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Should I just post a quick rundown for my votes or should I bother with the 2 feature length articles I wrote because I apparently have a lot of thoughts about games
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Aug 29, 2022 18:14
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ShallNoiseUpon posted:I mean you could try and shop them to a games magazine instead but I think you should just post them instead Don't give me any more ideas
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Aug 29, 2022 18:49
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Got A Little Nerd In Ya? Want Some? I've been doing this stupid gaming thing for over 30 years (christ), and I gotta say, my #1 vote for Year of the Game is hands down 1998. There is just so much that came out and went down that year that still matters today. Games that set the standard for the burgeoning shift to 3D, or created some of the most memorable moments in gaming history, games that opened whole new avenues of creative development, and games that set the scene for even wider shifts in how video games are embraced today. I Thought Zelda Was the Boy First off, the big hitters. Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Oof. This game is probably the single biggest design touchstone for so many 3D third-person action-adventures today. Mario 64 had demonstrated how you could move around and interact in three dimensions just two years earlier, but OoT was the one that showed how you could create a consistent, believable world for players to explore. There just seemed to be so much to it. A day & night cycle that had an effect on the world, a wide open area you could move through freely on your way to and from difference locations of interest, hidden skrullios scattered throughout the map that you could (sometimes painstakingly) hunt down, equipment and upgrades that meaningfully changed how you could interact with the world, and a ton of mini-games and side activities you could at your leisure (or obsession). Ocarina of Time is also probably the first game of the 3D generation where you felt you could have an impact on the world. Using the ocarina allowed you to swap between different points of time & solve some clever puzzles. It also showed you an alternate timeline, one where the world you've grown familiar with has undergone considerable change, and this is presented to you as what will happen if you fail. You could speed up or rewind time to manipulate the day/night cycle, and what you do in one timeline can affect the other. Nintendo had gotten more comfortable figuring layouts for their weird, probe-looking controller by now and learned some new tricks - this is the first game that had lock-on targetting, which is one of the fundamental control mechanics in almost every third-person action game. Where do you think the Chosen Undead learned it from? Do you remember how many times you whiffed a swing and unloaded into a wall in games without it? There's a reason OoT remains on every top 10 games of all time list. It's a bit rough by today's standards, but the controls are intuitive if you've ever played almost any third-person 3D game ever, and the world it created was so well realized that that you can still easily play it today. I gotta admit my a sentimental attachment here. Back in the era of the N64, I was gaming on a Playstation. Obvs money was tight & a second console was never in the cards, but I still really wanted to play those games I'd only gotten to try at my buddy Nick's house. So I bundled my rear end up & trundled a half mile down a snowy, rural gravel road to my neighbour's house. The kids there had an N64 with Zelda, Mario, Pilotwings (soooo good), Shadows of the Empire, some real bangers. And I offered up a trade : the Playstation in my backpack with goodies like MGS, FF7, Tekken 3, etc, for their N64, for a couple months. Once I had that bad boy, I could borrow games from my friend, and it was on like Donkey Kong. The N64/Playstation generation felt like the last one where it really mattered which console you got. You started seeing a lot more cross-platform games in each generation after this, and a lot fewer must-have exclusives. I mostly shifted to PC after this, and would sometimes look on at some of the stuff coming out on consoles longingly, but it didn't feel like I was missing quite as much. And as someone who hasn't bought a console since a second-hand PS2 Slim, I've ended up having access to almost everything I missed, either through PC re-releases years later, or hardware advancing enough that emulation is very accessible. Orcs in Spaaaaaaace In 1998, Blizzard had been killing it the past few years. The success of Warcraft II had crowned them the kings of real-time strategy, and Diablo had a strong first entry that everyone was talking about or playing. Expectations for StarCraft were huge, but there was a lot of naysaying and cynicism over how quickly the genre had turned to uninventive copycats. People needed Starcraft to be innovative, but they didn't know how. Starcraft? What, is it going to be orcs in space? How is having three factions going to make a difference when all anybody knows how to do is the same faction but with some minor tweaks between them? (I'm aware War Wind exists and came out before Starcraft, but it didn't exactly make a splash) So out comes Blizzard with this almost absurdly good game that changes how people think about RTS. Asymmetric factions were an epishot & hydraulic blast of air to a genre that some were already starting to worry was on life support. The hillbilly Terran Confederacy, merciless and devouring Zerg swarm, and the Jedi space wizards all felt completely unique from how we'd seen space marines and aliens before. Each was competitive with the rest, and seemed designed from the ground up with multiplayer in mind. I mean, you can anchor those tanks so they switch to a punishing barrage fire! Zerg structures expand the gross looking creep stuff! You can merge those two Protoss into one super unit! You can used a cloaked Ghost to drop a nuke in someone's face!!! The whole thing was polished to an absolute mirror sheen. Starcraft immediately blew every other RTS out of the water in terms of presentation, and even gave a lot of bigger PC titles a run for their money. The graphics were so detailed after being crammed into tiny resolutions and flat overhead perspectives for so long, that watching a Terran tank unpack and reposition, or a Hydralisk slithering along, was spell-binding. Even the character portraits had been rendered instead of a flat 2D portrait! Games, especially RTS games, didn't often have this level of rich & realized world, let alone create attachment to characters the way Korrigan did, or have this level of cinematic flair to it that extended to the installer. That first mission where you have to hold off a Zerg onslaught for 20 minutes was a nail-biter, and when you finally wiped the sweat from your brow, you had to ask - why hadn't anybody done this before?! On top of all that you have that same level of Blizzard charm and humor you'd expect after the Warcraft games. And they managed to put out an expansion pack that felt like it meaningfully changed the way it played in the same year. (Finding out it was basically Warhammer 40K with the numbers filed off took the wind out of it a bit, but I didn't learn that until years later) We Require More Success Starcraft was a landmark title, and remained the high water mark for the RTS genre for almost a decade. But what really makes Starcraft significant isn't just the game itself - RTS games started to decline soon after it's release, and not even Blizzard's own Warcraft 3 could breathe enough life back into the genre. No, what makes Starcraft so significant are two things : South Korea; and the success of esports leading to Blizzard getting some big boy britches that it ended up growing too big for. Not a lot needs to be said for the rise of Starcraft and legitimacy of esports, the sheer volume and passion of its fans, or the increasingly high pressure and big money that national South Korean attention brought to either. But Starcraft has a direct line from Korean esports to today's esports and Twitch streaming world. There were esports that tried to take off outside of Starcraft, but names like Thresh or the Frag Dolls never caught on in a big way (holy poo poo remember Thresh?), and Counter-Strike had a lot of inertia to overcome before Valve could start putting big dick money into it. Blizzard opened the door to major money moving into esports and gaming stars. Let's Plays and Twitch streaming were always going to happen - who hasn't recorded themselves playing a game on a VHS before? - but esports primed streaming for big audiences and big money flying around. You could argue that the ubiquity of RGB computers today is because of, in part, esports visibility and the overall 'max gamer' aesthetic it was marketed towards. Starcraft set a bar for basically everybody in the PC gaming world. Players knew it, other developers knew it, Blizzard knew it. Diablo 2 would come out two years later and cement them as One of the Greats. Big success can lead to big failure if you don't keep that momentum going. They couldn't just put out another Blackthorne, a fun if mostly just adequate game. Blizzard games had to have that touch now. They cancelled a whole graphic adventure starring Clancy Brown because it was too far behind the times and didn't live up to their standards. Word is you can find a copy out there on the internet if you go looking; I never knew that I wanted to. And I still want to play StarCraft: Ghost, goddammit. At the very least to see how far they got & where it went wrong. But they kept winning. Warcraft 3. World of Warcraft. But then Starcraft II didn't light the world on fire the way they expecting, and loving Dota 2 started stealing their lunch. Blizz must have been pissed about that. Diablo 3 came out of the gate swinging with the real-money auction house debacle, a lot of people say it didn't even hit its stride until the Soul Reaper expansion, and nerds got mad about rainbows. The wheels weren't coming off yet, but we all know where this bus crash landed. It's hard to think of many companies that were held in the same regard as Blizzard, except maybe id Software, Square (not looking too hot over there right now either), or Bioware (that one didn't turn out too great either, but at least they weren't as sex pesty. probably just average games sex pesty. sure were horny tho). Or Looking Glass / Ion Storm Dallas if you're a total loving nerd. (If I find out kindly uncle looking Warren Spector is a sex pest I'll never believe again.) Seeing one of the companies that felt like one of the good guys originally turn into a monolith aligned with Activision meant they were just another EA, in a world that doesn't need another EA. I imagine that must have been disillusioning for a lot of people. Buncha Tripp Spencer "shareholder minded" parasites running around excusing the excesses of capitalism and loving up the place. So even when you look at some of the worst practices in the industry today, Blizzard still remains a shining examplar, even if just as a warning to not let your dreams try to gently caress you in the Cosby suite. If Only You Could Talk To These Headcrabs... If there's one game you could point to that caused an immediate, seismic impact on a genre or gaming in whole, it might very well be Half-Life. Before gaben started regularly collecting rent from our paycheques, Valve released the game that would propel them to the highest stratosphere of the gaming echelon, and has given us a case of gaming blue balls so bad that even Duke Nukem doesn't have anything mean to say. He just stares off in the distance, cigar hanging from his lips, contemplating his own mortality. It's wild how much Doom had changed things in gaming just a few shorts years before. It took the air out of the room, and suddenly everybody's eyes were on first-person shooters. Even when other genres start to make a little headway and find air pockets of their own, FPSs were still the most prominent titles out there (and arguably still are). Valve sought to stand out from riptide of other shooters by taking another approach to gameplay. Everything that happened in the game would happen from the player's perspective, and while they were in control. It wasn't just shooters; this kind of immersion was something you just didn't see. Environment storytelling was established in games almost entirely because of Half-Life. It was no longer enough to run around in circles looking for keycards or blast away with bigger and bigger guns. You had trip mines and hornet guns next to your shotgun and rocket launcher, and encounters gave you a reason to consider how you used them. Environments were designed and traversed the same way you would in real life. Not a lot of people had considered that a flooded room could be so tense, or that the first flash of daylight walking into a sandy courtyard could be so relieving. Right before being ambushed by ninja spec ops, marines that actually call out and co-ordinate (I know, I know), and goddamn helicopters?! Versimilitude. That's what Half-Life had that the others didn't. The game itself is iconic. Head crabs. The crowbar. Orange jumpsuits. The G-Man. What really set it apart though, was it's commitment to creating a consistent, realistic world. NPCs had roles, and almost everything that you could interact with would do so in a believable manner. Half-Life was the first one in FPSs (and maybe gaming) to crack it. Other games had been shown how it's done, and things really took off after that. Valve captured that spirit of being in a real space and made it an environmental narrative. Take a moment to remember what Half-Life did that no else did the next time Captain Price squawks at you while waiting for you to trigger a door breaching animation, or find yourself face to face with a child's skeleton clutching a burnt and torn teddy bear, or slinking through the backstage of an automonized mansion on your way to a little light electric convulsion... therapy. Everyone knows Valve now. Steam is used synonymously with XBox and Playstation or Nintendo. They did the  thing, then started progressively bringing their prices back up from bargain bin slashes. There was a year where a lot of people cared about which color of team they were on, and I lost about $40 playing the little stock market Valve generated. Collecting cards to make badges and decorate my profile page was fun for awhile, but pretty pointless. There's Russian scammers and bots inviting you to vote for their CS team. That Domina dev was allowed to go on a little too long. I've also made enough selling other cards to pay for plenty of games. Finding mods for my favorite games is a breeze. And even though it's far from perfect, Steam has opened up more and more of the world to games. There are so many games coming out now on Steam, and in cumulative, that we're spoiled for choice. It's like going to a bar that has everything on hand and on tap. You're always going to find something you like or that you haven't tried before. More diverse voices are finding a platform and an audience. Every time Steam has grown, its caused a shift in gaming, and somewhere along the way, we all hitched along for the ride.FOXDIE? A Little On the Nose There, Buddy Of course Metal Gear Solid is here. Everybody knows why this is a GOAT. Hideo Kojima's batshit ode to nuclear disarmament and the inescapability of fate in our lives was a bombastic, cinematic thrill-ride that was utterly earnest and committed to exploring what constitutes a game in as many ways as possible. The 4th wall breaking Psycho Mantis fight. Meryl's codec frequency. Getting called out for using rapid fire then insta-killed by Ocelot during the torture scene. All the small little things that showed how much you could do in these new 3D games, like crawling prone through vents, letting one of Sniper Wolf's wolves piss on the cardboard box so they won't attack you, or smoking a cigarette to navigate laser tripwires. Metal Gear Solid was fearless in throwing new ideas and mechanics at you. There's a first-person sniper duel. Guards will be alerted by your tracks in the snow, but the tracks fade over time. CQC is actually more than button mashing, and the climatic finale sees Solid Snake duking it out bare-knuckle in a knockdown, take-out grudge match. (That torture scene was straight up bullshit though. I have no idea how I ever managed to mash my way through it and unlock the tuxedo) And talk about batshit, the plot and cutscenes were both baffling and brilliant. Games had tried to be cinematic before, like the failure of FMV adventures, but this was one of the first to do it in 3D, and do it successfully. There had always been games that were Weird, but never in a runaway smash title like this. It took serious philosophical examination, a fetish for military hardware & operations and a Saturday morning cartoon approach to character themes, and jammed it all into one big blender, along with the eager naivety of charting the possibilities of a new hardware paradigm, a deranged urge to use these new tools to subvert expectations of what a game is, and a little dollop of low-brow humor and titillation. As a treat. The whole souffle could easily have deflated, but those mad men at Konami pulled off a collosal feat. Metal Gear Solid launched a franchise regarded as generational milestones, similar to Legend of Zelda or Mario titles, and would go on to create some of the standout and iconic moments in gaming. "Do you think love can bloom on the battlefield?" Go For the Eyes! Three nerds from the Prairies had ditched medicine to start a game company. With only one, completely average, title under their belt, Shattered Steel, they had somehow managed to secure the Dungeons & Dragons license, and released Baldur's Gate to immediate critic and fan adoration. Everybody knows 2 is better, but this is the one that made that possible. Fallout to Fallout 2. RPGs were another unfortunate R-beginning genre that had fallen out of favor by the late 90s - partly in thanks to games like ARPGs and RTSs, so RPGs can rest assured they got their payback in the end. Quality RPGs were getting further and further apart, when previously computer gaming had been awash in a broad range of worlds and systems. Interplay had been putting out some bangers, and titles like Lands of Lore (featuring the dulcet tones of Patrick Stewart, long before he'd voice a king in a prison cell) and the Krondor series were pretty good, but when it seemed like only one or two good rpgs were coming out in a year, you really started side eyeing those "simplistic" JRPGs over in console land. Baldur's Gate ended up being the ur-RPG for a lot of gamers. It cemented the approach of having unique allies with well-expressed personalities and alignment conflicts. It was steeped in D&D lore and made the D&D, Forgotten Realms and THAC0 a lot more accessible to a lot of people. I wasn't a big fan of real-time with pause, and never really got the hang of it, but it was a fresh take on how RPGs had been doing it forever. Baldur's Gate 2 is the one that really belongs in the gaming canon, but so much of the next two decades of RPGs owes a lot to this game. The success of these two games is where the BioWare magic began, touching on at least one other beloved nerd franchise and spawning a whole new one for the XBox 360 generation. It's a very formulaic, horny magic, after Baldur's Gate. One concerned mostly with rigid concepts of morality and binary divisions, where you can sleep with people through the power of talking goodly and choosing the right dialogue options, which in retrospect, gross. But it kept people coming back. And while more traditional RPGs continued to die off, Bioware would go on to create must-have RPGs for each console generation from the XBox on. The mod scene for the first Neverwinter game was wild, and got me into making my own modules for a while. BioWare gave Obsidian the chance to really shine and prove their chops on Neverwinter Nights 2 : Mask of the Betrayer and Knights of the Old Republic 2. Mass Effect created a new standard in terms of presentation in RPGs that broadened the genres audience, and the promise of consequences for your actions over time tickled the imagination of so many. Bummer how that turned out, by the way. But at least some developers have turned that disappointment into an impetus to try to do it better. When the RPG revival of the 2010s began, a lot of money was being thrown at the idea of the pedigree of Black Isle and Baldur's Gate games. Obsidian successfully crowdfunded Pillars of Eternity with a game that appealed to all the fans who had been pleasing for something like this all-time great, and promised to bring them back. And they did, quite faithfully. One of the complaints levied against it is that it was almost too similar to the classics. I mean, have you played the Pillars games? It's Colonial D&D in a dress and a wig. Somebody keeps trying to make real-time with pause happen. But it worked, and old-school RPGs are having a renaissance, from the 100+ antagonistic-DM style of the Pathfinder games, to Jeff Vogel finally getting recognized. (I loved the second Pillars though. You can gently caress a hunky fish guy in it by making him feel better about himself. Tell me that isn't the most BioWare thing ever) In time we saw another rags to riches little guy get caught up in their own success and subsumed by a monolithic corporate entity. Who would have thunk that two of the hottest, true gamer companies of the 1990s would both crash and burn so spectacularly? We got a dumb meme out of Minsc and Boo before memes were a thing and the cake was a lie, but Boo gets his own Spelljammer bestiary now, so at least some things in the universe balance out. Even if they keep insisting on feeding us Minsc long past his due date. Fun fact : One of my good friends moved to Edmonton to work on the first game before we ever met. I knew he was friends with some people at EA Vancouver at one point, but he went by a nickname usually. His name is on the credits, and I never connected it until one day we were chatting poo poo. Tim Sweeney : The Demon Landlord of Tweet Street Unreal comes out in 1998. It's pretty cool, but it gets relegated to second place pretty quickly when Quake 2 comes out. Second place to Quake 2 is still pretty drat good, though, and it did well enough Epic would soon drop the Megagames and put an increasing amount of focus on the Unreal series and the Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine would obviously go on to become an integral part of game development, and ultimately lead to Tim Sweeney having enough money that he can finally pursue his libertarian vendetta against Steam. I always felt like Tim Sweeney was standing in John Carmack's shadow, and honestly, I still think that's true. The weird way he, when Fortnight blew up and he was looking at the idea of Bezos or Gates money, went after Apple and Valve for insisting on taking a cut of anything sold on their store came across as greedy and vindictive. Basically everything that's come out of his mouth makes me suspect his entire company's actions. (Apogee was always the better shareware company anyways, and those guys belong in the past) Don't get me wrong, Epic is a fine store and if you got free games because they want to buy market share, good on you. Epic the developers are not Tim Sweeney, and I'm not trying to paint them with the same brush. I hope everyone working on games can put food on the table and a roof over their head. Gaming as a whole owes a lot to the Unreal engine - its been at the heart every console generation since Y2K, and studios small & large all use it. Starting with the first Unreal, Epic is how Sweeney made his money, though, so it's going to end up dragged around a bit in the mud. The store's development serves their goal of earning as much money as possible as quickly as possible. Both of the lawsuits against Google and Apple were because Epic didn't want to share their obscene Fortnite bucks. Jokes aside, issues like the basket illustrates that even standard shop functionality isn't a priority. Epic wanted to get the shop up and running as quickly as possible to make sure none of those dollars got away. Tim Sweeney talks a big game about how what he's doing is for the regular folk, gamers and developers. There's no question of if they could put money into development, but if what they're really after is profits, it's far cheaper to maintain a less complicated store and avoid implementing more features. They're still raking it in, so there's nothing pushing them to try and take the lead. Epic exclusives are a murky topic, since one of the best things about gaming today is the reduced barrier to entry. It was lame when EA did it and it's lame when Ubi did it, even if they did cave pretty early. More stores and competition is a good thing! Humble, GOG and others did a tremendous job proving there can be alternatives to Steam. Developers get real paid and don't have to stress as much, and Epic still has yet to settle on a consistent policy for exclusives, so the jury's still put. While console makers are moving away from segregation, Epic seems like they're trying to spend their way towards it, in a move worryingly similar to video streaming services and the resulting Balkanization of TV. This all by the guy who called his first game ZZT as a marketing tactic. What's less clear is the impact of Fortnite leading the way in games-as-services. Fornite is still a monster, and has blazed a trail with the sheer size, frequency and scope of its updates. You can't say hosting in-game concerts or getting call outs in movies isn't significant. The game has shifted from not just a cultural icon, but to one that devours and reprocesses others for consumer consumption in its own ecosystem. (I can't think of a single thing that's uniquely 'Fortnite') Not just the dances, which is pretty indefensible for Epic to sell, or paying celebrities like Drake for publicity - it's an entirety of pop culture, Marvel movies, Darth Vader and kamehamas all reduced to simple icons, existing outside of their own individual or unique concepts to perpetuate engagement in an ecosystem they've already got you in. Goku isn't going to do a ton of handstand push-ups for eighty episodes or be simplistically cheerful, and Spider-Man isn't going to have to rush to work or have his marriage retconned in Fornite. No, you're going to get shot in the face by Bugs Bunny while LeBron James teabags you & calls you a retard. Epic isn't alone in this! MultiVersus is taking the same approach in its brazen character choices. (Pretty good game by all accounts though, and crossovers can be classics, like Marvel v Capcom. And you gotta respect it's commitment to Going There) Disney & Marvel have been consolidating characters and properties into their own multiverse that will keep producing remixes of familiar characters and storylines for years. (I just had a horrible nightmare of the future where we have three simultaneous Spider-Man franchises with the same three actors who've already played him. And probably a black one, for that key urban demographic) loving Meta exists! Second Life for people still not sure what to do with their monkey! Which is to say, Epic still needs to shoulder its share of the blame for its role in driving the increasing recycling and commodification of pop culture. Games as service is actually a pretty cool idea, and I'd like to see more developers succeed in finding models that allow them to afford frequent updating, alongside traditional releases. Crossing barriers and knocking down walls should be part of the point, not just a fortunate side effect. Cross-cultural communication and expression are both very good things we should strive for, but Epic is helping lead the way for a consolidation, not commonwealth, of cultures. (Wow! Ok! I was not expecting to come back and edit in an impassioned critique of capitalism!) What's really unreal is that this is the same year Cliffy B made Jazz Jackrabbit 2. It makes a certain amount of sense that before he brought us bulging biceps and wrap around Oakleys that his idea of edgy was a Sonic knock-off with the 'tude turned to 11. This is the dude who thought it was cool to say the Olsen sisters were bone-able teenagers, pretty much ripped off a game almost in whole cloth and ushered in the era of waist-high walls & cover shooters. Oh, but he did popularize the active reload mechanic that still shows up in games. But all that could be a another chapter involving the broification of games. (Kill Switch ruled btw & had a really clever twist that hadn't been run into the ground yet) If You Have Played At Least One of These, You Are Probably Somebody's Aunt or Uncle Then there are all the other hella significant games that came out in 1998. Resident Evil 2 proved that the first one wasn't just a fluke and went on to be a multi-platform smash hit franchise. Nobody could know it would end up in Chris punching a rock, spawn a frankly ridiculous number of film & tv products, have its own zombie survival escape theme adventure at Universal Japan, help spark a wave of zombie media that we're still trying to claw our way out of, give us spin-offs ranging from light gun shooters to an online four-person cooperative horror game for the PS2, sexy no-pants Hunk, tall mommy milker vampire fetishes, or scores of horny boys getting a first hand look at Mila Jovovich's minge. The first one amazing, but the sequel was just the best drat game there was in this new survival horror genre. And things would change in the game depending on which character you started with! When Simon Pegg wanted to get to play a game when he was filming Spaced, he chose Resident Evil 2. They put a real game in a show! They never do that! Tekken 3 releasing on console was important too. Released in arcades the year before, Tekken 3 had shown that there was definitely something to 3D fighters, and gave Street Fighter its first real competition since Mortal Kombat. Releasing on the Playstation solidified it's place as fighting game royalty and became the fighting game on PlayStation to me and my friends. Tekken 3 was the fighting game everybody I knew played. It was more dynamic looking and feeling than 2D fighters. It managed to develop its cast from a bunch of lazy archetypes and Street Fighter knock offs to a well rounded and compelling motley crew. Tekken 3 is where a lot of the more interesting mechanics that set it apart started to develop. Lei got his stances. King got ridiculous multi-button throws. Wave dashing caught on. Parries and chickens. The soundtrack was banging, and found me right as I was getting deeper into electronic music. I'd listen to playlists of Tekken, Daft Punk and Squarepusher while trying to master Lei's five animal forms or Hwaorang's left / right foot dance or practice escaping King's throws - goddamit Glenn can you stop throwing me for 2 loving seconds while I try to figure this move out? Tekken is the only game where I bothered to learn garbage like frame advantages, wave dashing & ha-ha steps. It's the only time I've lived that stoner bro stereotype of hours gathered round a CRT, blazing fat bong bowls all night talking poo poo, passing out, then waking up and immediately grabbing a controller so that this time I can kick King in the stupid face and god loving dammit Glenn not again. When I lived in Japan, me and my housemates bonded over an old PS2 and copy of Tekken 3, and would spend hours in arcades playing Tekken 6, chain smoking, drinking Kirin tallboys and shouting poo poo at each other. When we'd find a free machine with only one player on the other side, we'd huddle around and take turns trying to take down one of these obscenely good players (even though they it turned out they were usually just average Japanese arcade players, it turned out), shouting encouragements and cheering knock-outs and comebacks, then tagging in with a fiery determination and occasionally possibly amphetamines to avenge our fallen friend. I still hate playing against King, but maybe I'll go as him in his sweatpants & sneakers outfit for Halloween some year. Marvel vs Capcom, which became a mainstay of the fighting game community and invited us to "Welcome to Die", casting surprising characters from the back catalogue of different franchises, and triple digit combos. So I guess I got this mixed up with another Street Fighter with 3 in its name. Nash still looking fly tho Grim Fandango, a game out of time and place, packed to the brim with heart, style & dumb, dumb, dumb puzzles. This was Lucas Arts' swan song, a final capstone on over a decade of beloved hits. I don't know, but I always get a kick out of it when I remember Manny's voice actor is the dad from Ugly Betty. Fallout 2. This is one that deserves being entrenched in the pantheon. Black Isle managed to take all of what made the first one so great - its dingy, worn down setting, its freedom to explore and interact in dubious or moral ways, and its stat & skill systems that offered multiple solutions to problems - and went and made everything bigger and better. The world was way more vast. You could get a car. Quests were more involved. There were more vaults. Your sidekicks tried to shoot through you or run into your line of fire less often. There was more wacky stuff waiting for you out in the wasteland. Without Fallout 2, the series may not have been as well loved, and Bethesda might never have bought it up and reinvented it. Without Fallout 2, we might never have had Liam Neeson voicing your dad, Old World Blues, or a goon confused about what it means to be a 'Comfirmed Bachelor'. Mario Party 64. Did you ever know that you could hate your friends so much before this? They're still making these and tearing friendships apart. Spyro the Dragon. Spyro was one of the first wave of titles that took what Mario 64 had shown, and expanded on it. Along with titles like Banjo Kazooie (which came out in 1998 and was one the more egregious collectathons, a trend that continued), the Spyro franchise solidified a lot of the conventions for the still new 3D platformer genre. It holds up remarkably well and remains an accessible choice for young gamers, particularly the recent remaster. Xenogears. I gotta be honest - I barely played this one much more than the demo. When I did eventually come back to it years later, I found my enthusiasm for the premise of a mecha jrpg completely eliminated by its overwrought storytelling and cumbersome mechanics. It's weird quasi-Christian spirituality fails to connect in anyway for me, and the 2nd disc is more like a punchline to the first. I heard Final Fantasy 8 has the same problem where the plot just disappears, but I never got past Disc 2 on that one. But a lot of people loved it! FF7 had really paved the way for JRPGs to enter the mainstream, and here was Square serving up another slice of that delicious pie. The fact that they felt comfortable releasing this in the West, despite how exceedingly anime it can be and how out there it can get, shows the increasing acceptance and desire for genuine JRPG experiences. If I'd played it around the time I clocked 99:99:99 and got my gold chocobo in FF7, I probably would have loved it. Oh Suikoden came out too but I don't really know that much about it, mostly that it's super-well regarded, had some interesting & unique mechanics and I'm not into JRPGs anymore. Dance Dance Revolution inspired nerds to get sweatier and embarass themselves in public, and brought rhythm games to the forefront. Sure you had your Bemanis & Parappas & Guitar Freaks, but none of them really caught on like DDR did. People were sharing mesmerizing videos of someone doing top rank hidden mode doubles with perfect accuracy when Geocities was still a thing. The home version drove people to drop money on a footpad for the first time since the Power Pad, and people were charting the tracks in emulators so they could practice their patterns. Arcades only really seemed to make it in Asia, so rhythm games never really caught on the same way in other countries. Meanwhile, Japanese developers kept on iterating on popular franchises and experimenting with different controls. Today, there is still a good range of choices for rhythm fans, including Taiko no Tatsujin, Maimai and the rest of the Beatmania family. Harmonix got its start doing rhythm games like Frequency and Amplitude, where you can see the influence of the Japanese titles. They'd go on to make a game called Guitar Hero, and for awhile there in the 2000s, it seemed like everybody had a cheap plastic guitar next to their TV. And the influence of DDR is still being felt today. Audiosurf, Beat Saber and DJ Max Respect can all draw a through line from the earliest Konami rhythm games. Spin Rhythm XD is my current GOAT - it's just unreal to play on with an actual DJ controller. Harmonix made Fuser, which actually offers a reasonable facsimile of DJing and is really fun. (I'm going to plug Hexagroove: Tactical DJ, too) I was in my utterly naive rave baby phase when Dance Dance Revolution came out, so my passion for dance music and video games had found an alignment. It didn't matter that almost all of the music was actually terrible, or that it was a game more about accuracy than creativity, I tore it up every chance I had to go the arcade. My love of rhythm games stems from this one stupid game and a rapping dog. I'd mostly put arcade and rhythm games behind me, until I lived in Tokyo. That's where I first stumbled onto a Jubeat machine. This glowing, drum pad looking box looked way more intuitive and representative of what is what trying to emulate. And the music was good! Among a pile of atrocious J-Pop and anime soundtracks (thanks, nerds), there was actually a varied selection of genres and exciting new tracks for me. Progressing meant learning challenging but new fun techniques and ways to move my hands. And you got a cool little dude like a pig or a giraffe each time you leveled up! I even replaced my first E-Amusement card when it got damaged, navigated the website in Japanese, registered for backup and set my avatar and light choices, which I couldn't figure out how to do on the machines. I spent the better part of 10 years overseas, and Jubeat, a game that originated in the same family as Dance Dance Revolution, was a frequent part of my life. More Chock Full Than 640k of RAM There are a ton of other noteworthy games that came out in 1998. Die By the Sword, where you could chop off a dude's arm in real-time, pick it up and it to bludgeon him, & had this insane gestural sword control using the num pad. Dink Smallwood, which I only bring up because it was the long awaited and almost vaporware followup from the guy who made the door game Legend of the Red Dragon for BBSs. Brave Fencer Musashi. 1080° Snowboarding & Cool Boarders 3. The Elder Scrolls : Redguard, Bethesda's singular attempt to try something out of their tested & true. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, which was featured in an article where game journos were invited to do baby's first shoot course. I wonder what he'd feel about the hero shooter? Heretic 2, which exists only in my head as screenshots from PC Gamer and seemed like it had been memoryholed by the internet a couple years ago. Baroque & Clock Tower 2. Myth II : Soulblighter, a still unmatched spin on squad-level real-time strategy from this scrappy former Mac developer Bungie, who went on to do a few other things. Shogo : Mobile Armor Division, which proved why Americans shouldn't have been trying to ape anime yet, and how much of a foothold "Japanimation" had made overseas. Oh yeh! Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. Pioneered minimaps with cones of vision and alerts in 3D. Probably the first competent third person stealth game. Thief: The Dark Project. Star Siege: Tribes. Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines. Still waiting to see if Shadow Tactics or Weird West can maintain the momentum of the recent resurgence. Trespasser with its own take on versimilitude and it's tit-healthbar. Rival Schools: United By Fate, a Capcom fighting game featuring sports themed high schoolers. Soul Calibur. Bushido Blade 2, which took the first game's innovative sword combat and went and had fun with it - there's a disco ninja rocking an afro alongside a sad dying poet ninja. Pokemon Yellow, for everyone would had beelined straight for Pikachu in Red and Blue anyways. Tomb Raider 3, when Eidos first starting starting dropping the ball on their megahit. This was the best selling game in Europe in 1998! My heart goes out to all the Europeans that were hit hardest by Lara-mania. But you also apparently had 4 (!) separate footie games in your top 10 this year, so maybe you deserved it. Wargasm. 10/10 for name alone, no notes, don't know don't care to further. We Went To Saturn But We Missed the Stars The Dreamcast launches in Japan. It would be another year before Western audiences would get to lay their grubby hands on it, but the Dreamcast is remembered fondly as the swan song of a once cherished company that wasn't afraid to get a little out there or pursue any idea, no matter how improbable or money draining. Sega, you were an absolute nutter and I would have loved to see some of those ideas take off, but at least you gave us an iconiclastic treasure before you went out the door. I'll always remember that oversized Dreamcast backpack that I wished I'd bought. Games Act Grown Up Meanwhile, the first ever Game Critics Award is hosted at E3, and the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards debuts. Gaming is trying to legitimatize itself, and establishing semi-prestige bodies is one of the first steps. At the same time, an international awards committee, IASA puts Shigeru Miyamoto into its Hall of Fame. Foreign audiences were finally paying dues to one of the most influential developers in gaming. In time, he would come to be lionized as a household name, but in 1998, the rest of the world was still just waking up to Japan and what it had to offer gaming. Please God Don't Tell People I Wrote All This There were so many genre defining titles that came out in 1998, across such a wide range of genres. Games that shaped not just people's childhoods, but the games and kids that came after them as well. The events that played out this year marked the beginning of the end for beloved genres and a certain console maker, both of which would take years to recover and find their footing again. In others, the start of a new journies in gaming began, ones that would take gaming on some wild & uncertain rides as it collided with the wider world. It's not just that 1998 is the best year for gaming, but that every other year of the game since then began here. Cool Kids Club Soda fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Aug 30, 2022 |
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Aug 29, 2022 23:54
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So. Many. Dumb. Words. e: Cool Kids Club Soda fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Aug 30, 2022 |
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Aug 29, 2022 23:55
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Vote #2 goes to whatever the past year has been up until today. (2022 for voting purposes). This past year has been an torrent of top notch releases big and small, and we've seen furthering of a lot of the more exciting and healthy design trends of the 2010s. It's been getting increasingly harder and harder to point to stand out game years, as there is just so much constantly being released that regardless of your genre, you have an absolute glut of choice. Standouts for me have included : Warhammer 40K : Daemonhunters Pupperazi Spider-Man on PC Spin Rhythm (ok I just started playing it this year, but it's contender for GOTY the minute it hits 1.0) No More Fences The end of console exclusivity keeps getting a lot closer - console hardware is basically PC hardware at this point. Developers don't have to shackle themselves to console idiosyncrasies or end up with untranslatable code tying a game to one specific machine (what up, Bloodborne). Publishers have realized how large the PC market has become, and aren't as interested in using key titles as system sellers when choice often comes down to system preference. It would probably take something pretty disruptive, like a killer augmented reality game, or VR overcoming all its technical and financial limitations, to create that kind of market segregation again. Even mobile gets ports of PC games, and one of the year's biggest games is a Chinese gacha that you can play on your phone or PC - and is actually a fully-realized action adventure game that people tell me is actually good. I had a copy of Way of the Samurai 4 for PS3 that I got from a failing Blockbuster and thought I'd have to find a console to ever play it one day. When it came out on Steam out of almost nowhere , I ended up putting over 100 hours in it. (Where is my goddamn Armored Core on Steam, From?!! 😡) Heard they're making a new Skate game, too, so that's pretty hype. New genres keep popping up and can have massive influence in just a few years time, as developers tear them apart and really explore different facets of them, and find new ways of interpreting them. Look at card games, for example. What started with something niche in gaming, took on a life with Hearthstone. Then games like Slay the Spire & Monster Train adapted it to the even further reaching trend of roguelikes and popularized it card games even further. And now we're seeing card-based turn-based tactics, city builders, first-person shooters & camgirl management sims. I'm partial to Fights in Tight Spaces, myself. Museuems Are Colonialist And Should Be Dismantled And it's not just that developers are carving out new spaces in genre & gameplay. They're heading back to the past to mine out the best parts and head down abandoned & forgotten avenues of design. There's a lot of great stuff that can be still found in older games, and sometimes really creative, innovative ideas can come from working within constraints and limitations. Everything old is new again blah blah blah, but 7th Legion was an RTS withm mechs that came out in 1997 and had cards you could draw to cast powers on the battlefield. Some people complain about the term boomer shooter, but I think it does a really good job of encapsulating the vibe of these games. It's a lot more descriptive in the way that 'East coast rap' is, and just sounds fun. It's got a good mouth feel. Boomer shooter. Dusk is a brilliant throwback to the kind of game that you played one time at your buddy who didn't get Quake's house, complete with forgettablly generic name reaching to be creepy. One of the enemies is a dude wearing a plaid shirt and a sack on his head waving around a chainsaw, and it doesn't come across as a cheeky homage or blatant theft. It feels like something you remember playing in a dream after playing fps' and consuming mid 90s culture all day. Or Shovel Knight, which masterfully modernized a very specific era of retro action platformer into something that feels like it should also have been some long mythologized classic rediscovered in the dusty and forgotten archive of an eccentric hoarder who died alone. A game which then went on to reinvent itself 3 more times, and smash any sales expectations that anyone could have imagined. U Put The QT in LGBTQ Indie, queer, Indigenous, and self-exploratory games, and games that offer a personal perspective or examination of life, are proliferating. Regardless of who you are, you can likely find a game you identify with, or face increasingly low barriers to making one yourself. Even just the idea of games is less binary than before, with story games, social games & games that can be described mostly as an experience, like Fract OSC and Umurangi Generation, gaining more ground and wider audiences. Someone can make a game like Cruelty Squad, which works to cause a primal disgust through its entire presentation, or Kind Words, a lofi diorama where you can write kind, supportive letters to real people and feel comfortable sharing your own thoughts. Meanwhile, someone else develops a management sim about sodas that camgirl (Only Cans), which can only be either a pun taken to its final conclusion, or an astonishingly specific fetish. I Think Steam Forgot The Safe Word The market for smaller and mid-tier games has increased massively. Steam changed the way games are distributed, and widened the marketplace so much. It's crazy to look back at this thing I installed to play Company of Heroes 1v1, and realize that it would go on to reshape the entire gaming ecosystem. Steam's careful curation gave way to Green Light, then a broad opening of the gates, followed by throwing the last of it open with a sigh and a reminder 'dont try to sell any nazi poo poo or worse'. Between Steam's laissez faire attitude and the increasing maturity of the crowdsourcing and early access models, gamers have gotten to see much deeper into the development process, and developers have opened themselves up to so much engagement and collaboration in the process. Players from all over the world can quickly and easily find games developed in other countries across the globe, and find resources for translation almost as easily. It's not as perfect as it might sound and can always use a lot of work, but it's something akin to a democratization of gaming, if you wanna get act fancy about it Sales in games have grown to the point that major tentpole franchises sell absurd numbers. The market isn't limited to A, AA and AAA titles anymore. A game like Vampire Saviors, that the developer made based off a mobile game, just for something to play himself and only charged $3 for, ended up selling so many copies that he and his family can be set for life, and within 6 months games are already coming out that look to try different twists on it. Maybe one of them will take off, and spawn another new subgenre. Devil Daggers excised everything except the leanest cuts of an FPS and left us with a game drenched in a monochromatic black and crimson horror aesthetic straight out of some 1970s Czech metal band's album artwork. As far as anybody knows, the game doesn't even have an end, but a lot of people were still slamming themselves against it and getting flattened just to eke out a half minute or so on the leaderboard. Monster Prom, an exceedingly online & sharply written dating sim about trying to gently caress a medusa or werewolf, is not only a thing that sold well enough and with Kickstarter that they're releasing a third game in the series soon, but is also one of the most side-splittingly funny things in gaming. (Polly is bae, btw). More people can make a living creating something they care about than ever before. Accessibility is at an all-time high, and just getting better. Developers put a lot more thought and consideration to adaptibility and accomodations for players, regardless of if they have disabilities or not. The stigma of gitud and playing games to enjoy them, and not necessarily for the challenge, has started to wear off. Developers build cheat codes into the game so that everyone can decide what works best for themself. Streaming services like PSNow and Nvidia are starting to take off as the hardware catches up, and gamers don't have to rely on shelling out for costly systems. Even if the cost of graphics cards or some other component goes through the roof again, gamers can increasingly rely on their home TV, phone or whatever else they want to play. Microsoft's Gaming Pass gets a lot of praise for having a comprehensive, quality rotating catalog that frequently features newer and bigger titles for a very reasonable subscription. Microsoft! I mean, come on! This is the company that leaned into bro-gaming and called the third one XBox One. They literally had to be broken up by an antitrust at one point. And It's Gonna Be The Same Tomorrow I'm getting older and, of course, have my own nostalgic favorites and genre biases. I've seen games from before the NES, through quarters in arcades, BBSs and copied floppies, Dual Sense controllers and Voodoo Graphics, awful fan translations and bootleg emulations, and up to boob physics, bloom everywhere, and ray tracing being something you can do at home. I skipped most of the PS2 and 360 era and went back after to fill in things I missed. I never really had a handheld. To be honest, there's still lots of faults with gaming. Some newer, like how most platforms only sell you a license to a game, or Tim Sweeney deciding his was a voice anyone wanted to hear. Some old, such as crunch, how painfully white & male it is, and big companies eating up littler ones. The shine on indie gaming got tarnished a bit when we remembered that plucky communities of passionate upstarts are just as prone to abuse as anybody else, and that Chris Avellone didn't have any other stories and wasn't going to shut up. That whole Gamergate thing sure sucked. Bobby Kotick will have a fat golden parachute in a year's time, that Quantum Dream guy is going to continue being extremely French, and some of our heroes have been torn down - nobody is ever going to talk about Blizzard the same way again, and Stefan Molyneux finally ended up as the guy who overpromised and underdelivered one time too many. But there's a lot of positive movements moving forward, too. It feels like we've started to hit a critical mass, however, where developer ambitions and audience interest have exploded beyond what we could imagine even 10 years ago. As gaming becomes less and less insular, it opens itself up to awareness of wider influences and realities. Game developers are way past due to unionize, so seeing it happen, along with the fight to address crunch and inequality in the workplaces being met with some companies actually leading the way and committing to better working conditions and environments, warms the tiny proletariat in my heart. More people are celebrating the diversity of inclusion, and drawing firm lines with bigots, abusers and bad actors. That Steam review meme about a dad coming together with his son over a game, real or not, reveals a kinder, humane side of gaming other than the brainy intellectualism or hedonistic hyperviolence typically associated with it. So yeh, if you asked me to pick a best year in gaming, I'd tell you right now, and every now I can see in the *future. *barring climate disaster and/or massive social upheaval (don't forget to tell someone you love them)
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Aug 30, 2022 01:28
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Wild card for vote #3 - 2012. I bet some cool stuff happened this year, but the only that really matters is XCOM. Turn-based squad tactics is my #1 jam, and Firaxis didn't just bring a classic back into perfect form, that brought turn based strategy back. Heck, they could've just released War of the Chosen and I'd have died happy. But now there's a new wave coming out that think action economies are for blowing up, and I am Here for it. e: You're telling me Dishonored and Sleeping Dogs came out this year too?! I have a serious crush on Will Yun Lee because of that game. The combat is fun & visceral, and it's the closest a game has ever come to what it feels like in a big Asian city. I hear Ghostwire really nails Tokyo, so I'll have to check that. I ended up in Hong Kong a bunch of times after I played, and it was pretty cool to see a bunch of the same landmarks in the game. The soundtrack was next-level, too. Ninja Tune, Warp Records, Daptone, top notch hip hop and some really chill classical Chinese sounding stuff & Cantopop? I actually still play some of the songs I first heard in this game in my DJ sets, more than from any other game. Before Sleeping Dogs, I was never a whole man. Sleeping Dogs taught me the secret to fulfilment. Every time I went to Hong Kong, I was sure to have a pork bun in my hand. 2nd edit: e: Okay since this seems to be a year of favorites for me - Blacklight: Retribution. This is the only on-line shooter that I have ever gotten into it. The cyberpunk tactilol aesthetic absolutely ruled. I spent hours fine tuning my build and outfit. They got users from the community to design some real sick nasty helmets, sold them twice then sat on them for 2 years. I paid real money to get the Oni one with horns and light up eyes. You could call in a mech, land it on someone's head, have someone steal it, then cook them out of it with a flamethrower and steal it back. Most of player base ended up running Metro over and over. It had a Gangnam dance emote, after I'd just gotten back from watching it blow up in Asia and just start taking root at home. Everyone had a short, rechargeable wallhack and it led to a lot of fake outs and ambushes. I became a wiz with an SMG and got my first beast mode. I joined a Goon clan for christsakes. I would give random newbies exploding tomahawks and set them free into the wild. One emote was making like an airplane, and everyone who liked fun ran around in it constantly. In one game of CTF, I was running circles around the other team by myself until everybody dropped except for one guy who joined late. I capped him twice, then he asked if he could cap just once. "I just need one for today and I can't seem to get it  " So I fragged myself with a grenade and let him cap. On the way back from my spawn point, running with my arms outstretched and making engine noises, I bump into him. Both of us stop and stare at each other. There's 5 seconds left on the map, and we both decide to aim our guns into the sky and unload our clips. This is the game that taught me huehuehue.FTL was probably one of the first roguelikes for a lot of people. Long Live the Queen satisfied that Princess Maker itch. Thirty Flights of Loving was notable because it just really didn't seem to care about being a, you know, game. Not a lot of people were doing "experience" games. Tokyo Jungle looks absolutely bonkers and I want to play it.. Max Payne 3 was totally good and fun and I liked the direction they took. It's no classic but it nails Max Payne. Pocket Planes, which became my go to toilet & train game. I'm just glad Marvel Heroes didn't come out in 2012 or I'd have to admit how many hours I spent on it, and how many of those were just Squirrel Girl. I still giggle when I think about dumb goon jokes in that game. "Show your math" Cool Kids Club Soda fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Aug 30, 2022 |
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Aug 30, 2022 01:34
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Eh, I'll take it lol. I managed to do all this on mobile, which is a feat in itself. Think I did alright on the rest e: Heavy Metal posted:Also Duke did make a Half-Life joke or two, he said "not another Valve puzzle" one time. All great games though! I don't know about all that, I was just trying to paint a picture of Duke Nukem cowed by prostrate cancer. Because Valve. And blue balls Cool Kids Club Soda fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Aug 30, 2022 |
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Aug 30, 2022 01:38
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I'm gonna be so mad if 1998 loses
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Aug 30, 2022 01:53
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Big Bizness posted:
This guy gets why '98 was so big. Even if you don't like the games from that year, or think they don't hold up as well, you can't deny how influential they are as a whole. 2001 is a really solid choice for major gaming milestones, too. GTA 3 alone should be enough to make anyone sit up and notice. You also got Animal Crossing, Ace Attorney and Advance Wars (triple A gaming) for important titles. Not to mention the launch of the XBox and Game Boy Advance, and both XBox and PS2 going online. GameCube came out in 2001, too, I guess. Then you got notable stuff like the last Dreamcasts being made, Baldur's Gate 2, Black & White, Ghost Recom, Serious Sam, Red Faction, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Burnout, Ikaruga, Anachronox, Shenmue 2, Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, Zone of the Enders, Tactics Ogre: Knights of Lodis, Dead or Alive 3, Mech Commander 2, Parappa the Rapper 2, Pikmin, Uplink, and last but not least, Do You Like Horny Bunnies? That's a pretty stacked list of games that tried some new stuff, started some major franchises and just generally became a part of the zeitgeist. This is the last we'd see Shenmue for over a decade. Halo was the focal point of the broification. Dead or Alive gave us jiggle physics in TV commercials. People talked about Ikaruga like it was the Second Coming. Getting trolled by Kojima. Pyramidhead. Everyone going a little gay for Raiden and Tidus. Bullet time. Jack Thompson would go on CNN and decry GTA 3 as obscene. Gamers would start really crawling up their rear end to justify games as art, we'd laugh at Tim Rogers until we realized he kinda had a point, and reflective writing would become popular. Games wanted to be treated as more than just lowbrow, and this was another milestone towards a world of ludonarrative dissonance, Anita Sarkeesian and True Gamers. And with the exception of one or two, all of these games are generally considered innovators or classics of their genre. Did any of us know we liked horny bunnies before 2001? I don't even have any of my favorites on this list, but if I had an extra vote I'd probably throw it in here. Consoles going online was massive. A lot of iconic franchises got one of their most iconic entries or the one that really put them on the map. There was that whole war on terror thing that started this year, and the US Army would start partnering with XBox and Mountain Dew to start suckering a whole generation into war in one of the most cynical, exploitative manners we'd ever seen. Vote for worst game name of the year goes to Race War Kingdoms. Maybe for all years. Looks like that one didn't really hold up. Show me your Worst Named Game of each year
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Aug 30, 2022 05:18
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:HOLY poo poo 🤜🤛 e: I haven't even really taken the time to go over my 2022 list, just slapped on a few of the best and forgot to go back to it Cool Kids Club Soda fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Aug 30, 2022 |
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Aug 30, 2022 05:18
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Interstate 76 is criminally underrepresented all of the 1997 entries
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Aug 30, 2022 05:36
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Cool Kids Club Soda posted:Interstate 76 is criminally underrepresented all of the 1997 entries e: Your partners was named Taurus and there was button to make him read you a poem! It had a porno soundtrack and a guy named Skeeter! It ran on a modified Mech Warrior 2 engine and the best way to salvage cars was to snipe the pilot (roll up alongside and empty your pistol in to the driver's side) ! This is what sex appeal looks like! 
Cool Kids Club Soda fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Aug 30, 2022 |
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Aug 30, 2022 05:38
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Cleaned my 1998 entry up, made some edits, inc one addressing the trip mine thing and SFA3, and talked some more poo poo at Epic lol
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Aug 30, 2022 22:29
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Stux posted:thanks Couldn't have done it without you
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Sep 1, 2022 01:37
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Like, it's important to separate favorites from what really made each year significant. Lots of years have good games. People talking about favorites is more interesting when they can explain why they're Good. Sleepy Dogs alone makes 2012 worth talking about for me mostly cuz how much it evoked a time & space for me and influenced later experiences, but I think it also has something to offer others. Very few games have had a soundtrack with such respected eclectic electronic labels (like when Amon Tobin did that Splinter Cell soundtrack), let alone the back catalogue of a less-known Motown record label. It does a really good job of evoking Hong Kong, a city that most people will probably never visit. The bridge to Kennedy Town, Victoria Peak and how the road twists and turns. Chicken trucks & merciless minibuses. Stacks of apartment buildings butted up against piers, underpasses & industrial compounds. They absolutely nailed the weird ramped lanes and walls surrounding the Central Police Station, and the red light district that works its way up the hill - that's pretty much Lan Kwai Fong, a popular expat bar district. How these gorgeous, serene temples are nestled next to shopping malls or warehouses. The mother and daughter loudly discussing private matters in public, right outside your apartment, is such an East Asian experience. Even just the metal shop shutters, cages over windows and red paper charms on doors. This game gets it. I wouldn't be surprised to know that some of the designers were Hong Kong ex-pats, parachute kids, dropped off in western countries while their parents stayed, or foreigners who spent time in Hong Kong working. Sleepy Dogs does an unprecedented job of putting you in one of the world's most unique and major cities, and manages to squeeze in a decent amount of Chinese culture while it's at it. I don't think I've ever played any other popular title where you had to gently caress up someone's feng shui, or where Cantonese is casually thrown around. Not a lot games have music, popular or otherwise, from East Asia either. There's an entire world of superstars, trends & genres that doesn't get touched outside of the Chinese speaking world. It's a shame it never got a proper sequel and is DOA - I would have loved to see how much more they would have explored the setting. I wonder if they could have ever topped sitting at a table discussing big crimes while dressed head-to-toes in police blues.
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Sep 1, 2022 02:23
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See what you made me do Stux 😡
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Sep 1, 2022 02:23
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Making it real tempting to do another effort post on 2001 here
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Sep 8, 2022 19:04
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:
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Sep 16, 2022 03:09
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hatty posted:The UK has terrible taste
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Sep 16, 2022 08:21
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Year of the Year of the Game lol
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Sep 23, 2022 14:21
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Didn't realize the bar could go even lower
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Sep 23, 2022 14:42
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Logically, the greatest year in games will be far off in the future, right before the total collapse of the New Steam World Order, where babies will be fed a steady in-vitro drip of Final Fantasy LXIX and Futa Mars Colony Diner Dash, before being hooked up to the entirety of the Valve Index Supernet (made with Meta™) catalogue at birth.
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Sep 24, 2022 16:46
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Now let's do it again but for mobile gaming ...Hey, where did everybody go?
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Sep 26, 2022 17:52
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VideoGames posted:I have played more games from 1998 in 2022 than I played in 1998. I was broke as poo poo in '98 too
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Sep 27, 2022 14:14
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