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Folks it's time for games
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Dec 4, 2023 08:00
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 03:49 |
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I think the rules should clarify how the scoring works and I guess just be more upfront that the point is celebrating your top 10, not just your #1 Also disqualify ascending order lists 
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Dec 4, 2023 17:40
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I initially thought the puzzle difficulty might be a bit too low compared to the first game but with 132 of them to get through I think it’s good you breeze through some of them or the game would feel exhausting by the end. the gold puzzles definitely had a lot of the original difficulty and a couple of them took me a good half hour to figure out so the game still isn’t exactly easy.
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Dec 18, 2023 22:24
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the Paper posted:1. Hunt Showdown  Hunt was my #1 in 2021, glad it's still making lists!
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Dec 23, 2023 21:28
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BigDumper posted:4. Pikmin 2 - Gamecube Hell yeah, pikmin 2 is still my favorite in the series 
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Dec 29, 2023 03:27
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What a year. This is the year of GAME I really wish I had room to include these on the top 10 System Shock remake Wo Long Fallen Dynasty Elden Ring co-op mod Resident Evil 4 remake Metroid Prime remastered Lunacid Blasphemous 2 Astral Ascent Warhammer 40k Darktide    10. COCOON. Sound design is something I feel is underappreciated and underprioritized in a lot of games. COCOON is an example that good sound is powerful enough to carry an entire game. The shifting soundscape of its layered worlds is beautiful to absorb and it turns out a 5-hour game with one button can be completely engrossing when the presentation is this good.    9. The Talos Principle 2. The first Talos Principle was one of my favorite puzzle games and this is a slam dunk of a sequel in every way. I still really enjoy the format of freeroam environments with puzzles dotted around them that you can enter at your own pace with engaging backstory to find between them. There's a whole lot of content to work through with an almost exhausting 132 puzzles, and the new tools open up a satisfying number of possibilities to think about. It's extremely pretty to look at and the new soundtrack is just as good as the original's. Also there's a cat gallery. Thanks Croteam.    8. Hunt Showdown. It is the third year this game has been on my top 10. Since I dared to try it three years ago I still haven't touched a single other competitive game, because after 2000 matches and counting, I've still never had the same fight twice. Some days Hunt is thrilling and incredibly satisfying, some days Hunt is pure psychological torment and misery, but no matter what, Hunt is never boring. The possibility space in Hunt is so big that the game is very resilient to being "solved" and reduced to a repetitive meta. There is no playbook to follow and no single right way to play, which makes it so refreshing to play with teammates who think of different things than you and clutch matches in ways you wouldn't have tried. Every fight is a unique and original challenge, because there are so many random variables and weird things enemy players could try to do that it makes them unpredictable to a degree I haven't seen in any other game. The result is that the matches are so memorable and distinctive that I still think about moments from 500 hours ago. It's also introduced me to some of the genuinely coolest folks I've played any game with through the Awful discord. I really think this is one of the most remarkable games around today, as countless safer and more conventional multiplayer games have died and vanished in their first year, but somehow this unorthodox niche game for insane people is still going strong in its sixth year and even setting new playercount records. The devs continue to support it with a lot of content and I'm glad Hunt is going to be with us for awhile yet.    7. Baldur's Gate 3. I really enjoyed Larian's previous game Divinity Original Sin 2, but mostly only for the multiplayer gameplay and not for the writing and story, which was full of unlikable characters I couldn't stand and a plot I wasn't invested in at all. BG3 has been the total opposite, with a much more engaging central storyline and some of the best characters I've met in an RPG with preposterously good voice acting. Any single one of BG3's available party members is more likeable than the entire cast of DOS2 put together. Meanwhile, the already-impressive multiplayer from DOS2 has been improved even more and this is a great game to travel through with a friend. As of writing this I haven't finished the game yet, but at 90 hours in BG3 is definitely one of my favorites from this year and clearly deserves all the praise it's getting. Looking forward to finishing this in January.    6. Pikmin 4. This is a very important series to me and one of the only things I still feel real nostalgia for. As a kid I replayed pikmin 2 over and over and over and learned every inch of that game backwards and forwards, because somehow everything about that strange idiosyncratic game just resonated with me. This series is just too weird and unlike other genres to have a mass market target audience and each game in the series has a stood a real chance of being the last, with the decade-long wait between pikmin 3 and 4 being the longest yet, so we're truly lucky to finally have another entry in this series. I replayed the whole series in order via the HD switch ports before starting 4, and the old games still hold up incredibly well. While pikmin 4 hasn't replaced 2 for my series favorite, there's a lot I respect about it. It made some serious improvements to environment design and this is the best version of the series' visual style to date. Pikmin 4 is possibly the best-looking game on switch and it's baffling what it's able to eke out of hardware that wouldn't be out of place in a graphing calculator. Its campaign has the most content in the series and the new creature designs are as fun as ever. It made a lot of experiments with the formula, but the fundamentals of sweeping maps clean of hazards and treasure are still enjoyable. I deeply hope pikmin 4 isn't where this series closes and that we won't be left waiting an entire decade for more this time. I would also die for Oatchi.    5. Tears of the Kingdom. This game was a horrible catastrophe for my sleep schedule. There are a lot of more compact games which give you the feeling that there's something interesting to see waiting around every corner, but what makes TOTK special is just how long it's able to maintain that magic. The basic formula is still just as strong as it was in BOTW, with the intro giving you all the tools you need to complete the game and just enough tutorial to know how to use them at their most basic level, before setting you loose in the world to just freely explore wherever catches your eye. But those tools are so flexible this time that there's a very long journey to understanding what you're fully capable of, leading to a dual progression as you not only get mechanically stronger as Link but also smarter as a player. The most important thing TOTK gets right is that learning is fun. Whenever you ask "can I do this?" the answer is usually "yes" or "no, but the disaster was funny when you tried." There was a satisfying mental progression from confusedly gluing an egg to a weapon, unsure of what it would achieve, to eventually throwing quadcopters together in seconds and effortlessly flying to my objective. There are so many open world games now that it's hard for one to stand out from the pack, but the systems in TOTK are just so strong that I really think it's a must-play.    https://i.imgur.com/kKvr0TT.mp4 4. STRANGER OF PARADISE FINAL FANTASY ORIGIN. Waited for this to release on steam ever since it was announced once I tried Nioh 2 and discovered how good the multiplayer is in Team Ninja's games. Many people seemed to treat this game as a meme from its original trailers and weren't prepared for SOP to be much more than a meme, as it's actually a complex action game with razor sharp controls and a lot of depth to explore across a gratuitous number of classes. Just like Nioh 2, the multiplayer netcode is superb and coop is a great time. It's extremely satisfying to unpack what you're capable of doing with your class and feel yourself improve, while multiplayer keeps it forgiving enough that it isn't frustrating despite the high difficulty. Add a surprisingly sincere story about friendship and this campaign is a joy to play through. SOP rules.    3. Alan Wake 2. My main experience with Remedy is Control. Control was a very impressive game and I loved every part of it except, unfortunately, for actually playing it. I loved every part of Alan Wake 2 including playing it. This is just an incredible accomplishment of a game that successfully carried forward all of Control's strengths while putting a new spin on them. A highly surreal journey with excellent pacing, a lot of fantastic art direction and sound design, great actor performances with some really fun live action scenes, and an entire album of original songs to go with the end of each chapter. It's just a treat to take in from start to finish. There's a well-balanced contrast in vibes bouncing between the perspectives of its two protagonists, as Saga's chapters provide a solid familiar baseline for the story, but Alan's chapters go fully off the rails and get fantastically bizarre. The nightmare New York of Alan's chapters is one of my favorite environments in any game and where AW2 shines brightest. These segments have one of my favorite elements from any horror game that I have to single out: the nightmare is filled with hostile shadow figures, but only some of them are real and the rest simply vanish when they get close. Your resources are too limited to spend many flashlight batteries revealing which is which from a distance, so you're pushed into some wonderfully tense moments holding your ground with dwindling resources as a shadow gets close, praying this one isn't real, before the moment of relief as it finally fades away or the panic as it suddenly lunges at you. The addition of an inventory system with much less frequent but more dangerous encounters was a great change to make these moments feel higher-stakes and keep the gameplay engaging for its own sake instead of just being filler between story. AW2 keeps finding new ways to surprise, it takes an extreme number of risks for a high budget game, it's unapologetically weird as gently caress, and I'm beyond  at the prospect of a Control 2 at this level of quality.   2. Remnant 2. Normally when a special game feels like it was designed just for you personally, it's a low-budget indie title that knows it isn't for most people and only needs to sell three copies to turn a profit. Remnant 2 feels like if one of those unsafe, idiosyncratic games just for me was made with a professional budget. It's a strange blend of genres that doesn't quite feel like anything else, it uses randomization in an unusual way that means there's no predefined easy path to take your character through, it's unafraid of being demanding and rude to you, and I love it for all of these things. Remnant doesn't cleanly fit into a box. It's an excellent blend of difficult-but-fair mechanics with satisfying feel and responsive controls to back them up. In spite of how much friction there can be in learning the game, Remnant is fundamentally designed to be fair with clearly-readable enemy telegraphs and sound cues that equip you with everything you need to beat it. The boss design is flat-out phenomenal with some of the most creative designs and fun gimmicks I've seen in any action game. The art direction deserves more praise than I can give in this post, as every environment is stellar in its own way and I couldn't stop taking screenshots of cool things to see. NPC encounters are enjoyably bizarre.  Destroy the goon. I ran over 7 campaigns of this game across both coop and solo, and even though I kept raising the difficulty for each run, I had an easier time with each campaign than the last as I could feel my accumulated experience and muscle memory backing me up more and more. When I eventually arrived at the last few hurdles on the top difficulty, and finally on a hardcore campaign where I only had one shot to get it right, it felt like a triumphant final exam where the stakes were high but I knew the material and had confidence in my ability to see it through. Very few games are as satisfying as that.    1. Pentiment. I missed the boat on this last year. It's far outside of my usual wheelhouse and I want to thank everyone who convinced me to try it. This is one of the most emotionally moving stories I've ever played and one of those games which just radiates the love that was put into it. I didn't understand going in just how much a historical setting could add to an RPG, as its characters may be fictional, but the egregious class disparity and dire living conditions of the peasants portrayed in Pentiment's story were entirely real, and that makes the narrative hit a lot harder than other games. There is so much grief and pain in this story, but it's contrasted against so much humor and joy that Pentiment never feels like it indulges in misery. More than anything else, Pentiment feels genuine. I've never spent so long thinking about what to say in an RPG and considering what the consequences might be for everyone involved. I'm close to illiterate and this got me to spend an hour tabbed out of the game looking at maps of europe and reading about the peasants' revolt of 1524. I cried, more than once. Pentiment got me invested like no other story has and I'm very grateful for it.
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Dec 29, 2023 07:52
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Love the games, love the lists
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Dec 30, 2023 23:45
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There are many negative things I could say about some of the games on my top 10 and I did not say any of them because that’s not the point of this thread, it’s to celebrate specifically what we loved about the games
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Jan 2, 2024 18:13
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JonathonSpectre posted:1 copy of Pentiment
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Jan 3, 2024 22:03
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Thanks VG! Glad we finally got hunt showdown to rank.
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Jan 14, 2024 00:09
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do we not have a standard probe image for this year?
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Jan 14, 2024 01:04
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Captain Invictus posted:name and shame the people who voted this thread a 1, imo
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Jan 14, 2024 02:08
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Sally posted:2024 is gonna be year of nintendo for me. Luigi’s mansion 3 was way better than I expected it to be, I was assuming it would be on the level of “cute diversion” but it turns out it’s legitimately great and packed with attention to detail. Play it coop if you can, it’s more fun to have a gooigi with you tearing up the environments There’s one room in the arboretum where you get chainsaws and we reduced every last fragment of material in that room to splinters just because it was fun
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Jan 16, 2024 19:36
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 03:49 |
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Rarity posted:Putting all goons in crunch until our posting metrics are hit Doing overtime on posts because the execs say they’ll take my GOTY list out of the credits if I’m not a “team player”
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Jan 17, 2024 00:44
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