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7. Forspoken Originality and risk-taking are pretty hard to come by in the AAA space, so when Square-Enix of all people lets one of their studios leverage their resources to take an absolutely wild swing like this it’s always worth checking out. The game they come up with is a bizarre amalgam of the vast and the personal, about a surly New York foundling who gets swept up in a crisis engulfing a magical world. And what a world it is- it’s rare that an open-world feels like it really earns its divisions into territories and regions, taking seemingly eons to cross despite an extensive set of movement powers that let you run and climb at tremendous speed. In this world, you will fight monsters with maneuverability and range and beautifully flashy magical attacks, adopt cats, put on nail polish you stole from an ancient tomb, and gradually learn that emotional bonds aren’t scary even though your previous life had taught you otherwise. 6. Star Wars: Jedi Survivor  The other really good force pokin’ game of 2023 was a case study in a studio taking criticism to heart and growing their design in all good ways. Jedi Fallen Order was just short of greatness, and Survivor managed to fix its two biggest issues: Cal Kestis was kind of a dork, and lightsabers didn’t really feel powerful. Then they added an enormous main planet to explore and a bunch of really slick set pieces. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a four-quadrant AAAA Gaming Product, but a good team with a good vision can transcend this and make all the requisite puzzle sections, side activities, and lore dumps appealing and contributing to the larger whole. Star Wars has had a good string of games recently, let’s keep it going. 5. Neon White  When I first played this game, early in the year, it corrupted my save at about 75% campaign completion. I was mad about that for most of the rest of the year, until November, when I decided to forgive it, accept that the past cannot be changed, and grant it a second chance, only to discover that this sort of thing is exactly what the game is actually about. And I’m glad I did, because it’s a blast. Someone in a different thread described it as a game a 14-year-old would doodle in the margins of his math notebook, which is very accurate. You play as a damned soul, summoned from hell to cleanse heaven of demons with your cool badass parkour skills and awesome magical weapons, and also to hang out with your similarly tryhard crew and get up to puerile shenanigans. The parkour and weapons really are pretty great - every level is a timed challenge designed to get you into a speedrunner’s mindset of spotting shortcuts and figuring out what can be safely skipped - and the story and characters are deeper than they first appear. Fantastic music, too. 4. Resident Evil 4 Remake  I dithered pretty hard about which 2023 over-shoulder action-horror remake to put in this slot, but in the end I had to give it to the one that the other cited as a major influence. There was nothing really wrong with the original, I could have put in any of its 500 ports and re-releases and still had as great a time as I did back in the day. But there were also places where it could be so much more, and things that wouldn’t hurt it if they were cut away, and Capcom found almost all of them while preserving the feel and spirit of the game. Leon has a parry move that works on bullets! Ashley has more agency and gets creeped on less! There are sidequests and hidden treasures and new encounters and secret weapons! All of it adds up to a package that upgrades the game from a legend to a modern masterpiece that no longer needs any caveats about its age. 3. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon  Before launch, I was convinced there would be a cost to the fanbase that From had built with a decade of slow, menacing dark fantasy dungeon crawlers being presented with a fast and chaotic mission-based mech brawler with a heavy focus on equipment tweaking. I shouldn’t have worried, because it’s also very smooth to get into and get your bearings in, at least until you get to the familiar end-of-first-mission difficulty wall boss. This is not From’s first rodeo in this genre (the Armored Core franchise was their bread and butter for the decade preceding the decade of Souls) but it’s been informed by their evolution and rings familiar in a lot of ways even though your moment-to-moment experience is extremely different. Your giant mech is blazingly fast, incredibly nimble, and armed to the teeth with futuristic death-cannons that can level city blocks, but so are your enemies, making every fight a frantic tumble of missiles, bullets, and sword swings that ends in a deliciously rendered slow-motion explosion. It’s definitely a From game, but it’s at the same time definitely not a Souls game; losing the exploration and gradual narrative submergence in a rotten, collapsing world means it doesn’t have the staying power or ability to redefine whole genres in the same way the Souls games did. But it’s absolutely a blast to play, three times, before the tight and opaque requirements for S-ranks get to be too much for you. 2. Cocoon  The best puzzles games are the ones that lay out some very simple rules and then proceed to spin out every permutation of those rules imaginable and plenty that aren’t. The rules in Cocoon are simple. You are exploring a world and you find a ball. You can pick the ball up and move it around. You can plug the ball into various machines. One of these machines lets you enter the ball. Inside the ball is a different world. You can explore that too. While in there, you find a second ball. And it goes on from there, into a series of absolutely mindbending puzzles involving balls in sequences and combinations and nestings that are at once deviously challenging to approach and brilliantly obvious in hindsight. It also does a welcome and fantastic job of subtly cutting down on wild-goose chases without ever feeling like it’s leading you by the hand. Once you use a machine for its intended purpose, it quietly shuts off as it scrolls off the screen. If backtracking is not necessary to solve a particular puzzle, your way back just happens to be go away as a natural consequence of beginning to engage with it. It instructs you in all this and also tells a story about a little lost alien looking for his friends and what happened to the world(s) without using a single word. Cocoon was made by a designer known primarily for games in which scared lonely children die gruesomely; it’s good to know he can also make something this upliftingly beautiful. 1. Lies of P  If you had told me at the beginning of the year that there would be a Souls clone in which you play as a twinky Pinocchio who fights monsters, I might have thought you were joking. If you had told me at the end of the year that the Pinocchio Souls game was actually so good that it compared favorably to some of From’s own output, I might have thought you were insane. And yet here we are. A lot of studios have tried to copy the Souls formula, but this may be the first one to really succeed, and not just succeed, but add their own unique spins on it that make the game more than just a copy of a formula but something that doesn’t only play within the sandbox From built but ventures beyond into a new and original place. You’ve got a weapon in one hand and a gadget in the other, but now the gadget can be more than just a parry button- there’s a mine layer, a gun, elemental debuff applicators, a grappling hook, and more. You can still parry, and block, and regenerate health you lost with a flurry of attacks, and a perfectly timed parry can be extremely powerful and swing the fight in your direction, but now you can do this with weapons that can be customized and tweaked in new and deeper ways. You’re in a sick world in the process of collapse, but you have an active role in the course it takes, and so do the others you associate with. The easily derided Lying System starts out as simplistic Bioware-esque “hurtful truth or dishonest comfort” choices and evolves into surprisingly deep moral dilemmas with no right answer, in service of a story that evolves a basic Bloodborne rip with puppets into something much more even as it tacks even closer to where Bloodborne was to begin with. On top of all this, the art direction, enemy designs, audio and music, and pretty much everything else is top-notch. It also takes far more than you probably think from the original book (not the movie)- I didn’t actually know there was a crew of rabbit undertakers in there, but here they are as a gang of rabbit-themed toughs whose ultimate threat is to stuff you into a coffin. It’s not perfect- the final chapter is too long and too dull-looking, the parry window could be widened a bit, and there are too many bosses whose second phase is effectively a totally new boss- but it’ll be very exciting to see what this studio does in the future (especially if it follows up on the even more bonkers post-credits stinger). Honorable Mention: Destiny 2  Destiny is entering its endgame after nine long years, and while it’s looking wobblier than ever and it may have cracks deep in its foundation that it’s not clear if Bungie is capable of fixing, I’m still having fun with it and they keep releasing content drops that are for the most part good. Even if sometimes it feels like I’m Major Kong riding the bomb, I’ll most likely stick with it until the end, whatever it turns out to be. haveblue fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Dec 6, 2023 |
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Dec 6, 2023 00:26
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If a post has 1-10 just reverse all the ratings A lot of surprise underdogs this year
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Dec 6, 2023 19:06
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As far as I understand it, if it would be listed as a separate line item in a collection it count as a video game. So expansions and mods count, but not, like, your favorite map of the stock collection
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Dec 6, 2023 23:01
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One person has ranked elden ring so far Maybe everyone else is still finishing it
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Dec 7, 2023 19:26
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Aipsh posted:Gonna number my games using some ridiculous witness style puzzle* system that’ll keep Veeg occupied for weeks and delay the count I have posted two lists. One of them is entirely truth, the other one is entirely lies. You may ask me one question
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Dec 7, 2023 23:40
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Usually there’s a separate liveposting thread, but if there isn’t one I guess use general chat? Or post it yourself
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Dec 8, 2023 00:09
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ToxicFrog posted:Is the list with Forspoken and Cocoon on it the true one? Yes, that was 100% a joke quote:I ask because I remember thinking that the Forspoken trailer looked sick as hell, but then actually reading about it and deciding I wasn't interested, and I can't remember why, and your description makes it sound like something I might actually like. See if you can find it on sale. If you don't like its aesthetics and core game loop, it's pretty thin as an RPG. But it's got cool magic effects and a huge number of cats to pet quote:Similarly, I disregarded Cocoon because "by the developer of LIMBO" isn't actually a selling point for me, but it sounds like it might actually be pretty cozy? It's very unlike Limbo (or Inside, for that matter). It's not horror or tension at all, beyond the premise of being alone in a strange place or vague big things moving in the background. I'm pretty sure it's not even possible to die, the worst penalty you can ever suffer for failure is being forcibly ejected from a ball and then you just go in again
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Dec 8, 2023 05:52
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Hardspace Shipbreaker is very chill but I would find it hard to listen to anything besides its own space bluegrass tracks
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Dec 9, 2023 21:00
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You can have a decent amount of fun in Minecraft just by walking in a straight line and seeing what pops up. You just need some basic items you can carry with you and/or deploy as needed
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Dec 10, 2023 05:37
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What a year it was that the hot new From release is in danger of being buried
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Dec 12, 2023 20:54
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FireWorksWell posted:Nice.
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Dec 12, 2023 21:50
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theblackw0lf posted:If the thing I love about the souls series is exploration, does Armored Core also have that? It feel the game is more focused on combat which is why I haven’t picked it up yet. Not really. You pick a mission from a menu and get dropped into a large arena bounded by arbitrary walls. There is generally only one obvious path to follow and finding it isn't hard. Most missions have a single collectible, some have a treasure chest with a robot part in it, and occasionally there's a group of enemies you wouldn't find if you beelined for the objective, but in general taking your time and poking into every corner is intentionally not very rewarding
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Dec 22, 2023 22:19
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Mix. posted:the secret Asura's Wrath sequel we didn't know we were going to get This makes me want to play FFXVI more than anything else I have read so far
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Dec 24, 2023 02:11
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wash bucket posted:Armored Core, Baldur's Gate, and Zelda in the running for game of the year? The late 90s are back baby! Just based on my general impressions of the lists so far, Armored Core is not in the running for the #1 spot, which is kind of amazing when you think about it
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Dec 28, 2023 17:52
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DAWN OF THE THIRD DAY
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Dec 29, 2023 01:23
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I would love to play Tren but the last time I tried I was not able to figure out how. It doesn’t come up in PS store search, do I have to own and launch Dreams and search in there? For some reason I thought Dreams had gone up on PS+ and first I thought I had forgotten to claim it, but I may have just imagined that since I can’t find any evidence it ever happened. That post makes me want to go buy it regardless tho
haveblue fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 14:04
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Ineffiable posted:I actually enjoyed infinite warfare a lot too. It was a great scifi campaign. The jingoism and military worship goes down a little easier when all the political entities involved are fictional. It's definitely in the same ultra-gritty space military vein as, say, The Expanse, or the BSG reboot
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Dec 29, 2023 16:43
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SirSamVimes posted:Oh and my favourite band Poets of the Fall did three original songs (under the name Old Gods of Asgard, a fictional in-universe band) for the game and they are all sick. One of my favorite things about the Remedyverse is that Poets of the Fall also exist within it and it's not clear (to me, at least) if they are the same band there the way they are here
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Dec 29, 2023 22:37
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Blast through AW1 on easy. The Control DLC is skippable if you want to jump straight into AW2. IMO
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Dec 30, 2023 01:57
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Nail Rat posted:This is a big part of why it's my #1 as well. I still find myself randomly singing Champion of Darkness, or Dark Ocean Summoning, or thinking randomly about Yotun Yo. It is a blending of mediums and layers of fourth wall breaking that shouldn't work - but it does. They released an album of the chapter end songs, as well as an Old Gods of Agard greatest hits collection with all their songs from all the games so far, and both of them went straight into my regular rotation. Unfortunately “This Road” is MIA, I can only assume due to some licensing snag
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Dec 30, 2023 14:01
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wuggles posted:It would rule if it got a second podium finish off of people who played it after reading lists last year That would be pretty cool but I think this is too little too late. Unless a lot of people posts lists with it ranked very highly in the next 12 hours The podium feels to me most likely to be BG3, TOTK, AC6
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Dec 31, 2023 18:07
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AceOfFlames posted:Time flies and I have a NYE dinner to get to so hopefully I can sneak this in. Alas, I didn't have time to do a wrap up for each of them: You don't have to do a full wrapup with visual aids and youtubes but you should edit in a sentence or two about each so your votes count!
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Dec 31, 2023 18:55
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It's too late to edit it into my post 25 pages ago, but I do want to give an honorable mention to Alan Wake 2. The only reason it didn't make my list was the combat. I could list out a bunch of specific mechanics or incidents that felt bad, but in general it just felt superfluous and got in the way of the more interesting things the game was trying to do. It's very hard to build up narrative tension and anticipation a second time when the player has already seen a large chunk of what's about to happen, and the musical segments especially suffer from repeated restarts. I almost think AW2 should have had no combat or risk of progress loss at all, and I think the devs might a little bit agree with me from its almost peevish insistence on the reload screen that "this is not how the story goes" Everything I loved about it was tied into its aim to be more than just another horror game, and getting killed by a random mook and reverting to checkpoint cut it down to just another horror game. Therefore, I can't call it one of my games of the year, but this isn't the Avant-Garde Interactive Digital Immersive Theater Project Of The Year thread, so it just doesn't make the list
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Jan 1, 2024 18:48
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Hades was early access in 2019, final release for switch and PC in 2020, and all other consoles in 2021. Every year it got a big new audience
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Jan 2, 2024 06:25
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According to the thread rules we are only allowed to be negative about hentai games and dota
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Jan 2, 2024 18:17
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Disco Elysium is about a guy who forcefully evangelizes communism and is also a huge loser who destroyed his own life, so of course goons identify with it
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Jan 2, 2024 21:47
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Jusant is on sale on PSN and I bought it because of this thread. Just have to finish Blasphemous 2 first (gently caress Eviterno btw)
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Jan 5, 2024 21:07
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That’s what I did too. Apparently you can also equip fervor regain and use the down attack of the mace, which lets you regain fervor fast enough to support near-constant uptime of the spell that stops time and just beat him to death while he literally can’t do anything
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Jan 6, 2024 19:13
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Lawman 0 posted:Did we count the vootes yet? Thread title (1PM GMT is 8AM EST)
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Jan 10, 2024 21:17
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Goty is my middle name
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Jan 12, 2024 17:03
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AC was mostly famous for galaxy brained controls before From got famous for a lot of other thingsMorphogenic96 posted:I'm ready for the real Video Games Awards show... which is you know actually about the games that came out. Hoping for a lot of world premieres
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Jan 12, 2024 22:03
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Yeah AW2 story mode makes the combat absolutely trivial, it lets you just plow through the game experiencing all the good parts. You still have to fight but the enemies barely scratch you and die in one or two shots
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Jan 13, 2024 00:12
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The post with the most
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Jan 13, 2024 14:19
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VideoGames posted:Also, just got breaking news of the Silksong release date!!! ...March...29th...2078? oh geez. 
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Jan 13, 2024 14:52
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clive a clive
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Jan 13, 2024 14:58
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Red Alert 2 Yuris Revenge posted:The stupid rear end Pinocchio game rules and we all just have to learn to live with it.
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Jan 13, 2024 20:01
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please probe me with this
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Jan 13, 2024 20:34
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It makes sense to set up some rules about that, these events just get bigger every year and you can’t run them just on intuition and your personal sense of humor forever. It sucks but I’d rather they keep happening than anyone get mad about it or burn out
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Jan 14, 2024 06:32
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fridge corn posted:was bad. Its good now. Cuz it's retro Also because you can play a lot of those games remastered in 1080p or 4K and 60fps now
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Jan 14, 2024 13:42
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 23:00 |
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My movie of the year is Yöton Yö (but I’ve only seen some of it)
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Jan 14, 2024 20:07
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