Merus

This topic has exposed how few games I actually played this year. Anyway, of the games I played this year, I think the ones I think are worthy of mention in order of remembering them are Tomb Raider, The Stanley Parable, Gone Home, Guild Wars 2, Rayman Legends, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, DmC: Devil May Cry, Legend of Grimrock and Papers, Please. I also played a lot of Saints Row The Third but that is really pushing what counts as this year's games. I basically abandoned the Xbox 360 wholesale - its insistence on advertising to me on the dashboard I found incredibly creepy, and I didn't like the system enough to prefer it over the PS3, which had more interesting exclusive games by that point. Anyway, that's 10, which is about the upper limit of how many nominations you can have while still being selective. Animal Crossing: New Leaf - essentially it's Animal Crossing finally reaching a viable chunk of the original premise: it's a town of computer friends. By giving the player explicit control over a bunch of functions, it gives the game an upgrade structure and a way to customise their town all at once. The villages are a little smarter, a little more elaborate (although still not exactly fun to just hang out with) and the game has wholeheartedly embraced the silliness of its random generation. Space station as a consolation prize? Sure! But this also means that the game can be genuinely surprising and entertaining, and the much improved internet features let it actually work as a social game instead of a game that clearly intended to be a social game but was too frustrating to really sustain. DmC: Devil May Cry - Ninja Theory's reboot of DMC was exactly what it needed to be: a little more accessible, and with some actual edge to it. It had a proper story arc with actual character development and incredibly creative levels, and a combat system that played easy but had major depth to it when you started to play around with using attacks outside of the mode they started in. The Bad News boss fight is the best boss fight I've played all year, and one of the few fights where the boss made you fight a bunch of mooks mid-phase and it was even more awesome than the boss. It's also where I realised games had a real obsession with nephilim. Criminally overlooked. Gone Home - one of the big trend this year was exploring games without explicit challenges. It turns out our interaction vocabulary is rich enough these days that a game about poking around a big old mansion is, in itself, interesting enough to warrant at least a few hours of your time. The subtlety and feeling of dread that the game builds comes from an honest place - you start caring about these people whom you know only through their artifacts. Guild Wars 2 - the big flagship of the fourth generation of MMORPGs, in that games still responding to WoW feel janky and outdated. ArenaNet's insistence on trying to reinvent the wheel has meant the game's got a lot of things that just didn't work - their small-scale PvP mode is on life support, there's still a little too much reliance on grind - but they seem to have stabilised on a model where a new piece of story drops in every fortnight, for free, and along the way they've pushed out large-scale invasions, an 8-bit-style platformer, an election campaign and a couple of raids that smoothly scale between 2 and 80. Infrequent players can participate meaningfully, and long-term players can go for more elaborate rewards without burning through everything in a couple of hours. That is on top of what they launched with, which was throwing out questing entirely in favour of events happening in the world, and a comprehensive level scaling system that meant you could join up with a friend who'd just started on another server and your level 80 tragic, and all play together as equals. It's hugely ambitious, and while it bit off more than it could chew (and was a little too optimistic about what it was able to achieve), that shouldn't take away from its massive achievements already. I can't imagine Everquest Next would be nearly as ambitious if it hadn't been for GW2 demonstrating that swinging for the fences could pay off. Legend of Grimrock - I played this in January! It counts! It's a first-person dungeon crawler that's filled with clever little traps, that plays fair but not too fair, and doesn't punish you too badly for not being psychic about the character development mechanics. It is a fine antidote to the poisonous idea of 'dungeon crawler' meaning 'mindless clickfest'. Zelda: A Link Between Worlds - the best Zelda in a very long time. Reusing the game world of Link to the Past, and then giving you a different toolset (and making that toolset available from very early on), lets Nintendo have their nostalgia cake without having to compromise their game for nostalgia's sake. The story is actually half-decent; Nintendo's confidence in their storytelling lets plot points happen without them being pointed out, leaving players to make the connection, and there's at least one unexpected moment at the end. The wall-walk mechanic requires you to unlearn many of the Zelda tropes - can't go here, don't have the hookshot yet - and the abandonment of gear gating finishes off the rest. Because the game doesn't have to spend time in dungeons introducing its tired toolset, it lets the designers try out new ideas, like floors that glow when it's dark, or one where what's underneath you is just as important as what's to your left. Niggling problems the series has had for a while, like the worthless of rupees, get addressed, and the hard mode is actually hard instead of what the game should have been. Papers, Please - a perfect example of the trend this year of games using their mastery over interaction vocabulary to do things that you simply couldn't do if you're struggling to make the most fun game you can. Papers, Please uses the mechanic of checking paperwork - paperwork! - to paint a picture of the political and society confusion of a vaguely Eastern Bloc state. Stripping down Kolechians because some of their countrymen keep bombing the border is exactly the kind of banal, systemic evil that Papers, Please criticises, and it does it by making you do it and then realising what you've done. It's masterful at keeping the player pressured, even when you're me and have had lots of practice at examining forms for inconsistencies and mistakes. I still feel sort of bad for separating that husband and wife. Rayman Legends - utterly charming and expertly crafted. The new mechanic of the lum chains - if you collect a chain of lums in order, they're worth double - is genius, and the visual design and creativity on display is top-notch. It's a little I'm still playing it, actually, doing the daily and weekly challenges, which are semi-procedurally generated levels where the top 20% of players get a gold cup and credit towards being an Awesomeness Master (and an achievement!). Would I be doing this without the achievement? Probably not. Would I have missed out? Yep. The Stanley Parable - here's a game that has opinions on achievements! And most of the rest of storytelling and choice and consequence in games! Essentially the Stanley Parable is: when you're presented with a choice that's been created for you in every detail, it's not really a choice at all. Some of the paths are more incoherent than others, and the mod that it's based on addressed the desire to actually guide a player experience much better than the final game does. But it still packs a punch, the jokes go down smoother, and some of the new arguments - such as how a game that doesn't provide a choice at all except refusing to engage is cheating when it tells you that you consented to that false 'choice' - feel natural and logical. It's one of the best critical arguments this year, and also a very entertaining game. Tomb Raider - they finally managed to reboot Tomb Raider into something relevant. I could have done without the death porn, but its environments are striking, the storytelling is pretty great (let's quietly dismiss the argument that Lara should have been a wilting flower in the first half until she became 'comfortable' with killing, and accept that quick adaptation as part of the survival genre) and the level design is expansive without being prescriptive. It feels, for the first time in a while, like a game with its own identity. I think that's the big narrative of this year - 2013, more than any previous year, was a year where we saw more games that had a personality of their own instead of being refinements and reskinnings of previous games. Indies built games that were utterly unique, AAA studios pushed their best games to be something very different than what had come before. It's a medium that's starting to mature, where developers are confident enough that they'll make a product that's fit for purpose that they can dedicate energy to also giving it a clear identity. The cultural critique hasn't quite caught up, but the fear that games needed critics to explain their virtues ended up not being necessary: it turns out games can speak for themselves, and when they can't, the piles and piles of money they make does a pretty good job in their stead.

Was that game Metroid themed?

Do we know if this applies to the entirety of their channel? Can they have one channel for LoL play and another for 'personal' play? If they're 'off the clock', as it were, can they play other games?

I quite like this piece: http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977 It posits that snark is a natural reaction to smarm, and then goes on to dissect exactly what smarm is these days and how these smarmy charlatans and frauds use an ingratiating insistence on positivity and civility to smother any kind of objection to their bullshit.

I have occasionally gotten involved in multi-way conversations that are infuriating because most of your limit is taken up by usernames. BUT I think the value of Twitter is specifically that it prohibits long-form discussion. On Twitter, you only have two choices: be witty, or be banal. Get to the point, or don't have a point. It focuses discussion wonderfully. I think a lot of the stress people have trying to overwhelm their partner with arguments is borne out of not having one really good argument in the first place. It is very difficult to bloviate on Twitter. It is also difficult to have a furious back-and-forth, which diffuses arguments before they can really get going (and an immediate, text-based medium populated mostly by strangers is a terrible place for an argument. You can't judge emotional meter at all.) It's easy enough to drive-by troll, but you have to be pretty up-front with your trolling and it's not like trolling isn't an epidemic everywhere. I think it probably would have been better with 160 characters, though.

Godspeed.

Someone invented the sarcasm font. This will not be useful at all.

I saw the icon of the person who posted the music video, Teg, which is a picture of Sonic, thought it was part of the game's art, and thought, 'ah, that explains the zone'.

Considering the developers previously made a hacking game that was so committed to its fiction it required you to log in to the locally hosted game with a password, and a fun strategy game about global thermonuclear war, complete with cheery messages about how many 'MegaDeaths' you'd scored, and the sobbing of the survivors seeping into your bunker, I would hazard that the developers are quite deliberately trying to get you to feel a certain way about your prisoners. Whether they also communicate that this is not an effective way to feel about your charges is a stickier question, but I'd imagine they'd be quite open to improving this aspect of the simulation, given appropriate feedback.

I think the difficulty's a little easy - a lot of monsters in the dark world do 2 hearts of damage, and some of the bosses have some nasty attacks, but you have plenty of options for mitigating damage. Still, I have felt a little pressure on my health, which is more than most Zeldas. Basically thus far I think it's the best Zelda in some time. Ravio's shop fixes a lot of problems with the economy, providing a big rupee sink that doesn't necessitate grinding. Because the dark world dungeons don't rely as much on the 'get item-use item' formula, they employ other tricks, and working out what the rules of the dungeon are is part of the puzzle. It's never particularly difficult, but it's not obvious, either.

No, you start at 3 hearts, green tunic. Basically you get hit by those rats at the start of the game twice, you die. It adds the need to plan that you don't usually get from Zelda - you can't take a lot of hits, so you need to be constantly aware of where you're going next, avoiding unnecessary distractions. You need to get heart pieces as early as possible, which means you need to know where they are. None of the puzzles change, though.

Somewhat related to this, I like linking to the Metacritic/Gamerankings for Donkey Kong 64. Reviewers fuckin' loved Donkey Kong 64 at the time. It was huge, and technically excellent (coloured lights!) and had so much to do! It took just a little while for people to realise it wasn't actually any fun and that putting lots of things to collect in a level did not in fact promote exploration.

I think it's basically on the same level of discourse as the Suckbox... Crapbox.

My housemate did the hard difficulty. It's a post-game difficulty mode, not a hard mode. Enemy attacks are about four times as hard, apparently? Basically that's enough to make things a lot dicier.

That was Tseric. Although he probably got fired for telling a customer that he wasn't funny and to get off his internet.

My housemate's finally finished this, so I've just started. I've just reached the second dungeon, and had what I think was the weirdest hour I've ever had in a Zelda game. I was surprised how much I resent the traditional Zelda formula, where there are areas I clearly have to use bombs, the hammer and the hookshot. I will get them at some arbitrary point, and will have to trudge through areas I've already done to get the one thing I didn't have. I like this style of game specifically for the moment when I discover that some design element I've seen all over the place has a secret new purpose, that what I thought were the borders of an area aren't really the edge of what's available at all. It's rare that Zelda does this, although it still can happen, for instance when I discovered a particular kind of tile I'd seen everywhere just so happens to respond to wind. In that hour, between getting the signature ability to walk on walls and the time the shop opened for real, I had no goddamn idea how to proceed. I kept wandering around a little confused, because I was expecting the game to hand me answers on a silver platter like it always does. Instead, I had to actually explore a bit. I probably could have cut my time down significantly had I actually examined the problem and reasoned through what I needed, but the wall-walking is goddamn amazing at confusing the part of my brain that's convinced it knows how Zelda exploration works. So I spent an entire hour unlearning Zelda conventions, enough to realise I probably could get into an area I'd written off until later.

Between this and the Metacritic stuff, I've got this niggling feeling that Tom Chick's falling into the trap of mistaking having occasionally controversial opinions for being an iconoclast. 'Having something to say' can either mean that you've got detailed thoughts on a topic, or that it's geed up your emotions and you've got unexamined biases.

If you live in Australia, the background image is flipped. We have Spring Sale up the top and Autumn Sale on the bottom of the world. It is the best.

People didn't like GC because he was willing to serve as a representative for WoW's development team, and therefore a focus for people who mistakenly believed they knew anything about how to run a game with millions of players. I think he did a perfectly fine job - there were moments where he could have been more informative, but most of their mistakes seemed to come from trying to fix a larger problem. A lot of players like to blame GC for problems with the game, saying that vanilla/BC/Wrath was the height of the game, depending on their own personal biases and when their personal circumstances best suited playing WoW. WoW's unusual in that there is a very definite point one can say was the peak of the game: subscriptions were highest during the Wrath expansion, when Ulduar, one of their finest raids until very recently, was current. But the decline since then is only partly due to Blizzard's delays in getting Cataclysm out and its strong uptick in difficulty, but mostly due to the game being, what, seven years old at that point? And past its third expansion? (Usually by the third expansion the dev team either starts getting too ambitious or starts churning out content - at that point it's often a better idea to step back and just make a sequel.) We're solidly in the fourth generation of MMOs by this point, and games are coming out that do what WoW does better than it possibly could. (And also Elder Scrolls Online.) Decline is inevitable, and when the game starts declining, network effects make sure that continues. Anyway, players don't know what they want and usually don't understand that what they find fun is not necessarily what other players find fun, which is why MMOs are so hard if you're not doing a PvP focused one. Still, I think he did a pretty fine job with what he was given. Good luck to him in the future.

I seem to recall that the development team had more fun developing the FLUDD-less levels in Sunshine, which is why it informed Galaxy so much. The difficulty of Mario games definitely went up once they started introducing the super guides, as well.

I recall a Flash game with a cartoon third-world family, and you had to send them to work (in appalling conditions) so they had enough money to survive. Every time I try and recall the name my brain thinks of Hazard: The Journey of Life which is incorrect.

Re: hub levels, after having to scramble around in order to get to each set of levels in Galaxy, I started getting bad Santa Destroy flashbacks. The point of a good hub world is to set the tone going into a level, which Peach's Castle did (in some cases better than others) and many of its imitators managed as well. Delfino didn't do that, in favour of trying to make level entrances surprising, which goes against the job of a hub world. Rosalina's Starship got even worse, where not only did the hub not contribute to the tone of the levels (other than the last set), but it didn't even have secrets to reward poking about.

As far as I can tell, 'gaming chairs' are for suckers. They're expensive, and for the price you get a chair that isn't that comfortable and has a bunch of gimmicks built in you probably won't use, like embedded speakers. Do you have room in your setup and also budget for a nice, one-person armchair? You might have to Riker into it but it'll last you decades.

My first thought is that you could do with a new hobby

Why do you always get to be the head? I wanna be the head.