHours played = 70 (in 2022) / 70 (in 2023)  One of my top 10 from last year, I literally doubled my playtime in 2023 going for plat and topping it all off with the Burning Shores DLC. Unbelievable looking environments return for more ooohs and aaahs via The Power of the Clouds™, and Aloy's new ladyfriend is a darling. Guerilla continues to demonstrate their fundamental understanding of both amazing graphical technology and the capitalist bastard class who kills the world. RIP Lance Reddick, you will be missed. ## JusantHours played = 12  Gorgeous, wordless, meditative AA indie game about climbing a spire for...some reason, I won't spoil it. More climate fiction ahoy! There are notes of Ico, Journey, The Last Guardian, etc in here, as well as some really cool and methodical physics-based exploration. There are two ways to play, read all the notes on the way up for historical context, or ignore them all and try to piece things together through environmental storytelling. Another indie win for DONTNOD and a beautiful test case for what AA games can look like in Unreal 5. ## Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy OriginHours played = 48  Gaming step-child of 2022, you know it, you love it. SoP is everything they say, a throwback to AA gen 7 game development, a dope hardcore Japanese action RPG where you can build your own movesets, a meta-celebration of the humble origins of the FF universe, and perhaps in the running for funniest game ever released. Jack Garland henceforth will be appreciated as one of Nomura's best designs, an outright iconic character within the Square Enix canon. Accidentally on purpose. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- THE LIST - 10 - ForspokenHours played = 43 / ♫ Frey's Theme  Gaming step-child of 2023, they did Frey dirty, ya hear? This game is fun and unique, it's huge and beautiful to look at, it's weirdly cathartic, and it's chock full of cats. Luminous Productions was put into the grave for this one; ultimately it deserves better and they deserve their reputation back. Frey is a fun fish-out-of-water type (just like Jack Garland) who swears profusely and can't seem to come to terms with her maternal heritage. The story deserves credit for exploring some less common themes (in gaming at least), and there's more than enough climate fiction in here along with the badass magic and traversal systems to keep players interested for the duration of its Japanese RPGness. I've said more than a few words in other threads about how much of a culture clash this game is, sort of a fantasy-tinged exploration of how Japan views black culture in America. But in the end it comes down to the speed and fluidity of the gameplay itself, the cool boss fights, and just having plain old good gamefeel. See those mountains? You can vault them. Another experimental, under-appreciated cult release from Square Enix, currently the most diverse publisher in the industry. Favorite Moment: Coming home to a house full of cats and they're all sitting in a circle seemingly plotting to murder you 09 - KarmazooHours played = 30+ / ♫ Ruins Dark  The best 2023 game you've never heard of, Karmazoo is a cross-play, 10-random player, asymmetrical puzzle platformer by French micro-dev Pasta, creators of the fantastic 2014 ps+ freebie Pix the Cat. The centerpiece of this game is the endlessly replayable Loop mode which consists of 4 themed-yet-unique puzzle platform stages, Desert > Oasis > Temple > Machine, with modifiers in between stages voted on by the party. Each level is procedurally generated on the fly based on which characters are in the party. So if one person is a Seal you know there will eventually be blocks to ground-pound, and if another person is a Lantern you know there will be hidden hallways in a level. You cannot communicate with anyone except via emotes, funny character poses, or shouts, or by straight up helping them do poo poo, which is good karma, bro. You can only survive this thing as a team, either because it's a dark and scary world, the only way to progress through a point in the level requires one specific character's ability (there are over 50 different characters each with their own personality), or because the nature of a puzzle demands challenging, ad-hoc, group problem solving. There's a certain controlled chaos to this game that can get almost frantic at times, but the experience has such good vibes, such funny sprite animation and sound design, and such an immaculate difficulty curve, that you will continually come back to Loop with new characters you've unlocked in order to see what kind of puzzle dynamic the game will throw at you next. And to make friends by shouting at them as an Umbrella. Furthermore, you'll come back to see what the community has unlocked collectively, since the collective loop stats are tied to a Noby Noby Boy style global secret content system that nobody currently knows the true extent of. A chill, relaxing, humorous, and friendly game that will prove to you once and for all that humans can be good, fun, helpful creatures. Even if they look and sound weird, or have unpronounceable names. Genius game design for tenbux. Favorite moment: Whale Pile! 08 - Octopath Traveler II Hours played = 70+ / ♫ The Leaflands (Day)  Probably one of the most flattering homages to the 90s Japanese RPG style yet made, Octopath 2 is dense with myriad bespoke 2D details, animations and easter eggs, and also quite meaty as a turn based battler. Aesthetically, it's Square's most sophisticated application of the HD2D style, if maybe not their most experimental. It has a stunning...I don't even know what to call it...Pixel Chiaroscuro? sense of art direction, where day or night scenes can look extremely dynamic via moving clouds, trapdoored godrays, shining water with bokeh effects and depth of focus, incidental scenery animals, water features, etc etc etc. The localization is quite good all around, with on-the-fly battle chatter that is repetitive enough to sound iconic in that 90s sort of way, and music that while on short loops is also diverse, prolific, dynamic, and some of the very highest quality you can imagine from Square's excellent catalog of composers. Battle is complex and customizable enough to break open with a little effort, but maybe a bit frequent? Story boss encounters are excellent with spritework that is multifaceted and larger than life. A retro-inspired feast for the senses. I don't know what else to even say. I suppose I feel a little distant to it emotionally due to the game's open-ended structure which can be a bit much, each little story segment playing out in a kind of vacuum, and for the fact that as excellent an homage as it is...it's still trying to recreate a time in our heads that can't fully be recreated as novel. My brain is a bit too cynical sometimes to allow my defenses to go down on that level unless I'm being appealed to by blatant nostalgia, which is why competent remakes or remasters can still hit so hard at times. But there is no denying that this is Square delivering retro chic, turn-based, fantasy pixel opera of the highest quality...and there's a reason everyone is enamored with it. Contemporary Square Enix truly is a marvel. Favorite moment: That feel at the start of any story boss when a character's custom theme merges into the boss theme, it's  every. loving. time. 07 - HUMANITYHours played = 32 / ♫ Thrive  HUMANITY feels like a PSX game from Japan Studio circa 1997. I say that as a compliment, and as encouragement for Sony to keep this kind of thing coming. Intelligent Qube via Devil Dice via Lemmings, it's a brilliantly realized, perfectly distilled, trance inducing puzzle experience that knows exactly what it's doing and exactly how to train the player to get what they want. For me, it excelled at creating an extremely weird, otherworldly vibe, and setting me loose to play with new systems all while rewarding me for thinking creatively. By the end of its 90 levels I felt like a loving genius. The narrative is fresh and existential, and the physics systems which govern the movement of millions of bodies running, jumping, swimming, fighting, and flowing like rivers toward a light in the sky never fails to consistently impress with its scale and sense of perfect information. Does dog have what it takes to help human not be dumb gently caress? How much gun does it take to kill god? Is there bark at the end of the universe? Play one of the best action puzzle games in decades to answer these important questions. Favorite moment: Getting all goldy with zero hints. I am the smartest man alive. 06 - Atomic HeartHours played = 42 / ♫ Eleanora  'Soviet Bioshock', as it's been described. This game is less of a Bioshock clone and more of a weighty, first-person bullet hell. Soviet political themes are almost entirely present as aesthetic set-dressing...suggesting the game's true alternate history foothold has more to do with the cornucopia of free-market grift that accompanied the collapse/overthrow of Soviet life, and the fire-sale of every public good out from under its citizenry that followed. So it's a story about the cannibalistic tendency of globalism then, well who knows, maybe that and shooting blobby looking Russian mannequin machinery with a Kalashnikov while listening to premium Mick Gordon electronic sludge or Glasnost era Soviet hits, many of which kick fuckin rear end, babe. In the test chamber facilities the gameplay often takes on Portal style vibes as you solve ambient music industrial room puzzles using a variety of elemental-machine interfaces, but there's still room for prestige tours, larger than life bosses, and hemmed in arena style brickbat scrapes vs angry mobs, all punctuated with the single most satisfying looting mechanic to ever grace a videogame. Some of the best artistic design of the decade and certainly one of the best soundtracks of the year on the one hand, terrible localization and map navigation on the other. I dunno, I guess the gunplay was so satisfying and cerebral for me that I kind of stopped worrying about flaws in pacing/narrative or whether I might be missing a plot detail here and there. When you're popping a heal-pod, jumping, air dashing, and reloading simultaneously there isn't much time to get analytical about the rather chauvinistic attitude or script malapropisms. I think I'd given up on this game ever releasing some years back and then suddenly it was here and it was exactly what I wanted, a beefy, exotic retro sci-fi shooter that I sunk 40+ hours into. I played it gradually, on hard, in Russian, ...and every big encounter was a complete war of attrition down to the last bullet in every gun. Just glorious. When all of the DLC is available I'll give it another go. Favorite moment: The first boss, Hedgie, puts the entire gunplay loop into perspective in a few short minutes, an wickedly fun and bold skill check for the rest of the game. 05 - Hunt: ShowdownHours played = 123 / ♫ Drowning Water  One thing I can say definitively from having dropped 120+ hours into Hunt in the 2 months since I picked it up, this game hard as hell. Take Deadwood, staple it to the flesh of Bloodborne, season with gilded age cajun voodoo spice rub, and ducttape a rusty single action revolver into its hand. That's Hunt. Nothing is easy, everything is dirty and ragged. Every environmental sound can get you killed, every movement is deliberate, every single bullet is manually reloaded. The technology behind Crytek's custom rain sound effects feels flat out revolutionary for an interactive game. The amount of intricacy involved in team play requires several tens of hours to wrap your brain around in order to not get your friend's cover blown by startling a flock of birds accidentally. And when you gun some filthy thieving motherfucker down face first into the muck you better be stealing everything he has before lighting his corpse on fire. Having facility with anything in Hunt makes you feel electric. Surviving a prolonged gun battle makes you breathe heavily. The huge number of historically accurate weapons in this game means that each one has its own quirks, its own unique behavior that might suit it to a person's individual playstyle. It's one of the deepest, most inscrutable multiplayer games I've played that still has energy left over for things like fantastic art direction, music, and bespoke level design. I honestly can't wait to see what the CryEngine 5 upgrade brings to the game's atmosphere early next year. Maybe by then I'll be able to hit someone with my bullets. Favorite moment: Being lit on fire and then accidentally brushing up against your friends and lighting them on fire, too  04 - Final Fantasy XVIHours played = 96 / ♫ Indomitable  Rad as hell to be playing a new mainline Final Fantasy in 2023 (more than half a lifetime since I first discovered the series in the 90s) that isn't falling apart at the seams and actually has a cohesive story and cool battle system. FF has seldom been the deepest RPG series on the market, or the most consistent, but its identity as a bellwether for experimentation and aesthetic prestige command a lot of respect from me. Truth be told, there's some tedium here, but it actually works for me. It fits somehow, it's consistent with the game's message of labor through the gauntlet of climate change probably involving a lot of interpersonal work and acceptance of trauma...and the stoicism of this game's characters hit me really hard in the feels right when I needed it this summer. It was therapeutic to have a game say 'this is gonna suck, there's no way around it without sacrifice, let's help each other through." Not to mention that some of the mundanity on offer, whatever the dev's ultimate structural reason for it, ends up selling the contrast between normal living as we know it and huge...god tier, life changing chaos events. Like climate disasters. Like Eikon battles. It works in the theme and it works in the gameplay, even if they have eschewed numerous systems as an experiment in attracting new audiences (something tells me that stuff will all be back by popular demand). The boss battles feel like the biggest things of all time, they completely command your attention for huge chunks of time and they forever change the landscape of the game's story when through. They are some of the most stunning videogame spectacle moments in recent memory, earning every orchestral crescendo and melodramatic flourish, transforming the build-up of narrative melodrama into propulsive action mechanics and regular old oh poo poo moments. Clive and Company are all a serious, well-written, well-performed lot that give some of the other ensembles from the series a run for their money...even if we can't really control the party this time. In the end I just feel like this game said what needed to be said. It's a serious story that is concerned with mourning and then moving on. The only way out is through. Not all FF games have to be about that, but this one is and that's okay. So that's why it's pretty high on this list despite whatever issues. It continues the series tradition of taking risks and I respect it for that. I think I'll save a replay for when all the DLCs are out. Favorite moment: It's either '999999' or what's pictured in the gif above lol, both moments were some hype poo poo 03 - Call of Duty: Infinite WarfareHours played = 15+ / ♫ Fair Winds  Pure spectacle. The first, last, and only time CoD will make it into one of my lists. At the time this released I judged it as I judge all CoD titles, and CoD4 was my last specific memory of the series. This is a weird title, you can tell that the main audience was on to something when they panned it, it just doesn't have the same vibe they're used to. There are actual characters who don't come off as complete maniacs. Series staple dipshits like Price and Soap are nowhere to be seen, and there is a sweeping, cohesive plot that only occasionally feels confident in its own propaganda, while at other times it openly mocks the oorah Space Americans attitude. Sure, it's essentially revenge for Space 9/11 against Space Russians who have the audacity to want to control their own colonial resources, but man, the spirit just ain't in it here for blatant manipulative 'boots on the ground' milsim stuff we've come to expect. On the other hand, you pretty much get to play here as the antagonists from Titanfall 2, well-funded intergalactic imperialists...only this time operating on the back foot. It makes for a good double feature with TF2, two sides of the same sci-fi drama coin. And really, at the time that both games were released Infinity Ward and Respawn were locked in a dead heat to deliver the most badass space warfare setpieces, respectful competition between old studio mates. In my mind Titanfall 2 is all around the best FPS ever made but, while I didn't play any multi in Infinite Warfare, the extended cinematic campaign on offer here is probably one of the most epic singleplayer modes ever made for a shooter. This came at a time when Sony was courting Activision pretty hard, and there were some big dollars sunk into promotion, PSVR content, and exclusive bits for this title...a title everyone making it clearly expected would sell gangbusters, but in the end was kind of shunned and can now be had for under a tenner. There are still stacks of shrinkwrapped copies of this at my local supermarket. Presentation-wise, the scenarios that seamlessly transition you from planetside to orbit to battlecruiser bridge, then back to ship on ship piracy or covert ops or jet battles, it's hard to convey just how big and shiny and confident this whole product is, and the technical tricks that went into making it all work on a PS4 are some serious black magic (it's actually one of the few games that isn't officially supported on the PS5 back-compat, so it isn't sold digitally on the store, but the disc copy worked fine for me. Or maybe that's just another ploy to move more unsold discs lol). Anyways, if you want to play a cinematic singleplayer hard sci-fi shootmans that has few peers even like 8 years later, then look no further. A game I will probably replay several times just for the big screen wow factor. Favorite moment: Going to the low grav base on Mercury and dodging solar under flares in zero G across molten rivers. Absolutely wild scenery. 02 - Armored Core VI: Fires of RubiconHours played = 80 / ♫ Hearing Things  It had already been a pretty nostalgic year for me by the time August rolled around, but ACVI sure managed to slam that feeling home. Armored Core was one of the first 10 or so PSX games I ever owned, my first FROM title, and one of the games that all of my friends seemingly had to have their own copy of. I don't even know how it caught on, I think I had a demo disc that we all played for a while, and then it hit the store shelves and was this strange combination of forward-thinking, mechanically baffling, unapproachable, and deadly serious. Split-screen competition got pretty involved for us all at one point, and I remember the moment one of us discovered Human+ features and started using them in vs matches. Then all of a sudden everyone was in a race to the bottom. Anyways, I followed the series for another few installments and then kind of drifted away to AAA pastures and online multiplayer experiences of the mid 00s. Well, I guess by this point we've mostly acknowledged how FROM has pulled off another one of the all time skillful retro resurrections in gaming. It's the best pure mecha game ever, folks, and for a genre that's often been known to cut corners on polish in order to cater to its rather niche audience's desire for depth there is a sick sort of pleasure to be had from just how expensive and optimized this particular robo title feels, or how great an idea it was to put the Sekiro studio talent in charge of making it all happen. So many beats are perfect, the art direction, the endless gun porn of unnecessarily complex reload animations, the weight and scale and speed of your monster, the anger of metal foot on metal face, the bleak cynicism of the world around you, and the flexibility of the featureset at your disposal to tinker with. I must've had 2 dozen distinct builds in a pool to draw from by the end of New Game, a library of offensive options available any time I felt cornered by a challenge. Also, and it should be emphasized, this particular game has some of the finest boss battles in the entire FROMSOFT canon. FROM gets it, they know how to thread that needle. Another year goes by and they're once again the best in the action game biz, one which they've consistently been working to redefine for years, from Souls, through Bloodborne, Sekiro to Elden Ring, and beyond. Burn it all, betray everyone, sell your soul and rebuild its twisted essence up again from scrap metal. Favorite moment: "I won't miss." 01 - TReNHours played = 20+ / ♫ Stoplight / Trenhop / Early Hours  Around 18 months ago my mom asked me to rebuild the family albums, accounting for the consolidation of numerous photographs once thought to be lost or scattered to the four winds, and just in general as an effort to keep everything in good shape and undamaged for another generation. Rest assured, the relation of this series of impending personal anecdotes to the gaming topic at hand will eventually become clear. The big thing to note right out of the gate is that I tried to get out of doing this chore for a good while, like 6 months at the very least. My mom is getting up there, and personally speaking I'm already half dead, so the significance of this request was not exactly lost on me and I think I was a bit hesitant overall for that reason. That is to say she was... in that moment, with that calm and lovely voice of hers, at once bequeathing a large chunk of our family history to me for safekeeping, but also asking me to do a metric poo poo ton of tedious work. If you've never rebuilt an album before (or in this case a series of albums) then let me assure you it is an unenviable task, one that must be taken seriously, with a sense of irrational organization that respects the emotional intricacy of past events while also accounting for a potential future viewer's lack of context for them. There is an aesthetic flow that must accompany the historical flow. Archival photo albums are, after all, the kind of thing your great grandmother would run headlong into a burning building in order to save, they should be treated with that same sense of gravity and respect. So building them is a messy task in the sense that you sit in a room with heaps of photos stacked everywhere according to various criteria trying to adjust and straighten and adhere things carefully, craning your neck under lamplight in order to see details with strained eyesight. It's also messy in a mental sense, because you have the bittersweet opportunity (ie, obligation) to relive all of this poo poo you'd sometimes rather not remember...for several hours per day, for weeks on end, ...and in the preamble of buying all the necessary poo poo you need (where does one even buy albums anymore?) to complete the organizational task...sometimes for months at a time. These dead people are all living in your head, they are all telling you to respect the only remaining part of them left to this world, the context of their memory. A running theme through all this memorial ephemera will undoubtedly be gatherings, or shifting seasonal events, holidays, new children, new marriages. There are other things in there, too. Graduations. Family trips. Memorials. Animals. Those old stoic black and white portraits where people had to stand very still for a long exposure. The 5th birthday when they gave me Lego sets I was too dumb to build on my own. My older sister always built the sets using the printed insturctions, partially because I asked her to and partially because she secretly liked doing it. It went on like this for years. There she is with her headband, her dark eyes, the tired and partially resentful holiday morning expression. There are gifts around a tree, and a train is set up in the vicinity as well. Each year new pieces are added to the train until it becomes its own multifaceted kind of annual engagement, a ritual that goes back into a large cardboard box for the other 11 months of the year. The memories of these childhood events are staged like perfect museum-grade dioramas before the camera's lens, they are material culture demonstrations which are also by nature inherently photogenic, mechanically reproduced. These kinds of things lock in your mind as ritual, they motivate a lifelong relationship with nostalgia...the aspirational recreation of the ideal, of what never was, of perhaps how we think things ought to be. There is mom drinking tea in the background wearing thick wool socks. She had long hair then, held up with chopsticks. After the parents divorce I have two houses. One of the houses has the train in the attic. Dad likes to build it up different each year and then sketch out the arrangement of parts for whatever layouts in meticulous detail with little written notes, in case I want to build this same shape next year. He has dozens of these. He keeps them in his half of the family album, now divided. Physical keepsakes of organizational flow states. He leaves the train up for a bit past New Year's Day on average. He's attached to the whole idea. I only have a limited amount of specific/crucial wooden pieces available, that is, the setup can only get so large before it's got a bunch of abrupt dead-ends to account for. Male/female, double male, double female. Trestle. Cross. Curve. Long. Mountain. Siding. Nomenclature. Westward expansion. Empire simplified for elementary level engagement. Train track taxonomy. In order for a layout to be 'good enough' it has to be accessible for the freight trucks visiting the container station and also reversible so that trains can double back in different directions without running into each other. Paramount within this equation are the usage of switches, forks, and crosses. Most of the trains have magnets and can mix and match cars, but one of the older trains has delicate wooden wheels and the cars connect with an intricate system of metal hooks. Most of the wooden track pieces are uniform, but there are a few on offer from very old sets. Older than I've been alive. Do you get the picture? Sakurazuka posted:I'll take the double female and 3-way Around the time I finished fully arranging three new family albums this summer I was also playing TReN. This is a game I had not been anticipating whatsoever. I just saw a trailer one day and downloaded it. The game is a digital facsimile of collective human nostalgia, rendered lovingly in Media Molecule's proprietary game-building engine, Dreams. TReN is actually the swansong of the studio's Dreams development project, tools essentially open to the public. It's a walled-garden videogame thinktank that the developers have also been using to release their own projects for some time now. Make no mistake though, TReN is MM's latest full-size release but it also represents sort of a farewell to the Healey-led incarnation of the studio. The project came about because John Beech, MM dev and former construction worker, created a wooden train simulator in Dreams while anticipating the birth of his daughter, a sort of game jam personal project. The rooms it depicts are rooms in the new house he was moving to, the artwork is that of various MM devs. The pictures, people come and gone. Through some turn of events in 2023 he has now become the studio's creative director. TReN ultimately formed within the studio as an attempt to make a supposedly 'AAA' experience using the Dreams toolset. But it's more than that. It's an exploration of the personal histories of the members of the studio. It's a game about the passage of time and about how play inherently shapes character. It's a game about the crystallization of nostalgia. In fact, it is the single most nostalgic game. It's a game about how we think things ought to be. It's joyful, wistful, contemplative, melancholy. Similar to HUMANITY, TReN is also a return to the kind of small, focused game idea that proliferated across the PSX dev ecosystem in the late 90s, when things weren't so inclined toward the cinematic budget in the hundreds of millions. Despite the photorealism of its environs and the complex physics often at play, you're still on the track, the controls have a deceptive forward/backward simplicity and momentum to them. The goal is to get good times or just have a good time, and for my money TReN made me feel the most complex brew of emotions of any piece of media this year. It is as close to perfect as a game has been for me in a long time. It reaches down inside me and rips out feelings I had successfully buried. It made me dig out my wooden train after 15 years sitting in the attic and build a custom train memory diorama dedicated to this post, an idealized picture, a museum-grade memory in space. TReN is a VHS-filtered love letter to play, and flow, and fun, and our connection to others. It's a photo album of memories rendered as a physics puzzle. It's an arrangement of keepsakes as a time trial. It's 95 levels of painstakingly arranged feelings, with a turbo button. Favorite moment: Finding the PSX, The Future of Play trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tBbyRm_jyk -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- EZ List 01 - TReN 02 - Armored Core: Fires of Rubicon 03 - Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare 04 - Final Fantasy XVI 05 - Hunt: Showdown 06 - Atomic Heart 07 - HUMANITY 08 - Octopath Traveler II 09 - Karmazoo 10 - Forspoken -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- glhf see you in '24 BeanpolePeckerwood fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 07:48
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What a year. This is the year of GAME I really wish I had room to include these on the top 10 System Shock remake Wo Long Fallen Dynasty Elden Ring co-op mod Resident Evil 4 remake Metroid Prime remastered Lunacid Blasphemous 2 Astral Ascent Warhammer 40k Darktide    10. COCOON. Sound design is something I feel is underappreciated and underprioritized in a lot of games. COCOON is an example that good sound is powerful enough to carry an entire game. The shifting soundscape of its layered worlds is beautiful to absorb and it turns out a 5-hour game with one button can be completely engrossing when the presentation is this good.    9. The Talos Principle 2. The first Talos Principle was one of my favorite puzzle games and this is a slam dunk of a sequel in every way. I still really enjoy the format of freeroam environments with puzzles dotted around them that you can enter at your own pace with engaging backstory to find between them. There's a whole lot of content to work through with an almost exhausting 132 puzzles, and the new tools open up a satisfying number of possibilities to think about. It's extremely pretty to look at and the new soundtrack is just as good as the original's. Also there's a cat gallery. Thanks Croteam.    8. Hunt Showdown. It is the third year this game has been on my top 10. Since I dared to try it three years ago I still haven't touched a single other competitive game, because after 2000 matches and counting, I've still never had the same fight twice. Some days Hunt is thrilling and incredibly satisfying, some days Hunt is pure psychological torment and misery, but no matter what, Hunt is never boring. The possibility space in Hunt is so big that the game is very resilient to being "solved" and reduced to a repetitive meta. There is no playbook to follow and no single right way to play, which makes it so refreshing to play with teammates who think of different things than you and clutch matches in ways you wouldn't have tried. Every fight is a unique and original challenge, because there are so many random variables and weird things enemy players could try to do that it makes them unpredictable to a degree I haven't seen in any other game. The result is that the matches are so memorable and distinctive that I still think about moments from 500 hours ago. It's also introduced me to some of the genuinely coolest folks I've played any game with through the Awful discord. I really think this is one of the most remarkable games around today, as countless safer and more conventional multiplayer games have died and vanished in their first year, but somehow this unorthodox niche game for insane people is still going strong in its sixth year and even setting new playercount records. The devs continue to support it with a lot of content and I'm glad Hunt is going to be with us for awhile yet.    7. Baldur's Gate 3. I really enjoyed Larian's previous game Divinity Original Sin 2, but mostly only for the multiplayer gameplay and not for the writing and story, which was full of unlikable characters I couldn't stand and a plot I wasn't invested in at all. BG3 has been the total opposite, with a much more engaging central storyline and some of the best characters I've met in an RPG with preposterously good voice acting. Any single one of BG3's available party members is more likeable than the entire cast of DOS2 put together. Meanwhile, the already-impressive multiplayer from DOS2 has been improved even more and this is a great game to travel through with a friend. As of writing this I haven't finished the game yet, but at 90 hours in BG3 is definitely one of my favorites from this year and clearly deserves all the praise it's getting. Looking forward to finishing this in January.    6. Pikmin 4. This is a very important series to me and one of the only things I still feel real nostalgia for. As a kid I replayed pikmin 2 over and over and over and learned every inch of that game backwards and forwards, because somehow everything about that strange idiosyncratic game just resonated with me. This series is just too weird and unlike other genres to have a mass market target audience and each game in the series has a stood a real chance of being the last, with the decade-long wait between pikmin 3 and 4 being the longest yet, so we're truly lucky to finally have another entry in this series. I replayed the whole series in order via the HD switch ports before starting 4, and the old games still hold up incredibly well. While pikmin 4 hasn't replaced 2 for my series favorite, there's a lot I respect about it. It made some serious improvements to environment design and this is the best version of the series' visual style to date. Pikmin 4 is possibly the best-looking game on switch and it's baffling what it's able to eke out of hardware that wouldn't be out of place in a graphing calculator. Its campaign has the most content in the series and the new creature designs are as fun as ever. It made a lot of experiments with the formula, but the fundamentals of sweeping maps clean of hazards and treasure are still enjoyable. I deeply hope pikmin 4 isn't where this series closes and that we won't be left waiting an entire decade for more this time. I would also die for Oatchi.    5. Tears of the Kingdom. This game was a horrible catastrophe for my sleep schedule. There are a lot of more compact games which give you the feeling that there's something interesting to see waiting around every corner, but what makes TOTK special is just how long it's able to maintain that magic. The basic formula is still just as strong as it was in BOTW, with the intro giving you all the tools you need to complete the game and just enough tutorial to know how to use them at their most basic level, before setting you loose in the world to just freely explore wherever catches your eye. But those tools are so flexible this time that there's a very long journey to understanding what you're fully capable of, leading to a dual progression as you not only get mechanically stronger as Link but also smarter as a player. The most important thing TOTK gets right is that learning is fun. Whenever you ask "can I do this?" the answer is usually "yes" or "no, but the disaster was funny when you tried." There was a satisfying mental progression from confusedly gluing an egg to a weapon, unsure of what it would achieve, to eventually throwing quadcopters together in seconds and effortlessly flying to my objective. There are so many open world games now that it's hard for one to stand out from the pack, but the systems in TOTK are just so strong that I really think it's a must-play.    https://i.imgur.com/kKvr0TT.mp4 4. STRANGER OF PARADISE FINAL FANTASY ORIGIN. Waited for this to release on steam ever since it was announced once I tried Nioh 2 and discovered how good the multiplayer is in Team Ninja's games. Many people seemed to treat this game as a meme from its original trailers and weren't prepared for SOP to be much more than a meme, as it's actually a complex action game with razor sharp controls and a lot of depth to explore across a gratuitous number of classes. Just like Nioh 2, the multiplayer netcode is superb and coop is a great time. It's extremely satisfying to unpack what you're capable of doing with your class and feel yourself improve, while multiplayer keeps it forgiving enough that it isn't frustrating despite the high difficulty. Add a surprisingly sincere story about friendship and this campaign is a joy to play through. SOP rules.    3. Alan Wake 2. My main experience with Remedy is Control. Control was a very impressive game and I loved every part of it except, unfortunately, for actually playing it. I loved every part of Alan Wake 2 including playing it. This is just an incredible accomplishment of a game that successfully carried forward all of Control's strengths while putting a new spin on them. A highly surreal journey with excellent pacing, a lot of fantastic art direction and sound design, great actor performances with some really fun live action scenes, and an entire album of original songs to go with the end of each chapter. It's just a treat to take in from start to finish. There's a well-balanced contrast in vibes bouncing between the perspectives of its two protagonists, as Saga's chapters provide a solid familiar baseline for the story, but Alan's chapters go fully off the rails and get fantastically bizarre. The nightmare New York of Alan's chapters is one of my favorite environments in any game and where AW2 shines brightest. These segments have one of my favorite elements from any horror game that I have to single out: the nightmare is filled with hostile shadow figures, but only some of them are real and the rest simply vanish when they get close. Your resources are too limited to spend many flashlight batteries revealing which is which from a distance, so you're pushed into some wonderfully tense moments holding your ground with dwindling resources as a shadow gets close, praying this one isn't real, before the moment of relief as it finally fades away or the panic as it suddenly lunges at you. The addition of an inventory system with much less frequent but more dangerous encounters was a great change to make these moments feel higher-stakes and keep the gameplay engaging for its own sake instead of just being filler between story. AW2 keeps finding new ways to surprise, it takes an extreme number of risks for a high budget game, it's unapologetically weird as gently caress, and I'm beyond  at the prospect of a Control 2 at this level of quality.   2. Remnant 2. Normally when a special game feels like it was designed just for you personally, it's a low-budget indie title that knows it isn't for most people and only needs to sell three copies to turn a profit. Remnant 2 feels like if one of those unsafe, idiosyncratic games just for me was made with a professional budget. It's a strange blend of genres that doesn't quite feel like anything else, it uses randomization in an unusual way that means there's no predefined easy path to take your character through, it's unafraid of being demanding and rude to you, and I love it for all of these things. Remnant doesn't cleanly fit into a box. It's an excellent blend of difficult-but-fair mechanics with satisfying feel and responsive controls to back them up. In spite of how much friction there can be in learning the game, Remnant is fundamentally designed to be fair with clearly-readable enemy telegraphs and sound cues that equip you with everything you need to beat it. The boss design is flat-out phenomenal with some of the most creative designs and fun gimmicks I've seen in any action game. The art direction deserves more praise than I can give in this post, as every environment is stellar in its own way and I couldn't stop taking screenshots of cool things to see. NPC encounters are enjoyably bizarre.  Destroy the goon. I ran over 7 campaigns of this game across both coop and solo, and even though I kept raising the difficulty for each run, I had an easier time with each campaign than the last as I could feel my accumulated experience and muscle memory backing me up more and more. When I eventually arrived at the last few hurdles on the top difficulty, and finally on a hardcore campaign where I only had one shot to get it right, it felt like a triumphant final exam where the stakes were high but I knew the material and had confidence in my ability to see it through. Very few games are as satisfying as that.    1. Pentiment. I missed the boat on this last year. It's far outside of my usual wheelhouse and I want to thank everyone who convinced me to try it. This is one of the most emotionally moving stories I've ever played and one of those games which just radiates the love that was put into it. I didn't understand going in just how much a historical setting could add to an RPG, as its characters may be fictional, but the egregious class disparity and dire living conditions of the peasants portrayed in Pentiment's story were entirely real, and that makes the narrative hit a lot harder than other games. There is so much grief and pain in this story, but it's contrasted against so much humor and joy that Pentiment never feels like it indulges in misery. More than anything else, Pentiment feels genuine. I've never spent so long thinking about what to say in an RPG and considering what the consequences might be for everyone involved. I'm close to illiterate and this got me to spend an hour tabbed out of the game looking at maps of europe and reading about the peasants' revolt of 1524. I cried, more than once. Pentiment got me invested like no other story has and I'm very grateful for it.
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Dec 29, 2023 07:52
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:
Me waiting here twiddling my thumbs hoping Microsoft puts all the old CoD games on Gamepass because I never played Advanced or Infinite Warfare and I would like to at some point. Though honestly MW19, Cold War, and MWII had some of the most enjoyable FPS campaigns I've ever played (MWII in particular just put on a clinic for how to make an FPS campaign that wasn't the same shooting gallery after shooting gallery). They've done really good work in the past 5 years, although from what I hear MWIII was a misstep.
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Dec 29, 2023 08:17
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Fucken hell BP I'm literally crying. What a post
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Dec 29, 2023 08:36
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I purchased Pizza Tower because of this thread. So far I don’t really like it, but I compulsively finish whatever I buy so maybe I’ll come around. And the art does rule. Anyway, thread works. Devs supported.
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Dec 29, 2023 08:46
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Beautiful post BP, and great stuff Owl Inspector, such a cool thread we got here folks.
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Dec 29, 2023 08:54
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fridge corn posted:Fucken hell BP I'm literally crying. What a post right? i only played some videogames, this motherfucker went on a fuckin journey. i'm just like, yeah, this game was really fun
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Dec 29, 2023 08:57
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Owl Inspector posted:
Great list, great pics, and everything you say about Hunt is true and right and good.
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Dec 29, 2023 09:41
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fridge corn posted:Fucken hell BP I'm literally crying. What a post  VVVVVVV BeanpolePeckerwood fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 09:44
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BP thank you for that beautiful list
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Dec 29, 2023 10:09
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Also I have actually owned Elsinore for like 13 months but finally got around to it thanks to this list and wow that just ate two of my days, go play that if you liked Outer Wilds but wanted more commentary on privilege, class and racism in your time loops. In retrospect I guess actually it's more like The Forgotten City.
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Dec 29, 2023 10:55
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I don’t know if I’m gonna finish the last game before I make my list. Don’t know if I can legally put it in such a high spot if I haven’t finished it  I’m one of those people whose family and child pictures got suspiciously destroyed in a flood before I saw them so I can only sympathise BP.
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Dec 29, 2023 11:01
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Aipsh posted:I don’t know if I’m gonna finish the last game before I make my list. Don’t know if I can legally put it in such a high spot if I haven’t finished it You don't even have to have played a game at all to rate it as highly as number 1, apparently, so just go nuts. No rules no masters only chaos this year 
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Dec 29, 2023 11:07
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Goddamn yeah that was a hell of a post, BP 
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Dec 29, 2023 11:13
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Really great list BP. I'm glad so many variety of videogames exists to entertain and be enjoyed by many people like the year of the jrpg fan, to the dude on a memory journey, to the trophy hunter, to the challenge seekers. This goty thread is really interesting to see what kind of people put together lists like these.
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Dec 29, 2023 13:11
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I would love to play Tren but the last time I tried I was not able to figure out how. It doesn’t come up in PS store search, do I have to own and launch Dreams and search in there? For some reason I thought Dreams had gone up on PS+ and first I thought I had forgotten to claim it, but I may have just imagined that since I can’t find any evidence it ever happened. That post makes me want to go buy it regardless tho
haveblue fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 14:04
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haveblue posted:I would love to play Tren but the last time I tried I was not able to figure out how. It doesn’t come up in PS store search, do I have to own and launch Dreams and search in there? For some reason I thought Dreams had gone up on PS+ and first I thought I had forgotten to claim it, but I may have just imagined that since I can’t find any evidence it ever happened. That post makes me want to go buy it regardless tho Yeah you need to get/buy Dreams, and then Tren is a creation within it, so you need to open dreams and within the little browser navigate to it. :Edit: I had a strange bug where I couldn’t get beyond the very first stage, I’d complete it and get no grade, or time or score, it was very odd. Might try deleting the whole thing and trying again Aipsh fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 14:09
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:
Also I love how this photo is like a microcosm of BP lore. I don't recognise all of it but I recognise some of it. And I see you there VP jewel case.. 
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Dec 29, 2023 14:17
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My gaming 2023 was shaped by the Steam Deck. I picked it up in late 2022 as a promotion gift to myself and it quickly became the main way I played games - whether handheld, docked or streaming more demanding games from my desktop PC, every game on my list was at least partially played on Deck. The flexibility it gave me to enjoy my PC library inspired me to dig into my Steam backlog and got me to tackle games I never thought I'd be into - and got me to buy some more. Gaben stays winning. Onto the list! 10. Sonic Superstars Aping the chaotic multiplayer style of recent Super Mario Bros titles is such an obvious move for Sonic and friends that I'm surprised it's taken Sega until now to implement. A few tedious bosses and camera issues couldn't take the shine off blasting through a few levels with Mini Boat after school. 9. Metal Gear Solid 4 I'm not sure whether PS3 emulation has gotten drastically better at some point recently or if I just found the magic combination of settings that work for this game but I was finally able to play MGS4 from start to finish without any real issues. Playing it in 2023 it's an interesting halfway step between the PS2 titles and the glorious stealth sandbox of MGSV. The cutscenes are long and self-indulgent, but I'm willing to forgive that seeing as it was supposed to be a send-off for the series as a whole. The story also has another example of Hideo Kojima the accidental prophet: all powerful AIs that can be fooled into endlessly repeating themselves was meant as a plea from Kojima about how done he was with MGS, but it hits different in a post-ChatGPT world. 8. Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin In so many different ways Dark Souls II feels like it's trying to distinguish itself from its predecessor by subverting player expectations, and even if some of those twists don't quite work for me, I respect that it's not content with just polishing the same formula. One thing DS2 does do better than any other game in the series is tell its story through gameplay. There's still plenty of world-building cruft hidden in item descriptions, but meeting King Vendrick and the manner in which I gathered the power to defeat his hollowed form made me feel connected to DS2’s story in a way no other title in the series could match. This was also my first experience with the Souls online player base (thanks to the version of DS1 I played now being permanently offline). Coming from a silent Lordran I'd dreaded invaders, but when a player named NOT TODAY blocked my path and flattened me with a giant hammer all I could do was laugh. I didn't defeat any invaders in DS2, but baiting one into following me onto a series of moving pillars and then dropping them to strand him remains one of my favourite moments with the game. The biggest difference that online play made was the player ghosts and messages that populated the world, and the in-jokes that I was suddenly party to. Hidetaka Miyazaki has been quoted as saying that Dark Souls multiplayer was inspired by driving up a snowy hillside: sometimes others help you out, sometimes they get in your way. But most of all, you get comfort from knowing that you're not the only one struggling. Don't give up, skeleton. 7. Vagrant Story Back in 2020, I gave Vagrant Story a kind of backhanded writeup in the Best Games thread, lauding its presentation and mechanics while criticising how poorly it taught them to the player. Having played it start to finish from a completely fresh save for the first time in years… I think that assessment stands. However, it turns out that when you know what you're doing, VS gives you everything you need to succeed. A dungeon with a fire elemental boss has nearby treasures that include a fire gem (that can be slotted into your shield to shrug off fireballs) and a water weapon spell. Careful exploration of the areas around a golem turn up a hammer that deals blunt damage, bypassing its sky-high defenses. Like a lot of other games on my list, VS is often obscure to the point of frustration - and it doesn't even have player messages to help out! But that made breaking the game over my knee all the more satisfying. When I first played the game over twenty years ago I remember the final boss taking almost no damage from my attacks and having to unleash combo after combo to slowly wear him down. This time, wielding a weapon I'd forged myself, imbued with mystic gemstones and enhanced by ancient magics, he fell after two brief strings of attacks. This game rules, and it fit perfectly in a gaming year filled with mechanically obtuse Japanese takes on western fantasy. 6. Rollerdrome I hate it when a game is boiled down to genre comparisons. “It's Harvest Moon meets Mortal Kombat!” “It's the Dark Souls of sokobans!” It feels like you've completely given up on saying anything meaningful. Having said that, this game is absolutely Tony Hawk meets Max Payne. Rollerdrome is set in the kind of 80s-style dystopia that a lovely billionaire could plunge us into any day now, where desperate contestants take part in the titular bloodsport. Rollerskating around the quarter-pipe and grind rail filled arenas equipped with an arsenal of firearms and a bullet time ability, your goal is to kill every enemy as quickly and stylishly as possible. Your guns have a tiny ammo pool, which refills when you complete skating tricks. This means you quickly hit on a rhythm where you unload everything into an enemy, perform a 540 pretzel grab to reload, and skate on to the next foe. At a certain point I hit a flow state similar to that in Doom (2016), where the enemies were no longer just targets but opportunities to perfect my score. I'd save weaker enemies for moments when my combo was in danger of ending and bait out attacks so that I could get the brief period of free bullet time that followed a perfect dodge, weaving everything together into one continuous dance of death. It's glorious, brutal and stylish. 5. Hi-Fi Rush I've played my fair share of character action games. I've hosed with a witch and made some devils cry. But my skill ceiling was always pretty low and at a certain point I'd just be mashing buttons. Hi-Fi Rush fixed that for me by having the entire world move to the rhythm of the backing music, so it didn't matter how fast I mashed buttons, my action executed on the next beat. This made the game almost turn based, with me plotting out my next few moves against what I thought my opponents would do. A rhythm game lives or dies on its soundtrack and Hi-Fi Rush has a spectacular one, with tracks from Nine Inch Nails and the Prodigy alongside an equally impressive original score, all augmented by the claps, guitar chords and “yeah!”s that accompany your attacks. You're connected to the music in a way that's just fun, and I had a huge grin on my face almost all the way through. 4. Neon White Neon White is full of smart design from top to bottom. Being able to consume your weapons to gain a movement ability means that each stage is some mix of FPS, platformer and puzzle. Every stage having an alternate route that's required in order to get the top rank of medals means that you're constantly looking for new ways to break away from the obvious path, and this game expects - invites - you to break it. It teaches you to be a speedrunner in the best way. I also love the presentation. Aside from the fidelity of the graphics, the music, menus and anime story make it feel like an inscrutable Japanese game found at the bottom of the menu on an Official Playstation Magazine demo disc. This game is great and its bitesize levels make it all the greater on Steam Deck. In fact I'm going to go and attempt a couple more ace medals right now. 3. Dark Souls Almost exactly a year ago I booted this game up on my Steam Deck for the first time. I'd had the trilogy for years thanks to various bundles but the reputation of the series as a punishing grind had put me off. I'm not sure what made me try Dark Souls but I'm so glad that I did. I have Terminal Metroid Brain so the moment that I took the elevator down from the Undead Parish and found that it deposited me back at Firelink Shrine I was completely sold on the game's design. The thing I hadn't realised before I played Dark Souls was how funny it was. Yes, it's full of weird lil guys, but almost every doorway is a practical joke where the punchline is “four skeletons stab you”. Getting killed by a trap or mimic inevitably just made me laugh at my own carelessness rather than get frustrated. My favourite comedy moment was climbing to the top of Sen's Fortress, dodging (and being flattened by) endless rolling boulders and finding that the mechanism was driven by… a giant with a huge pile of boulders. This was my first experience with Souls bosses and while I definitely tilted a couple of times on the more challenging ones that just made them all the more satisfying to take down. Fighting Artorias and learning his moves was the highlight of my time with Dark Souls, and it seems like Fromsoft agreed as bosses that reference Artorias turn up throughout subsequent games. As I said at the outset Dark Souls has a daunting reputation and it's not completely exaggerated - I saw the words YOU DIED many, many times this year. But this game kickstarted me, someone who's officially Bad At Video Games, to become a Souls guy. 2. Dark Souls III At first blush DS3 seems like a slightly desperate attempt to reassure anyone put off by Dark Souls 2. “It's okay, it's like the one you enjoy! Look, Andre’s here! Please don't review bomb us!” I was initially pretty put off by this, but was soon won over by just how good it was to play. DS3 is fast, responsive and brutal. It's filled with references to the previous games but these callbacks feel earned instead of cheap, especially in the Ringed City DLC which acts as a conclusion for the whole series (and contains some of its best battles). I enjoyed playing this game so much that when my almost-finished save game was lost (victim of a lack of cloud saves) I was excited to play through it all again and complete the sidequests I'd missed the first time. When I finally put Dark Souls 3 down I was satisfied that my Souls journey was over and that it was the best game I'd played that year. Until I played… 1. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Remember how I said learning Artorias’s moves, figuring out his openings and turning the tide on a battle that initially seemed impossible was my favourite part of Dark Souls? Sekiro gave me a game full of bosses like that. Removing the options for different builds means you can't just out level or otherwise cheese most bosses: you have to learn them. Every boss that took me multiple attempts went through the same process: I began overwhelmed, began to recognise moves that I had good counters to, put together more and more of the boss’s moves and finally emerged victorious. The handful of bosses that are reused or remixed at points throughout the game could be criticised for being uncreative, but I always enjoyed the opportunity to see how my skills had improved. Genichiro is the best example of this: he made short work of me at the start of the game, the rematch partway through was a tough fight that I eventually overcame, but when he turns up ahead of the final boss he's little more than a warmup act for the main event. And what a main event. Sekiro’s final boss, like so many others, had me playing until late at night. I gave up, went to bed, and then took him apart with my morning coffee. In that moment there was no question - this was my game of the year. (And don't worry, I've started playing Elden Ring and 2024 will have to be an amazing year for it to not feature on my list.)
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Dec 29, 2023 14:29
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Party Boat posted:3. Dark Souls I've said it before and I'll say it again, you love to see it.
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Dec 29, 2023 14:32
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:
I can't believe there is another Infinite Warfare defender out there, other than me.
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Dec 29, 2023 14:33
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bone emulator posted:I can't believe there is another Infinite Warfare defender out there, other than me. Despite my resistance I was encouraged to play it by some other defenders on here, namely QoP and Veni.
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Dec 29, 2023 14:39
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I actually enjoyed infinite warfare a lot too. It was a great scifi campaign.
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Dec 29, 2023 15:00
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:
This was exceptionally lovely. Thank you so much for sharing it. Party Boat posted:3. Dark Souls The novice-enthusiast-connoisseur pipeline. I went on a similar journey last year. Welcome to the club, friend. Enjoy Elden Ring and Armored Core 6 in 2024 - you've already got two of your top five for next year right there, trust me.
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Dec 29, 2023 16:23
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Ineffiable posted:I actually enjoyed infinite warfare a lot too. It was a great scifi campaign. The jingoism and military worship goes down a little easier when all the political entities involved are fictional. It's definitely in the same ultra-gritty space military vein as, say, The Expanse, or the BSG reboot
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Dec 29, 2023 16:43
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Lisztless posted:The novice-enthusiast-connoisseur pipeline. I went on a similar journey last year. Welcome to the club, friend. Enjoy Elden Ring and Armored Core 6 in 2024 - you've already got two of your top five for next year right there, trust me. If From want a hat trick they just need to release Bloodborne on PC...
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Dec 29, 2023 18:04
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I wasn't able to play as many games as I wanted this year as I was quite busy with work and the release of Spider-Man 2. Which also means it's disqualified from my list. My favourite games this year were: 1. The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom 2. Street Fighter 6 3. Lies Of P 4. Super Mario Bros. Wonder 5. Cocoon Honourable mention to Brotato, which is not a game of the year contender at all but I played it a ton while waiting for code to compile or game builds to finish.
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Dec 29, 2023 18:04
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Adding another entry to my list. It doesn't matter for the overall standings but I finished it a couple of days ago and it's so good that it really deserves a spot. So, appending this to my original post: 6. Dishonored 2   An absolute tour-de-force of level design. One hit after another with not a single dud, just a procession of the finest examples of level design prowess that you can hope to find. Each one deceptively small but feels expansive, and you can spend hours exploring them. There are two obvious high-concept standouts that tend to get most of the attention (and you know the two if you've played it) but the others don't fall short (and I'm including Karnaca's streets). It was actually shocking how consistently excellent these little playgrounds are. I can scarcely think of a stronger sequence of levels in any game (one candidate is in the original Psychonauts: Lungfishopolis -> The Milkman Conspiracy -> Gloria's Theater -> Waterloo World -> Black Velvetopia is incredible). Beautiful architecture, great use of verticality, fun toys to mess around with. This is peak Arkane firing on all cylinders. The fact that their other studio was busy making their own masterpiece at the same time just makes it better. I'm only putting this at number 6 because the story's pretty thin and the ending's a bit of a shrug, though it all gets the job done. In my memory the first game had a more substantial and involved plot though, whereas this one felt like an excuse to showcase the GOAT-tier level design. Fair enough tbh!
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Dec 29, 2023 18:55
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10. Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2 I really got into chasing the retroachievements for these on an emulator and it got me to discover a new love for the games trying to do a bunch of challenges I’d never have considered on my own like completing the dark cave level without Squawks, or complete Hothead Hop without collecting a banana. A lot of people rag on achievements but even as someone who doesn’t normally chase them I think they add more to games than people give them credit for. At least for people who are bad at setting challenges themselves. 9. Lunacid An indie loveletter to the Kings Field and Shadow Tower games, From Software’s predecessors to the Souls games. This is the best kind of imitation, taking what was great about the games and modernising the rough edges that don’t add anything. It’s still arcane and punishing but it lacks the clunkiness and more arbitrary bullshit that makes going back to it’s inspirations somewhat difficult. 8. Warhammer 40 000 Rogue Trader A sprawling crpg from the team responsible for Wrath of the Righteous, this game manages to be a bit more approachable by merit of the system it’s built in being slightly less of an overcomplicated mess then Pathfinder 1e, but this is still a game where you are going to spend a lot of time in character creation menus every level up. And probably a lot of time respeccing when you realise you misunderstood something. But the combat is snappy for a turn based rpg due to the game favouring a rocket tag approach to damage and hp values that I personally really enjoy. The writing still has some of the jank and awkwardness of their previous games but it’s charming and funny too. It does an almost unprecedentedly good job for a crpg of making you feel like a big deal, with touches like you not needing money, you simply requisition what you need from any faction you have sufficient influence over and the game providing a dialogue option to prompt your seneschal to introduce you to seemingly every person you meet. You really feel like horrific space nobility at the top of the cosmic equivalent of the East India Company. This all said, the game is loving busted and is pretty much unplayable without a cheat mod to fix stuff that breaks atm so can’t really put it higher. Also going on what I’ve heard it gets worse and if I was up to Act 4 this might not even be on the list. 7. Octopath Traveler 2 Oddly for something this high on the list I don’t have a lot specific to say. It’s just a really good rpg with likeable characters, good music, beautiful visuals and a intricately designed combat system that is a joy to master. The highs for this game probably aren’t as high as some of the lower entries on this list but it’s just consistently good in a way that I don’t remember any problems that drag down some of the earlier entries. 6. Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origins Played a bit last year but only really sunk my teeth into it this year. Considerably more approachable than Nioh/Wo Long but still got that technical complexity that makes the good Team Ninja games shine. The FF fanservice is strong though oriented, understandably, towards the earlier FFs which I’m less attached to. The writing is and excellent mix of high melodrama and farcical comedy, the story is very fitting for a reimagination of FF1 a tale of time travel and schizophrenic mixing of technology and fantasy. The character writing is a lot of fun and there’s one scene where Jed suggests something and Jack snaps back and Jed apologises for annoying him and then Jack is like “Sorry, I’m not angry, this is just how I talk” which kind of sums up the energy the game is going for. 5. Hifi Rush A glorious character action rhythm game hybrid that stands alongside the genre’s greats like Wonderful 101 and Devil May Cry 5. The conceit of matching attacks to the beat is glorious genius, and while an indie game called No Straight Roads beat it to the punch on this mechanic, it’s far better implemented here. The choice and use of the licenced tracks is inspired with the final boss battle set to NIN’s The Perfect Drug being only really eclipsed by the final boss battles of my number 4. Pikmin 4 I’m one of the people whose favourite Pikmin was 2 and was disappointed with 3’s return to being more like 1. So 4 is the game I was looking for. More Pikmin. More levels. Crazy challenges. A piklopedia to fill with treasures and goofy terrible wildlife. 3. Baldur’s Gate III A fundamentally different approach to crpgs compared to Owlcat’s Rogue Trader, Larian’s BG3 ditches much of the grognard poo poo to try and encourage you to engage with the environment and the various ways you can jump/climb/throw or use the myriad different utility spells to gently caress with the world. If the joy in Rogue Trader’s combat is figuring out the right mix of abilities and feats to push your damage numbers into the sky the joy in BG3 is is figuring out that you can trivialise this one fight by having Karlach throw your gnomish wizard through a window to the second story so they can cast cloudkill down onto the ground floor and force all the enemies out of their fortified position. Also it’s really well written and acted. Like holy poo poo. 2. Armoured Core VI Everyone else has effort posted this. So I’m just gonna say, it got me to buy a mecha kit. And the boss fights at the end were my top gaming moments of the year. Rubicon Abides Traveler. 1. My Time at Sandrock I’m a sucker for building and farming and crafting and despite me bouncing off Portia I fell hard for Sandrock. It’s going to go down as a classic. At least within it’s field. The conceit of the game is you’ve come to a isolated desert town as a Builder, and so you build. The loop of gathering materials from increasingly varied and dangerous locales to process into goods to fulfill orders while expanding your workshop to meet ever growing and changing demands would be a engaging loop on it’s own it’s handled so well. The game however goes so far beyond what’s standard for this genre it’s frankly upstaging it’s peers. The town is incredibly lively, with a wide variety of colourful characters that don’t just interact with the player but have webs of relationships through the town. Unlike many games in this genre that focus too much on ‘coziness’ Sandrock like the og Harvest Moon games does not fear making some villagers huge assholes. Or to have some villagers just dislike each other. There’s an extremely entertaining level of small town (and geopolitical) drama playing out in the streets of Sandrock. Whereas most of these games I end up just arbitrarily picking someone to romance just to see what ‘content’ is locked behind it, in Sandrock I actually had a hard time choosing who to woo (or be wooed by, the game has several npcs who will take the initiative if they like you enough) because so many npcs were likeable and I wanted to see their romance arcs. It is just packed to the gills with touches that show a dev team that put their all into not just making a great game but listening to feedback and implementing features and ideas people have wished to see or see return to this space for years. So let’s say an npc wants an item. You have it, but it's in a storage box. Need to run back for it right? Nah you can just pull from boxes to complete quests. Or build. It just gets rid of the obnoxious stuff and leaves in the friction and grinds that people actually like in these games. A Sometimes Food fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 19:07
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Honorable mentions: Metroid Prime Remastered: One of the greatest games ever made got a stunning remaster this year & turned out to be the best looking game on the Switch. Dual stick controls allows you to comfortably journey back to Talon IV in the year of 2023. There were plenty of great remakes this year. Xenoblade Chronicles: Future Redeemed A beefy DLC adventure that could be a whole game in itself. Been a Xenoblade fan since the original Wii adventure & this DLC neatly wraps up the trilogy. The combat has been refined & doesn't feel as bloated as the base game's. 10.Theatrhythm Final Bar Line Theatrhythm is secretly one the best Final Fantasy games. Almost 400 tracks in the base game of some of gaming's greatest music. Extremely replayable & addictive gameplay. 9. Resident Evil 4 Remake Resident Evil 4 did not need a remake. The original is a masterpiece & still stands as one of the GOAT's after almost 20 years. It has been released on every platform since then, so what more could Capcom really add? They made it fresh again. Knife parrying a chainsaw is one of the greatest thrills this year offered in gaming. Certain sections of the game were expanded upon. The mine cart section is a highlight & an already memorable section was turned into a twisted amusement park ride. The Remake is not as good as the original RE4, but that's fine. Having another version of RE4 in the world is never a bad thing. 8.Fire Emblem Engage For more than a decade the Fire Emblem series has been coasting on map designs. Outside of the FE Conquest, the maps have been stale & relatively simple. Engage map designs are a standout in the series 30 year history. The new break mechanic adds a lot to the core combat & I hope it returns in future installments. People dislike the story but I found it engaging. The Saturday morning cartoon vibes fit the series rather well & I take that over Fates & Three Houses bloated multiple campaigns. 7.Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp These games still slap. Saluting all the brave APCs I sacrificed to achieve victory. The remakes are so vibrant & have wonderful animation for the CO's. The QOL updates enhance the experience & make it a smoother experience in year 2023. Also, the computer doesn't cheat with Fog of War anymore. Hopefully Nintendo & Wayforward collaborate again, but the remakes showcase that the original Advance Wars are some the greatest strategy games ever made. 6. Street Fighter 6 Never been much a fighting game fan or even any good at playing them, but the call of more Street Fighter always seems to pull me in. The gameplay is so snappy & tight, that I'm constantly playing just one more match. SF6 just shows how half-baked SF5 was. The character creation system is too good & I've seen so many absolute weirdos, it's great! World Tour is a brilliant addition & hilarious to boot. The sight of my horrifying character flighting a Mime is why I love video games. 5. Super Mario Bros. Wonder Mario is weird again. The New Super Mario Bros. games were good gameplay wise, but just devoid of any soul. Wonder is truly the successor to Super Mario World with its creativity & ambition. The Wonder effects are a blast & it’s just exciting to hop into a new stage & see what unfolds. Weird Mario is best Mario. 4. Final Fantasy XVI In an era when games are going for prestige TV vibes, it’s refreshing to see a video game go for pure spectacle. The Titan & Bahamut Eikon fights are astounding. Voice acting & cutscene direction are very impressive as well. Clive is one of my favorite FF protagonists & Torgal is the best boy. 3. Super Mario RPG Just a lovely RPG that holds up incredibly well after almost 30 years since it came out. The remake remains incredibly faithful to the original & just adds some small QOL improvements to enhance the gameplay. Everything about SMRPG is incredibly charming. From the script, locations, & enemy design this game just oozes joy. 2. Octopath Traveler 2 I lost interest shortly into playing the original because it seemed like a fine RPG. Solid gameplay but nothing exceptional besides the graphics & music. The sequel greatly expands on the original’s shortcomings & stands next to Chrono Trigger & Final Fantasy VI among Square-Enix’s greatest RPGs. Phenomenal soundtrack & great cast of characters. Partitio is an extremely fun & charming character despite being a capitalist pig. 1.The Legend of Zelda: Tears of Kingdom ToTK is massive, it might be too big. Yet, I can’t stop exploring every nook & cranny looking for Koroks on same janky hoverbike I made. The beauty of ToTK is making the journey your own personal experience. Ultrahand is a technical marvel & one of the greatest abilities I’ve ever experienced in a game. I can’t believe the Switch can run this game at times. Exploring the Depths is a highlight with foreboding it is exploring the dark. I still prefer BotW but TotK is a masterpiece in its own right.
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Dec 29, 2023 19:19
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A Sometimes Food posted:5. Hifi Rush lol
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Dec 29, 2023 19:19
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Oops. I had AC6 as #1 til I was actually writing the Sandrock review and realised how glowing I was with it.
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Dec 29, 2023 19:31
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A Sometimes Food posted:Oops. I had AC6 as #1 til I was actually writing the Sandrock review and realised how glowing I was with it. I figured as much. I wishlisted Sandrock anyway, just to be safe
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Dec 29, 2023 19:34
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I've never posted in one of these and I didn't do a very good job of keeping a running list of thoughts this year. I'll look to rectify that next year. This is my first year as a dad, and my sector at work has been heavily affected by layoffs, resulting in less time to play games. Because of that those I could play, I had to make meaningful progress, even if I could only play for 30 minutes. 6. Alan Wake 2 This game would be higher on my list, if I could play it more. It feels criminal for me to try to play it for only twenty minutes. What I have played of it I've really enjoyed. The ambiance, the storytelling it reminds me of a great Grant Morrison comic. Particularly in how there are layers to the story being told along with meta commentary. 5. Spider-man 2 Grateful that this game is as short as it is or that I may not have finished it. It's a by-the book safe sequel. I didn't enjoy the story in it as much as the first, and I hope Insomniac is more ambitious for the third game. I will say that every sidequest I did or activity was enjoyable. That to me is an accomplishment. 4. Midnight Sons A lot of bad news and press around this game, I think that mostly comes down to folks hearing that the game had cards and not being interested. It's particularly telling that the team that made it had the same reaction when Creative Director Jake Solomon told them they were going to make a card-based system. A part of me wishes they'd abstracted the concept of cards into anything else. Skill slots, for example, to help dissuade the perception folks may have had. I'm glad this game was made. It's refreshing to have the characters act like their comic book selves, and while some of the dialogue can be grating you mostly get used to it and start to enjoy the company of your rag tag goofballs. 3. Darkest Dungeon 2 At first, I was thrown off by the fact that you're no longer in a Dungeon; I mean it's in the name. After getting used to it, the changes really make sense and it's been a great game on the Steam Deck for when I have 20 minutes or so to. I love the puzzle solving nature of the characters and the amazing Mignola inspired art. 2. Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty What a game. I remember being excited for this when it first released and having to refund it (I only had a PS4 pro). Now coming back to it with a great PC, it's incredible. I thought Silverhand would be a gimmick, but he's a lovely character I genuinely enjoy hanging out with. He gives you a lot to play off when making decisions or roleplaying as your preferred V. 1. Baldur's Gate 3 I've never played anything like this. It's the first CRPG I've ever knowingly tried. The amount of reactivity in the world was incredible and made it feel like I was playing D&D with friends. I've only made it to Act II after 50 or so hours. I'm waiting for when I can take a few days off to sink more time into it.
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Dec 29, 2023 19:35
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Games. There's too many of them. I tried to play them all, but alas did not succeed. Of the ones I did play a significant portion of however, these are some of them. First, these:  Wow, there are some great games on that list! In a normal year, Xenoblade, RE4 and Metroid would be in the top10 for sure. Xenoblade is probably there because I finished it in January. The Spider-man was fine, and I'll probably get the sequel on sale at some point, but I'm all Marvel'd out at the moment. RE4 is a weird one because I loved it when I played it, but cooled on it pretty fast. It's just not as memorable as the original, probably because it is so similar to that game, which I have played trough several times. idk. Metroid Prime was also real good, and the remaster is superb, amazing they could get it to run so well and look so good on the Switch. Never played more than 15 minutes of the original, so completely fresh for me. Would probably be one of mye all time greatest games if I had been in the Gamecube camp back then. I bolded the game I'm actually voting for in the cases where there's more than one title. 10. Dead Space Remake  That's right! It's the best remake or remaster of the year! (I haven't played Super Mario RPG yet). I was skeptical of this one, thinking the original still looked and played great. However, I tried out the demo for it and was completely hooked and when it dropped on Gamepass I played it obsessively over a couple of days. Just an amazing looking, sounding and playing game. This really is the definitive version of Dead Space to me now, which I'm not 100% sure I could say about RE4 and its remake. I hope they keep making them, and also that they aren't afraid to make a brand new DS3... Protip: Cut off their limbs! 09. Super Mario Bros. Wonder  That's right! It's the best Mario game (I played) of the year! Looks great, plays great. Good levels. Music is good but not great, certainly better than the New games. Don't have a whole lot to say about this one. But I will say that I haven't really touched it since getting to the credits the first time. Now give me a proper Mario Galaxy style game for the Switch Pro, Nintendo! 08. The Legend of Heroes VI: Trails in the Sky  That's right! It's the best old game of the year! Finally got around to this one after starting and forgetting about it for years. Played a bunch of Dragon Quest last year, so in a similar vein I decided to start the gargantuan Trails series. The thing that got me to stick with it this time was weirdly enough using mouse and keyboard to control it, felt real good to control that way, very fast and fun combat. Good writing, fun characters. Great music. Really enjoyed the good vibes and the episodic feel. Boxquote: "... just like one of my Japanese animes!" 07. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty + Cyberpunk 2077  That's right! It's the best update or DLC of the year! That poster who put Cyberpunk as their game of the year before playing it all those years ago is finally vindicated. First they fixed the dang thing and improved the graphics with the 1.6 patch, then completely retooled the leveling and made the graphics even better, and the game is actually fun to play and looks and runs great now! Of course, I upgraded my PC this year, but when this game first came out it ran at sub 20 frames with broken graphics, now I'm running it with Ray Tracing Overdrive and all the bells and whistles at a solid 60. None of that matters if the game is not fun of course, but it is! The story is slow to start, but eventually I got used to it, and even Keanu grew on me over the course of the game. Then the DLC dropped and it certainly shows how much they've learned over the years. in short, it's great and Idris Elba is certainly a much better VA than Keanu is. Good game. 06. Final Fantasy XVI  That's right! It's the best PS5 exclusive of the year! While I yearn for another FF9 style return to basics, I did enjoy this action game with Final Fantasy elements quite a bit. Finally delivering on what they've tried to achieve since FF13, it turns the secret ingredient was good writing, great voice acting (especially the man himself, my dear Clive) and a good gameplay. And it's been said before, but man this game gives some good Asura's Wrath vibes in the boss fights... 05. The Case of the Golden Idol + The Spider of Lanka and The Lemurian Vampire  That's right! It's the best point and click murder mystery game of the year! Just an immensely satisfying brain teaser of game. The thrill of figuring out the sequence of events after starting with what seems like complete nonsense, methodically gathering clues and working things out ... it's great. And the art style got that weird VGA graphics crossed with a Ren & Stimpy close-up thing going on, which is just fantastic. 04. Octopath Traveller II  That's right! It's the best JRPG of the year! Good writing, good voice acting, great music, good battle system, lovely graphics. A very good Switch game, it looks and plays great on that old thing. I enjoy this game like it's a good book, playing an hour or so before bed, soaking in the vibes. I hope they keep making em. 03. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom + The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild  That's right! It's the best Switch exclusive of the year. I finished Breath of the Wild this year for the first time and it was truly spectacular. I loved it. Now, just after I finished it, Tear of the Kingdom came out and so I was naturally a bit Zelda'd out, but nevertheless I played decent chunk of Tears, and it too is great. And thusly, I am giving this spot on my top 10 to Tears, even though it really is for Breath of the Wild. It's my list dammit! 02. Alan Wake II  That's right! It's the best Finnish game of the year! Oh, boy, did not expect this. I wasn't a big fan of AW1, in fact I barely played more than an hour of it before this year. But when footage started showing up of AW2, I forced myself to finally get trough AW1, even though everyone insisted I didn't need to. I discovered a flawed, but very ambitious and technically constrained game in AW1, the 360 couldn't really deliver on what they were trying to do, or perhaps they did not have the budget. Well, now some 13 years later, they do have those things. Alan Wake 2 is an incredibly impressive, immersive and well made game. Quantum Break was a huge misstep for Remedy, but Control really showed they were still a developer to pay attention to and they really deliver this time. Playing this on my new computer with all the graphical doohickeys turned on, this truly feels like a generational leap and the writing and direction is just amazing. I'm almost disapointed Remedy's next is seemingly a Max Payne remake now, because i want more of this weird poo poo! My back of the box quote for Alan Wake 2: "... a multimedia extravaganza!" 01. Baldurs Gate 3  Yes, it's Baldurs Gate 3. You heard it before, the first act is probably the best one, the third act is a bit of a mess and there will be probably be a "definitive version" at some point. But, dang, when this game is good it is reaaal good. The reactivity and attention to detail is just incredible. The characters are so good, especially the companions that are not the two boring ones. When I was 14 or so and playing Baldurs Gate 2 and reading Drizzt novels, this is probably what I envisioned looking down at the isometric view of pre-rendered Athkatla. Yes, It's the best game of the year, dear reader. Congratulations to Larian. Now make me another Icewind Dale game. bone emulator fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Dec 30, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 21:32
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Keeping it stripped down this year.  5. Diablo IV I have no envy for whatever balance the devs are having to strike between poopsockers and common folk, but I played the campaign once and thought it was awesome. The art direction is magnificent and the action is taut. The cutscene at the game’s climax in Hell is the best one Blizzard has ever made, which is saying something given that they’ve been practically unrivaled at it since I was a kid.  4. Super Mario Bros. Wonder New Super Mario has been buried somewhere near the earth’s core; our anguish is at an end. The game world’s greatest champion of movement has regained the crown. Bow your heads, and hold right.  3. Elden Ring I won’t belabor this; you’re familiar with Elden Ring. I still haven’t become Elden Lord, but if I’ve learned anything about From games, maybe not finishing the game is the truest path of all. Besides, I haven’t even done all the weird poo poo the NPCs keep vaguely mentioning. Most importantly, Astel Naturalborn of the Void is my favorite From boss ever.  2. Humanity To be honest I spent this whole year thinking this game was much more popular than this thread has indicated. To me it’s got blissfully perfect puzzling accentuated with just the right amount of breezy existential storytelling. The rivers of people at the heart of the game never stop being a captivating sight.  1. Marvel’s Midnight Suns I’m close to embarrassed at how much I loved this game. Sure, the core deck-building/card-playing mechanics are expertly designed. And yes, your superhero pals look and sound extremely cool in action. And I suppose it was wonderful to create a central character so goofy-looking (^^^) that everything he does on screen is hilarious. And of course, it was a relief that the story and dialogue were well-written in spite of modeling themselves off my least favorite movies on the planet. But then, dear reader, there were the friendships. Who could forget the book club chats, the spa sessions, or that time we threw a birthday party for Magick when she really didn’t want one? It’s just a delight that Firaxis devoted enough time to this aspect of the game to make it shine. Midnight Suns is as good as it gets.
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Dec 29, 2023 21:37
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2023 – The Year of the (Arcade) Rat The year was 2010 and I was dissatisfied with life. Failing to get into a program a desperately desired to be a part of, I moved back home to while away a few years working on a postgraduate degree. I had a stipend, so at least I wasn’t burning money, but I certainly wasn’t making much either. Suspended animation. Purgatory. While my studies were going well enough, I had begun to lose interest in the things I once loved, primary among them, games. I had been an avid collector of Famicom games in college, building up a large library and diving deep into the history of games that came before I was born and left their mark on the games I grew up with. However, stuck where I was, it all felt so trivial. What was the point of games? What was the point of anything, really? I had fallen into a deep nihilistic funk. I sold the lion’s share of my collection. I got into some bad habits that I took a long time to recover from. Eventually enough, I pulled myself out of it, thanks to a few life-changing books, some good friends, and a place that opened in my hometown within a year. An arcade. Not just any arcade, but one run by a maniac with a passion for the medium and an eye for quality. One focusing on Japanese sit-down style candy cabinets (loaded with hard-as-nails shoot em’ ups and fighting games) classics from the golden age of the early 80s, and pinball machines from their respective renaissance in the 90s. There was no other place like it in the entire region, and here it was opening in my backyard.  Closer to its current form, but very much familiar I hit it off with the owner and soon was part of the circle, stopping by just as much to shoot the breeze and hang out with him and the regulars as much as playing the games. And what games there were: the owner had an extensive collection of arcade PCBs and was constantly rotating what was in the cabinets on a monthly basis. I got a crash course in arcade history, interactive style. There were tournaments and parties, but on any given weekend it felt like a party even if there wasn’t any official one. It was a truly special time and place, and I feel extremely lucky to have been able to live it, to become, against all odds, a bit of an arcade rat in the 2010s. It meant a lot to me to have this very special third place – a place where I could leave my troubles behind without resorting to substance use, a place where I could learn fascinating new things about a part of the hobby I had never really known or cared about before. I tried all the games and would dabble for hours but I wouldn’t say I ever really excelled any of them at all. For whatever reason at the time I didn’t have the focus for the shmups or the dedication to improve at fighting games. I was there for the vibes. And for the puzzle games.  The greatest achievement of these years was not my degree, but winning back-to-back high score contests on Vs. Dr. Mario Eventually, as things do, things changed. I had to move away for love and work, and the arcade moved to another location. It’s still plugging along but has to put up with competition from a barcade downtown and a big multinational chain at the mall. I’m sure it still holds magic for some, but the magic is different. I haven’t been back to my hometown in nearly a decade. May it stay there for many years to come, and be something special to someone else the way it was to me. Yet here, hundreds of miles and a dozen years removed from that, I had my own little arcade revival, in a year packed with banner release after banner release. Thanks to modern rereleases I could play those games that saved me, and those I wanted to give my undivided attention to but had to let pass by. A big part of this is because I’m part of a family now and getting older, and that means less personal time to sit down for a 100+ hour AAA game. Staying up all hours of the night becomes a more dangerous prospect, both for my personal life and for my health. Arcade games are immediate because of the intended setting. You get right into the action to set players up for the failure state, in order to boost revenue. There were many games I played this year, but here is a non-exhaustive list of arcade games I spent at least 5 hours on each this year (not including those in my top 5): Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Mappy, Progear, Groove Coaster, OutRun, Akai Katana Shin, Espgaluda II, ESPRa.De Psi, Burgertime, Crimzon Clover World Explosion, Dariusburst AC, Dodanpachi Dai-Ou-Jou Re:Incarnation Consider them all honorable mentions. I even got around to modding an arcade stick that I had picked up in years prior, replacing the stock elements with NeoGeo coded Sanwa buttons and a Seimitsu lever.  Stickers provided by my generous four-year-old That’s not to say I played only arcade games this year. Here are my other honorable mentions: Pizza Tower, Fire Emblem Engage, Powerwash Simulator, Signalis, Drainus, Honkai Starrail, Pikmin 4, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Splatoon 3, The Void Rains Upon Her Heart, Slay the Princess With that let’s get to the list. 5 – Mushihimesama (Cave, 2004)  While I played many bullet hell shooters this year (poorly, badly, too shortly), Mushihimesama was the one that left the greatest impression on me because it was the first one that I buckled down on for a 1CC. Granted, that run was on Novice – Maniac (a relatively easy mode) before I moved onto other games, but really opened my eyes to what playing the genre for real is like. Taking note of your weak points, training on stages further along in the run until you’re confident you can do them without dying, and then tying all this together into one survival run that stands as the assembled work you’ve done. The agony of getting so close and failing, and the joy of seeing it all put together. I’d like to come back to Mushihimesama again, but I’m busy with a glut of other games and other shmups that I’m getting stuck into, but it’ll always hold a special place in my memory as the first arcade bullet hell I really took the time to work at. It’s a great game and a wonder to look at in action. It puts aside the tired military and space aesthetics used in most shmups for something more fantastical; both your craft and all enemies are bugs. The visuals are as vibrant as you’d expect and gives the whole production some needed levity. I’d encourage you to play this game, specifically the 2021 LiveWire re-release if you can get your hands on it. It has six levels of difficulty to help ease you in and can be further modified by the options within. Maybe it’ll hook you in the same way. 4 – Street Fighter 6 (Capcom, 2023)  We’re going down to Memphis. While I had spent a lot of time in the arcade, fighting games were always something that eluded me. I could never handle the execution and didn’t have the patience to lab out anything. Friday night casuals and tournaments intimidated me, so I’d hang out and watch while my friends played. The way it usually went is that I’d fly by the seat of my pants after getting invited to casual matches, get destroyed repeatedly for a half hour or so, and walk way having learned next to nothing. Bless their heart, the arcade owner and friend tried to teach me to play Third Strike properly over a series of months, but it never really stuck. Enter Street Fighter 6, a game that goes to great lengths to ease players in with an extended tutorial disguised as a single-player story mode, optional modern control scheme blessed by the devs, and more training resources available to the player than before. Also the online play is shockingly competent. Here’s the first Street Fighter that I actually got into beyond dabbling. Played this thing for almost 50 hours, and I want to get back into it! I want to improve, I come away having had a good time most every time. I finally get it, what all these people who crowded into a tiny space around a cabinet were feeling, even if it’s a 10th of that feeling. A lot of love went into this game, and it shows. It’s just plain fun. 3 – The Talos Principle (Croteam, 2014)  Like last year’s AI: The Somnium Files, here’s a game I had kicking around in the backlog for years. One I didn’t get to until the sequel was announced, and now I’m kicking myself for not having played this sooner. It’s a game that makes you feel smart, even if you’re taking ages to solve the baseline puzzles. A game that The Witness wishes it was. I picked this up relatively late in the year and I haven’t been able to put it down – I was hoping to get more time in with some other games, but this has my undivided attention. I love it. A game best played at night with a stiff drink enjoyed slowly while ruminating on the themes in the text presented to you via consoles. Again, a game that makes you feel smart. All I need now is a pipe and smoking jacket and the illusion is complete. I haven’t even bothered to do many of the overworld puzzles in order to grab the stars for the true ending. I am eager to give the sequel a try, but trying to take it one step at a time, slowly sipping away at this like a nice drink. 2 – The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Nintendo, 2023)  Well, somehow, they did it. They improved upon Breath of the Wild. Sure, it’ll never recapture that sense of wonder and loneliness and having a Zelda game that’s doing something new in the spirit of the original NES game, but they did make a better and even more technically impressive video game. It follows in the tradition of saying “yes” to the player as much as possible, this time with Garry’s Mod slapped into it. More madcap antics ensue. Ultrahand aside, the map design alone makes it better than BotW, and that’s all because of the underground and light roots. While the underground has been (rightly) criticized for being same-y, finding and lighting up lightroots serves as a sub-system of the map that lets you suss out the locations of shrines on the overworld, even those that are hiding in caves or are otherwise difficult to find. I’m probably just a huge dummy, but it took me like 50 hours to realize that shrines and lightroots were co-located, and another 10 or so to realize that the topography of the underground is the overworld’s, flipped. What this means is that I didn’t need to rely on a guide to find any of the remaining shrines and that’s a plus in my book. It’s not perfect, I will echo what another goon said, in that the starting area, the Great Sky Islands, is maybe a little too well designed; it sets the bar very high for sky islands that every other chain of islands in the game fails to reach. I wish there were maybe one or two other sky areas as big as that. The story didn’t hit me as hard as Breath of the Wild did, for personal reasons, but these are all minor complaints. The mad lads did it. Plus you get to ride around on the back of a mech, it’s the best Zelda 1 – Tetris: The Absolute – The Grand Master 2 Plus (Arika, 2000)  This is Tetris, but hard. Tetris that wants to demoralize you, set you ablaze and grind your ashes into the earth so that you can be built up better, stronger, an Absolute unit. A Tetris grand master. My love affair with this game goes a long way back. I became familiar with the Grand Master series after dabbling with the first entry while on vacation in Japan. Its reputation preceded itself, spoken about in hushed tones. “There are only a few people who have actually beaten the game and gotten the Grand Master title, you know”. The game’s popularity increased when a video sometimes referred to as “Tetris God” was uploaded by Arika, showing the play of a GrandMaster rank promotional exam from The Grand Master 3. https://youtu.be/zHI4Ycx5b5g?si=Ja-BIQdtDGQkfAZE I could go on all day about what makes these versions of Tetris different and special, but I’ll keep it short and say there’s a lot mechanics going on under the hood and it gives players a lot more agency in how to move the pieces around compared to modern “guideline” Tetris rules. It also ramps up to the point where a piece moves from the top of the screen to the bottom of the well in a single frame, and expects you to play at that speed at length. Having spent enough time at the local arcade to be comfortable, but not seeing any Tetris in sight I took matters into my own hands and purchased a PCB of The Grand Master 2 from a dealer in Japan (TGM 3 requires a proprietary arcade PC, the Taito Type X to run, I wasn’t about to splash out that kind of money). It remains the most I have ever spent on a single game-related thing, game or console besides. I have no regrets. I wired the money sight unseen to an account in Japan along with an order form, and a week or so later I was the proud owner of my first arcade PCB. The owner was kind enough to let me install it in one of the cabs in the arcade with the understanding that he’d get any revenue and I’d get to play it for free anytime I wanted. I was in love, and while I never got beyond rank S2 in the arcade, I have the fondest memories of struggling against this game. When I moved away from my hometown a few years later I sold the board to the owner for the price I originally paid for it. I believe it’s still in a permanent spot in his candy lineup. For years, Arika would tease a return or a port of the Grand Master series, but it would always fizzle out and fans would be told to wait. Until Hamster, as part of their Arcade Archives series, released Tetris: The Absolute - The Grand Master 2 Plus on June 1st of 2023. My love had come back to me. Not only had it come back to me, but it had also come back to me in a portable form factor, with acceptable emulation. I dropped Tears of the Kingdom like a pile of hot rocks. I’m still garbage at it. I’m still struggling with it, but I’m getting a little better over time. I’ve also started working on playing the Absolute Death mode, where the single-frame drop rate I mentioned earlier is the default state from the start. It’s maddening, and games typically last only a few minutes at most. If there’s one game I can see myself playing for my entire life it’s TGM. I’ll probably never get Grand Master rank, but I can keep chipping away at it, keep pulling my hair out, keep loving this game, and keep hating this game. I’m so glad it’s back in my life. Quick List: 5 - Mushihimesama 4 - Street Fighter 6 3 - The Talos Principle 2 - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 1 - Tetris: The Absolute - The Grand Master 2 Plus Edit: adding more images Tempura Wizard fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Dec 30, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 21:38
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:Words about games 1. What a truly bespoke list. appreciate the words as always 2. I'm glad someone else had TReN on their list. truly a little gem of a game, capable of capturing a moment and evoking the kinds of thoughts/feelings you mentioned. 2a. How dare you make me realise I stylised the name wrong in my list, forcing me to go back and edit it?? 3. I thought about arranging some music into a single medley of each of my top ten games instead of what I eventually did, and I got as far as TReN before realising I didn't connect with the music as much in some of the other games enough to include them. a great little soundtrack though.
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Dec 29, 2023 21:38
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Oh man 2023 has just been insane for games. By February I realised this, and I have just been more and more vindicated as the year went on. I know this list is meant to be games you played this year, but I feel the need to fill it exclusively with games from this year because there's so many good ones. 10:ARMORED CORE 6: THE FIRES OF RUBICON: I haven't actually finished this one, I got distracted by other games and I need to get back to it. It absolutely kicks rear end though, I love spending time fiddling around to make the prettiest robots with the nicest colour schemes and then getting into pitched battle with other, much larger robots with the screen so full of missiles that I cannot see. Gorgeous visuals, great music, great vibes. 9: Jedi Knight: Survivor: What can I say? It's just a fun Star Wars game. It's colourful and bright and adventurey with fun NPCs and well designed kind of Sekiro-ish combat. Giving you more weapon options is a great improvement on the first game (especially when I discovered the greatsword lightsaber form) along with the universe feeling much less lonely by letting Cal have some friends beyond just those in your ship. Would be a GotY contender in a normal year. 8: Final Fantasy XVI: Some of the greatest over the top spectacle I have ever seen in a game. Interesting characters and one of the best performances I have ever seen from a voice actor in the form of Ben Starr as Clive (lmao) Rosfield. Has some pacing issues especially towards the end, and I wish it had more RPG elements beyond lovely "number goes up" gear. Still, a great Final Fantasy-rear end Final Fantasy. 7: Slay the Princess: I never thought I'd put a visual novel in a list like this, but this one is just amazing. In my time playing through it, it called to mind: The Stanley Parable, Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, Omori, FFXIV, Doki Doki Literature Club, Lovecraftian horror in general, Junji Ito, Alan Wake, Corpse Bride. The writing is spooky when it wants to be and hilarious when it wants to be and the two voice actors playing so many different versions of the same characters are phenomenal. 6: Remnant 2: I don't really like looter shooters. I don't like improving your gear being based off low drop chance RNG bullshit. Thankfully Remnant solves this problem by having all your cool weapons and armour either be guaranteed drops from bosses (often multiple different drops based on how you kill it) or by finding secrets and solving puzzles. I found hidden passages in two different dungeons which gave me keys, which unlocked a door in a hidden area in the overworld for that zone and gave me a pulse rifle. I found a hidden door in an Indiana Jones rear end dungeon and the resulting area had another hidden door, and that resulting area had another hidden door and then I had to go through a trap gauntlet and got a cool-rear end suit of armour. I found a dungeon the final encounter was a board game match against a fae construct with a bow as my reward for winning, and my co-op partner realised that every time I moved a piece in the board it opened and closed doors in the dungeon so I continued playing - no longer to win, but to arrange the pieces so she could access treasure chambers while not opening myself up to losing the board game because that would reset the board and close the doors I painstakingly opened. At one point my partner died so I ran into the death fog around the edge of the overworld because I didn't realise that there was an infinite use homeward bone (okay it kills you, but if you don't drop anything it's a homeward bone) and happened to run into the exact right spot to find a hidden suit of armour in the fog. Thinking something is up, I returned after respawning to investigate further and found a secret class, which was so much fun to play as that I used it for the entire rest of my playtime! Also the gunfeel is excellent, the weapon variety is top notch, the class system allows for some crazy builds (you can equip any two classes you have unlocked at a time but your main bonus perk is decided by which of them is your "main" class) and the bosses are great. Remnant 2 is fantastic and it broke my heart when my GotY came out late in the year and I was forced to push it out of my top 5. 5. Pizza Tower: Now we're in the territory of games that most years would be an easy slam dunk GotY but are denied that position because despite how amazing there are, there's even better ones. In February, two absolutely phenomenal games came out near-simultaneously. Both absolutely perfect at doing what they do. Firstly we have Pizza Tower, which mixes Wario energy with Sonic speed while having better level design and flow than either and an aesthetic which mixes old Nickelodeon cartoons and MSPaint. You charge around at top speed through fun levels with some of the best pixel animation I have ever seen in my life and some surprisingly engaging and fun boss fights. The game has a ton of replayability too. The levels are designed so on your first runthrough you can carefully scour it for each and every little secret and then have a frantic mad dash for the exit when you trigger the self destruct, but once you've done that there you can chase the elusive P-rank by clearing the entire level, finding all the secrets and doing a second lap of the escape run all without breaking your combo once. It's a difficult and harrowing experience but when you achieve the flow state of Pizza Tower movement, it feels so good and landing that P-rank is a powerful dopamine rush. Highly recommend checking out speedrun videos of a few levels so you can see how the levels enable a skilled player to just fly through them. 4. Hi-Fi RUSH: The second of the two bangers the year started with. There's been a few of these "do actions only on the beat" games coming out, like Crypt of the Necrodancer, BPM: Bullets Per Minute and Metal: Hellsinger but Hi-Fi RUSH is the first one of those I've played where it didn't feel like it had to compromise complexity to be playable with the rhythm elements. You have many combos to learn that all have different roles in the combat, summonable allies to juggle that counter specific armour types, special attacks that cost a guage you build up and all the while you need to keep to the rhythm of the absolutely bangin music. It has a delightful musical score, some really clever use of licensed music (special mention to Invaders Must Die and Whirring) and a full alternate soundtrack with unlicensed original songs for streamer-safe mode that is legitimately on par with the licensed stuff for the most part. The writing is also really simultaneously dumb and clever and incredibly funny with charming characters. I lost count of the number of times it made me laugh out loud without ever feeling like it was relying on Marvel-ish quips. Even the unvoiced text logs or conversations you find while wandering around are really funny. And not only do the comedic beats land, the emotional ones do too. The story and characters aren't complicated but they are really engaging. Also I'm not normally a big fan of dumbass protagonists, but Chai is an utter delight. 3. Lies of P: As soon as I played the demo of this game, I knew it was going to be something special and I was right. This is the best soulslike that is not made by From Software. This is a better souls game than at least one of From Software's actual soulsborne games (which are all excellent, I just rank this one higher than Dark Souls 3). This is the first time I have played a soulslike that actually truly nails the gamefeel of a Souls game. The boss design is phenomenal, the music is great (especially the unlockable records). The story is intriguing, though not as mysterious as From's oeuvre and the world is a ton of fun. It also includes a lot of interesting new additions to the formula, like your final charge of estus refilling as you deal damage or mid-combat weapon repairs during downtime between traded blows. The greatest feature is the fact that any non-boss weapon has two components (blade and handle) and you can interchangably swap these around. I spent most of the game using a serrated saw blade attached to a rocket powered glaive handle and it absolutely kicked rear end. One thing I appreciate is that there is not a single hint of irony involved in the ridiculous concept. Yes, this is a Soulslike where you play as Pinnochio and your level up waifu is the Blue Fairy and most of the boss fights and NPCs are in some way references to Carlo Collodi's "The Adventures of Pinnochio" - with one nod to Disney in the form of the Talking Cricket being named Gemini. And it just treats this entirely seriously without feeling the need to make fun of itself. It has confidence in itself and the story it is telling and it is all the stronger for it. Also worth noting is that it has some of the best boss fights I have ever encountered in a Souls game. I once saw a negative review complaining past the one third mark every single boss is a multiple healthbar monstrosity and all I could think was  yes please, this is what I come to the genre for. Special mention goes to King of Puppets, Laxasia the Complete, Archbishop Andreus, Nameless Pu- oh wait I'm just going to end up reciting the full list of boss fights because they're all so good.2. Baldur's Gate 3: This is probably going to win all the GotY awards. It is the best RPG I have ever played. It is also the most RPG I have ever played. There is so much of this game and they add a little (or a lot) more with every patch. This is a game where no two runs are alike, everyone will see some different scenes because it is not designed for you to see everything in one run. This game is an adventure, and your story is yours. The party members are all great (except Halsin who is really boring) with honourable mention to my personal favourite Jaheira, making a reappearance from BG1-2. Random bits of dialogue make me laugh out loud on the regular, especially thanks to the phenomenal voicework and almost every line of dialogue being mocapped to give life to even the most inconsequential exchanges. The story is interesting and almost every quest is in some way linked to the greater whole in ways you wouldn't expect early on. When me and my girlfriend were playing together, there were points where we were just going OOH OOH OOH as we connected seemingly unrelated dots on our imaginary conspiracy board. Larian's phenomenal encounter design makes the battles a treat as well, despite being hampered by the not-great 5th edition of D&D. There is no trash fights, and now that this game has inspired me to play BG1-2 I really feel the tedium of beating down a dozen of trash encounters for every interesting one. Don't get me wrong, they're great games but Larian's encounter design just shines especially in comparison to them. This is the game that reawakened my CRPG brainworms, which have been long dormant since the Pillars of Eternity series died. 1. Alan Wake 2: Is Baldur's Gate 3 a better game? Probably. But Alan Wake 2 is a game I love more. It has been thirteen years coming, a game that finnish developer Sam Lake (and his company Remedy) have been trying to make for over a decade and he has spent the entire time cooking. The game is filled with so much love. From the characters to the writing to the visuals to the stupid live-action sections that Remedy squeezes into literally everything they touch. The gunplay is mediocre but I don't care because the atmosphere and the vibes of the game are absolutely impeccable. I also love that unlike Alan Wake 1 which used licensed music for its end of chapter screen, AW2 has an original song for every chapter including one by Poe who hasn't made a song since the year 2000. Also like every Remedy game since AW1 (except for Quantum Break), it has a musical setpiece (actually two) and it is fantastic. God I love this game. I love this self-indulgent masturbatory mess. This is a game where there is a scene in which Alan Wake goes onto a talk show in a spooky nether realm and meets Sam Lake (portrayed by Sam Lake), who in-universe is the actor who provides the face for Alex Casey, who is actually Max Payne with the serial numbers filed off (also portrayed by Sam Lake, though voiced by Max Payne's VA James MacAffrey), who also exists as a real person in the real world who coincidentally also looks exactly like Sam Lake and is voiced by James MacAffrey (rest in peace you absolute legend) because he is also just Max Payne with the serial numbers filed off.  Oh and my favourite band Poets of the Fall did three original songs (under the name Old Gods of Asgard, a fictional in-universe band) for the game and they are all sick. Also, if I was including games that didn't come out in 2023 but I played for the first time, I would probably put Bloodborne at number 3.
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Dec 29, 2023 21:47
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Honorary Mentions: Game I really should have started already- Little Goody Two Shoes and Stray Gods: The demos were fantastic and I've heard nothing but love for it but it just kept getting pushed back Game I haven't bought but know is worth your time- Radiant Silvergun: It's a PC port of one of the best shmups ever made and it runs well. You should try it. 10. Fortnite I've been fully defeated by this game since it added in the game mode without the stupid building poo poo in it. The game is just fun, it's easily the best of its genre and constantly is adding in new mechanics and map changes to keep the matches interesting and give you plenty of options with out to pick your fights. The last year of updates including the Neo-Tokyo city dropping the middle of the world with grind rails and swords that made you dash half a mile and the movement gear from Attack on Titan meant every mid-to-late match fight became this intense ballet of movement and shooting that nothing else really matched this year. 9. Cassette Beasts Absolutely charming little monster catching game with a fun cast and very brisk pace that does just enough novel poo poo and has a sense of style that's all its own. Plus you can make a monster that opens every fight with 10 super powered attacks that wins on turn 0 and that's pretty funny. 8. Theatrhythm Final Bar Line One of the best rhythm series ever made coming back for one last show with basically every bit of music you could dream of from the Final Fantasy series and a lot of the broader SE RPG catalog. 7. Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition This would be entirely because of my specific nostalgia but this re-release is honestly the best version of this game ever made. It includes everything ever made for it in a re-made engine that runs on modern hardware and includes an entire new game's worth of levels made by the older designers and people in the Boomer Shooter community at large. They even went and added in enemies that were in the original release's credits but cut for time including getting the original video recordings of them, digitizing the actors to make sprites getting new voice actors for them. It's a love letter to a franchise that honestly doesn't really deserve it. Oh and the soundtrack is stellar and there's like 7 different version of it in game. 6. Lethal Company Surprise hit out of nowhere this year. The game manages to strike an incredible balance between genuinely spooky horror, shocking jumpscares and some of the most fun 'loving around with friends' multiplayer I've had this year. 5. Etrian Odyssey III HD It's a PC port of my favorite game in one of my favorite franchises with all the artwork scaled up and redrawn. It's gorgeous, they managed to make a DS franchise play well while keeping all the touch screen map drawing that's core to it. It can be brutal and arcane and occasionally just loving cruel if you're not prepared , but that's the fun of it. Explore, delve, plan, die to a roaming FOE that you forgot would be here at this time of night. 4. Baldur's Gate 3 Okay this thing was a loving nightmare. My clear file was 95 hours long. Twice I had to download tool to input command prompts to unfuck an NPC spawn to continue a questline because they tied a character spawning in to an NPC that was completely unrelated in the first act of the story. The third act dragged on for an eternity. And I love it. The writing can be simple and a little quippy here and there but it's earnest in all the right places the main cast is at worst okay if boring and at its best some of my favorite companion writing in western RPGs. The game manages to be actually funny in places and have relationships between characters I cared about and wanted to see through and the gameplay is easily the best from the D&D/D&D Knock off RPGs. It's not great mind you but it didn't make me annoyed like RtwP games and didn't expect me to optimize and play a entire party of 3.X/Pathfinder characters like the Pathfinder games do. Also Lae'zel is simply the best. We love a rude alien elf lady who recognizes that I am not just iron and steel but also silk and satin. 3. Slay The Princess I can't say anything about this game here. If you're interested even slightly please go play this. It's a game that flows from horror to drama to romance to humor and with an ease that I was stunned by in places. The voice actors (all 2 of them) voice a dozen or so characters each and give all of them unique and memorable performances that are emotionally moving in places and it wraps up in one of the most well down and touch stories about love that I've gotten to play in a long time. Don't miss out on this one, please. 2. HI-FI Rush One half incredible character action game, one half musical that knocks both of those out of the park. After being devastated with how bad Bayonetta 3 turned out both mechanically and the goddamn awful story it told, HI-FI Rush felt like I booted up devil may cry for the first time. It manages to create a tone of humor and silliness that is kept just enough in line that it doesn't make the more earnest character writing feel at odds with the actual game you're player. The combat is fantastic with gimmicks and mechanics layered on top of you at fairly steady pace that eases you into some hectic encounter design later on and that's mirrored by the stellar soundtrack. The final level and boss would have easily been the best moments of gaming I had this year if not for my #1 game. 1. Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon An entire decade had come and gone since new AC dropped and I was worried. 5 wasn't exactly the best that franchise had seen and we've had a decade of Souls games. I had a little nagging worry that this would come out and not be what I've been needing from Fromsoft all these years. And I was a loving moron for worrying. This game does everything it needs to and more. It's slick, it runs like a dream, the writing and characters are among the best the franchise has ever seen and the writers haven't lost a single step writing the cyber-punk PMC nightmare world of Armored Core. As you get through it, tinkering with your mechs, checking page long charts of numbers to see if you can scrape out just a little more power without overloading your frame, scraping the design and doing ground up retools for missions, fighting AI copies of pilots you meet in the story in the arena, the story unfolds in these fits and starts peppered with little bits of details you can pull from secrets in missions or careful observation. While there are plot beats you can kind of call if you're familiar with mecha anime or the previous works it's told in a skillful way that you cannot help but fall in love with. Between boost dashing through gun fights and trying to pile bunker and airship the game creates a web of interests and backstabbing and plotting that makes you feel connected to the Rubiconians and just stuck under the weight of your mercenary nature.
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Dec 29, 2023 22:14
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