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would be epic to nothave 5 million paragraphs about blizzardin the op of the thread abotu how gaming owns
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Dec 11, 2022 18:31
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DMCrimson posted:8. TUNIC (4.5/5): Yeah it was great to bust out pen and paper and take pages of notes on a game, haven't done that in a long time. If you really enjoyed the puzzle-solving aspects of Tunic on a structural level, and have a tolerance for older games, you ought to consider trying the puzzle games The Fool's Errand and 3 in Three. I can't elaborate on this much without spoiling things. They have been released as freeware bundled inside an emulator for old Macs. http://fools-errand.com/index.htm If you end up liking those, System's Twilight is a similar game to 3 in Three, the individual puzzles are much stronger and more original but overall it's a bit less satisfying on a structural level. https://eblong.com/zarf/twilight/index.html (also enjoy their vintage Web 1.0 sites) I was reminded of those games when playing the later parts of Tunic, outside of the obvious more recent games that it gets compared to. #1 this year is pretty much a given, but interested to see what ends up winning the #2 spot. edit: Stux posted:would be epic to nothave 5 million paragraphs about blizzardin the op of the thread abotu how gaming owns Kind of glad somebody said this, it was more tolerable in previous years but this year is committed to the running gag of pretending that no games were released in 2022 so there's nothing else to break it up with Item Getter fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Dec 11, 2022 |
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Dec 11, 2022 19:03
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Escobarbarian posted:Wario Land II is an amazing game. There is a platformer called Pizza Tower coming out early 2023 which is hugely Wario Land-inspired and looks sick Item Getter posted:Yeah it was great to bust out pen and paper and take pages of notes on a game, haven't done that in a long time. Thank you for the recommendations, I'll check these out!
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Dec 11, 2022 19:38
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There were plenty of good games released this year. My base "good" score (based on my criteria) is a 70 and I scored 52 games 70 or higher last year, 48 games this year and I'm not finished yet. My top 50 will likely arrive before I go on a trip for the holidays, so I have around 10 days to play the remainder of what I intended to play and then do writeups.
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Dec 11, 2022 19:42
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7. Return to Monkey Island - Good adventure game. I'm not a big Monkey Island guy, but I love Ron Gilbert's stuff, and this is another great game from him. 6. Chunithm - It's an arcade rhythm game with limited release, but I found it at an arcade a month ago and played it nonstop for 90 minutes and was sad I had to leave. 5. Rogue Legacy 2 - Had a great time with this. It's a little too hard, but the progression is interesting, and there's lots of environments to explore and character types and weapons to learn. I dropped this for Vampire Survivors, but I should go back to it. 4. Elden Ring - My second From game, after Bloodborne. I enjoyed it a lot, though I didn't end up beating it. I enjoy the exploration more than the combat, so when all that was left was boss fights, I just quit playing. Might go look up a build online and some spoiler guide and give it another run through sometime. While it wasn't my favorite game this year, it totally deserves every GOTY award. 3. Escape Academy - A short game, and a little ugly, but I had a really great time with the puzzles in this one. Perfectly hits the puzzle difficulty balance. I need to grab the DLC. 2. Tinykin - Pretty bog-standard 3D collect-a-thon (Banjo-Kozooie etc), but definitely at the peak of the form. Also really good music and art direction. I was ready to give it a 2nd play through as soon as I finished it the first time. 1. Vampire Survivors - It's rare that I put more than 6 hours into a single game but this one's blown past that. I'm almost 30 hours in and I'm still having a great time. The unlock progression is perfectly tuned, still finding boatloads of new unlocks and weapon combos and evolutions and even new mechanics. And there's even more coming in DLC??? GOTY, no question.
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Dec 11, 2022 19:55
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Also, hell of an OP.
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Dec 11, 2022 19:57
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This was one of the best years for gaming in a very long time. All of the new releases, and most of them were incredibly good imo.
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Dec 11, 2022 19:59
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top tier OP I don't have a list to post though, just wanted to say that  haveblue posted:Extremely good OP but I have to point out the December banner is almost unreadable on the default/light mode forum style looks fine to me, unless this was part of your plan to oust me as a light mode user I use dark mode everywhere else, just not here, dunno why
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Dec 11, 2022 20:01
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ok ok ok here we go i make no promises!!! first a runner up: Path of Exile, which i am playing right now this weekend, because a new league launched but more importantly a new hard mode launched called Ruthless, which strips back the last 9 years of player power creep and brings the game back to feeling like it did when it first started. a sort of PoE Classic, i'm having a lot of fun with it. good poo poo  10. Not for Broadcast - this is an FMV game where you take on the role of a news channel control room technician, in charge of swapping camera feeds during live broadcasts, picking commercials to air between segments, and the censor button. the gameplay itself is simple, but engaging, and additional mechanics are layered on as the studio upgrades its equipment over time. the real jewel of this game though is the story - this poo poo gets wild. the choices you make during the broadcast and between shows affects what happens to the characters and the world and stuff can escalate quickly. there's something like 14 different endings - there are 2 main factions you can choose to side with, the Advance political party or the Defy rebellion group. I first watched a full playthrough on stream that went all in on Advance, and in my own playthrough i went with Defy the whole way. the difference is pretty dramatic and i was absolutely hooked on both endings. this game goes hard. the FMV acting is better than what you usually see in these kinds of games, but there is definitely a lot of cringe to get through. it's intentionally cringey though and there is a lot of funny stuff as well. the main characters are acted well enough that i was definitely invested in what happened to them. good poo poo https://i.imgur.com/nM8N5O3.mp4 9. Lost Ark - this is probably the best korean style MMO i've ever played. the gameplay is a lot of fun, and there is an absolute loving shitload of content for any level of player, from simple collectathon stuff to full on super hardcore raiding. the story is actually pretty good too! it does a lot of very dramatic cutscene stuff that you hardly ever see in isometric games, with big swooping camera angles and stuff, that is a lot of fun to watch. good poo poo  8. Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak - sunbreak fixed a lot of the complaints i had about base Rise, added quite a few new monsters, had a SICK AS HELL final boss fight, and added a pretty good endgame grind. they made lance good again. good poo poo  7. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker - this is still one of my top 2 favorite games of all time, and the patch content this year has been great. island sanctuary is awesome, the MSQ is amazing as always, and i'm not completely burnt out on raiding yet. good poo poo https://i.imgur.com/vYomVFC.mp4 6. Stray - i did not take any screenshots of Stray so here is a video of my cat. his name is kirby. stray is not about kirby, but it is a game about a cat, and a lil robot, and helping both of them find their home. it was short, but very sweet, and i had virtually no complaints about it. good poo poo https://i.imgur.com/k8W3jl2.mp4 5. Tekken 7 - i am an absolute idiot and i should not be playing PVP games because it gives me extreme anxiety, but T7 has been the kindest fighting game to me so far. what does that really mean exactly, i'm not entirely sure, but i feel good about my skill level and that's not something i can say about the others i've played. i feel like i have a much better grasp on how to play and i can keep up with what's happening on screen a lot better and actually execute my moves and combos most of the time. and those moves look fuckin sick. good poo poo https://i.imgur.com/HOuLfMb.mp4 4. Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen - i actually managed to get through the extremely bad first part of this game and i got to see why people love this game. it's so goddamn janky but full of heart and silliness and it's a true classic. i get to clamber all over big monsters like a little bug and stab the poo poo out of them, i get to kill god, and my pawn brought me back an extra god-killing sword so at the end of the game i had two of them. good poo poo https://i.imgur.com/wXOcaxD.mp4 3. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands - this is borderlands but fantasy, which means it's way more fun and interesting than regular borderlands. guns are boring. magic is always cooler than guns. so now you have magic, and magic guns, and guns that shoot giant anchors as rockets. the story was pretty good, there was a lot of good humor of course, and the best Mister Torgue scene they've ever made. he finally got to blow up the ocean. good poo poo  2. Valheim - the late entry coming in hot with an extremely cool update in the Mistlands. it's a very spooky new biome which like most biomes in this game is super scary at first, and corpse runs are a nightmare, but when you finally get the various pieces together to unlock the items you need to progress, in this case a big fuckin crossbow, a magic featherfall cape, and magic spells so you can become a fuckin' WIZARD, it becomes much easier to get around and deal with the enemies. my friends and i just beat the boss and i had a blast. being a wizard is loving awesome. good poo poo https://i.imgur.com/pMRdFFH.mp4 1. Warhammer 40k: Darktide - this game came out and i played nothing else for 3 weeks straight. holy gently caress this game is fun. it's vermintide 2 but in 40k, you can be a zealot or a psyker but most importantly you can be an ogryn, and it's the best. you can be 4 ogryns. ogryns don't know how to use grenades, so they just throw the whole box instead. the game is not perfect, it's not completely finished, but i don't care. this is probably the most fun i've had based on pure gameplay in a long time. good poo poo Kerrzhe fucked around with this message at 09:01 on Dec 29, 2022 |
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Dec 11, 2022 20:30
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Feels Villeneuve posted:1. Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age  It was the first Dragon Quest I ever played and maybe it's set my expectations too high, but what a wonderful, charming, warm blanket of a game that got me through the first COVID lockdown my country had to sit through. Kerrzhe posted:5. Stray - i did not take any screenshots of Stray so here is a video of my cat. his name is kirby. Hell yeah Kirby! (Also Stray is great too!)
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Dec 11, 2022 21:00
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DQXI was also my first Dragon Quest. I played it this year. Expect it to rank very high on my list.
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Dec 11, 2022 21:18
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Hmm, I also finished DQ11 this year. Loved it, but I played a lot of games I loved this year...
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Dec 11, 2022 21:35
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Honorary mention to Vampire Survivors, the feel-good success story of the year, Pentiment, a brilliant passion project that I wasn’t able to finish, and Powerwash Simulator, for reasons that should be self-explanatory. As for the others… 10. Returnal: Ascension  A preamble: many of my GOTY choices have been informed by other games I’ve played this year. I’ve waded through three games (or two and a half, gave up on one of them halfway) that were so-called “frictionless” experiences filled with stats, loot, crafting, and characters who are far too eager to shepherd your dazed mind through every step of the experience; all of them were also sequels to games I liked, and as sequels they were either mediocre, gratuitous, or utterly terrible. I’m weary of it, and especially how that style has near-fully colonized singleplayer games at a certain budget tier. They drove me back into the arms of Returnal, which many people loved at the time but I was tepid on, and Returnal answered my desperation with one of the best expansions I’ve seen in recent memory. And for free, too! It makes you want to cry. The Ascension update has hapless protagonist Selene scaling an infinite dungeon called the Tower of Sisyphus. If this was a mere score-attack mode then I would have been fine with it, because Ascension strips Housemarque’s outstanding gameplay down to the bare essentials, shuttling you through tourniquet-tight platforming and combat challenges with enough secret areas and optional goodies to keep you engaged. But Ascension also has its own sizable chunk of story content, which I was warily onboard for – Selene’s actress Jane Perry is outstanding and Returnal has some of the best horror prose I’ve seen in some time, but the main campaign’s conclusion was a thumping disappointment. Ascension drills down into a few key details of Selene’s backstory that were only alluded to in the main campaign, and has one single line, shown only in environmental detail, that re-contextualizes everything about the story. It turned my disappointment into a begrudging thumbs-up, and I don’t change my mind easily. As homogeneity slops across the AAA space, Returnal stands apart as a high-budget game that did something different – not always successful, occasionally frustrating, but its stripped-down roguelite style and lush space-horror background is more novel than ever. Ascension lifted it to new heights. 9. Sifu  Sifu has the most satisfying Platinum trophy I’ve ever gotten. A tough-as-nails brawler whose main conceit has you ageing a little more every time you die has only one conclusion for your first playthrough – you’ll keel over from heart failure before you get past the second boss. I did, but I brought back some keycards! They let me take shortcuts, so I reached the boss with a little more spring in my step. And then I died again. And again, until I didn’t. The game’s philosophy is exemplified in its very first setpiece, which is literally just the famous corridor fight scene from Oldboy. The first time you go in there, the ten or so miscreants occupying that seedy hallway will probably play handball with your skull. The tenth time, you won’t even break your stride as you punch them all to sleep. Like all great brawlers, Sifu asks for perfection through attrition, going through its levels again and again until they no longer surprise you, and then can no longer out-fight you. The soft, almost pillowy sound effects that accompany your basic punches and kicks are counterpointed by a thunderous bass beat for the knockout blow, and eventually you’re playing a dubstep track for every mob of badguys that comes your way. The shortcuts and secrets you take back from the Game Over screen further shave down the continues you have to spend, until finally, you reach the ending as a creaky old man. Now to do it again. Sifu’s final trophy demanded that I die no more than five times for its entire nails-hard duration and it was such a joy to play that I didn’t bat an eye at it. The only disappointment was that all the shortcuts I took kept me from fully enjoying its beautiful stage design – burning and hallucinogenic nightclubs, a four-story museum where the camera angles shift and mutate along with the exhibits. It’s the best pure gameplay experience I’ve had since Sekiro – gradually overcoming brutally challenging stages, until you barely notice them as they fall at your feet. 8. Cyberpunk 2077  I broke so many of my rules for this one. I thought CP2077 was a laughable fuckup at release, I’m tired of the open-world icon-hunting formula, and everything that was revealed about the game’s tortured development cycle covered it with stink. But when the 1.5 patch dropped, which allegedly made the game fuctional if not necessarily good, it was accompanied by a 50% price drop that made me shrug my shoulders and give it a try. Seventy hours later, I had to re-evaluate some things. CD Projekt Red did not know what they were doing when they developed this. CP2077’s first act is a tight series of narrative-heavy missions leading up to a grand heist, all contained within a single district; after that’s done, the entire map explodes into a glut of picayune icon hunts that might make some players recoil and drop it like they just saw a spider crawling up their hand. The skill tree is badly lopsided even after patching, the economy is hosed beyond belief, damage feedback is so weak that you’ll often drop dead without even realizing you were being shot at. But I found its scrappiness weirdly compelling, especially because the catastrophic bugs were mostly absent, and it held me long enough to see the flashes of brilliance underneath it – flashes that became more common with time, not less. When it gets out of its own way, Cyberpunk has some incredibly engrossing and varied missions, usually funneled through its side cast, a wide array of noir-classic no-hopers who are all excellently acted and mo-capped. Keanu Reeves is the weakest link, not really able to sell his lines as a sneering punk anarchist, but he still does a fine enough job, and he’s a consistent but not overbearing presence in the story. The main campaign is surprisingly brief, but those special side missions – a quiet underwater trek through a drowned city, a frantic horror-themed forensic investigation as you try to thwart a kidnapping – cover a variety of genres and gameplay styles and they’re all surprisingly deft. And while the gunplay’s not so great when you’re getting shot at, the guns all kick like a mule and have great feedback and animations, when you’re not electing to just fry everyone’s brains from the other side of the street. Night City itself is a fantastic environment, one of the few that I’ve been content to just walk around in without icon-hunting. Winding back-alleys and multi-tiered night markets give way to sweeping plazas and skyscrapers, and the outskirts are marked by fields of gently glowing hydroponic farms or mountains of electronic trash. But the game’s fundamental flaws always make you feel like you’re merely looking at the city rather than living in it; there’s nothing to do here but find icons and shoot guys. Nevertheless, the plot and the performances convincingly sell the personality of the city itself, its allure and its menace – it’s a predatory organism in itself, and as you get further into each of your companions’ quests, they all express some desire to escape or at least insulate themselves from Night City’s malignant influence somehow. That’s reflected in the excellent Edgerunners spinoff, one more broken rule. Multimedia adaptations of video games are usually not great and seldom affect the base property at all, but that hail-mary anime not only drove CP2077’s disastrous release out of the public consciousness, it was a great encapsulation of the desperation that turns at the heart of Cyberpunk – these people whose hopes and ambitions placed them in the belly of the beast, who risk everything on the chance to get away another way. 7. Know by heart…  Icepick Lodge, one of the greatest and unluckiest indie developers out there, have had an especially bad time of it lately. Pathologic 2 pushed them further than ever into the mainstream but didn’t sell well enough to support the dev costs for the remaining 2/3’s of the campaign, and then recent geopolitical unpleasantness compounded their woes. In that time, they were able to release Know By Heart to nonexistent fanfare, in an attempt to build up their coffers for the rest of Pathologic. Know By Heart is one of those stories that’s difficult to describe without spoilers. It’s a gentle top-down walking sim about provincial homebody Misha, whose routine is interrupted by a surprise homecoming from his childhood sweetheart Asya. Over the next several days his old friend group knits itself back together, but things fall apart due to a strange pandemic of amnesia that exclusively targets people’s connections to one another. Misha and Asya try to hold on to each other as everything around them falls apart, and the question is raised: what remains of a place when everything you find personally meaningful about it falls away? Rendered in primary colors and buoyed by a piano-only soundtrack that ranges from playful to deeply melancholic, Know By Heart isn’t nearly as stressful or punishing as Pathologic or The Void, but follows the formula in some ways. The player is encouraged to become intimately familiar with Misha’s hometown, literally piecing together the map from optional wanderings between landmarks, and you can catch glimpses of the townspeople’s own stories and struggles as you strike out from the critical path. There are dialogue choices and plot branches, but no fail state and no deviation from the story’s final conclusion. It’s haunting, but not stressful. Icepick are known for their surrealism but prove no less deft at making the everyday feel extraordinary. The story’s tonal high point comes when Misha and friends push a stalled car, laughing and joking as the backing piano lifts into a light arpeggio that becomes brighter and more energetic as they gain speed. Know By Heart is full of these moments, and it’s another work of art from one of gaming’s most unique and treasured voices. 6. Kirby and the Forgotten Land  Kirby might be the most consistently pleasant franchise in this entire industry. You almost always know what you’re getting – a breezy pastel platformer with level design that’s familiar but varied, secrets that are well-hidden but not aggravating, and just enough tweaks to the power-copying system to make it stand out from the last one. When you finish, you can enter a postgame mode and be annihilated by a sudden sky-high difficulty spike. It’s all in good fun. When it was announced that Kirby would be going full 3D and showcased environments that resembled an E-rated Fromsoft game, some people were side-eyeing it, me included – it looked like the series had just decided to be derivative in a different way. The final result was more iterative than I expected, and more successful than I’d hoped. Forgotten Land is unmistakably Kirby where the fundamentals are concerned. It trades in the traditional side-scroller format for much larger open maps, and abilities are fewer overall but sequentially upgraded through some of the collectibles. Its secrets might be some of the most rewarding yet – most of the power upgrades are very cool and visually distinct, and freeing the caged Waddle Dees scattered throughout the stages has the side benefit of upgrading your hub area from a sad huddle of shacks to a thriving little town with shops and minigames on display. Kirby takes extremely well to the added plane of movement; the little puffball is lighter on his feet than ever, with the newly-added Witch Time (Kirby Time) quick-dodge mechanic letting you keep up with the familiar enemy roster’s own upgraded techniques. This game’s format transition from side-scrolling could have been awkward in a plethora of ways and they knocked it out of the park on their first try. And the aesthetics are razor-sharp. Forgotten Land’s stages mostly consist of overgrown or decayed commercial environments, but Kirby’s size relative to these places gives them a beautiful sense of faded grandeur, with the misty bridge above being my favorite of the bunch. This is one of the best-looking and performing games on the Switch, with barely a single hitch as Kirby dips and dives through it challenges – culminating in, yes, a postgame difficulty spike, whose ultimate boss might have the most memorably sinister intro in the series. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is just like its namesake, taking the best parts of its influences without losing its core identity. 5. Live a Live  Somebody must have wished upon a star to get this thing made. I’d heard about Live a Live for years – a 90’s-era JRPG with multiple protagonists and gameplay styles across several different eras, that could only be enjoyed in the West with emulation and translation patches. I thought it sounded neat, but never got around to trying it. So when Square-Enix excavated it from their back catalogue and gave it a full remake, I jumped on the chance to try it out at last, and my conclusion is that this game is ridiculous. It's innovative even for today, let alone 1994. The only reason I can think of why it wasn’t a genre-defining mega-classic was that the market back then wasn’t ready for it. “Different gameplay styles” is an understatement if anything. At its heart it’s a turn-based RPG with grid movement and attack patterns, similar to the Lunar series, but every chapter of Live a Live radically overhauls its aims, aesthetics, and storytelling style. The Prehistory chapter, being pre-language, is told entirely in emoticons and pantomime. Feudal Japan takes place over a single sprawling dungeon with a totally optional full-pacifist run that would later go on to influence Undertale. The contemporary era is a fighting game where your level 1 Ryu sendup brawls with a series of colorful bosses, learning their attacks for his own use as he goes on. In the Old West chapter, the camera lingers mournfully on the dusty plains outside a beleaguered tavern, and the Far Future chapter is an ensemble cast puzzler/horror thriller in the vein of Alien. Each one of these sections would be a decent indie game in their own right, and they’re given a fantastic graphical overhaul from their original pint-size sprite work. And the localization! The writing team had the time of their lives penning Live a Live’s English script, and it elevates the relatively simple stories and characterization of every scenario. The Old West’s protagonist is terse and bone-dry whereas the villain quotes Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian almost verbatim, and the Medieval Chapter’s dialogue is entirely in iambic pentameter. Mood, tone, writing, even gameplay – every part of Live a Live is unique and memorable in its own way, and the remake only emphasizes its strengths. It’s not perfect, with some chapters being weaker than others (the Near Future chapter meanders and is dragged down by a weak ENG voice cast, whereas the final chapter leans way too hard into random encounters), but overall it’s one of the best JRPG’s I’ve played in recent memory, and a much-deserved resurgence for a game that was decades ahead of its time. 4. Norco  ”I wanted to outlive you, but if just an echo of my memory haunts your lonely days, that will be enough.” Half of Norco’s story is spent playing as a woman with terminal cancer, as she runs errands through the eponymous New Orleans district in a last-effort bid to secure some money for her family. She can only make her way around town with a ride-sharing app, and every time you place a call, her paltry bank balance dwindles on her phone. If you check the phone’s messages, you can see an astronomical hospital bill that updates as often as her bank account decreases, as well as texts to her estranged daughter, plaintively asking her to call home. The texts are unanswered; the call will never come. A point-and-click adventure rendered in truly gorgeous pixel art, Norco joins other games like Kentucky Route Zero and Night in the Woods as a magical-realist tale about the corrosive influence of capitalism and its cast’s attempts to survive it. The district huddles under the shadow of the Norco Refinery, whose chemical processing sickens the population and poisons the soil, and the nameless protagonist has returned home after the death of her mother to find her brother estranged and the rest of the town tragically the same as she remembered. At one point early on, she reflects on the three floods that ran through her family home, and then envisions the fourth and final flood, which will destroy the house long after it’s been abandoned. In her backyard, the family’s helper android fixes up a beater pickup truck. A local mall is populated by a juvenile cult that seeks utopia in outer space, and the bayou is haunted by a sentient power source that may or may not be a wayward fragment of God. Kentucky Route Zero and NitW are two of the most profound games I’ve ever played – the former dryly eloquent, the latter irreverent and terse. Norco is just as text-heavy but with more literary flourish in its narration, in a way that sometimes feels self-conscious, but the character voices are strong and distinct, wistful and vulgar by turns. The narrative follows in much the same vein, tinging its human desperation with filthy, fantastical occurrences that don’t always click together but never fail to be memorable. Same with the gameplay – the point-and-click puzzling is simple and occasionally broken up by a somewhat baffling QTE-based combat system, at one point, you can take part in a shadow puppet show that has you steering a top-down boat in the bayou, narrated by a wrathful alligator whose shadow is made by a pair of clenching hands. It’s messy and wonderfully unique. As it approaches its conclusion, Norco’s surrealism takes over more and more of the narrative, and the ending is uncomfortably abrupt. But at its core, it’s a story about arbitrary acts of human kindness and cruelty. Families hurt each other for nothing more than the masochistic gratification of bringing one another pain, and just as suddenly dive in to save each other even though it destroys them. That core keeps Norco from being totally lost in its bizarre happenings, and in that way, too, it’s much like the other entries in this strange little sub-genre – desperate people holding on to one another as the floodwaters rise. 3. Ghost Song  ”A success. In this moment, always a success.” Ghost Song’s Kickstarter was the first to actually catch my attention, upon its debut a whopping 9 years ago. The pitch promised a moody Metroidvania in the vein of Fromsoft’s Souls series, and unfortunately, that space has become absolutely saturated in the years between the game’s pitch and its final release – it came out about a month ago and quicky vanished into the indie churn. But I remembered how it originally caught my eye, and gave it a spin day one. Of all the many, many Metroid-likes I’ve played, this is one of the closest homages to Metroid itself. The character’s resemblance to Samus is unmistakable, and the setting bears more than a few resemblances to Zebes, a barren moon knotty with secrets and derelict machinery. Some of the secrets are ludicrously well-hidden – the answer to one of the plot’s key mysteries is concealed in a corner of the map that you’re not even given any reason to think is accessible, behind several difficult jumps that require all the traversal upgrades at your disposal. The usual point-and-shoot combat is innovated by a simple but effective heat-buildup system, where your gun gains heat and loses effectiveness with continued use and increases the power of your melee attack, encouraging you to alternate between the two as you cool down. Weapon upgrades are varied and interesting, there’s plenty of neat accessories to change up your play style, and the painterly art style has an excellent soundtrack that’s heavy on mournful guitar licks and menacing synths. Ghost Song is solid overall, but for me, the writing made it exceptional. In its earlier builds, Ghost Song was apparently much closer to Souls plotwise, with the player character scavenging a lifeless world alone – you would be searching for the dispersed crew of a wrecked ship, only to find them all mutated and insane. In the final release, the ship’s crew is alive and well, and getting them off the moon becomes your central objective, gathering parts from the distant reaches of the environment and returning them to the base camp. Their dialogue updates with every part returned, and unlike the terse portentousness of Souls games, most of the dialogue is playfully baroque and philosophical, similar to Failbetter’s games or certain sequences from Kentucky Route Zero. A badly damaged android works to build herself a new body before she shuts down, fretting over the shape of her new nose and whether her habits and identity will change with her form. An incompetent inventor wants to make art but is hesitant to trade in her inventions for sculpture, because if she fails at something she wants to do, “it isn’t funny anymore.” An itinerant spaceman offhandedly confesses to being the one who destroyed the planet; later you can find him overlooking the blasted plain that used to house a bandshell, wistfully reminiscing about a childhood picnic he once spent there. The crashed spaceships’ AI’s are gentle, blustering, and for some reason believe the player character is one of them. All of this takes place in a setting where ghosts dwell in puddles, and the stars house leviathan worms that attract and devour the souls of the dead. It’s a beautiful contrast of the fantastical and the mundane. Ghost Song ultimately cares for its personal stakes more than the grandiose ones, and its conclusion can feel abrupt given its backstory and its setting. But despite its troubled development and belated release, it still managed to stand out in a field that had become far more cluttered since it was originally proposed. A success, in this and every moment. 2. Signalis  ACHTUNG. ACHTUNG. DU HAST ES VERSPROCHEN. I’ve been a horror fan ever since my dad made the perhaps ill-advised decision to let me watch Clive Barker’s Lords of Illusion at the age of ten. It can be a difficult genre to like – in my experience it’s especially vulnerable to trend-chasing, everyone trying to copy the Latest Popular Thing with the lowest budget possible. And this is especially true for horror games lately, a field that’s been clogged full of copycats, also-rans, “guilty coma dream” stories, and gossamer-thin Steam releases that exist mainly to sell tie-in merch and make some gawping putz on Youtube pull a stupid face. Konami’s tangibly desperate Silent Hill “revival” didn’t encourage me – just one more example of publishers today constantly retreating back into safe and familiar convention, something antithetical to the disquiet that good horror is meant to evoke. Signalis, which has been in development by a two-man team since 2014 and finally released in late October, is one of the greatest horror games of the last decade. A top-down sci-fi shooter with clear influences from the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill games, it nevertheless quickly becomes clear that Signalis has an identity all its own. The player controls military android Elster as she searches for someone on the derelict mining station of Sierpinski. Puzzles consist of finding various flavor of key to fit in various shape of lock, and the enemy roster is further complicated by everything’s apparent reluctance to stay dead; unless you set a fallen enemy on fire, there’s always a chance they’ll come back up on your next trip through a room. Most of the tension comes from a punishingly strict inventory limit. There are no jumpscares or aggravatingly overbearing soundtracks a la Dead Space; aside from the occasional discordant screech or burst of radio static, it’s oppressively quiet, and that reserved nature seeps into all its other aspects as well. The graphics are blocky PSX throwbacks that leave just enough to the imagination, interspersed with highly detailed character portraits and unnerving first-person exploration sections. The soundtrack consists of mournful keyboards and occasional snatches of licensed classical music. The characters take in their horrific circumstances with exhausted resignation. The cutscenes are interspersed with Evangelion-esque frames of German and Chinese text smeared across a bloodred screen, as though the terror the characters feel is banging its fists against the walls of the story, trying to get out. Throughout the exploration of Sierpinski, we get bits and pieces of the setting outside the station – it’s an original and compelling piece of worldbuilding that ironically unmoors the player further, because the science-fiction elements excuse and bulwark the fantastical, nightmarish occurrences on the station. Cancerous, insane androids wander the corridors; the miners predictably dug too deep. But time and space become more fragmented as Elster delves deeper (the Nowhere sequences from Silent Hill are predictably homaged), and we’re left wondering how much of what we see is actually unreal and how much is excusable by the mechanics of the setting. In other words, Signalis threads the needle of depicting nightmarish events without descending into “it was all a dream” allegory, something that precious few stories can actually claim. Underneath all the genre trappings is a core plot that’s achingly relatable and personal; Elster shows little emotion during her descent into the planet, but Signalis in the end is about its characters more than its events, and conveys that very well. The inventory limit can chafe, there’s a lot of backtracking, and the ending requirements are frustratingly opaque. But overall Signalis is a triumph, a piece of horror that dodges every pitfall and cliché that’s frustrated the genre in recent years and presents something thrillingly new. If there’s any justice, it’ll be talked up and referenced for a long time to come. 1. Elden Ring  ”The way ahead is pleasingly simple.” Of the first ten hours I spent in Elden Ring, at least two of them were spent fighting the same three enemies. I was under-leveled, under-equipped, and my reflexes were not nearly up to par. I might as well have been trying to kill a tiger with a toothpick. And throughout my many, many restarts, Elden Ring quietly stood by until I was ready to get on with things. Elden Ring is a magnum opus, the culmination of ten years of work and inspiration by one of gaming’s most influential and creative developers. Every idea that Fromsoft and Hidetaka Miyazaki ever had found a place somewhere in the massive, messy expanse of the Lands Between. It’s breathtaking, it’s immersive, and most importantly, it’s quiet. Elden Ring shoves you into this huge and hostile world and then has the confidence to leave you alone in it, and this year, there were so many games where I so badly wanted to just be left alone. There’s going to be a lot of posts made on this game already and I don’t want to be redundant, but one point I do want to make is this: Fromsoft’s environments are about their enemies as much as their assets, and Elden Ring’s overworld is made unique not just by the architecture by what you encounter there. I remember one totally unremarkable canyon because I spend a good half hour wading through a skirmish between puppet monsters and magic ghosts to get to the other side. One of the many cave systems is unique because it happens to house the angriest bear in the world. The more willing you are to take on Elden Ring’s challenges, the richer its world becomes; you remember its locales not just by the scenery but by the blood you’ve spilled there. And if you don’t want to engage and have the skills or the kit to tear through its challenges, then in finest Fromsoft tradition, a 90-hour experience can be chopped down to five as you gallop from one end of the massive map to the other, slaughtering everything that isn’t smart enough to clear the path. Amidst all these “frictionless” experiences, Elden Ring gave me plenty of friction on my first time around, and that made it stand out all the more in retrospect. One of my favorite experiences in games period was in the original Dark Souls, when I first discovered Ash Lake – dropping down through a grueling secret area that was basically one giant elevator shaft to find this enormous vista, heralded by its very own background music. Elden Ring dropped similar sights on me every six hours or so. The elevator to Siofra River, the transcendently repulsive tour of Caelid, and even the more-maligned endgame northern wilds – at least at night, when everything’s turned bone-white and marked by herds of roaming ghosts. It’s all endlessly hostile, and always guiding you towards something new. There are flaws, as there will always be for an undertaking of this scope. The crafting and upgrade systems are half-baked. The difficulty in the last few areas felt overtuned even by my generous standards. The plot’s grand arc works fine but becomes increasingly less coherent as you get into the fine details, and the quest requirements are often impenetrably opaque. But all of those issues have faded with time, and instead I remember those vistas and everything they offered, and the fact that I was able to enjoy them in silence and at my own pace. The tarnish fades. The gold remains. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Dec 11, 2022 |
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Dec 11, 2022 21:39
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 GOAT
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Dec 11, 2022 22:28
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tithin posted:
Good choice OP
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Dec 11, 2022 22:29
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#5: Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous. It's a hot mess of a RPG but what a mess. #4: Queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor. You keep doing your thing, Jeff Vogel. The dream of the 1990's RPG is alive at Spiderweb Software #3: Stray. The whole game was just a vibe but what a vibe #2: Pentiment. Josh Sawyer's Fresco Elysium BUT #1: Dwarf Fortress, because nothing compares Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Dec 12, 2022 |
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Dec 12, 2022 01:47
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I've played a decent amount of good (and not so good, but fun) games this year, but as I get older I really only get super involved in the narrative-focused ones instead; as such, my only GOTY candidates I have are: 2. Pentiment  It's been described as Josh Sawyer's Disco Elysium, but as I've barely played Disco Elysium besides getting myself killed in the first five minutes  (blasphemy, I know) it stands on its own. The dialogue is occasionally meandering, and the text speed could be a bit faster, but the town of Kiersau is quite endearing, even if you have no prior knowledge of the time period. Meeting the characters, seeing the town (and them) change depending on how you play, and also slowly peeling apart the layers of both the player character and the mystery is quite a narrative experience and I enjoyed it a lot. There's definitely no wrong choices, although the game is fairly lengthy (10-15 hrs) so you may not be able to or want to see them all. The art is great, and while there's few musical numbers the few that do sound out definitely add to the experience. Josh Sawyer was one of the main directors for Fallout: New Vegas, lauded for its narrative and it really shows here. 1. Signalis  Normally I'm not much of a horror game person, as I'm not good with gore or scares. However, Signalis is just such an excellent experience it trumps that for me. A two-person dev project clearly heavily inspired by Silent Hill, Signalis is a mix of eldritch and sci-fi that references H.P. Lovecraft, among others, in your journey to find the main character's lost dreams. As you wander through the dark corridors, you slowly get enough bits and bobs of information to create your own interpretation of what is going on. There's the usual keys upon keys upon keys gameplay from Silent Hill/Resident Evil, but the puzzles are generally well crafted. I will say the inventory limit is a bit restrictive, and the middle section can be quite irritating since there is no map. Sound design is quite excellent - OST available here https://signalis-ost.bandcamp.com/album/signalis-original-soundtrack (with the caveat there's some minor spoilers in track names), with the few flashes of classical music meshing quite well. Art is pixel and anime-inspired, and overall is good and functional (although doors can be hard to see sometimes). Overall it's quite a triumph for a two-person team and probably the best horror game I've seen/played in years. RoyalScion fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Dec 12, 2022 |
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Dec 12, 2022 04:09
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I just beat Pentiment which I started cause people on the forums kept talking about it. Not only has it completely upended my top 10 list, but I think it's way better than Disco Elysium which everyone keeps comparing it to (of course I also didn't love Disco Elysium as much as many others did).
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Dec 12, 2022 05:06
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Oxxidation posted:Honorary mention to ..... Pentiment, a brilliant passion project that I wasn’t able to finish RoyalScion posted:2. Pentiment Well, the thread is already living up to its purpose by introducing me to a new game I guess I need to add to my list of things I need to play, if only to better understand how you were both wrong* for putting it above Pentiment! * Objectively** wrong! ** Subjectively speaking Edit: But seriously, Signalis went under my radar, looking forward to checking it out! Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Dec 12, 2022 |
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Dec 12, 2022 05:35
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I don’t know why it was a complete no show at the VGAs. It deserved some recognition. Might be my favorite game this year.
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Dec 12, 2022 05:55
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 My journey into TOME began with a desire to find a classic roguelike that actually clicked with me, and I went through probably a dozen before finding this one. Boy did it ever click with me. It turned out the thing I was really looking for in a roguelike was the ability to make proper builds, to spend points in talent trees, and TOME absolutely showers you in talent trees and build choices. Between the unique, class-specific trees that define what you can do and what you're good at, and the more generic ones shared between class archetypes or found through play that amplify what you're already good at, the build variation in TOME is utterly mindboggling. Not to mention all of the racial choices you can make to add another layer of complexity on top of things. Want to be an ogre rogue who specializes in throwing poison daggers? Go for it. Want to be a skeleton berserker? Take your bones to the battlefield. Want to be a tiny psionic furry? Not sure why you would, but the choice is there. Add to this a host of difficulty options (some to make it easier, some to make it harder) along with a huge number of unlockables that cover races, classes, individual talent trees, and cosmetics, and there's an absolute ton to do and a million ways to approach it. Granted, the game isn't perfect: while the individual level layouts are randomized, the overworld isn't, and every character tends to go through the same places in more or less the same order. Also, it's not exactly pretty; there are definitely roguelikes that look a lot better than this one. Still, if you can get past the ugly appearance, there's an utterly colossal world and variety of characters waiting for you.  I played Wacraft III and Frozen Throne back when they released, but my time was largely spent on custom maps and multiplayer; I simply wasn't skilled enough at the campaign to get very far without cheats. Earlier this year, however, I discovered that they actually added a slightly easier difficulty at some point that turned to be more or less ideal for me, and I dove in. The base campaign was fun enough, but it was in the expansion that the game really came alive. The Frozen Throne is, without a doubt, the best RTS campaign ever made. Where the original campaign got a bit samey, the sheer variety of mission types in TFT is astounding. Additionally, the races aren't just carried over from the base game, but each get their own specific twist: instead of the Night Elves, you play as the Sentinels with their own specific units; instead of the Humans, you play as the Blood Elves with their own, and so on. Not to mention the brief uses of the Naga as nearly their own separate race with their own tech tree. TFT takes the hero-focused design of the base game and runs wild with it, with an enormous variety of ability-laden heroes and units. Every unit, every character, every hero is dripping with personality and individuality, and even on the easiest difficulty, massing a single type of unit will only get you so far. It encourages you to experiment, to try out different army compositions, to explore hero interactions again and again. Not to mention the enormous missions that reward exploration with sidequests and bonus items for your heroes to become even stronger. As I didn't play the Reforged edition, the game looks somewhat dated, but there's enough of a classic Warcraft nerd in me to appreciate the wonky proportions, the low-res textures, and the middling voice acting. The story, too, doesn't merit a ton of discussion, but the campaign is still filled with enough thrilling moments (Arthas and Anub'arak's journey through the underground, Maiev's escape from the Tomb of Sargeras, and of course the climactic battle between Arthas and Illidan) to keep me entertained throughout. I know I'm late to the party, but goddamn is TFT good.  Unlike the above, Chrono Cross is a game I've played before, and several times at that. I took the rerelease this year as an opportunity to play through it again, and while that rerelease isn't very good (plagued with constant slowdown and an ugly filter that you can thankfully disable) I still immensely enjoyed my time with it due to the strength of the game on its own. No, it isn't as tightly designed as Trigger. Yes, the accent filter is stupid. Yes, there are unnecessary characters. Beyond those caveats, however, is one of the best looking, best sounding, and best playing JRPGs I've ever experienced. The tropical archipelago of El Nido is a phenomenal setting, and the art direction brings it to life in an incredible way. Even those who malign the game can't help but admit that the soundtrack is stellar, supplying an often melancholy mood to what is really a melancholy game. Chrono Cross takes place in a world where awful things have already happened, are currently happening, and will happen again; while you don't grasp the true extent of the inevitability of death at the start of the game, every new revelation just drives home how utterly hosed you and all of existence are. People will say that the story is terrible, that it's an awful sequel to Trigger, that it's convoluted for convoluted's sake, and all of the above are wrong. The story of the game is born from a single question: what happened to Schala at the end of Chrono Trigger? Her fate, where she is, and what she's doing serve as the core of the game; extending from that centerpiece are the myriad threads that the game explores. There are just so many threads that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to arrange them into a proper timeline, but I would argue that that's largely the point. Chrono Cross is a game about the dissolution of time and identity, where people aren't who they seem to be, places exist where and when they shouldn't, and timelines stop and start in unnatural ways; is it any wonder that it's difficult to grasp the totality of all the moving parts? Worlds upon worlds and timelines upon timelines? And yet, through it all, you defy fate and inevitability and carve your own destiny into the timeline. Plus, Starky exists, so how can you really get mad at the game?  My husband has insisted throughout our entire relationship that I should play these games, and it was only last year that I finally gave in and started them. Turns out he was right and I should have played them way, way sooner. I'm currently on the fifth game, but it was the finale of the initial trilogy that holds a special place for me. Specifically, the final case of the third game, that serves as an absolute culmination of everything that they had been working toward. Character storylines that had been built up over three games and dozens of hours finally weave together in ways I never expected. Every major character, even the prosecution, end up coming together to solve a massive mystery that spanned the whole trilogy, and the final revelations left me absolutely stunned. Even beyond that final case, however, the games are just fantastic. Cleverly written and animated characters abound, mysteries unfold in entertaining if unrealistic ways, every rule of the court is broken at least twice. Ace Attorney is an absolutely delightful series full of delightful moments and characters, and I was utterly depressed to learn that the fourth game represented such a massive shift on that front. (it's coming back into its own, but I miss Maya so much!!!!) I'm sure people have gushed about these games a ton over the years, and now I totally understand why. Special shoutouts to Godot, who despite seeming like a boring rear end in a top hat in his introduction is one of my favorite characters of all time now.  Warframe is another game that I've played off and on for awhile, but it was only this year that the game really clicked with me. It is impenetrable, adding layer after layer of impossible to understand mechanics, with some of the most absurd grind I've encountered in a game, and yet for all of August I couldn't stop playing and clocked a couple hundred hours into it. Having people around I could constantly pepper with questions about this mechanic or that helped immensely, and even hundreds of hours in I still have to check the official wiki to figure poo poo out. None of that matters because the game is just so goddamn fun. A third-person shooter at its core, Digital Extremes have fine-tuned the movement and combat to absolute perfection. Your characters, the titular 'warframes', are commonly described by the community as 'space ninjas', and there's some truth to that in terms of the agility your frames possess. Double jumping, gliding, flipping, leaping all over the place, it's a frenetic but perfectly controllable experience. Swarms of deadly enemies can be taken down with an honestly staggering number of guns, melee weapons, and frame abilities, comboed together in increasingly complex and clever ways. The mission variety is ever-increasing with extremely frequent and comprehensive updates, and the sheer volume of Things To Do can certainly be overwhelming. Not to mention just how much you can do to continually eke out a percent of extra performance from your frame, and be rewarded for it through completion of increasingly difficult objectives. I would also be remiss if I didn't mention what may be the most surprisingly good aspect of the game: the story. It doesn't start out as anything special, and I didn't expect it really to grow beyond the most basic backdrop for killing thousands of enemies and vacuuming up loot. Somewhere around halfway through, however, things start to happen. Characters coalesce, events play out, and you start to realize there's a method to the madness. And, somewhere between thirty to fifty hours in depending on how focused you've been on progressing, you hit what is for my money one of the most incredible revelations in a video game, and you realize you've only just started. You mention That Moment to another Warframe player, and they'll nod in understanding, and you desperately wish you could tell people about it, but even talking around it spoils an event that deserves to be experienced organically.  I played Crypt of the Necrodancer when it released back in 2015, devoured it, fell in love, and then dropped it for a few years. Earlier this year, they released their second DLC Synchrony, and I picked it up again and goddamn if this still isn't one of the most fun games ever made. A rhythm-based roguelike with some incredible tunes, massive item and character variety, dripping charm from every sound and sprite, Necrodancer is a masterwork. I wouldn't have put it on my list just for that DLC, however. I discovered an additional difficulty mode, called Mystery Mode, and refused to play any other game until I clear a run. In Mystery Mode, every single item, monster, and object is replaced with a question mark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6am0o28yk_0 This is a video from one of my failed attempts that I think gives a good example of how it plays out. You can only discover what items you find through experimentation, and you can only identify monsters through the way they move, certain sounds, and how much health they have. It turns the game upside down in an incredibly fun way, and clearing a Mystery Mode run is one of my all time proudest gaming achievements. I'd love to do it again but on a character that dies on missing a beat, but that's going to be tougher.  Two JRPGs I played this year that end with 3, and it was exceptionally difficult ranking them. I'm sure a lot of other people are going to talk about Xenoblade 3, so I won't go into too much detail. It's just a fantastic game with an incredibly fun core cast, generally satisfying (if a little bit repetitive) combat, a story that left me guessing for dozens of hours, and some incredibly beautiful vistas. I don't know how Monolith make such gorgeous environments, but they're amazing at it. I just had a great time the whole way through, collected all the bonus classes, did all the sidequests and generally just 100%d the game, which is pretty rare for me. I didn't want to put it down and I didn't even want it to end when the credits rolled. Top tier gaming.  This was the other JRPG, and it just edged out Xenoblade on the pure strength of its themes. I played the Persona series backwards starting with 5, and I utterly hated 4. Apart from the overall mystery, nothing about it appealed to me whatsoever, and I ended up just cheating through the immensely boring gameplay to see the end of the story. I was worried 3 would be a similar scenario, that the gameplay would be just so outdated that I would loathe playing it, but I could not have been more wrong. It doesn't have all the quality of life of 5 to be sure, and Tartarus wasn't really the most thrilling dungeon, but everything else about the game more than made up for those small shortcomings. Persona 3 chose its theme in death, and sticks to it every step of the way. Everything revolves around death from the first moment seeing people turn into coffins, shooting yourself in the head to summon demons, and into the final scenes of the game. Everything is about death, dying, and persisting in the face of that inevitability. Tack onto that a typically amazing Persona soundtrack, a compelling cast including a very, very good dog, and you have one of my all time favorite JRPGs. P5R edges it out for me overall but gently caress if 3FES wasn't a masterpiece.  Another game that I think will appear on a lot of lists and I don't think I need to talk too much about. It's Elden Ring, y'all. It's a Souls game brought to an open world, and it could hardly have been done better. Usually I find open worlds aimless and get bored (I still haven't played more than a couple hours of Breath of the Wild) but Elden Ring's world is massive but not empty and your goals open but not vague. You always know where you can go to continue progressing, but you're rewarded for exploring every nook and cranny with items, weapons, armor, and bosses. There is perhaps an argument to be made that there's too much content, that there is some overuse of the same boss in multiple places, but it never bothered me. Once I beat the game with my first character, I instantly rolled a new one to try out different things, and rare is the game that can get me to do that; rarer still is the game that can get me to do that a third time, but Elden Ring holds that honor. I can't wait for inevitable DLC to give me an excuse to dive back into this incredible world. The rusted anchor is the GOAT btw.  For most of the year, I assumed that Elden Ring would easily take my top spot, just due to its overwhelming quality and how much fun I had with it. Nothing could compare to that, right? Until a friend suggested a little game called Tactical Nexus to me, and I have since lost hundreds upon hundreds of hours to this game. I don't even know where to begin with describing it. Its steam page barely describes how the actual game plays, and you won't really understand unless you try it for yourself. At its heart I guess it's a puzzle game disguised as a series of RPGs. Every puzzle is a tower consisting of multiple floors covered with static enemies that don't move and act more as obstacles, and your task is to get to the end. You have health, attack, and defense, and combat happens automatically when you bump into an enemy, comparing your stats vs theirs to decide who wins and how much health you lose in the process. Thus, your health is the primary resource you spend on working through the tower to get items to heal you or boost your stats, but even that isn't as simple as it seems, as you can often find multipliers to how much experience you receive or how much health potions give you, so you're incentivized to explore, to fight as little as possible and lose as little health as you can until you collect those multipliers. On top of this is the scoring system, where you get a final score based on your health, your level, and your stats. High enough scores award you with medals that you can then spend in other towers to gain items from the start to give you additional stats and thus change your route through the tower, and even unlock additional floors that you couldn't ever get enough stats to access without those medals. Even when you grasp that much, every new batch of towers introduces some new mechanic, like digging tools that you get limited quantities of that can allow you to bypass enemies with clever usage, or consumable orbs that let you swap places with items or enemies or swap your attack and defense, and the list goes on. Tactical Nexus is one of the most maddeningly complex games I've ever encountered and I can't stop playing it. I'll do the same tower repeatedly, changing some little thing about my routing to try and eke out a slightly higher score to nudge me into the next medal tier, which can be quite an undertaking as some of these towers can take multiple hours to clear even once, even when you know where you're going. It's a black hole of time and I hate it and I can't stop playing. gently caress this piece of poo poo game. Don't play Tactical Nexus. Stay away. My list, for ease of reference 10. Tales of Maj'Eyal 9. Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne 8. Chrono Cross 7. Ace Attorney 3 6. Warframe 5. Crypt of the Necrodancer 4. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 3. Persona 3 FES 2. Elden Ring 1. Tactical Nexus
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Dec 12, 2022 07:30
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10. Rune Factory 5 I'm a sucker for farming games. I haven't played Harvestella so maybe it would have taken this slot, but RF5 while a step down from 4 is still a fun, relaxing game. 9. Neon White Addictive, time attack fps goodness. An excellent intro to speed running and what makes it fun. 8. Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker My drug of choice seven years running and it's only gotten better. 7. Pillars of Eternity 2 (Obsidian 2018) Replayed this as part of a Game of the Month club the Auspol discord does. I really love this game and it's iteration of RTWP. I also enjoy the writing a lot more than most seem to. I finally knocked off the Royal Deadfire Company route, probably the most overtly evil route in the game, and it was. Uncomfortable. The game is very good at making you feel like a piece of poo poo when you do lovely things. 6. Doom 2 (ID Software 1994) Another GotM entry, we had a good time running a Doom 2 tournament. I took the time to beat it on Ultra violence for the first time since I was a kid and the game holds up shockingly well, admittedly with the modernisation touches added by gzdoom. If you've somehow never played this, it's really worth taking a couple of day to. I completely washed out on the tournament though I did win the picking comp. 5. Dwarf Fortress (Bay 12 Games ASCII 2007 Steam 2022) Dwarf Fortress isnt why I joined SA, but it was one of the things that got me posting instead of just lurking gbs photoshop threads. I played it a bit years and years ago, but have long since lost the skill to parse the original's controls and ascii. The Steam version modern UI makes the game mucyh more approachable and it's been great fun running progressively longer lasting forts the past week. I'm also extremely happy it's been such a success. Toady and his brother have given so much to the world for free they really deserve enough success they don't have to worry about medical bills. Admittedly so does everyone, but if you give that much to the world especially so. 4. Grounded (Obsidian 2022 Early Access:2020) Obsidian's third entry on this list and a major departure for them. This was simply a good fun survival crafting game with an adorable setting (legally distinct Honey I Shrunk the Kids) and it was fun to play with a friend. I really recommend it to anyone who likes playing these sorts of games, especially with friends. The aesthetic is great and the yard is full of secrets to find that make exploration very rewarding.  3. Pentiment (Obsidian 2022) Great writing, great art, unique presentation and an fascinating deeply research setting combines to make the best adventure game in a year stacked with great ones (Citizen Sleeper and NORCO were also contenders for this list) and Obsidian's third entry on the list. Game hit me hard emotionally and got me deeply invested in it's world. My Andreas wasn't perfect but he tried and the end result was one I felt made things better overall even if it was somewhat bittersweet. 2. Pokemon Scarlet (Gamefreak 2022) In spite of the myriad technical issues I enjoyed this game a lot, much more than any Pokemon game since I was a child. The open world was handled really well and being able to just go after high level gyms or pokemon was a joy. I ended using a huige variety of pokemon compared to normal as when i overleveled something it was an excuse to go build a new more level appropriate team. The writing was also really good and endearing. Team Star is great, but probably as far as they should push the sympathetic antagonist teams, kinda hope the next game has some real assholes. Nemona having a single braincell and it's the same one Goku has made for a hilarious rival and Clavell was very funny. Also really liked the designs for pokemon and trainers. Not as good as the high water mark Alola set design wise but it's up there. 1. Elden Ring (FROM Software 2022) One of the most hyped games ever and it met if not exceeded expectations. FROM loving showed the entire open world genre what it should be but has failed to even approach in decades. I literally forgot Forbidden West had released and I'd played it cause of Elden Ring just completely obsoleting it when it came out some eight days later. A Sometimes Food fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Dec 30, 2022 |
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Dec 12, 2022 10:06
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1. Elden Ring Big game, big fun, Big Souls. 2. Vampire Survivors Defined a genre, and for 3 dollars literally unbeatable. 3. Victoria 3 The first Grand Economy game, in its third iteration. Number go up, to 3. 4. Dwarf Fortress Thank you Rarity for waiting for the release, so I can get several failed forts in. Strong contender for 2023. 5 Terra Inivicta Still in early access but already addicting with its blend of turn and real time based, mix of X-Com and grand strategy and bolted on solar system simulator. Also strong contender for 2023! 6. Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous The definitive edition came out, the game is gigantic enough already! Working on my fifth playthrough. 7. Cyberpunk 2077 My second playthrough was this year, with tons of mods was fun as hell. It still looks awesome. 8. Assassins Creed Valhalla Up to the very end a very enjoyable open-world murder-romp, loses it in the permanent protagonist switch. 9. Forza Horizon 5 Drifting up and down the volcano, tuning super-cars into ralley monsters. The fun is selective but still a weekly driver.
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Dec 12, 2022 10:23
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What do you know, my list is actually, like, half current! Assuming you count me waiting a year to play a game on Steam that came out in 2021 on EGS as having come out this year. Which I do. Anyway, here's some games, and some songs from those games, because I like video game music. I generally want to do different vibes with each one but I kinda just go with my heart on some of them. Maybe next year I'll do some fancy graphics as well, who knows? Also apologies on a couple since certain companies are annoyingly proactive about their takedowns so I may have had to locate some less-than-perfect uploads. Honorable mentions: Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel. gently caress man I can't believe I'm just fully back on board with this stupid game now. I was on and off with Duel Links over the years, playing the Steam client but the phone game-yness of it always felt bad. But, thanks to Duel Links, I was at least familiar enough with some of the more modern concepts that I didn't feel like a complete fish out of water getting back in like a lot of people did earlier in the year. I had a leg up on a lot of the people who quit playing in the DM era of 02-05 like myself, because I actually knew how to do things like Pendulum Summon! Not that I would ever do such a thing. Pendulum decks are for perverts. Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes. I'm not a Musou guy, having only really gotten into Hyrule Warriors, and I feel I should stress that, after finishing each house one time (gently caress church route), and sitting through a good chunk of The Discourse, I am beyond sick of Three Houses, so I didn't expect to enjoy this game as much as I did. But I did kinda fall off hard about 2/3 through Scarlet Blaze and have tried picking it back up a couple of times, and just haven't been feeling it. So I figure an HM is warranted. Cool game, actually does some really interesting stuff with the story and characters, but it is still a Musou at the end of the day. #10 - Xenoblade Chronicles 2 [2017] 1 | 2 | 3 I have very mixed feelings on Xenoblade 2. I wrote an essay about it in the Xenoblade thread a few months ago, so I'll keep this bit short. It's a game that has good things in it, and I liked parts of it. But I am also the type of person who plays games somewhat slowly, and I'm going to be honest I did not play many more than 10 this year. If I had, I would not be talking about XB2 here. But, I had to see what it was, and I ended up liking it in the end. But man was it a struggle at points. #9 - Bowser's Fury [2021] 1 | 2 | 3 Not really much to say on this one. It's a pretty stock-standard little Mario experience with a neat gimmick or two. I like 3D World a whole lot and using that engine for a miniature Odyssey-esque expansion is a really good value add for a 3D World re-release (which I didn't actually play since I'd already done so on Wii U. My brother bought this one.) #8 - Torna - The Golden Country [2018] 1 | 2 | 3 For years I'd heard about how Xenoblade 2 was incredibly divisive but everybody seemed to agree that Torna, its DLC released a year later, was almost unanimously adored. I definitely get it. Torna fixes so many of my issues with the base game and overhauls the combat I never really got used to and makes it both more active and more understandable. There are fewer needless mechanics bogging it down, less UI clutter, and an overall increased pace to it that felt a lot more satisfying to engage with. That's not to say it was perfect, it still has a few lingering issues, but I generally enjoyed it much more. As far as the non-gameplay bits go, the story, characters, and writing were likewise leaps and bounds better. There's a drastically reduced quotient of "unfunny anime hijinks" and I say that as a big weeb who loves me some anime and JRPGs. The biggest problem with it story-wise are it being locked to a pre-determined event in the main game's chronology, meaning they couldn't deviate from the villain of 2, since he was present then as well, and as I mention in the post I linked above, I very much did not like him. That doesn't really change here. Still, despite the "Xenoblade 2-eyness" of it, they seemingly took a lot of fan feedback into consideration and did what they could with the game they were working with to make a largely much better experience. #7 - Pokemon Legends: Arceus [2022] 1 | 2 | 3 This is absolutely not unique to me but I've been in and out of love with Pokemon for awhile. I was pretty disappointed and annoyed with Gen 5 when I played it back in the day, and ever since I kinda realized "Maybe... I don't need to play every single one of these." And so ever since, if the game has things that interest me, I'll pick it up. If it doesn't, I won't bother. I'm not expecting radical change in this series at this point and have just sort of accepted it's going to be stagnant for as long as they think they can get away with (which is seemingly forever), and so when Legends Arceus gets announced, it's a genuine surprise to me. Early footage looked a bit wack, but as it came closer to release, people started to realize "Oh man... is this game... actually kinda cool?" And it is! It's about a decade overdue, sure, but it's a genuinely cool new spin on the formula, and I loved being able to actually CATCH them now. The story was, while not anything particularly outstanding, still more daring and creative than anything the main games have done in awhile. Lot of cool characters, a few interesting new Pokemon (Sneasler and Hisuian Zoroark are two of my new favorites). Just in general there's a lot to like here. I haven't played Scarlet/Violet and I know there's a bit of influence from Legends in there, but since that was being developed in the same timeframe, I'm hoping the next entries that are starting development post-Legends will incorporate more of what makes that game so fun. Or just do a sequel set in a different region's history, that works too! #6 - Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition [2020/(original: 2012)] 1 | 2 | 3 Yes, Xenoblade takes up 3 spots on my list. And yet none of them are Xenoblade 3! Funny how that works. I'm going to be real here. This is my second favorite video game of all time. It has been since the original came out in 2012 (in the US anyway). I feel comfortable listing a replay of it here because I went ham on it this time. First time through, I didn't complete Colony 6. I didn't do anywhere near every sidequest. I only discovered there were extra Skill Trees at the very end of the game. I had spent most of the game with a single party formation and had no Affinity between anybody but Shulk, Riki, and Dunban (plus Shulk and Reyn since they spend so much of the early game together). This replay, which I admittedly started but dropped off back in 2020, I got about as close to 100% as I was willing to bother with. Finished the collectapedia, maxed out both Affinity Charts, got all the Skill Trees, rebuilt Colony 6, etc. All while re-experiencing (most of) the story I adored for the first time in a decade. I love this game. When I hear people dismiss the Xenoblade series because X was a weird outlier and 2 was an embarrassing horny romcom anime, it genuinely saddens me that they're also including the first game in that. I'm hoping the massive critical acclaim 3 has gotten will inspire more people to check out the first one, because I would genuinely say it's a masterpiece. There's also the Future Connected extra story. It's fun. It's nowhere near as significant an addition as Torna is to XB2, I feel. It mostly just serves as an epilogue to give Melia a bit more closure after things kind of go off the rails for the High Entia and the main plot can't really afford to take that detour at that point. So while FC was nice it was mostly inconsequential other than the Melia stuff. #5 - Yakuza 5 [2020/(original: 2015)] 1 | 2 | 3 My gradual journey through Yakuza continued with Y5 this year. I had some issues with this one while I was playing it. There was a lot about the story that just... lost me until the final hours when everything was tied together again. But still, I had a lot of fun in the various cities as different characters. Kiryu's new life as a taxi driver in Nagasugai named Suzuki, trying to fly under the radar only to get caught up in the underground street racing scene was a good way to start the game. I was a bit annoyed to see Saejima back in prison, repeating the escape plot beat from 4, but ending up in a small mountain hunting town in way up in Hokkaido helping the local hunters deal with an enormous bear that had been terrifying them for years was a nice twist on things. Haruka's budding idol career was a fun bit of combat-free gameplay. New character Shinada has a baseball subplot that I did not play because I didn't like the batting cages minigame. Akiyama is also present. And of course, all of them eventually get dragged into Tojo clan drama, for one reason or another. The way the game wrapped up was both satisfying and interesting, and I'm planning to start up Y6 soon next year to see where they take things after the ending of 5. Also, Shinada ftw. I may not have done his subplot but his involvement in the main story was probably the best part of the game. Aside from Akiyama's combat; holy poo poo juggling dudes with air kicks like Sanji from One Piece was so much fun. With both the gameplay and the story, you can very much feel that Yakuza 0 was the next game they made after this, because they're really hitting their stride in a lot of areas, it's just that Y5 was a bit too ambitious and winds up bogging them down a bit. Still, ended up being a great experience by the end. #4 - Hitman 3 [2022/(EGS release: 2021)] 1 | 2 Hitman is good. I like Hitman. Assassinating rich and influential scumbags will never get old. I know people are probably thinking IOI are going to change things up when they return to the series after their James Bond project, but I hope they manage to keep the straightfaced clockwork lunacy of these games. It's so much fun. My only real gripes with 3 are I wasn't a big fan of the Berlin level, and the story, which had been fairly interesting in 2 and the later stages of 1, got a bit up its own rear end by the end. But hey, they earned it. Excellent trilogy. #3 - Triangle Strategy [2022] 1 | 2 | 3 This sits in that category of game that would just live rent-free inside my head pretty much from announcement to release, along with Persona 5 and Dragon Quest 11. I was so insanely hyped. I've heard some Tactics Ogre/FFT purists dismiss this one but everything it was doing just worked perfectly for me. The 3-way conflict, the choices and branching story paths (and not always being able to get the outcome you want, depending how you play!), the satisfying tactics gameplay and probably most obviously, the presentation. All just chef's kiss fantastic. I definitely hope this genre gets the HD2D treatment again in the future, not necessarily another one in this world, but something of a similar tone would be wonderful. I really loved just about everything this game had to offer, with only a few minor issues here and there. If you have any love for political dramas and tactics RPGs, give this a look. #2 - Sonic Frontiers [2022] 1 | 2 | 3 If I'm being completely honest, I think Triangle Strategy probably should take this spot based purely on the quality of the games alone. But the narrative of Sonic finally getting a big W for the first time in a long time (not counting Mania) pushes it over the edge for me. It's such a good feeling to play a fun, well made 3d Sonic game that maybe not everybody loves but most people will at least agree is a massive step in the right direction for the series. Like with Pokemon Legends earlier in the list, I think Frontiers does a lot of Open World Video Game Tropes that people have moved past or gotten sick of after years of Ubisoft's blueprint dominating so much of the industry, but the thing to keep in mind about franchises like Sonic, Pokemon, and Zelda is... they can kinda get away with it because of what they are. It turns out, even if your open world is just a vaguely pleasant cloudy green field with some cliffs and patches of woods, or a big desert separated by some canyons, it's still fun as gently caress to run around it as Sonic the Hedgehog, because he's Sonic the Hedgehog. The Cyberspace levels are probably among the most common complaints, specifically the 2D ones, and... yeah I kinda can't defend them. They just feel wrong to me. The 3D Cyberspace levels are good, nothing on the level of the original Boost Trilogy's best stuff, but certainly a step above Forces. The open world combat is bizarrely engaging. I've been a big proponent of the opinion that normal enemies in Sonic should never have health bars. However, giving Sonic a bunch of different attacks and abilities and tuning enemy encounters around that stuff (or not, in many cases, and letting you flatten them completely) is a fun alternative. Translating that moveset over to the incredible spectacle boss fights at the end of each island feels like such an awesome power trip, and by far the best incarnation of Super Sonic in 3D in history. Just for the love of god don't forget you have a Parry, as useless as it might seem for most of the game. I never fell victim to this, but I've seen a number of people do so and it hurts to watch. The main story plays it pretty safe, barring two big points that being the developments with Eggman and Sage, as well as the revelation of the origins of the Chaos Emeralds, Chaos from SA1, and the Chao. However, in that safety, Ian Flynn, the lead writer and main creative force behind the last 16 years of Sonic comics, makes a point to build up the main cast of Sonic, Tails, Amy, and Knuckles. With a lot of small conversations around the maps, some optional, the four of them are fleshed out in ways the games haven't seen practically since Adventure 2. With the recent announcement that they're going to be working on the game post-launch for awhile, adding new content and fixing issues (hopefully like the game's absolutely gnarly pop-in), as well as playable characters besides Sonic, I'm absolutely looking forward to where things go from here. #1 - Live A Live [2022/(original: 1994)] 1 | 2 | 3 And here it is. The game almost nobody saw coming. An HD2D remake of a Japan only Super Famicom JRPG that seemingly nobody but hardcores who went digging deep in the emulation/fan translation mines spoke of. If you aren't aware of what this game is, think of it as the original Octopath Traveler. A game split into a series of seven vignettes, each starring a different character, and each taking place in a different time period. Ranging from Prehistoric cavemen fighting extinct beasts and dinosaurs while grunting and pantomiming to each other, all the way to the far flung future, with a sci-fi horror plot starring a robot on a spaceship. Each story and character has their own unique gimmicks to them, and no two chapters are alike in the way you progress through them. The only true commonality between them is a shared battle system, taking place on a 7x7 grid, with each player character and enemy being able to move around and direct their different attacks to spots on the grid, with more powerful moves generally taking a bit of time to charge up. I knew I would be getting this game when it was announced, but I did not anticipate how much it would utterly endear itself to me. Knowing only bits and pieces about the original from a friend's description, I found myself loving every chapter for different reasons, and when when they all come together for the finale, I got so excited every time I met back up with one of my friends I'd just had an adventure with. The game is by no means perfect; there's definitely still a few things that scream "this was originally made in 1994" that they wanted to stay true to, but I've played a fair number of games that do that type of thing that hold up WAY less than Live A Live does. One of the posts in this thread I read said it still feels innovative in 2022 in a lot of ways, let alone for 1994, and I have to agree with that. What a wonderful surprise this one was. I spent over a year waiting impatiently for Triangle Strategy, and yet only a few months later another HD2D release would snatch away a potential GOTY spot right from under it. Folks, if you haven't, play Live A Live.
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Dec 12, 2022 10:34
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TriffTshngo posted:#10 - Xenoblade Chronicles 2 [2017] 1 | 2 | 3 Congratulations on doing something no one has done before in the 5 years of running this thread: listing both a main game and its DLC as entries. In past years when people vote for specific bits of DLC the points have been counted with points for the main game so to stick to that standard what I'm going to do here is say Xenoblade Chronicles 2 w/ Torna gets 3 points and then you can either bump one of your HMs into #10 or keep your list at 9 games 
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Dec 12, 2022 10:43
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Rarity posted:Congratulations on doing something no one has done before in the 5 years of running this thread: listing both a main game and its DLC as entries. In past years when people vote for specific bits of DLC the points have been counted with points for the main game so to stick to that standard what I'm going to do here is say Xenoblade Chronicles 2 w/ Torna gets 3 points and then you can either bump one of your HMs into #10 or keep your list at 9 games In fairness they do sell Torna standalone. I mostly separated them because of the gulf of quality/how much more I liked Torna than the base game (even if their relatively close positioning doesn't make it seem that way lol). I'll just keep it at 9 entries counted then I suppose.
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Dec 12, 2022 10:49
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Yeah Nintendo refers to Torna as DLC sometimes but it really is just a standalone game.
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Dec 12, 2022 10:52
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Oh cool if it's a separate release then that's fine 
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Dec 12, 2022 10:54
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 10. Devil May Cry V i only got around to playing the vergil dlc this year and yeah this game still owns  9. Kingdom Hearts 3 i did all the challenge mode/superboss stuff this year and also replayed it and while this game has issues (gently caress the frozen world) and way too much of the best moments are in the dlc, plus all the best combat content, its still a strong game imo. combat isnt as good as 2 but its still fun and its got a lot of very fun fanservice moments and a cool boss rush. ive always had a heavily nostalgia-fueled soft spot for kingdom hearts' plot but i think there is actually some good stuff here legitimately. and yozora just rules  8. Labyrinth of Touhou - Gensokyo and the Heaven-Piercing Tree another replay but i really like this game. fun diverse cast, some neat spins on standard dungeon crawling/etrian odyssey/wizardry type gameplay, very user-friendly in terms of letting you reset your character builds. some pretty funny writing sprinkled throughout too even if it barely has a plot. the post-game is pretty tedious but thats my only real complaint.  7. Melty Blood Type Lumina When this game came out I liked it but it had a ton of issues that made me think it wasn't as good as its predecessor, Actress Again. The devs have been extremely responsive to those complaints from the fanbase, fixing basically every issue the game has. Combine that with all the DLC characters being completely free - not limited time free, just free forever - and this is one of the best and most generous fighting games on the market. Fast, snappy, Neco-Arc. https://i.imgur.com/76wyaBf.mp4 6. Total War Warhammer 3 this game launched in what i can only call 'a state' and its dlc scheme is insane (at this point if you want all the content you have to buy 3 full-priced games and like 40 separate items of DLC) but it sucks hours away like nothing else for me. im also big into the multiplayer, its a unique and interesting multiplayer game. https://i.imgur.com/wp24Jx1.mp4 5. Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes It's a fun game but it has real issues in terms of replayability/being able to play specific maps whenever you want/general balance, and the plot doesn't really function without Three Houses as context, but for fans of the original game it provides a lot of neat information and what-if scenarios. It's very much a game for the fans but I liked Three Houses a lot so it worked pretty well for me.  4. Blaze Union i had 3 games i actually wanted to put above blaze union, good year (tho only one of them actually came out this year technically)  3. Witch on the Holy Night disclaimer i havent read the official tl or played the switch port so maybe they hosed something up but this is a really good VN. Amazing production values that really push the visual novel medium forward and the characters and writing are all great. You really get a sense of how everyone relates to each other. And compared to a lot of VNs its a relatively breezy read in terms of length, its pretty focused on what it wants to do. It leaves a lot of things open for a sequel that hasn't happened (yet? stranger things have happened) but the character arcs and stuff are all pretty satisfying by the end. Plus the magic fights are cool. Very much recommend to anyone who likes visual novels.  2. Project Sekai: Colorful Stage Featuring Hatsune Miku gacha is bullshit but this game's gacha/rpg stuff is basically pointless so whatever. the writing's incredibly good and sincere, with long-form character arcs intertwining in really interesting ways, it has every event thats ever happened readable in the backlog because FOMO marketing is stupid, it has hatsune miku music. the only gifs i can find of it are stuff like this made by 14 year olds. top shelf stuff. the official translation's kinda mediocre and the gacha stuff still sucks even if theres no content locked behind it (even moreso than when people say that about other gacha games) but whatever, i love it.  1. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 A massive JRPG that marries the ambition of Chronicles 2 with the focus and stability of Chronicles 1. Great characters, fun combat, a fantastic progression system, way too much to do, an amazing OST, this is one of the best major JRPGs I've played in years. i couldnt find a good gif. edit: honorable mention to sonic frontiers, which i really liked, and signalis, which feels like an indie horror game made by someone whos read weird yuri manga Endorph fucked around with this message at 11:00 on Dec 12, 2022 |
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Dec 12, 2022 10:54
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Rarity posted:Oh cool if it's a separate release then that's fine You can get it either way, it's just a bit cheaper to get it as the DLC addon versus standalone, but yeah.
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Dec 12, 2022 10:55
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Rarity posted:Congratulations on doing something no one has done before in the 5 years of running this thread: listing both a main game and its DLC as entries. In past years when people vote for specific bits of DLC the points have been counted with points for the main game so to stick to that standard what I'm going to do here is say Xenoblade Chronicles 2 w/ Torna gets 3 points and then you can either bump one of your HMs into #10 or keep your list at 9 games listing dlc seperately is fine if its fine for mmos. cheers.
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Dec 12, 2022 11:32
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God help me I actually agree with that. Never thought the FFXIV expansions should have been listed separately.
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Dec 12, 2022 11:34
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I voted for Shadowbringers one year even tho I had only played up to Stormblood at that point 
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Dec 12, 2022 13:07
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I know we disagree often, but I really like your list
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Dec 12, 2022 13:25
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Yeah it’s a very good list super well-written and that Elden Ring bit about remembering otherwise potentially dull locations because of the enemies there is so spot-on
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Dec 12, 2022 14:32
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Its a very good videogame imho
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Dec 12, 2022 15:01
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OP would it be possible this year, to get a list of games that only one voter put on their list, or does that not work well with your tabulation method
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Dec 12, 2022 15:29
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I've got all my banners finished, I've just gotta find time in my busy holiday retail schedule to do a write up.
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Dec 12, 2022 15:34
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Feels Villeneuve posted:OP would it be possible this year, to get a list of games that only one voter put on their list, or does that not work well with your tabulation method I think we could probably do this.
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Dec 12, 2022 15:35
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Feels Villeneuve posted:OP would it be possible this year, to get a list of games that only one voter put on their list, or does that not work well with your tabulation method You just need to use the excel array function =lmaogamingloser{}
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Dec 12, 2022 16:20
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