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GOTY of the Year

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On 12/4/2017 at 1:50 PM, jennegatron said:

on first blush here is where i stand:

1. Collar X Malice (PS Vita)

2. Yakuza 0 (PS4)

 

 

The more of Yakuza 0 I play the more sure I am that this is my #2 for this year. Both of these games are some of my favorite I've ever played period. I am constantly re-charmed by Yakuza. it's so earnestly joyful to play.

 

I think I would go so far as to bump 2 games out of my top 7 fave games of all time to add these two. (that list was, in no particular order, Hatoful Boyfriend, Harvest Moon: FoMT, WoW: WotLK, Dropsy, Tokyo Mirage Sessions: FE, Pokemon Red & The Sims. I would bump the Sims & Pokemon for Collar X Malice & Yakuza 0)

I am absolutely head over heels for these two games. 

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Ok, I'm done with my list.

 

 

My Top 15 of 2017

 

15.    Little Nightmares, by Tarsier Studios

A physics platformer with good puzzles and nicely done horror tropes that was well worth playing through. It’s like an off-brand Inside.

 

14.    Robo Recall, by Epic Games

Epic’s shoot em up was a nice introduction to touch-controlled VR gaming. Packs a lot of complexity, cool ideas, and room for experimentation into it’s gunfights.

 

13.    Strafe, by Pixel Titans

Turned out to be more of a first-person Teleglitch than old-school Quake, which upset a lot of people. Me, I had a lot of fun with it.

 

12.    Conductor, by Overflow

An overlooked little VR gem, in which you ride a locomotive through a dark forrest and occasionally stop to do physics-puzzle and clear the path ahead. An atmospheric and fun little game.

 

11.    Road Redemption, by Pixel Dash Studios/EQ Games

An action packed arcade racer with a lot of nifty ideas and a permadeath campaign-structure that’ll have you coming back until you’ve beaten it.

 

10.    Freeways, by Justin Smith

Takes one aspect of city-builder games, namely transportation, and hyper-focuses on it, resulting in some very fun and addictive gameplay.

 

9.    Night In The Woods, by Infinite Fall

An adventure game that’s light on the puzzling and heavy on the sass. Effortlessly charming, cool, and heartwarming. This is a game you play not for a challenge, but rather just to hang out with the characters in it.

 

8.    Hollow Knight, by Team Cherry

A wonderful metroidvania that’ll pull you deep into it’s world.

 

7.    Ultrawings, by Bit Planet Games

A VR flying game that’s just the right mix of arcade and simulation. The touch-based input is a novel idea that works beautifully, and each of the airplanes is unique and fun in it’s own way.

 

6.    Rain World, by Videocult

Is a strong contender to Zelda and Prey for most real-feeling and complex gameworld of the year. The inhabitants of this world are the main feature here. Their unpredictable AI and procedural animation grants them a wildness not seen in many Video game characters. The harsh conditions and un-explained systems of it’s gameworld also grants it a realness that more accommodating and handholdey gameworlds lack. Rain World feels like a real place, and it is terrifying.

 

5.    Super Mario Odyssey, by Nintendo

A game that's been designed to be a pure joy and make you smile from ear to ear. This game right here, is a good time.

 

4.    Lone Echo, by Ready At Dawn

I like games where you’re basically just a working joe, and this is very much that. The combination of a great narrative, immersive gameplay and an innovative new locomotion-system makes this a game that really shows the full potential of VR.

 

3.    Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, by Mimimi Productions
(Technically a super-late 2016 release, but c’mon.)

Fantastic stealth-tactics game with great characters and story. Thoroughly engrossed me for the couple of weeks I played through it.

 

2.    Zelda: Breath of the Wild, by Nintendo

A great open-world adventure that does "the hero's journey" very well. You constantly feel like you're improving, preparing for a great showdown. It manages to feel dangerous, while somehow never being too difficult, and it's systems allow for out-of-the-box thinking.

 

1.    Prey, by Arkane

I played Zelda quite shortly after Prey, and it’s surprising how much my top 2 games of this year feel similar, gameplay-wise, while being completely different in their story and gameworlds. They both allow for lots of experimentation and novel approaches to problem-solving. But whereas Zelda's narrative is a rather simplistic thing, Prey offers complex characters, tough choices, and a narrative that pulled me in and kept me hooked until the end. It's the best immerisive sim since Deus Ex.

 

Honorable mentions
Star Trek: Bridge Crew
Horizon Zero Dawn
Snake Pass
Gravity Rush 2
Spintires: Mudrunner
Kôna

Bound

 

Still want to play
Mario+Rabbids, Golf Story, Heat Signature, Darkwood, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, Nioh, Rime, Hellblade, What Remains Of Edith Finch, Nier Automata, Yakuza 0, Styx 2, Sniper Elite 4, Persona 5

 

The problem with the game industry right now? Too many great games! I can't keep up! :(

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12 hours ago, plasticflesh said:

Game Maker Tool Kit made a video about Snake Pass and that sold the game to me. I've been really enjoy it as a fresh take on the puzzle platformer. I'll GOTY that

 

Great video by Mark Brown as usual. The movement-mechanic is indeed great. Usually no matter what animal or thing you're playing in a game the movement is the same, press forward to go forward, press jump to jump. So it's great to see a game rethink that and make you really think like a snake to get around. Unfortunately, as a game Snake Pass impressed me less, which is why it's relegated to my Honorable Mentions. About halfway through you've pretty much seen all the game has to offer and the movement-mechanic starts to wear out it's welcome. I started getting bored with levels from that point on, only finishing them to have it done with. My campaign is currently at 85% completed and I don't know if I'll ever bother with the last 3 levels.

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It turns out I did not play enough games from 2017 to have ten (in this year of bountiful games, I mostly spent time catching up on a backlog!), so my top 3 are Hollow Knight, which I consider the best Metroidvania ever made, yes even better than that one; Horizon Zero Dawn, which had a beautifully realised world, and who could still throw out surprising fights right up until the end, and Snake Pass, which broke my brain in a delightful way and which I just devoured.

 

I did not buy a Switch.

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1 hour ago, Henke said:

 

Great video by Mark Brown as usual. The movement-mechanic is indeed great. Usually no matter what animal or thing you're playing in a game the movement is the same, press forward to go forward, press jump to jump. So it's great to see a game rethink that and make you really think like a snake to get around. Unfortunately, as a game Snake Pass impressed me less, which is why it's relegated to my Honorable Mentions. About halfway through you've pretty much seen all the game has to offer and the movement-mechanic starts to wear out it's welcome. I started getting bored with levels from that point on, only finishing them to have it done with. My campaign is currently at 85% completed and I don't know if I'll ever bother with the last 3 levels.

 

True, I definitely see what you're saying. I just got to the lava levels and it's beginning to have more punishment with less checkpointing, turning a casual and expressive joy of coiling and exploring for extras into the more technical and linear challenge of performance.

 

Two other games on my list, beside Freeways, Hollow Knight, and Snake Pass, would be Kingdoms and Castles which I enjoyed for a while to sate my casual city building desires, and Dragon Quest Builders, which doesn't count because it is a 2016 game.

 

 

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The problem with Snake Pass is that it starts demanding you pay attention to the snake's body having weight that the head is not in control of by about the water world, so by the fire world if you're not able to reliably hold onto a scaffold you're going to have a bad time. But it may never occur to you that this is what's happening! It took me a while to work out.

 

In the air world, I was flinging myself off cliffs, confident that I'd be able to grab onto some bamboo and hold myself there. There's still some bits I think are overtuned, but being able to essentially jump, as a snake who can't jump, makes you feel so goddamn accomplished by the end.

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21 minutes ago, Merus said:

The problem with Snake Pass is that it starts demanding you pay attention to the snake's body having weight that the head is not in control of by about the water world, so by the fire world if you're not able to reliably hold onto a scaffold you're going to have a bad time. But it may never occur to you that this is what's happening! It took me a while to work out.

 

In the air world, I was flinging myself off cliffs, confident that I'd be able to grab onto some bamboo and hold myself there. There's still some bits I think are overtuned, but being able to essentially jump, as a snake who can't jump, makes you feel so goddamn accomplished by the end.

 

What's interesting is that Snake Pass introduces the lava pretty quickly after introducing the spikes. I can sort of see why, lava is slightly less punishment than the spikes.

 

I really enjoy the physics of having indirect control over the whole body. And found the sort of cheesy way of maximizing friction against a vertical wall to get out of a lot of death states. I use the bird and the grip function very infrequently. I find the grip function to be actually more harm than help, I think because it causes the collision balls to get closer together to create more friction, it also creates unwanted density, so it helps to keep a tight coil, but if there's a dangling bit it creates too much density and gravity wins. 

 

I also have the added personal challenge of being OCD enough to hundred percccccent levels as I go through them. Dragging levels out for a while as I search for that last blue bubble or fail again to get that last gold token on a revolving bamboo spit.

 

 

 

 

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Zelda

Yakuza Kiwami

Mario

 

Honorable mentions:

 

Ogre (A totally good electronic adaptation of a totally great wargame)

Wipeout Omega Collection (it's basically 2 remasters, but they jammed so much good stuff in there)

Assassin's Creed Origins (such mixed feelings about so many aspects of this game, but I played the hell out of it, so I must have liked it?)

 

Also all the repackaged for the umpteenth times Neo Geo ports for the switch, which just feels like the perfect home for them, except for the lack of a good d-pad. Even the Pro Controller isn't up to scratch, in my opinion. 

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Man, the more I use it, the more I'm beginning to think that my goty for 2017 is actually "ebaying the ION drum kit adapter for Xbox One". Between that and Rocksmith, I think I spend about 3/4 of my gaming time playing music on real or almost-real instruments instead of actually playing games. The great part is, I'm watching myself get markedly better at both. I am now at a point where I can play almost all non-shred songs near-to-perfect on RS and just cracked my first ever "5 stars on an expert-level devil-horns-difficulty song" on my ION kit. Love it so much. While RS has been a big part of how I spend my time for a few years now (nearing 850 hours in the 2014 edition, had about 100 in the original before that), I hadn't used the drums in about 5 years before deciding to grab the adapter. So worth it. Honestly, probably a better and more rewarding experience than any "game" game that I've played this year.

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I made this list mostly as a...idk, a thought experiment for myself but it's just been sitting open in notepad for a while now so I'll share!

 

Nier Automata
Paperclips
PUBG
Heat Signature
Prey

 

Honorable Mentions (Unordered)
West of Loathing
Crossout
Battle Chef Brigade
Mario
Multibowl

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Thimbleweed Park

It was the only [true] adventure game that my brain on turkey got hold of this year. So this gaming year would have just sucked if Thimbleweed Park had been anything but spectacular. It was: Spectacular. Graphic whore that I am, I feared I wouldn't be able to connect to the story and characters. I could. Yes, certainly, I didn't like the ending, but the journey there was so wholly satisfying that I just hope Ron Gilbert will go on to make more adventure games in that style exactly. He won't.

 

Horizon Zero Dawn

Back in April, I surprisingly found a PS4 slim under my arm at the checkout of my local electronics store, bundled with Horizon Zero Dawn. It was the first truly open world game that I really got into for ages. I loved the story, loved Aloy, loved the world they were creating. I left this world after 112 hours, but thought that was enough. Didn't buy the DLC: Some new ideas are in order, folks.

 

Uncharted: Lost Legacy

This was only my second Uncharted game, as I had skipped the PS3 generation altogether and hadn't bought a PS4 for remasters (yet ^_^ ). But boy that was intense. Every scene loaded with detail, playtime not stretched with the exception of a short scene towards the end. And to me, Naughty Dog's flirt with an open world environment was wildly successful. Exactly as big that you had a good bit of room to maneuver, that you needed that map, and exactly as small that you never got lost for long. Damn it, I need more games like that. If only the zombie shit was my thing.

 

Honorable mention: Battlechasers: Nightwar

Recently, I didn't finish my JRPGs any more. Although I'm a total grinder, I lost interest in the grinding in so many games these last years and hence abandoned them (like I abandoned Final Fantasy XV this year). Battlechasers did an exceptional job in keeping motivation up and serving both the hardcore completionist grinder fraction as well as the short but hard enthusiasts. Warning: For the people who didn't read the comics, the story is about as unambitioned as humanly possible.

 

 

I ...uhm... played three hours BotW at my cousin's house. Just sayin'.

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If you have some favorites from 2017 that you'd like to write about, I'm hosting a big retrospective over on Haywire (again). Just fill out this form to take part.

 

Da Rules:

 

1) If you'd like to do multiple games, fill out the form multiple times.

 

2) This is more a list of interesting games than great ones. Weird game jam games or itchio gems are very welcome.

 

3) You'll have to write a 200-300 word laudation to explain what's interesting, exciting or entertaining about the game. You don't have to review it, you don't have to go into the negatives at all.

 

 

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Prey is my GOTY.  How original.  But it's got a killer combo of action, tactics, planning, story, exploration, and experimentation.

 

There are some huge caveats, such as:  I only game on PC, I don't play sidescrollers or platformers (nothing since Trine 2 anyway) and I only have time for 10-12 games a year. 

 

Honorable mention from the strategy category:  Byzantine Games' Field of Glory II.

 

 

 

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On 12/26/2017 at 11:07 PM, SuperBiasedMan said:

When do you expect to request those btw? Just wondering when I'll likely be writing mine.

 

Right, that part is buried a little bit in the description, but I'll need those by the end of January. I'll be sending out confirmation and reminder emails soon though, so just wait for those notifications.

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20 minutes ago, Deadpan said:

 

Right, that part is buried a little bit in the description, but I'll need those by the end of January. I'll be sending out confirmation and reminder emails soon though, so just wait for those notifications.

 

Sounds good. :tup:

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