~GAME(S) OF THEY YEAR~

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Alright all, what are your favourite games this year? I haven't played that many games this year, to be honest, so my list will be quite limited. Feel free to list your top X number of games or just your favourite game of the year, whatever!

4. Dragon Quest 11

This is my first Dragon Quest game and, I'll admit, I've not finished it yet although I have seen the credits. I want to describe this game as an extremely well-executed mediocrity. The combat system has the requisite level of depth, your party is well-balanced, the story is a simple fairy tale. I didn't enjoy the characters at all; it felt like even the most charismatic characters exist in a bubble without any meaningful interactions or stresses between different characters. Perhaps that's part of the appeal. It's easygoing. I enjoyed my time with it but I'd prefer something wild and unpredictable. Also, the music is terrible and even with the orchestral mod on PC it's not great.

3. Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Imagine if Morrowind was set in medieval Bohemia and you have found the appeal of this game. I didn't finish this either, but I really enjoyed the experience that I had. It mixes the freedom and role-playing elements that you expect with an incredible level of graphical fidelity and atmosphere that immerses you in its world to an extent that I haven't experienced before. The game has a level of jank and lack of polish that becomes its je ne sais quoi, making the world feel real and unpredictable yet without seriously impacting your enjoyment of it. This game is raw as hell and I love it.

2. Dragonball FighterZ

I've never really played a fighting game before. I'm far from competent but I've spent so many hours dipping in for online play. No other game on this list gives me the same adrenaline rush, the same glorious highs and humiliating lows that this one does. It helps that I grew up with DBZ. I should try and seriously learn this game, or perhaps Tekken or BlazBlue or whatever, but I'm also trying to learn Japanese right now so I don't have the time.

1. Valkyria Chronicles 4

This was a total surprise for me. Every issue that I had with the original game has been fixed. The level design is vastly improved and, shockingly, the story and character writing is genuinely great. I found myself conflicted and surprised through the duration of the story, as characters and their motivations would clash and genuine drama would occur. Every single character, from the main crew to every other member of your squad, feels like a real believable human being. There are some missteps but they are incredibly minor compared to what the game accomplishes. This stands in stark contrast to the original, which had an inane & unfocused story, one-dimensional characters and iffy level design.

Games I need to play:

- Monster Hunter World. Heard nothing but good things but it seems like a huge time investment and I don't really know what to expect. Something about it makes me think there will be too much downtime for my ADD-riddled mind.

- Celeste. Idk why I haven't played this. I like challenge platformers.

- Hitman 2. I own this and I enjoyed the first one, but it's a game that requires me to be in a certain frame of mind.

Popular games I don't care to play:

- Red Dead Redemption 2. Triple A nonsense where you spend half your time looking at elaborate animations and holding down the buttons to go from one place to another. Huge marketing budget.

- God of War. Look, I know the combat isn't going to be as good as a real character action game, and every bit of footage I've seen includes excessive amounts of slow-walking around while characters talk, or pointless "puzzles" that exist to waste your time, or fights that are broken up with cutscenes of fighting. Why would I play this? Huge marketing budget. At least this one doesn't have DLC or an online mode that is blatantly modeled around extracting money from players.

- Any other Triple A game. I could not care less. I played the demo for the new Tomb Raider and I actually couldn't finish it. These games are calculated to be as boring as possible but they do have a huge marketing budget. I know this is a crazy conspiracy theory, but I'm starting to think that there might be a correlation between said huge marketing budget and the Metacritic score of these games. Well, maybe not Tomb Raider, I think it received mediocre scores. It's possible that reviewers are just idiots. I don't know.

Red Dead Redemption 2
JJ Macfield
Kingdom Come Deliverance
Monster Hunter World
Shadow of the Colossus remake
Okami HD
Super Smash Bros Ultimate
Earth Defense Force 5
Dragon Quest XI
Shenmue I & II
and I believe Yakuza 6? I think that was this year

Have a hard time remembering most games that came out within the year I played them, and those that are actually older I just never got around to.

These are some of the games I played from 2018.

Beat Saber - VR music rhythm game that's decent in itself but is made brilliant by its community made content. All of which is unofficial and not really supported by the developer.

Crosscode - an action RPG that plays a little like Secret of Mana/Zelda and set in an MMO setting... like MMOs it's bloated with content that seems to just be there to pad out the playtime. But it executes the combat well and has interesting puzzle mechanics.

Rimworld - a fantastic colony management game, one of my favorite games on this list. But though it officially released out of early access this year, I haven't played it much, having played a lot of it in years past. I highly recommend it.

Subnautica - I liked the game, but the final release is disappointing. Basic features were removed for the VR release including keyboard and mouse support. It is my most disappointing game to come out of early access this year.

Valkyria Chronicles 4 - This was disappointing too. After a decade since the original, the best they were able to come up with was a clone? There's nothing bad about it, but there are so many things that could've been improved. It's as good as the original, but since that was almost a decade ago I expected more.

Overload - I enjoyed this 6DOF shooter from the developers of Descent. Great combat and classic labyrinthe level design. It could've done with a bit more originality though. It's a well executed, modern take on Descent with some minor changes to the formula.

Dragon Quest XI - I haven't finished it. I got bored of it for now, but I'll likely return to it. It's a very polished, but mediocre JRPG. It's exactly what you'd expect of a Dragon Quest game. It's not blowing my mind, but it's like good comfort food.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon - it's a reasonably good homage to old school Castlevania, but it too slavishly follows the conventions of those games to be unique or interesting in itself.

Steins;Gate 0 - best visual novel of the year and an excellent sequel that acts as a companion piece to the original, whilst also feeling like an important rather than extraneous part of the overall story.

But my favorite game of 2018 was Celeste. It's brilliantly designed in every way, from its tight, precise platforming and well tuned level design, its engaging narrative and relatable characters, and its evocative soundtrack. No other game this year has had me from the start so enthralled in its moment to moment gameplay, with a sense that everything enjoyable in it has been distilled to the point where it has zero padding. It's all tied together with a story that's an affirmation about triumphing over one's anxieties and self-doubt in order to become the best version of yourself, and that message is cleverly and inextricably linked with its gameplay design.

Okay, I'll bite:


Smash Ultimate: Simply put, the best fighting game I've played. Best roster, too.

Cogmind: FINALLY a turn-based roguelike that is not trying to be Nethack. I hate Nethack. Cogmind is unique in every possible way, and continues to amaze me the more I learn about it.

HyperRogue: Cogmind is great, but HyperRogue is easily my favorite of that genre. There is nothing else like it, period. A roguelike set in a non-Euclidean universe, it's tough to wrap your mind around (and for some people, tough to even look at) but the gameplay is brilliantly designed to work WITH the bizarre-geometry instead of against it. Incredible amount of content, too.

New Retro Arcade: Neon: The game that got me interested in VR in the first place. Well, not really a "game" per say, but a front-end for emulation of all types. This program is *amazing*. Utterly amazing. Neither words nor screenshots can do this justice.

Synthetik: Kinda like Enter the Gungeon, but with realistic guns and a setting full of robots. Instead of the wild shooting and dodging of Gungeon, this one emphasizes careful aim, tactics, and using cover, yet manages to be chaotic still. The best gun mechanics I've seen in a very long time, too.

Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy: It's hard to describe to anyone the appeal of this game. Usually, anyone that's heard of it mostly just knows of it's tendency to induce extreme rage in players. But there are those such as myself that just ended up loving it. I've beaten it numerous times now, and keep coming back to it. I'd love to see a sequel.

No Man's Sky: Yeah, I know it released in 2016. Technically. But that's not how I look at it. To me, this game actually released in the summer of 2018. Talk about a comeback... they managed to take a game that had an utterly disastrous launch, a game that was almost universally hated... and turn it into a game that is genuinely fantastic. It's been incredible to watch. Even many players who *hated* it when it came out, love it now. It's THAT improved. Hell, "improved" isn't the right word here. It's as if they turned it into it's own sequel. It went from being simple and empty, to complicated and absolutely stuffed with content. A bazillion things to do, and like any survival game, you have the freedom to come up with your own ways of doing things. THIS is what it was meant to be, and then some.

Polybius: There's no description I could give that'd be enough for this one. I was already used to VR by the time I played it, and it STILL blew my mind. Jeff Minter has been making games for a very long time, and this one proves that he's still the genius that he was way back then.



What's that? AAA games? Hahaha no. I don't play those. Why would I?

Well, except occasional things from Nintendo. They're the only one that hasn't become corrupted yet.

Red Dead Redemption 2
Valkyria Chronicles
Frostpunk
Farcry 5

Ah another "RDR2 is a horse riding simulator" guy.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Far Cry 5

Spiderman

Detroit: Become Human

Spyro Reignited

Black Ops 4

He has a point though, in a way.

They spent ALOT of time and ALOT of money on things that are seriously, REALLY irrelevant. There's a reason the whole "horse balls" thing became a meme for a time.

AAA developers keep whining about "oh noes the costs are just too much". THIS is why. They all do this sort of thing right now.

All they have to freaking do is JUST MAKE A GOOD GAME. Don't need to simulate the physics of every individual snowflake! At least from what I hear, RDR (singleplayer anyway) actually is good... making it a rarity right now. Even I think it looks fun (despite me not giving one fart about the graphics), and I normally wouldn't touch a AAA game with a 32509 foot pole. But it still didn't need all that crap. Imagine how much more actual content could have been put in if they hadn't spent so much time/effort on that!

That being said, they STILL managed to make the online part into a greed-festival. It's getting outright embarrassing at this point. They made a good game... but they still couldn't resist corrupting part of it. I knew they'd do something like this, which is why I didn't touch it after all.


At least they aren't Bethesda though. Or EA or Activision.

You apparently don't know Rockstar's style. The whole point is the little things matter as much as the big things. They put in the smallest of details in the biggest of worlds. It's what makes the game feel alive, with a fully living, breathing world that immerses you like no other. There's plenty of content as well, as I don't see how over a hundred missions and hundreds of animals to hunt and fish for can be considered empty.

I will say that Online sadly is subpar.

I do know their style, actually... and it's not associated with detail. Not as the core, anyway.

Rather, they were one of the developers that really brought the "open world" style of gameplay into focus. They created a big world with their games, where you have the freedom to go about your tasks however you see fit. Even ignoring many missions if you so desired. Combine that with good storytelling and memorable characters, and you have a winning combination. It's the same idea that fuels Skyrim, and.... well... I wouldn't exactly put down Skyrim as "detailed". It has vast sweeping vistas, but tiny details are something it is NOT good at. But, it doesn't have to be. Small details can HELP immersion... but they do not form the core of it.

Think of VR, right? THE most immersive form of gaming that exists. The thing is, VR games do not have to have extreme detail to produce this effect. In fact, they can do it with almost no detail at all. Or "broken" detail in some cases, such as Google Earth's often odd "melty" buildings (which is a side effect of the tech that renders them from their visual data). Hell, look at something like Oculus's Toybox program. There are various areas you can choose in there, and frankly, theyre' very simplistic. But regardless of that, even a flat, blank texture, when used right, works fine for immersion. Even I will occaisionally forget that a surface is not solid, which usually results in me attempting to set my controllers down on something that in fact does not exist. Or it can lead to players doing hilarious things like trying to sit on non-existent chairs. Again, high detail is not required to create this effect. Low detail can work IF it's used right.

And this is the case with non-VR games as well. Hell, look at the very first Zelda. By the definition of immersion you're using, it shouldn't work. Just looking at it, it's SUPER obvious that you're looking at a very low-tech electronic game. Not realistic at all. But even all these years later... players still easily get very immersed in it's world. Instead of pure detail, the devs focused on simply making the world and it's mysteries INTERESTING, while the gameplay encourages exploration and experimentation, and you meet up with all sorts of quirky characters and foes on your way to defeat Ganon. Later games on the NES would eventually be capable of dramatically more detail than Zelda was... but that doesn't stop Zelda from being one of the most immersive games on the console. The same held true for Metroid and it's literally non-existent backdrops and simple tiles that made up the landscape.


In other words... detail alone not only does not create immersion, but it isn't even truly important to it. Never was. And Rockstar's devs are more than capable of creating a very, very immersive game WITHOUT having to render individual hairs on every wolf blowing in the wind.

The fact that they DID spend all that time making those unnecessary elements is pretty much guaranteed to be used as a justification for the hyper-greed that appears in the multiplayer. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the actual point to begin with. Publisher greed has gotten THAT bad lately.


Don't get me wrong: I still recognize RDR 2 as a great game, even if it's really not my thing (I don't have the patience for that genre really). The devs managed an amazing accomplishment... but that doesn't prevent the "horse simulator" complaint from being absolutely valid, and doesn't mean that the extraneous stuff was actually needed or important.




Anyway, that's all I have to say on that. Yeah, rambly, sorry, but game design is one of my special interests, and I've learned a lot from devs that I've worked with, so it's easy for me to ramble about it.


I now return this topic to it's original purpose. Theoretically. Have a good day, everyone.

5. Runner3

I played the original six games via the Wii collection, and I Bit.Trip.Runner was definitely my favorite. I didn't play Runner 2 due to not having any of the consoles it was on, so I was pretty excited to finally play another game in this franchise. I'd like to spend more time with it- I haven't touched any of the "retro" levels -but I like it a lot. The multiple checkpoints they've added post-launch make the Runner gameplay less frustrating without making it less fun. I also love the game's style; it has a cool Alice-in-Wonderland feel to it, especially in those fun little cutscenes.

4. Dandara

This is a medtroidvania with a twist: instead of running and jumping like usual, you leap from floors, walls and ceilings with pretty much no gravity. Coupled with great level design, it's a great twist on a familiar formula. The game is based on the real-world Dandara, a South American hero who rescued slaves. The story and environments follow suit, but not in a realistic way, which is what I love most about it. The crazy scenery makes it feel like you're traveling through a dream, and this feeling is enhanced by the fantastic visuals. It's really good with atmosphere, too; I still remember how unnerving it felt to cross the one-way bridge after beating the first boss.

3. Minit

Another great indie! Minit is a Zelda-esque game where, after every 60 seconds, you die and get sent back to the last checkpoint; I like to think of it as Majora's Mask on caffeine. That probably sounds annoying, but it never feels that way; the world is designed so that you can get to places quickly and accomplish things as fast as possible. The characters are also really charming despite how little time you spend with most of them, which I think is helped by the games simple visual style; it's just black, gray and white with very simplistic character designs. It's primitive without feeling low-quality, and I find it really appealing.

2. Kirby Star Allies

As a massive Kirby fan, I'm pretty biased on this one, but I'm giving it the silver medal anyway. Star Allies plays the same as the other recent entries, but the twist this time around is that you can form a team of four characters and use your teammates to add elements to the weapon-based abilities. Understandably, it's not as crazy as it was in Kirby 64, but it's still fun. Now, when it first launched, I and many others were a little disappointed with Star Allies; it didn't have as much content as its predecessors, and the main quest felt kind of uninspired. But the 3 content updates that came out over the course of the year totally made up for it; each one released a new pack of Dream Friends, which are special teammates that come from across the series. This is the first time a lot of these guys have been playable, and it's awesome. Another, more challenging mode was also released, addressing the content issue. But I think the most impactful moment of Star Allies is unlocking the final puzzle-piece picture; I legitimately teared up when I listened to the accompanying music on YouTube later.

1. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

I don't think I need to say much; I'm sure others around here have said quite a bit already. Losing all those extra modes is a bummer, and the adventure mode not having much in the name of cutscenes like Brawl's did is unfortunate, albeit expected. But Ultimate makes up for those shortcomings in so many ways. I really hope this is Sakurai's last Smash game, because he hasn't downplayed how big a toll their development takes on him, and he proved with Kid Icarus Uprising that he's not a one-trick pony (I didn't play it, but I know it's beloved by many others).

I really can't stand open world games like the type that Rockstar or Ubisoft produce. They're enormous worlds that are mostly filler, and moving from point A to B with little bouts of gameplay interspersed. That they spend so much time on elements so unimportant to the gameplay is IMO symptomatic of a larger issue with game developers following the latest trends, be it open worlds, gambling through microtransactions, battle royale modes, or online persistence, rather than sticking with a coherent design that enhances the gameplay.

Obviously there's a tons of people that love those sorts of games though, so it's just a matter of my preferences. But those sort of games are antithetical to what I look for in a game; a tight and well crafted experience.

Aye, totally agreed. That whole "bandwagon" thing with AAA games is... well, one of the reasons I stopped playing AAA games. Just... bleh.

Honestly even the new Zelda, I didn't like (got it as a gift). I played about 5 hours of it and was bored out of my mind. Heck, I don't just call it Zelda. I always refer to it as "The Legend of Zelda: Ubisoft Edition". Likely, I wont ever go back to it. Or any game like it.


There WAS one exception for me though: Just Cause 2. And there's a reason for that: There is stuff to do EVERYWHERE. No blank stretches of land, no unnecessary focus on things that ARENT gameplay (though it was still very nice-looking). The entire map is utterly drowning in THINGS YOU CAN FREAKING DO. You could still certainly just explore and take in the landscape if you wanted (though you might be randomly assaulted by enemy troops at any moment), but no matter where you were on that map... there was action and adventure to be had. And no ultra-long cutscenes or talky bits. That game was pure gameplay, from start to finish. What's more, there was a clear focus on pure fun there. The whole grappling hook / parachute combo thing was freaking brilliant, among all sorts of other things they did. A fantastic game that DIDNT try to be a freaking movie.

I was quite disappointed to see that it did NOT become the trend for this genre. I haven't played the third or 4th games in that series either... they came out MUCH later, so I rather expect they probably went with the Ubisoft style instead (maybe).

One way or another though, it was pretty much a one-time deal, that game.

Feh. This is why I stick to indies now. Just... feh.

I'll stop there before I get to rambling too much again.