2015 in Games

BB · 12-15-2015, 10:39 PM

It's time once again to spend some time reviewing the games that have filled our free time in the past year. Last year's thread can be found over here- I'd be really interested to know if anyone played something from that list this year!

Surprisingly for me, I've not played many new games this year! I spent a while going back over retro classics I enjoyed previously, but as I've played them before I won't include them on this list. (You may do so if you like.)

I've been playing SIF all year, but I'm not going to include it in this list because it's mentioned at the end of last year, and although TF2 has had a lot of new stuff added and plays like a very different game I'm sure everyone knows I love that title to heck already and I don't need to go into it.

Let's go!

-

Hatoful Boyfriend

This is a tricky one. Whatever I say about this game, if you haven't played it before you'll still think of it as “that goofy VN that has birds instead of bishies”. If I tell you the characters are all well-realised and enjoyable to get to know, you still won't take it seriously. If I tell you the worldbuilding is great and there really is a genuine and believable reason for it to be birds instead of humans, you still won't take it seriously. If I tell you that Hatoful Boyfriend is one of the darkest and most twisted stories I've ever known... you'll raise an eyebrow at me and scoff, and won't take it seriously. But, please... if you're in the “it's dumb because it's birds and that's dumb” crowd, just try it. It'll surprise you in the best of ways, just so long as you let it.

-

Trails In The Sky FC

It feels like I've been playing this for a million years, although I'm still only 4/5 through it. This game goes HARD on the worldbuilding!

Trails (or if you prefer, TitS... no, lets stick with Trails) is basically a very barebones tactics RPG, but I feel that describing it as such is misleading. In truth, it's more like a slice-of-life visual novel with an occasional sRPG minigame. The story follows Estelle and Joshua, who are in training to join the private-hire army called the Bracers. Bracers spend their days righting wrongs and being commissioned by folks to clear out monsters, escort them places, and so on. There is an on-going overarching plotline involving their missing father, but it's certainly not in any hurry to get to the meaty bits of it- 80% of the game is spent just being Bracers and helping out normal folks in their daily lives.

It maybe sounds dull, and well... it can be. It's not one for those who don't like a VERY slow burn. It's the first half of a two-part story, so the plot progression comes in drips. But it's more than made up for in the frankly staggering efforts spent on worldbuilding. EVERY NPC has a name and a personality. I don't just mean, "even minor characters"- I mean, in a fight against a boss-guy who surrounded himself with mooks, every one of the mooks had a name and a distinct personality. I had never seen them before and in the 20 hours of gameplay since I haven't seen them again, and they literally only existed for that single fight to act as cannon fodder, but they still had development!

It goes beyond that, and after pretty much every single storyline event all the NPCs in the world have something new to say, will be doing something different, etc. People will have new things to say even in the brief space of time between talking to two plot-relevant NPCs who live in the same town. It's pretty overwhelming and I can only wonder how much of it I'm missing out on just by not going around the entire world every time I talk to a new significant person.

The battles themselves are... weak. I wouldn't sell the game to someone who just wanted sRPG fixin's. It's laboriously slow to kill even the simplest of encounters and there's an obnoxiously high chance to miss attacks, making them drag out even longer.

I've not finished it but I intend to, it's just hard to stay into it for long stretches. I do recommend it, but tentatively- and not to people who don't think reading is pretty much the best thing ever.

-

Undertale

Haven't got far with this one! Everyone either already knows Undertale or is thoroughly sick of hearing about Undertale so I'll keep it brief- very charming, often laugh-out-loud funny game unashamedly aping Earthbound in style that will make you cry when you accidentally kill someone you love- and you will love them and you probably will kill them.

-

Trine 2

I didn't play this single player- it handles live co-op with up to three players, so I played it through with my fiancee. It's definitely the way I'd recommend playing it, and there's so much potential for arguing and insulting each other and getting in fights that few other co-op games can quite manage- it's the way co-op gaming should be.

Knightly Pontius, wizardly Amadeus, and thiefly Zoya get told by a magic lamp they have to kill all the goblins and so they do it because magic lamps never lie, and in the process get embroiled in a bitter rivalry between two princesses, at least one of whom is a rotter. To defeat the goblins and the witch, they must solve a barrage of physics puzzles and convince the knight (me) to stop throwing his thrice-damned hammer into the carefully-placed tower of blocks just as the wizard (her) is about to solve the puzzle you absolute bastard. Players can freely switch between the three characters and, as the thief is the best at getting into secret areas, players are also free to argue about which one gets to be her.

It's an astonishingly pretty game even on minimum settings- genuine 'wow's from both of us. The whole affair is very storybook and fairytale so it's a family-friendly title as well, if swearing at each other isn't the way you play your co-op (???). It's absolutely recommended to anyone who has a partner or two to play it with.

-

Gunpoint

A quirky jumpy-stealth-em-up, this game favours quick action over sitting in boxes for hours. Guns have been banned, and local arms-dealers are a little less than happy about it. Richard Conway is hired to help rival companies one-up each other as they develop new technologies to replace weapons. Equipped with his Leapfrog trousers and no guns, he crashes into action.

The jumping is incredibly fun in itself, offering new ways to enter your marked building and also escape it when things go awry. Another tool in Conway's arsenal is the ability to rewire security systems to his own ends. Door won't open? Wire up that security camera to the button that opens it and jump in front of it- now it'll open the door instead of sound the alarm. Rewire light switches so the guards get confused and run around trying to turn them back on while you slip past in the darkness. Rewire a guards gun so it activates the gun of the guard behind him and make him accidentally shoot himself in the back. The puzzle element this adds gives the game a lot of its substance.

The story and dialogue are genuinely funny and often had me laugh out loud. Gunpoint is very cheap and comes recommended infinitely. Get it right now!

-

Shantae Risky's Revenge DC

Good goggly blimey but the sprite art in this game is phenomenal. This game belongs in a gallery. There is even an animation that plays if you stop walking on Shantae's other foot where she adjusts her step to match her standing sprite.

Oh, right, the game. It's a metroidvania-but-not-quite which sees half-genie Shantae collect things from across the globe to battle the fantastically-named Risky Boots. The controls all work very nicely and the music suits the theme very well, although the story isn't any great shakes. My one major major grievance with this game is its travesty of a map. I have no idea how it made it to the shipped game in its useless current state- I'm not alone complaining about it. Use a fanmade map if you want to use the map at all, it makes sweeping up missed collectibles a chore otherwise.

Game is still great though.

-

Worms Golf

This was a tag-along from a Humble Bundle many moons ago that I just kinda glossed over. It's pretty fun- as you might expect there's more to it than just a golfing game. Each course has various collectibles that add a fair amount of replay value to them and the puzzle-like designs are well made. Main niggle is that the shots feel kinda weak and also don't ever seem to follow the shown prediction arc even approximately- a real pain when trying to get in a small gap.

-

Alien Breeds 123

These are lumped together as they are pretty much all the same game. There's no development or evolution between them aside from a few of the weapons are slightly different, so I'm treating them as a single title.

Well, I wasn't impressed with this at all. I played the original Alien Breed on the Amiga all those years ago, and it's remained a fan favourite since then for its tense and fast combination of arcade shooter and survival shooter. These modern rearrangements go big on the “survival” but really forgot about the “fast”. Gruff McSpacemarine plods about at the speed of a tectonic plate as he roams around what feels like the same spaceship corridor over and over again. The game revolves around following the markers on the map to reach your destination but for some reason EVERY SINGLE TIME there is a door in the way, requiring backtracking. This isn't exploration- you get a waypoint marker that will take you to a door, and then a new one that takes you back to a corridor nearby to get the key, and then the first marker comes back, and nothing happens during any of this. It's just filler. It would be excusable if there were enemy encounters on the return journey or something but it was quite often the case that it served no purpose other than to make the level longer.

Other annoyances include a waiting time when searching lockers and bodies for ammo and items, as well as activating doors, switches, terminals... pretty much everything you can interact with requires at least one second of charging time, usually nearer three. Again, this would be fine if there was a present threat because then decisions have to be made, can I open this door before that alien eats my head, etc. But again it was so often the case that there was literally no reason to make me wait. One situation in particular required three switches to be flipped to open a door. The switches were all within three steps of each other, all took several seconds to flip, and absolutely nothing happened between them. Very dull and tedious and boring and slow.

-

Jigoku Kisetsukan

It's unashamedly Touhou and it's not trying to be anything else, lets get that out of the way from the off. Comparisons are not only inevitable, but clearly the intent since the earliest stages of development. If you have played and enjoyed a Touhou game in the past, you know what to expect here and will slip right in. It's completely free, so I will already say I recommend giving it a go.

The one thing Touhou has which this lacks, and I apologise if this sounds a bit purple-prose but it's true, is soul. The characters are fun, but where Touhou expands on a character's theme through their attacks, and their music, and the in-depth lore behind their existence, Jigoku doesn't bother with any of that. Most disappointingly, although there are enough boss fight themes to go around, the characters are not given their own unique theme- the first boss you fight has the same music no matter who it is. It seems a small criticism, but the level of attention Touhou gives these small details, it really stands out.

Another criticism, and one that is more general, is the frankly ridiculous difficulty spike during the last boss. Again there's a different final boss for each character but they share the same pool of attacks... which are so much harder than anything else the game throws at you it's unbelievable. I know the point of these games is to learn the patterns and figure out how to beat them over time, but when I can literally play through the entire rest of the game without taking one hit and then suddenly have to use continues on the final boss, something isn't right with the balance.

This is another area where the lack of thought shows, as each player character has a unique shot type and movement style but the only unique battle they each have doesn't pay any heed to this. Why does the character whose shot is only as wide as she is and whose movement speed is the slowest get the same rapid sideways-movement dodging attack that the fast character gets? Why does the close-range-only character face an attack where she literally cannot get close enough to the boss to deal any damage?

Aside from this though, the patterns are REALLY fun to play against. I did genuinely have a good time with this title despite my above misgivings. This has some of my favourite danmaku in the series. ...So to speak.

-

Touhou 15 Legacy Of Lunatic Kingdom

tl;dr: GOTY.

The demo version released earlier in the year had left me uncertain how much I would enjoy this game as it's a pretty big departure from the norm, but I needn't have worried- Touhou 15 has become one of my absolute favourites in the series.

The new addition of Pointdevice Mode marries the concepts of Spell Practice with the main game, creating something alike the sidegames (Impossible Spellcard comes to mind). There are no lives- instead, you have to repeat each pattern, spellcard and stage “chapter” until you can clear it without being hit. Essentially, the game becomes like a TAS, with every completion effectively a “perfect” run of the game (although, it won't be!)

The new system allows for some really interesting and astounding new patterns (animated gifs warning) to be thrown at you. Also, incredibly hard! This is without doubt one of the hardest games in the series on any difficulty. Despite that, it's fantastically fun- each spell becomes more like a puzzle to solve rather than a simple barrage to weave through, each one requiring some study and testing to figure out the optimal strategy. Each spell you clear is a huge victory and you can feel yourself growing with each step in a far more noticeable way than the other titles.

Pointdevice also allows you to save your progress and come back to where you were so you don't have to burn yourself out on That One Spell You Just Can't Clear. Getting stuck on Clownpiece's first survival spell will immediately show the benefit of being able to drop out- dizzy!

Speaking of Clownpiece, she's fricken adorable and I love the story behind her outfit choice. The fandom kinda exploded when she first showed up and were denigrating her design for being too wacky, but trust in ZUN- he knows what he's doing and, with context of the translated details, even American Flag Fairy makes sense. I could go into it here but I guess that's too much for this article huh? (Please ask please ask)

I'm also really impressed with how the Pointdevice Mode was integrated into the story, and reflected in the music too. The battle against Junko is, to all parties, a fight the player can't possibly lose- so rather than the usual hard-hitting Huge Fight Against Unhappy Odds heard in previous titles, the final boss theme carries an almost arrogant sense of triumph.

The final stage is so cool, and has a wonderfully cinematic moment over the Sea Of Rains (which incidentally is a very cool callback to the SSiB manga) as the Earth rises in the background timed perfectly to the swell of the music and incoming barrage.

Finally, on a fanboy note (hahaha just kidding this whole screed is fanboy-powered), Sanae returns as a playable character and I love her so much. I'm so, so happy she got to go to the moon.

All in all Touhou 15 is a superb entry in the series and if you've never played one before, absolutely do not start here as you will be crushed into powder.

-

Oracle Of Seasons

Oracle of Ages was in last year's Games Of, but I didn't finish this one! I think I played it too soon after finishing Ages, and it also felt like the weaker of the two titles. The season mechanic didn't grab me much, although the underground dudes are really cute. I should get back to finishing this game really, but it'll be some time before I do. Since it uses the same everything as Ages, I imagine my impressions will be the same as that, so read my entry for that in last years thread!

-

Prof Layton 2

It's Layton again! No, really. It's the same game, with different puzzles in it. That's no bad thing, it just makes it hard to talk about it in a way that isn't repeating myself. The story's resolution was absolute tripe again just like the first game, but it did include a very exciting sword fight.

Also- Professor Layton is an absolute asshole. He gets away with it because he's so polite and nonchalant about it, but he really is a cock when you pay attention to what he's actually saying. I love it- he's one of the best-written arse-bastards I've ever known and it's wonderful.

-

Nintendo Badge Arcade

Extortionately expensive F2P, but the physics of this crane game are really nice to play with and you do get a generous amount of free goes at it. It's nicely presented with a rabbit clerk talking to you throughout, and each crane machine has a different layout to play. Don't have much else to say about it really- you probably already know if collecting badges for display on your menu is your kinda thing.

-

Pokemon Rumble World

Fun enough in small doses- it's pretty mashy without a lot of variance, but it's a nice timewaster. Possibly because it's early on, I'm finding that the enemy pokemon level up really fast which is annoying- I no sooner catch a decent level pokemon I like than it's already too weak and I have to go catching again. Also the randomness will get annoying to collectors, with boss pokemon catchable but only a low chance of it happening.

-

Pokemon Picross

Argh! Okay, let me preface- I fricken LOVE Picross games, and I fricken LOVE pokemon, so this was really exciting for me when it was announced. It was the most exciting thing in that Direct for me and I realise that makes me lame and I don't even care.

The free-to-play stuff is frustrating beyond belief, but also admirable in a way... Pretty much everything you do costs in-game currency Picrites to perform. Picrites come to free players in drips but really, there's no way you can rely on free ones. I'm actually stuck in the game because I ran out of picrites and can't afford to unlock any more levels to get more. There's a daily puzzle that awards 3 picrites (up to 13 at later levels) and the next 5 or so missions will cost 70 to unlock... Yeah, it's like that. Honestly I'd prefer they'd dropped the first level batch as a free demo and made the game a standard retail title or released it as Generation Packs rather than this carrot-stick style.

There's some really nasty money-sinks that the game throws at you without much explanation that I will warn you of here. Firstly, you will be told about the Alt-World early on, in excited tones which make it sound like a good deal. Alt-World puzzles are the same puzzles in the normal game with harder rules- you don't get any rewards for completing them and they are all repeats. It costs twice as much as opening up a new set of puzzles does and is only at all worth considering after you've done everything else.

At some point you'll find a mega pokemon puzzle, but to do these you need to buy the 500 picrite Mega Pencil. I have seen a total of two of these mega pokemon puzzles in 10 worlds (out of 30-odd). Again, only worthwhile when you've run out of things to do. These two sinks are so connivingly placed and sold that it really left a bad taste in my mouth.

Then again, you can't buy more than $30 worth of picrites as the game will give them to you free of charge after this, which is the cost of a standard retail release, so that's pretty neat... it makes the drip-feed stand out more, though. For reference, I bought 800 picrites with the special one-time offer there is available- was about £3.50. I feel like that's a reasonable price for what it's got me, without spending on the alt-world or megas.

But, you know, it's Picross. If you like Picross, you'll love it. And I do.

-

Transformations

Oh, no, wait, I didn't play this yet... or even start making it. Heheheh, but you're gonna love it when it's done. Trust me. Be excited.

mauve · 12-16-2015, 12:12 AM

The Banner Saga: Viking Oregon Trail. I'm in a love-hate relationship with this game. On the one hand, it's beautiful and has some great character design, and the decision-making is actually really tough. On the other hand... I feel like there's almost no point in getting to know or like half of these characters since so many of them die out-of-combat due to stupid decisions or plot reasons, so I end up wasting Renown Points to level up characters who will blindly jump off a cliff or get crushed by dead robots while I'm trying to figure out how to keep everyone from starving to death. Don't get me wrong; I'm enjoying the game so far, but as time goes on it feels like less and less of the game has anything to do with me and my decisions.

Tales from the Borderlands: I. LOVED. THIS. GAME. I was incredibly skeptical about Tales from the Borderlands at first: How on earth could you make a Borderlands game, a franchise which exists almost solely on stupid humor, over-the-top violence and excessive randomized loot drops, as a point-n-click adventure?! The answer? Let Telltale Games do it. I ADORED every minute of this game. The characters were great. The humor was great (and it fit into the style of the original games!). The voice acting was great (PATRICK WARBURTON). The writing was great. It was short, yes, but it managed to accomplish everything it needed to accomplish, and it didn't fall into any of the standard plot traps I expected it to fall into. Plus Telltale employees wrote Handsome Jack better than actual Gearbox employees did in Borderlands The Pre-Sequel. He was just as condescending, conniving and car-salesmanesque as you would expect. Bravo, Telltale.

To be fair, it has major technical issues, at least on Mac. It ALWAYS starts in an overly-huge resolution so I can never see the start menu. I had to toggle in and out of windowed mode in order to get it to reset to a resolution that would actually fit.

Gemini Rue: Uuughhhh..... I really wanted to like this game. I'm a fan of Wadjet Eye Games, and so I picked Gemini Rue and Primordia up for cheap in a Steam Sale. Wadjet Eye didn't actually write this game; they just published it. And it shows. I know a lot of people like this one a lot, but I found the characters to be too fanfictiony. The bland, doe-eyed boy who is being forced to become an assassin in an eeeevil experiment laboratory, and the gruff, "doesn't trust anyone because TRAAAGIC BACSTORYYY" gravely-voiced former gang assassin who's now trying to be a good guy. To be fair, it took me quite a while to figure out the story's big plot twist-- I had it figured out about ten minutes before the actual reveal. And the game handled the ability to switch between characters/storylines much better than Broken Age did. Also Abe Goldfarb is back. I begin to think that all Wadget Eye published games feature Abe Goldfarb.

For some bizarre reason, characters from Cowboy Bebop are hidden as easter eggs in the game. Rather than amuse me, I found this a bit disappointing: It was like this lackluster game was holding my nostalgic favorite anime characters hostage in a depressing and grim world. Booo.

Broken Age: Act 2: Another disappointment. I'm honestly not sure why this took so long to produce. The majority of maps, characters, and items are directly recycled from Act I. The story was... okay, although not fantastic, but it made characters I enjoyed LESS likeable. Shay just came off as being kind of a jerk.

Really, there's two big problems that stand out most of all for me. The first is a mechanical issue: Unlike Act I, Act II forces you to switch between Vella and Shay and to use things you supposedly learn from one character on the other's world. This wasn't utilized in Act I, and I think it worked better that way. Everything you did was based on what that character themselves learned or knew. In act II, you are forced to make use of knowledge that the characters shouldn't have. This really tears you out of the story. Rather than "being" Shay or Vella, you become just the all-knowing third party making your puppets dance. The other major issue for me was the reveal of Shay's parents. If this was handled any other way, it would've been a great reveal. The way they DID handle it just felt like the devs were lying to you the whole time. Throughout the first half of the game, Shay refers to the "Sun" as "Computer," going so far as to insist that she's not his mother and is an AI that has gone rogue. The player has no reason to think otherwise. Suddenly, in Act II, oh, wait, she's a real human that's really his mother and SHAY JUST SUDDENLY CASUALLY REMEMBERS THIS in an "oh yeah, my real human mom HAS just been two doors away from me all this time and I totally knew that" moment. This could've been really cool if A) Shay honestly had no idea these were real humans and got to meet his parents for the first time or B) Shay DIDN'T EXPLICITLY SAY THESE WERE COMPUTERS and left it vague enough for the player to assume they're robots until the big reveal and they realize Shay just has such a horrible estranged relationship with them that they might as well be robots. As it was, it just felt like the player was lied to.

Primordia: This more than made up for the disappointment that was Gemini Rue. Atmospheric and interesting, Primordia featured a dystopian future inhabited by half-mad robots who formed cults around what little they remember of humanity and its relics. The first half of the game, wherein the player is wandering a sandy wasteland and exploring the mysterious world, is much better than the second half, which takes place entirely within a robot-city that's about six streets long. It lost steam at that point.

The atmosphere is moody and oppressive, and the world really drew me into it. I especially like your character's sidekick, Crispin, who will give you hints when you're stuck if you talk to him. He also gives crass remarks if you pester him for hints too often. OH! And the main voice actors are Logan Cunningham (the narrator from Bastion and the voice of the Transistor) and Abe Goldfarb (IN. EVERY. WADJET. EYE. GAME.).

Shadowrun: Hong Kong: As I said in my Steam review, this game falls at the exact middle point between Shadowrun Returns and Shadowrun Dragonfall. I enjoyed it, certainly, and it features Harebrained Scheme's fantastic writing and characters, but it's just a middle ground between the two older games. The ending was a little disappointing too. Still, I have no regrets for buying/playing it and will probably replay it with another class. My troll mage kicked ass though.

Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown: A cheap ripoff of the Harebrained Schemes games, only halfway converted into an MMO. Horrible voice acting and a semi-decent character creation process (but only a few character portraits per race, so your character NEVER looks like your portrait, especially if you're an ork or troll), with a watered-down combat system. It's sorta fun to kick around in, but can't hold a candle to the Harebrained Schemes games.

Quantum Conundrum: I'm not really sold on this game and I don't know why. It's cute and the writing is charming and funny, but it just didn't hold my attention long enough to make me want to struggle with the more difficult puzzles. I haven't played it since August. I STARTED playing it in August.

Technobabylon: I'm still torn on this one. Another game published but not written by Wadjet Eye. I really liked the beginning with the unemployed computer hacker-- she was an interesting character and I liked the introduction to the Trance and how it affected peoples' lives, but then the narrative switched over to a stereotypical older cop who doesn't trust new technology and doesn't play by the ruuuuuules and added story elements about a new holy war and stolen embryos and a bunch of other stuff, and I just want to go back to the hacker girl and maybe learn more about this MindJacker who's killing Trance users. I'll definitely go back to this game and finish it, but I'm not as hooked on it as I've been to other Wadjet Eye titles.

Portal Stories: Mel THIS GAME IS SO GOOD. IT IS ALSO *FREE* AND ANYONE WHO OWNS PORTAL 2 ON PC SHOULD PLAY IT. The writing is great, the environments are great, the puzzles are DEVILISHLY hard some times, it has custom skins for Mel (the player) and a fully voice-acted Personality Core, and there's lines for Cave Johnson (and whoever they got to voice him did a really excellent job), and I THINK Valve has officially accepted the story as canon. Don't quote me on that though-- that's just the rumor. Anyway. Play this.

Aperture Tag: The Paintgun Testing Initiative: Wow, this was a banner year for Portal mods. This was a very challenging and very interesting take on Portal, which focuses almost exclusively on the Gels used in the second half of Portal 2. Really creative stuff, although story-wise it's not as good a game as Portal Stories: Mel. The mechanics don't always work exactly as intended, which can be frustrating. Still, it's got more custom voice-acting and a wacky sense of humor.

Legends of Heroes: Trails in the Sky: I picked this up because the reviews were almost entirely positive and gushed about the great story and compelling characters and incredibly long playtime. I'm not entirely impressed, to be honest. Maybe I'm just not far enough into the story to really get into the "good, interesting characters" part, but so far the only interesting thing is that the JRPG heroine is the outgoing, strength-based leader and the JRPG hero is the quiet, even-tempered and diplomatic one. And even that's not super unique. I dunno. Maybe it'll get better later. I'm only 2 hours into the game.

Nidhogg: Fun but frustrating. Surprisingly (and hilariously) gory for a sprite game.

Crypt of the Necrodancer: I bought this on a whim, fully expecting to ragequit it forever as soon as it got too hard, but I'm really enjoying it. I usually die over and over and over again, but the music is so catchy, and the gameplay is very fun, and the levels randomly regenerate every time I die so I'm never actually repeating anything.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic It was really good--- up until the ending. Then it was just super disappointing and lame.

Invisible, Inc: This game builds so much tension and suspense! I love it. It's very short-- Maybe 3-4 hours total-- but that actually works really well for the game. You get a random assortment of missions spread across the globe every time you play, and you only have 72 hours to prepare for the final mission. "Hours" translate to distance you can travel, so you have to decide whether to focus on multiple missions in the same part of the world, or to cherry-pick fewer missions in distant lands that might have better payoffs. And if you don't prepare well enough, you could land yourself in an unbeatable final mission and have to start again. Add to that the fact that missions are turn-based and have randomly generated maps, so you can never memorize a building's layout and you can't make educated guesses about where your target might be. Every round of play in a mission, the alarm level raises, which brings out new enemies, raises the difficulty of hacking, and other unpleasantness, so you have to decide how long you want to stick around collecting resources you'll need for your next mission. The entire game is basically a suspense movie, and every decision you make is the equivalent of the movie hero screaming "DO I CUT THE RED WIRE OR THE BLUE WIRE?!?!"

Battleblock Theater: I remember complaining about how easy Super Mario Bros Wii-U was. Battleblock made up for that. It is one of the few games I actually regularly ragequit, yet I still come back to it. Super fun, and also super enraging. Cute character skins, the best narrator/writing, and good music.

Overcast · 12-16-2015, 01:53 AM

Hotline Miami 2: I had walked into this somewhat expecting more of the same, but there was a wildly different tonal sense as I walked through this. For a lot of people I learned this created dissonance and aggravation but for me it kinda slowly simmered in me to a boil before extinguishing the fire and leaving me feeling dark and distant. This is probably my favorite game of the year, and the finale to the series I never knew I wanted.

The Beginner's Guide: I had just finished Undertale and was so full of emotions when I learned one half of the guys who had made the Stanley Parable had made another walking simulator. And I was forced along another emotive roller coaster that left me grasping for answers at the end, in a way he wanted me to. Playing me like a damn fiddle in a strangely perfect image of theme as game.

Dominons 4: Finally a game I can describe with more than just emotions. There is an interesting feeling to this game, as if you are building your own internal mythological concepts as you play a god trying to attain supergodhood in a war of dominance. There is some pre-set mythos but a great deal is all you. I also got to watch the process of PF consuming a game and mastering it in like a week, which is always fascinating.

Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin: I liked Dark Souls 2, I know that is kinda made an awkward grab at a lot of the concepts of Dark Souls without actually reaching the bar but it was something that felt mechanically improved despite it. It was fun to play, and with Scholar you got to see the game in a perhaps more finished format than you may have initially imagined. It still doesn't quite reach the setting depth that Dark Souls had, but with the addition of everything in this version it finally approaches about as close as I think it will ever get while still being as ambiguous as you might expect of the series.

The Age of Decadence: Finally. It's finally done. I've been playing a half finished game with a little more content continually for the past couple years but they finally did it. AoD can be a little clunky, sometimes overtly difficult in a way that seems luck based or unfair, but the story is something deeply fascinating, vacillating from court intrigue to lost knowledge that has become something arcane, to just raw violence to solve your problems. I love the setting and story and if you can get past how horrifically ugly the game is, and I easily can, there is a ton to love here.

Pillars of Eternity: There is something of an oddity here, I liked this game, but I don't think I was in love with it. I honestly felt the same way about games like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. My favorite game of the Infinity Engine days was Fallout, and my favorite Bioware DnD adventure was Neverwinter Nights, so by nature I kinda just prefer my games to be less oriented on group dynamics and more on concentrating on your character with the option of assistance. The balance of the game though was definitely more toward having that group around, and unlike Baldur's Gate it never really branched into the outright ridiculous as far as classes go. There was a bit missing, and the story had a less than satisfying ending. I enjoyed the journey though, and I'd appreciate more.

Arcanum · 12-16-2015, 06:00 AM

I can never remember the games that came out from January to April/May when it gets to this year roundup time, so I looked at my steam product activation history and made this list. Then I realized how massive this list is (which isn't even the full list of what I played this year), so I'm going to keep it rather short for each title because holy shit do I get a lot of games.

Dying Light
This is actually a really solid zombie game. The melee combat feels pretty good, which is usually a hard thing for first-person melee systems to accomplish. And night time in the game is genuinely terrifying with the super zombies chasing after you. I only have two complaints about the game. While the parkour is fun it seems a bit more grounded in realism than other parkour systems in games. Specifically there is no horizontal wall run, which is disappointing since you have these esoteric weapons to kill zombies with, but you can't fiddle with gravity a bit to make wall runs possible. The other complaint is that mid/late game, when you have really powerful crafted weapons, night time is no longer scary because you can fight the super zombies. Then a little later you get the grappling hook, which trivializes the parkour system and the need to scout the best route on the fly, and allows you to avoid any punishment if you screw up a jump because you can just zip back up to where you were. This made late game extremely boring, and because of that I never actually finished the game.

Grey Goo
Pretty fun RTS. More macro focused than StarCraft 2, and I've seen it compared to the Supreme Commander (never played that game so I wouldn't know). The factions are neat and have somewhat unique mechanics, but the different units didn't really feel all that different resulting in pretty similar playstyles. The story mode was really fun and challenging, and the cinematics were gorgeous. Sadly the multiplayer community was practically non-existent from launch, so I had no incentive to keep playing the game.

Evolve
I played this game during its betas and absolutely loved it. I bought it despite the shitty DLC model, and had some fun for about a week or two. For those who don't know, the game is asymmetrical multiplayer where one person is a monster against 4 hunter players. The monster needs to flee the hunters and eat NPC creatures in order to evolve and become stronger so that it can start hunting the hunters. Sadly the game became stagnant thanks to the poor matchmaking. I would win 90% of my games as the monster because of how people failed to grasp the need for teamwork as the hunters, and my games as a hunter were awful because of the same reason. The few times there was teamwork with a good monster to fight, the game was fantastic. But nobody wanted to stick around to learn the game, coupled with the DLC disaster, and the active player count plummeted within weeks, making decent matches even less likely due to massive skill gaps.

Sunless Sea
Holy shit this game is good. Absolutely fantastic writing, amazing atmosphere, and just overall extremely enjoyable. The naval combat is a bit lackluster, but that's more of a side distraction than the main focus of the game, which is exploring the Sunless Sea and going on adventures on whatever islands you find, recruiting officers onto your ship, trading, going insane, managing resources, and cannibalism. Highly recommend this to anyone who doesn't hate reading.

Dragonball Xenoverse
Spectacle Dragonball Z fighting game. It's pretty flawed, but is still a really fun game if you're a fan of the series.

Ori and the Blind Forest
Absolutely beautiful game. It's a Metroid-light game that has a simple story, an adorable protagonist, and beautiful art. Not as much exploration as typical metroidvania games, hence the "-light," but still a very enjoyable experience.

GTA V
It's Grand Theft Auto. Not really much else to say. Really fun game, the story is solid with interesting characters. Multiplayer was neat for a bit, but it really shines if you're playing with friends and all of mine slowly stopped playing so I did as well.

Witcher 3
Holy shit this game is amazing. It deserves all the awards and praise that it has been getting. Morally grey quests with no morality system built in the game to let you know X choice gives Y karma. Your choices have consequences, that's all the feedback you get, and it is amazing. The writing is phenomenal, the game world is gorgeous, the combat is extremely satisfying. I could gush over this game for quite a long time. My only complaint is that once you get around level 20+ you can get some really powerful skill builds that trivialize a lot of the combat. I ended up purposefully gimping my build to keep it enjoyable. Other than that, this game is the best RPG I have played.

Freedom Planet
The best Sonic game since Sonic Adventure, and it's not even Sonic. This game was originally made as a Sonic fan game, but it grew into its own thing and I'm really glad it did. It is a fantastic 2D platformer, has a cliche but still interesting story (mostly due to the characters), and plenty of replayability thanks to multiple playable characters with unique play styles. If you liked the old Genesis Sonic games, then give this game a shot.

Duck Game
2D arena duck combat. Best played with friends. You can join random games online, but it's not nearly as fun as being able to laugh at the ridiculous moments that happen very frequently with 3 of your friends.

Ronin
Interesting 2D action game with some stealth elements. You move around the level in real time, but when you are spotted by an enemy time freezes and the game becomes turn-based with simultaneous turns. You can see where enemies will be shooting thanks to their laser sights, and the only way you can move around the world is by jumping. It essentially turns every combat encounter into a puzzle, and allows you to perform some crazy ninja maneuvers that would normally be extremely difficult if the combat was all real time. The game is pretty short, and there's not much incentive to replay it once you beat it, but it was an enjoyable experience while it lasted.

Rocket League
Best sports game of the year. It's soccer with rocket powered cars smashing into the ball instead of people kicking it. Plus they just added a hockey mode. Words can't even do justice to how amazing this game is. Hell even video doesn't do that good of a job. I know, I watched gameplay clips and didn't get why my friends were playing it. Then I tried a friend's copy through steam's family share and instantly bought own copy.

Titan Souls
Shadow of the Colossus meets 2D meets roguelikes. It's a neat game but I have one problem with the game which is that your respawn point is far enough from bosses to be extremely annoying. In a game where you die in one hit, you need to be able to restart the scenario almost instantaneously. Super Meat Boy does this, where death is easy to come by but restarting a level is instant and painless and feeds into the "one more try" mentality. In Titan Souls when you die you need to walk 5-8 seconds to get back to the boss arena. That doesn't seem like much, but when you are dying 10+ times against a boss it really adds up and is needlessly frustrating.

Warhammer Vermintide
Left4Dead but melee focused, and with classes. This is another game that does melee combat right. It's also the first game to shamelessly clone the Left4Dead format, and I'm okay with that. L4D is a fantastic game, and I'm surprised it wasn't successfully cloned sooner. The game also features a loot system to get you that dopamine fix and keep you playing. Also the devs are actively listening to their community, and plan on expanding the game with more classes and possibly more enemy types (currently you can only fight against Skaven, rat creatures).

Transformers Devastation
It's a character action game by Platinum and it plays like a character action game by Platinum and that is fantastic. Really fun game, multiple characters that are different enough to give you some variety, but similar enough to allow skill to carry over between them. Story is your typical sunday morning cartoon fare, and it is wonderfully fitting. Environments are a bit repetitive (for example you traverse the exact same city map in a lot of the chapters, just doing different objectives in it), but the core gameplay and boss fights are amazing. Highly recommend this if you're a fan of Platinum, G1 Transformers, or fast paced action games.

DmC Devil May Cry
Oh my god this game is terrible. Got it through a Humble Bundle and figured I would give it a chance despite hearing bad things about it. If you haven't played many character action games before then I'm sure you could enjoy this game. But anyone who is a fan of CAGs like anything by Platinum, or any of the previous DMC games, will most likely not enjoy this game. It's just not a DMC game.

Rebel Galaxy
You can't take the sky from me. Neat space combat/exploration/trading/questing game with an amazing soundtrack that constantly reminds me of Firefly. The game's combat pretty much takes Assassin's Creed Black Flag's naval combat and puts it into space, and it works really well. One thing to point out is the game is limited to a 2D plane, so there's no up/down navigation or exploring, but it doesn't limit it as much as you think. The game knows it's an arcadey space action game, and doesn't pretend to be anything else.

StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void
The conclusion to the SC2 trilogy. I enjoyed my time with it. The story was decent, the missions were interesting, I finally got to play a campaign as my main race, and finally everything got wrapped up. Multiplayer also underwent a lot of changes, and I haven't had time to play enough to adjust to them. The games start really fast now thanks to an increased starting worker count, and matches get really hectic really fast.

Abyss Odyssey
This 2D brawler game has some really neat concepts like procedurally generated levels, some roguelike elements, and multiple characters with different playstyles, but all of it is held back by the sluggish combat. It's slow, it feels unresponsive, it wants you to combo enemies but it doesn't give you the tools to do so beyond a few hits. It just feels not good, and I couldn't keep playing the game because it bothered me so much.

Just Cause 3
Explosions! Guns! Jets! Explosions! Grappling hook! Wing Suit! Parachute! Explosions! Boats! Helicopters! Explosions! More explosions! This game gives you plenty of tools to have a fun time, and then leaves it up to you to have it. If you capture every settlement in the most efficient way you will probably get bored super faster, it's up to you to get creative and make it more entertaining. Likewise the story isn't anything to write home about, and is more of a way to gradually introduce more challenging enemies (like a tank that has an energy shield) and to occasionally have a cool set piece.

Kyanbu The Legend · 12-16-2015, 08:33 AM

Been very busy so I haven't played much but there are two I'll bring up. One that I played from start to finish this year, and the other is more of a game I've played on and off since 2011. Which I'll review later on.

WildARMS XF (PSP/Vita)
Cross fire is a neat little TRPG and the last entry in the long standing WildARMS Franchise. It's kind of the FFT of the series in my opinion. The story focuses on Clarissa and Felius Arwin, a pair of young drifters whom are trying to get their mother's sword back after it gets stolen by a lone drifter and skilled swordsmen, Rupert. Their chase leads them to the kingdom of Elesius. Where one simple rescue mission to free a town from bandits results the two being dragged into a country wide conspiracy involving the King, the Royal Council, The church, and a sea of corruption and treason. While the game is set in a western world with wild west inspired designs that the WA franchise is known for. Clarissa is the only one who carries a gun. Granted it's a very special gun but still. XD The story is pretty decent. A bit cliche but enjoyable none the less. With some memorable characters and moments. "Katrina" being my favorite character mainly because of one amazing moment and everything after it. XD
Gotta love Evil Katrina lol.

Gameplay:
Like I said before, it's a TRPG similar to the likes of FFT. While having it's own take on the genre. battles take place on hex grid maps of various sizes. You pick up to 6 of your characters to place into battle. Like FFT and most of TRPG. XF uses a class system. Each character has their own unique class tied specifically to them. All in addition to numerous classes to chose from for new recruits or changing your main characters jobs to fit your current mission. And here's where things get a bit unique and annoying in some cases a bit too early on. Each battle through out the story is set up like a puzzle. After being given a brief summary on the field, the enemy, and the objective. It's up to you to solve the map.

To do so you will have to change your character's class to ones that have the skills you need to complete the mission. Fortunately you do not have to grind to use all of the skills that class has. Because each class has complete access to all of it's skills from the get go. Simply equip the class you need and you're good to go. But should you level up a class for any given character, that character will learn a skill from that class. Which you can equip to said character. Equipped skills can be used regardless of what class your character currently is. Allowing you to mix and match skill from varies classes to make your characters more versatile. Maxing out Classes isn't too bad as each class level caps at 7. And most vital skills are learned by Class level 3, though it does pay off to max them out to unlock each classes hidden skill. Not necessary but they can be helpful mid to late game. But unfortunately the only time you get a lot of experience is through story battles. Going back and replaying a map won't get you much experience. Though aside from class leveling, you'll rarely ever need to grind as the game is very dependent on you using the jobs it wants you to use for each given mission rather then you being at a specific level. Making each battle unique at the expense of you losing quite a bit freedom of choice when it comes to playing styles. You still have some leeway but that falls mainly on how many of your characters have mastered a class, or at least learned some skills from different classes.

Some of these missions have fairly simple objectives like "rescue everyone without getting seen" or "get to point B, on the map". Others more complex and challenging. With some maps being fairly difficult a bit too early on. like late Chapter 1 early where you have to make good use of stat debuffing or you're not winning as the game will sometimes and very intentionally put you up against enemies that are not only way above you but can stat buff them selves... And this is happens in chapter 1 and chapter 2 though it's not so bad compared to the first time. And there are points in the game where you can be very easily put in a bad situation if you haven't been stocking up on new gear and items as well as learning "Emulator" skills (this game's version of "Blue Magic") from enemies later on in Chapter 3. As frequently as possible whenever you can. As the game loves putting you in chain battles without the option to go to town an buy gear/items. Especially in Chapter 3 oh dear god I got pretty close to a dead game because I missed a chance to learn a Emulator skill from a certain enemy during a story battle. Resulting in me fighting enemies without the spell they are weak against. And they had high defense and hit like trucks! Damn those golems!!!!! be sure to learn "Electrigger" ASAP! as it makes this point of the game go by a lot more smoothly. As the Golems are x2 weak to it! Especially when cast by the Emulator Class thanks to their "Exploit Weakness" Skill. By the way, the game doesn't tell you this UNTIL it's too late to get the skill. It just assumes you went out of your way to get it before hand... thanks Labyrinthia...-_-

Fortunately it's not too hard to get a good balanced team set up. So the game actually gets easier towards late game (chapter 4 onward). And there are a few skill combinations that can break the game in half though they require a bit of class grinding. There's also one more thing. the VP bar, which depletes every time your characters move. Each character has their own VP stat. Each one varying depending on what class that character has equipped. Should you VP bar hit 0, your character will become fatigued. meaning they'll take damage at the end of their turn. Kind of like poison. Fortunately this won't kill your characters. At worst they'll be down to 1 HP. Unfortunately if you don't plan your moves out carefully or keep VP items and VP recovery skills handy. This can become a problem should your mission drag out too long. But despite popular belief. This is not really an issue. You take very little damage per turn and that's only when the VP bar is at 0. Which will take a while to happen. and it resets whenever you revive a character during battle anyway for the most part. Also for WA veterans, I'm afraid to say there are no Summons in this game that you can use. Though they do play a role in this world's lore and story. You just can't use any of them.

All in all, WildARMS XF is a fairly decent and challenging TRPG. With a interesting take on the Class system and some interesting missions as a result. But the game's difficulty curve is too hard in the beginning while being almost too easy towards the end (during the end of the last battle before the Final Chapter. You can literally win the battle by doing absolutely nothing aside from moving all of your units as far back from the starting point as possible... I'm not kidding and the game even encourages this in what ends up being an anti climatic but very poetic victory that's full of irony XD). A decent story, a some what lovable cast with questionable voice acting. And great Sound Track, and many memorable moments that'll make you smile, cry, and probably rage.

7.8/10 (Good)

Loyal · 12-16-2015, 09:43 AM

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Okay, so this game is actually ridiculously fun, both in general gameplay and cathartically. The core gameplay is really well done, controls are smooth and polished, and there's a lot to explore and mess around with off the beaten path. Even the humble cardboard box has been expanded to be massively fun. You can pick up and run with it, you can spring out of it to shoot or CQC someone, you can use it for fast-travel by sitting down on marked Delivery Points, and you can even slide down a hill with it to go sledding. Many of the weapons and items you can use are similarly expansive in the sheer number of things you can do with them if creatively inclined. With that said. it's not without its issues. I don't have the time to go into all of them, so I'll just explore the biggest two:

First, this game is a massive, shameless microcosm of Konami's business plans going forward. Besides being priced as a full $60 game, there are a ton of microtransactions for little shit. None of them are strictly necessary to enjoy the game, but you'll feel the sting of not buying them as the game goes on, because upgrades and such gets expensive and time consuming if you limit yourself to just in-game resources, and people who've spent money on microtransactions have undeniable advantages over those who have not.

Second, FOBs. FOB stands for Forward Operating Base, and it serves as the pretext for the game's multiplayer outside of just getting MGO3. FOBs allow you to expand your base staff further and collect more resources, which is helpful, but you can also invade other players' FOBs to steal their shit, and vice-versa. This turns the game into a massive time sink, because you need to be constantly vigilant if you want to be able to defend your base against your foes. And that's where it goes south. FOB missions as player-vs-player ordeals are massively unbalanced in favor of the defender (when present). And if the defender is not present, the attacker can freely steal lots of the victim's hard-earned resources, which then affects the victim when they return to the game. If you go offline for any significant length of time, you can expect to see your GMP (in game money) completely in the red from repeated assaults taxing your vaults. BUT IT'S OKAY. For a nominal fee of Real World Moneys, Konami will (temporarily) reimburse you for any resources lost in FOB missions. It got to the point where I completely restarted my save file just so I could tell the game Not To Go Online and not bother with FOBs whatsoever.

Also, Quiet is the most blatant sexist bullshit with the weakest justification imaginable, and a crime against decency and women.

Undertale
GOTY, all years. It's tons of fun, every character is unique and memorable, music is A+ good, and it's one of the few games that makes me not want to play it again just so I can keep the happy ending intact. Nothing feels rushed or incomplete, and everything has a place and a function and a purpose. I kinda wish Toby Fox would make another game that focused on just the Bullet Hell/RPG mashup mechanics, because it's so well done I just want to play more like it. It's short, sweet, guaranteed to make an impact, and well worth your ten dollars.

Rivals of Aether
The long-awaited Smash Clone With Furries arrives (in beta) and it's pretty sweet. The controls are silky smooth, combos feel satisfying, and you are well rewarded for playing well and going for the gfy (provided of course your skill can back it up). Design-wise, the game focuses on decision making over execution, to good effect. L-Canceling is seen as unnecessary, so instead all aerial attacks just have low landing lag. Wavedashing exists, but has forgiving timings and can be done out of jumpsquat frames. Things like that. I see a lot of great things in this game's future if the devs can keep the ball rolling.

With that said, it is still in Playable Beta (technically Alpha since it isn't feature-complete), and it kinda shows. Balance is kind of all over the place, several characters feel like they're trying to be too many things at once or have overcentralizing mechanics which dominate their matchup meta, the AI needs a lot of work, and there is no real way to play the game "casually". Even ignoring differences at high levels of play, there's such a massive gap in skill even between "has never played a fighter before," and "new to the game but has gotten used to Rivals controls," that it comes off as extremely hostile to new and less-skilled players.

Starbound
I finally broke down and picked it up. It seems cool, but I was expecting it to... I dunno, be further along after three+ years of development? Also, they released a "Stable" update * shortly after I got in which introduced massive drops in frame data. So, not a good early impression. Hopefully they'll be better later.

Valkyria Chronicles
This game is weeb as hell but it's so fun. I got the PC port on Steam and it's well worth the cost. There's a great blend of strategy and RPG elements, and the aesthetic is gorgeous and complements the storytelling well. Just uh... if you're controlling a Tank unit? Don't try to move the mouse and move the tank at the same time. It results in weirdness.

Brawlhalla
I don't remember if I got this late 2014 or early 2015, but whatever. Another go at a Smash clone. Not that great tbh. It's decent for casual fuckery (and I love me some casual fuckery), but there's nothing memorable about it, and it doesn't really seem to have any great competitive potential. Most of the characters aren't that different from each other aside from raw attack/defense/speed values, and they have little or no personality to speak of.

Majesty 2
This game was on sale so I bought it. It's a fairly fun strategy game from Paradox, without the hyperconvoluted bullshit that drives me away from most Paradox games. It controls somewhat similar to Dwarf Fortress in that rather than giving specific orders to certain units, you assign a task to be completed, and then one or more eligible units available will go to complete that task. It's pretty neat. However, I can't seem to connect to the internet for anything, and the difficulty curve on single-player missions is so brutal.

Bard The 5th LW · 12-16-2015, 02:25 PM

Undertale: Had a charm to it that I feel catapulted it to my favorite game of 2015. Gameplay was fun, but I'll say the soundtrack/dialogue/design of it all was hat one me over. Its a good display of what someone can create on a low budget with simple mechanics.

Bloodborne: There was some intangible quality about Bloodborne that bugged me. I liked the gameplay for the most part, but bits and pieces of it felt unfinished, and the plot kinda falls off a bit after the midway point. It was still enjoyable though and I think a Bloodborne 2 might be able to address these flaws someday. I'll probably get the DLC at some point down the road as well.

MGS5: I admit I still technically haven't beaten it but I think Ive played enough to make a judgement. As far as gameplay goes, MGS5 knocks it out of the park, but I think its missing the intangible 'something' even more than Bloodborne. I haven't played most of the Metal Gear Solid games (I missed MGS2-4) but I still remember loving the codec calls and boss fights from Twin Snakes and Revengeance, and this game just felt empty in that regard. Had a really strong base but it didn't build on it enough presumably because they were paying Keifer Sutherland by the line.

Fallout 4: I haven't had the time to dive into this one yet so my judgement is to be taken with a grain of salt. Like Bloodborne and MGS5 it also has fine gameplay but I'm not fond of the way it handles the main character so far. I felt that FO:NV handled the protagonist perfectly - it gave little detail and let you put your own identity on them. This game feels like it doesn't really want you to roleplay at all so far. You can be sarcastic or mean, but your characters options are all the same. Maybe it can still win me over though.

Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin: The Sequeling: Colon, the colon: Only putting this at the bottom because its a remake. I honestly think I enjoyed DS2 more than BB, and the DLCs helped in that regard, although I didn't care much for Frigid Outskirts.

Basically, one small game with simplistic gameplay that won me over through pure charm and a bunch of bigger games that I feel had pretty solid gameplay that failed to have charm.

phil_ · 12-16-2015, 06:18 PM

I've played a lot of PSX games this year, so let's start with some of those. These won't be long because I don't think I'm going to convince anyone to go out and play games from a decade ago… wait, it's been almost two?!

Ridge Racer Type 4:
The drifting feels good The graphics could be better but for Playstation are great in that nothing pops up after you'd want it to pop up. Something about the mix of music, short but not that short tracks, and the other racers' AI makes getting first feel really good. That said, the cars all feel pretty similar with the exception of top speed, so filling your garage isn't very satisfying.

Brave Fencer Musashi
First up, I never got the hang of combos and played the game using only the mash x attack and special attacks. For those who haven't heard of this game, you have a Kirby sword that gives you powers when you throw it at an enemy and suck them up. There's also a fatigue system, which makes you regularly take naps at the castle or else you start moving like you have two broken legs. This is annoying at the beginning and is abandoned by the finale (it would be impossible otherwise). Most enemies have useless powers, a few are obviously required to proceed, and a very few are required to proceed but are anything but obvious (normally one considers Thwomps more as traps than monsters). Anyway, you go around opening monster seals because that's always a good idea, you get jumpy powers and elemental powers to supplement your monster powers, and you kill guardians who all took me at least three times to beat. Throw in some frustrating timed sections and action figure collecting (you have to take them out of the packaging to play with them), and you get a collection of ok to great ideas with ok presentation. Last thought, I was kinda bummed that the NPCs' lives just kinda stopped at a certain point; I liked seeing what they were up to. Wow that was long.

Jumping Flash
A game I always wanted to play, but was too inexperienced with virtual 3D spaces to have any idea what was happening when it came out. Being a seasoned pro at this point, I jumped the rabbit tank to the end of the first round of worlds and part way into the remix worlds before I felt I'd had enough. For an early 3D console game, the controls and camera are really well put together, and I'm a sucker for surreal dreamscapes, so I had fun.

MegaMan Legends 1 & 2
There is no need for any sub-weapon but homing missile in either. There is no need for any sub-weapon at all in the first one, and I accidentally ran it buster cannon only. The movement in the first game takes a while to get used to, but eventually feels more than adequate for what Mega Man needs to do. The controls in the second game make combat into Circle-strafe: The Strafening, which is less fun, and even then manage to be unsuited to the last boss. I eventually pot spammed through it, to my shame.

That said, some of the NPCs are cute, the mini games in the first one are a fun distraction, the optional dungeons in the second make you feel like the treasure hunter Mega Man is supposed to be in this series, and license exams can go to hell. Oh, and the Bonne family have good taste in robots.

I didn't get far in Adventures of Tron Bonne because I don't feel like managing 50 robots and I was a bit burned out on MML at that point.

Klonoa: Door to Phantomille
Some of the platforming was neat, a lot of it was tedious, and even I was off put by the cutesy voices. And you people know how I feel about cutesy voices. Still, I finished it. The last boss was fun. No real motivation to go back and 100% it, since it involves rescuing hostages and I already rescued all the ones in the last few levels because, in those levels, rescuing hostages required going through levels the hard way. Going back to the easy levels to poke into the easy routes and sniff out dudes doesn't sound like fun.

Rhapsody, a Musical Adventure
Another game I've been trying to play for a long time. Unlike Jumping Flash, it kinda sucks. Story's ok, presentation is good, the songs are fantastic for harried 90's voice actors working for peanut dust (which means the songs cause no lasting physical harm), but IT'S. TOO. EASY. I didn't use a single healing item the entire game. I didn't use a single item at all. I only needed to use a healing character on the final boss's final form, and doing that made the fight go from "Chance of failure" to "I can heal all of my characters in a single turn what it takes him three turns to do. With a basic spell I can spam all day." I didn't grind. I intentionally cycled my (all functionally interchangeable) puppets to keep their levels down. I started running from every fight. It didn't matter: even holding back my magic, walking up to monsters and hitting them was enough to get me through the game.

It made me sad, but at least I've played through it now.

That's enough Playstation, how about stuff from this century?

Nights. Journey of Dreams
Picked up the sequel to NiGHTS for $3. It's not very long, the cut scenes are very, very goofy looking, and the story is in no way the specific kind of "epic" that gets good reviews. But, once the unfortunate children are left behind, it's fun the fly NiGHTS through rings and score combos, which is the point of the game. The levels are ok, but I feel somewhat spoiled in saying that. There are definitely some inspired moments, like navigating by mirror while flying through a castle and a giant carousel spinning in the branches of an enormous tree. On the other hand, there's "Grass Level" and "Mario Sunshine did a lot more in each individual stage than you've done in this single world out of seven Seaside Level." Also, it's somewhat difficult to appreciate these worlds when all you can concentrate on is rings and NiGHTS. Maybe I'll come to better like them with time.

Thing that is definitely an issue, though, is everything to do with getting the final ending. You have to get a C-Rank in all levels. It lets you know this the first time you beat the game. That's one play through the last stage. So, I cleaned up my remaining D's and E's, which was pretty easy as I didn't have a lot of them. But, there are two terrible children, so I have to play through the final stage with the other one (that's run 2) and get at least a C on that. So, now I have all my C's. I play through the last stage a third time, adding on an extra boss fight and changing the dialogue just a bit. That's play three. What I haven't mentioned, here, is that after each completion of the final stage, there's a short movie showing the wooden child you've been playing getting himself or herself together and not being an embarrassment. Then there are credits. These credits play a smooth disco version of the NiGHTS theme, with lyrics. So, by the time I've made this third run, I've spent like twenty minutes of my afternoon listening to this song (it plays part-way through the last stage as well). Beat the final boss for real (he gains all of nothing but going slightly faster) watch crying children because sure, the real ending should be the one where I watch a Team America puppet cry in his pajamas, get the same movie AGAIN but with a stinger afterward where the children meet in real life and are bewildered by snow flurries they are married now TRUE END , and then the credits roll. But this time, it's the sleigh bells version of the same song which will play that Thing 1 and Thing 2's wedding reception. So, I watch the credits once again, tapping the Cookie Clicker ripoff on my phone, and get… a new menu for watching all the story scenes for Father Issues. Faced with the prospect of doing this again for Mother Issues, I stopped for the day.

I'll probably go back and do it, though. Damn it.

Game's still fun, with only two frustrating levels, and one of those was only frustrating because they were asking too much too soon. I'd recommend it if you see it lying around for less than $10. Just don't play through the last level more than once in a day.

Steam games!

Strike Suit Zero
I love the idea of piloting a transforming mech/space plane and unleashing sparkly death like a metal god. I suck at video games and got stuck on some escort mission. I'm sorry, Strike Suit Zero.

Crypt of the Necrodancer
Bought this to have something other than Stepmania to play on our dance pad. Stepmania can be played while intoxicated (don't do this, it is dangerous). Necrodancer demands sobriety, at least in the getting acquainted stage, and that was too much to ask of me. Another personal failing.

Super Meat Boy
Fun on a bun, occasionally utter bull. But, given that I can list the not-fun kind of frustrating levels on one hand so far (almost finished Bandage Girl's Levels and have up to the end of Hell done in the Dark World), I'd say the level design is overall top-notch. I don't like fans, though. Most of the very difficult levels become somewhat meditative, in that you do thing, die, do thing slightly differently, get further and die, and just refine this process over and over, burning the perfect run into the muscles of your thumbs and right index finger until eventually success happens. And then your brain comes back on, you hoot, and watch all the Meat Boys you sent to die do just that.

They Bleed Pixels
Just bought it, just started. It is a different kind of hard from Meat Boy, in that it requires all brains be active and engaged to dispatch monsters in a way that gets you enough combo points to build a check point while also not falling into very fast-moving saws. It also has a very different engagement with internet humor and such: murdering through "They Bleed Ponycorns" brought me much greater joy than "You unlocked Alien Hominid, he jumps worse than Meat Boy and his times don't count."

So far I'm on board. I just need to get gud so levels stop taking me 30 minutes.

PHONE GAMES!

Quote:

Originally Posted by BB

I'd be really interested to know if anyone played something from that list this year!

You know damn well what you did!

Love Live: School Idol Festival
BB and I had a bit of a thread last January about how good this game is. Allow me to now point out how it is an abusive relationship.

A reminder of gameplay basics: You tap through songs to earn cards, and you can only play a song when you have enough Live Points (they regenerate over time). You then you feed these cards to each other so that you get more points for your taps. You can feed two of the same card to each other to (after more tapping) unlock their full point-scoring potential as well as a short scene with the girl on the card. Each month there are two events where you compete against every other player to get rare cards and, more importantly, a second copy of those rare cards.

It takes one-and-one-half-hour for the Live Points to play a song on Hard to generate. You have a maximum limit of Live Points, after which you stop generating more. So, any time you have a full bar is wasted time, as you could have a less than full bar and generate Live Points.

The monthly events take up all but almost a week each month. As in, one stops, you get three days or so to recover, and another starts. "Recover" is used intentionally.

See, these events are very engaging in that, in a game with premium currency which can be bought for real money, you can actually beat people who pay while remaining a free player. All it takes is dedication. Lots and lots of dedication.

See, all of the events require you to spend the time and effort actually playing the game. Money doesn't make this any easier or faster. But, paying or not, you have to play so much that, even if you had no maximum LP limit, natural LP regen won't grant enough songs over two weeks to rank high enough to get good prizes. That is a lot of playing. That is "Wake up in the morning and play SIF for twenty minutes to empty your LP gauge, then play a five minute song every 90 minutes for the rest of the day, then set an alarm so you'll wake up before your LP gauge refills and you start losing precious potential LP to play some more in bed, pass out, then do it again." Every day. And that's not counting the sessions where you play, empty your gauge, spend a premium currency to refill your gauge (they give you some for free), empty your gauge again but you've done the math and the last song on that gauge levels you up, which refills the gauge again, and then you empty it again immediately because to do otherwise would waste points and you want that clam bucket Hanayo card so you keep tapping until your fingers bleed because you've just spent over an hour tapping faces in four minute increments. And the whole time you're watching everyone else's scores, and wondering if it's enough (it isn't; you're going to spend the final twelve hours of the event burning Love Stones and tapping out the shortest song over and over to just edge out the competition who is doing the same thing).

And then the event ends, and you get your card, and you realize you're structuring your life around never leaving the house for more than six hours because any longer than that and your LP bar will fill. And you sleep, because you are tired.

And the thing is, what's keeping me from playing is that my internet is too shoddy to download the current updates. I'm done with the physical and emotional roller coaster of events, but the core gameplay of face tapping to idol music is just that good and I miss it.

Puzzle and Dragons
Leveling up cards is needlessly complicated to hide overwhelming XP requirements behind "Well, you should have leveled up more efficiently." The titular puzzle is pretty good, but dungeons take too long for it to be useful in filling the short pauses phone games are for. Plus it has to load and sign in, so you could boot it up just to put it away because you have stuff to do now. SIF is a better cards and emotional abuse game.

Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector
A simulation of my mother's favorite hobby: leaving out food to attract stray cats. You leave out food, arrange toys, then check in over the day to see what cats show up and to take pictures of said cats. It is the second best thing I've ever downloaded off Google Play behind ES File Explorer.

10B Wives
Recall, long ago, when you were young and read my review of NiGHTS Wii. Do you remember my mentioning a Cookie Clicker ripoff? That was this. You tap The Road to Marriage to hand in marriage registrations and gain Love. Not Love Points of Lovica, "love." You spend 15 love to marry Apron Wife, who starts generating love herself as she walks along The Road of Marriage. You tap, get more love, then marry Kimono Wife. She joins Apron Wife and makes more love. You level them up with increasing amounts of love, buy them gifts to multiply the love they produce, and wait as they generate enough love to marry stranger and stranger and probably illegal wives. Hence the name, "Ten Billion Wives."

Much of the fun to be had is in describing what you are doing. "One more minute, I gotta get enough love to buy CEO wife a new watch." And, much like Kitty Collector, it is well suited to "I got a second, let's check on my wives," as phone games ideally should be.

Edit: Wait, I forgot one.

Undertale
There is no Linux version.

_mike · 12-16-2015, 07:46 PM

I play games too.

Seiken Densetsu 3: Sequel to Secret of Mana. It's an action RPG where you pick 3 dudes out of a roster of 6 total dudes (3 fighter types and a thief, mage, and healer) to go on an adventure. There's a limited amount of stat customization, so you can't really screw up an individual character. What you can screw up is team structure, as we did in our first playthrough as a thief, mage, and healbot. Stalin the thief doesn't hit very hard, Burger the mage's spells are inferior to fighters just hitting things and while Token the healbot was a really good at her job, she brought absolutely nothing else of value to the team. It was a challenging run. We played through three more times with more "balanced" teams, where I'd buff and we'd steamroll using the experience gained from that first harrowing run. Good stuff, would pay actual money for if we hadn't already played it to death. The only problem I had was a few moments that made me question the translation, but it didn't bother me enough to play through the game again raw.

Parodius: We played a few of these; mostly the one for SNES with the announcer. They're side-scrolling space ship shooters with silly everything. I enjoyed trying to name the parodies, and there are lots of characters to keep the game fresh, so I had fun despite these kinds of games not being super my thing.

Samurai Showdown: A weapon based fighting game for NeoGeo. The computer is a cheating bastard. The inputs are simple and no characters stick out as being overpowered, but since generally Phil's the only person I have to play against I didn't spend a lot of time on this game.

Twinkle Star Sprites: I think the third Touhou game is a rip off of this? It's a top down scrolling shooter where you try to make combos to hit your opponent with junk. It's simple enough to make a good party game if you have a party where people are ok with playing as little Japanese fairies who shoot lasers.

Majora's Mask: For the N64. I can appreciate it more as a "gaiden" than I did as a kid since I know that word now, for one thing. Influenced by the internet, I now interpret almost every thing that happens in the game through the lens of "how can I make this about death?" I was somehow much more economical about time in this run, getting tons done in each 3 day cycle, despite spending a lot of time in Termia field hunting Dodongos. My greater feeling of attachment to Deku, Goron, and Zora Link over child Link might say something unflattering about my psyche.

Ocarina of Time: If I type more than a sentence here the internet will collapse into a singularity from the mass of what has been written about this game.

Eternal Darkness: Lovecraftian horror meets "pick up this thing and put it there" gameplay. The combat is only interesting in how widely different characters differ in their proficiency for it. The less said about the story the better. The voice acting is mostly ok, but the occasionally super goofy line or delivery still make me smile.

Desert Golf: A side-view, simplistic golf game inspired by Journey. There is no last hole, but apparently one somewhere in the 1000s is only beatable by glitching. I haven't gotten there yet.

Minute Quest: A side-view, simplistic RPG that I don't understand. I'm, like, 20 times higher level than the things that are killing me. It's good for killing time, as it's original title, "Himatsubu Quest" implies.

Vectorman: I just found out that double jumping can be used as a weapon, so now I have to get back to the boss that stumped me a month ago and see if I can make that work. It's nice that the enemy design allows you to dodge most attacks instead of having to memorize where every enemy is in a level. On the other hand, I think the game expects me to memorize where every power-up is if I'm going to survive to the end. The voice samples are surprisingly good for a Genesis game, and the story of a leader robot going insane when a nuclear bomb is used to replace his head is timeless.

BB · 12-17-2015, 02:17 AM

Quote:

Also Abe Goldfarb is back. I begin to think that all Wadget Eye published games feature Abe Goldfarb.

The easter egg in Blackwell Epiphany pretty much confirms he's the voice of Wadjet Eye. I'm fine with that though!

Quote:

Quantum Conundrum: I'm not really sold on this game and I don't know why. It's cute and the writing is charming and funny, but it just didn't hold my attention long enough to make me want to struggle with the more difficult puzzles. I haven't played it since August. I STARTED playing it in August.

That seems to be the going opinion. And the first person platforming gets irritating on harder levels too (never played it myself, going by others).

Quote:

Portal Stories: Mel

It's on my To-Play list! Need to find time for it.

Quote:

Freedom Planet

This too. Am I right in thinking it's a little bit Megaman too? How well does that work?

Quote:

Undertale: Had a charm to it that I feel catapulted it to my favorite game of 2015. Gameplay was fun, but I'll say the soundtrack/dialogue/design of it all was hat one me over. Its a good display of what someone can create on a low budget with simple mechanics.

If I can win even 1% of as many hearts as Undertale has I'll be chuffed beyond belief. What a success story it's been.

Quote:

They Bleed Pixels vs Super Meat Boy

Be warned that the thing you praise SMB for apparently isn't matched in TBP and later levels are supposed to be infuriating in the worst ways. Can't vouch for that myself.

Quote:

You know damn well what you did!

<3

Actually we're just finishing up an event in which we t1'd. Good times.

10BW sounds... odd. Might give it a once-over.

Quote:

Seiken Densetsu 3

I was always led to believe the thiefy guy was the best because he always hits twice, huh. My first party was Fighter Mage Healer though and by the end the only one doing anything worth doing was the mage as all my fighter hits were 1 damage.

Quote:

Twinkle Star Sprites: I think the third Touhou game is a rip off of this?

Yep! Also the 9th.

Quote:

Majora's Mask

Really need to give this another go someday... I've just never forgiven it for crashing after 8 hours of gameplay that wasn't saved.

12-15-2015, 10:39 PM	#1
BB >-❥ Love Arrow, Shoot! ~💖 Join Date: Feb 2006 Posts: 677	2015 in Games It's time once again to spend some time reviewing the games that have filled our free time in the past year. Last year's thread can be found over here- I'd be really interested to know if anyone played something from that list this year! Surprisingly for me, I've not played many new games this year! I spent a while going back over retro classics I enjoyed previously, but as I've played them before I won't include them on this list. (You may do so if you like.) I've been playing SIF all year, but I'm not going to include it in this list because it's mentioned at the end of last year, and although TF2 has had a lot of new stuff added and plays like a very different game I'm sure everyone knows I love that title to heck already and I don't need to go into it. Let's go! - Hatoful Boyfriend This is a tricky one. Whatever I say about this game, if you haven't played it before you'll still think of it as “that goofy VN that has birds instead of bishies”. If I tell you the characters are all well-realised and enjoyable to get to know, you still won't take it seriously. If I tell you the worldbuilding is great and there really is a genuine and believable reason for it to be birds instead of humans, you still won't take it seriously. If I tell you that Hatoful Boyfriend is one of the darkest and most twisted stories I've ever known... you'll raise an eyebrow at me and scoff, and won't take it seriously. But, please... if you're in the “it's dumb because it's birds and that's dumb” crowd, just try it. It'll surprise you in the best of ways, just so long as you let it. - Trails In The Sky FC It feels like I've been playing this for a million years, although I'm still only 4/5 through it. This game goes HARD on the worldbuilding! Trails (or if you prefer, TitS... no, lets stick with Trails) is basically a very barebones tactics RPG, but I feel that describing it as such is misleading. In truth, it's more like a slice-of-life visual novel with an occasional sRPG minigame. The story follows Estelle and Joshua, who are in training to join the private-hire army called the Bracers. Bracers spend their days righting wrongs and being commissioned by folks to clear out monsters, escort them places, and so on. There is an on-going overarching plotline involving their missing father, but it's certainly not in any hurry to get to the meaty bits of it- 80% of the game is spent just being Bracers and helping out normal folks in their daily lives. It maybe sounds dull, and well... it can be. It's not one for those who don't like a VERY slow burn. It's the first half of a two-part story, so the plot progression comes in drips. But it's more than made up for in the frankly staggering efforts spent on worldbuilding. EVERY NPC has a name and a personality. I don't just mean, "even minor characters"- I mean, in a fight against a boss-guy who surrounded himself with mooks, every one of the mooks had a name and a distinct personality. I had never seen them before and in the 20 hours of gameplay since I haven't seen them again, and they literally only existed for that single fight to act as cannon fodder, but they still had development! It goes beyond that, and after pretty much every single storyline event all the NPCs in the world have something new to say, will be doing something different, etc. People will have new things to say even in the brief space of time between talking to two plot-relevant NPCs who live in the same town. It's pretty overwhelming and I can only wonder how much of it I'm missing out on just by not going around the entire world every time I talk to a new significant person. The battles themselves are... weak. I wouldn't sell the game to someone who just wanted sRPG fixin's. It's laboriously slow to kill even the simplest of encounters and there's an obnoxiously high chance to miss attacks, making them drag out even longer. I've not finished it but I intend to, it's just hard to stay into it for long stretches. I do recommend it, but tentatively- and not to people who don't think reading is pretty much the best thing ever. - Undertale Haven't got far with this one! Everyone either already knows Undertale or is thoroughly sick of hearing about Undertale so I'll keep it brief- very charming, often laugh-out-loud funny game unashamedly aping Earthbound in style that will make you cry when you accidentally kill someone you love- and you will love them and you probably will kill them. - Trine 2 I didn't play this single player- it handles live co-op with up to three players, so I played it through with my fiancee. It's definitely the way I'd recommend playing it, and there's so much potential for arguing and insulting each other and getting in fights that few other co-op games can quite manage- it's the way co-op gaming should be. Knightly Pontius, wizardly Amadeus, and thiefly Zoya get told by a magic lamp they have to kill all the goblins and so they do it because magic lamps never lie, and in the process get embroiled in a bitter rivalry between two princesses, at least one of whom is a rotter. To defeat the goblins and the witch, they must solve a barrage of physics puzzles and convince the knight (me) to stop throwing his thrice-damned hammer into the carefully-placed tower of blocks just as the wizard (her) is about to solve the puzzle you absolute bastard. Players can freely switch between the three characters and, as the thief is the best at getting into secret areas, players are also free to argue about which one gets to be her. It's an astonishingly pretty game even on minimum settings- genuine 'wow's from both of us. The whole affair is very storybook and fairytale so it's a family-friendly title as well, if swearing at each other isn't the way you play your co-op (???). It's absolutely recommended to anyone who has a partner or two to play it with. - Gunpoint A quirky jumpy-stealth-em-up, this game favours quick action over sitting in boxes for hours. Guns have been banned, and local arms-dealers are a little less than happy about it. Richard Conway is hired to help rival companies one-up each other as they develop new technologies to replace weapons. Equipped with his Leapfrog trousers and no guns, he crashes into action. The jumping is incredibly fun in itself, offering new ways to enter your marked building and also escape it when things go awry. Another tool in Conway's arsenal is the ability to rewire security systems to his own ends. Door won't open? Wire up that security camera to the button that opens it and jump in front of it- now it'll open the door instead of sound the alarm. Rewire light switches so the guards get confused and run around trying to turn them back on while you slip past in the darkness. Rewire a guards gun so it activates the gun of the guard behind him and make him accidentally shoot himself in the back. The puzzle element this adds gives the game a lot of its substance. The story and dialogue are genuinely funny and often had me laugh out loud. Gunpoint is very cheap and comes recommended infinitely. Get it right now! - Shantae Risky's Revenge DC Good goggly blimey but the sprite art in this game is phenomenal. This game belongs in a gallery. There is even an animation that plays if you stop walking on Shantae's other foot where she adjusts her step to match her standing sprite. Oh, right, the game. It's a metroidvania-but-not-quite which sees half-genie Shantae collect things from across the globe to battle the fantastically-named Risky Boots. The controls all work very nicely and the music suits the theme very well, although the story isn't any great shakes. My one major major grievance with this game is its travesty of a map. I have no idea how it made it to the shipped game in its useless current state- I'm not alone complaining about it. Use a fanmade map if you want to use the map at all, it makes sweeping up missed collectibles a chore otherwise. Game is still great though. - Worms Golf This was a tag-along from a Humble Bundle many moons ago that I just kinda glossed over. It's pretty fun- as you might expect there's more to it than just a golfing game. Each course has various collectibles that add a fair amount of replay value to them and the puzzle-like designs are well made. Main niggle is that the shots feel kinda weak and also don't ever seem to follow the shown prediction arc even approximately- a real pain when trying to get in a small gap. - Alien Breeds 123 These are lumped together as they are pretty much all the same game. There's no development or evolution between them aside from a few of the weapons are slightly different, so I'm treating them as a single title. Well, I wasn't impressed with this at all. I played the original Alien Breed on the Amiga all those years ago, and it's remained a fan favourite since then for its tense and fast combination of arcade shooter and survival shooter. These modern rearrangements go big on the “survival” but really forgot about the “fast”. Gruff McSpacemarine plods about at the speed of a tectonic plate as he roams around what feels like the same spaceship corridor over and over again. The game revolves around following the markers on the map to reach your destination but for some reason EVERY SINGLE TIME there is a door in the way, requiring backtracking. This isn't exploration- you get a waypoint marker that will take you to a door, and then a new one that takes you back to a corridor nearby to get the key, and then the first marker comes back, and nothing happens during any of this. It's just filler. It would be excusable if there were enemy encounters on the return journey or something but it was quite often the case that it served no purpose other than to make the level longer. Other annoyances include a waiting time when searching lockers and bodies for ammo and items, as well as activating doors, switches, terminals... pretty much everything you can interact with requires at least one second of charging time, usually nearer three. Again, this would be fine if there was a present threat because then decisions have to be made, can I open this door before that alien eats my head, etc. But again it was so often the case that there was literally no reason to make me wait. One situation in particular required three switches to be flipped to open a door. The switches were all within three steps of each other, all took several seconds to flip, and absolutely nothing happened between them. Very dull and tedious and boring and slow. - Jigoku Kisetsukan It's unashamedly Touhou and it's not trying to be anything else, lets get that out of the way from the off. Comparisons are not only inevitable, but clearly the intent since the earliest stages of development. If you have played and enjoyed a Touhou game in the past, you know what to expect here and will slip right in. It's completely free, so I will already say I recommend giving it a go. The one thing Touhou has which this lacks, and I apologise if this sounds a bit purple-prose but it's true, is soul. The characters are fun, but where Touhou expands on a character's theme through their attacks, and their music, and the in-depth lore behind their existence, Jigoku doesn't bother with any of that. Most disappointingly, although there are enough boss fight themes to go around, the characters are not given their own unique theme- the first boss you fight has the same music no matter who it is. It seems a small criticism, but the level of attention Touhou gives these small details, it really stands out. Another criticism, and one that is more general, is the frankly ridiculous difficulty spike during the last boss. Again there's a different final boss for each character but they share the same pool of attacks... which are so much harder than anything else the game throws at you it's unbelievable. I know the point of these games is to learn the patterns and figure out how to beat them over time, but when I can literally play through the entire rest of the game without taking one hit and then suddenly have to use continues on the final boss, something isn't right with the balance. This is another area where the lack of thought shows, as each player character has a unique shot type and movement style but the only unique battle they each have doesn't pay any heed to this. Why does the character whose shot is only as wide as she is and whose movement speed is the slowest get the same rapid sideways-movement dodging attack that the fast character gets? Why does the close-range-only character face an attack where she literally cannot get close enough to the boss to deal any damage? Aside from this though, the patterns are REALLY fun to play against. I did genuinely have a good time with this title despite my above misgivings. This has some of my favourite danmaku in the series. ...So to speak. - Touhou 15 Legacy Of Lunatic Kingdom tl;dr: GOTY. The demo version released earlier in the year had left me uncertain how much I would enjoy this game as it's a pretty big departure from the norm, but I needn't have worried- Touhou 15 has become one of my absolute favourites in the series. The new addition of Pointdevice Mode marries the concepts of Spell Practice with the main game, creating something alike the sidegames (Impossible Spellcard comes to mind). There are no lives- instead, you have to repeat each pattern, spellcard and stage “chapter” until you can clear it without being hit. Essentially, the game becomes like a TAS, with every completion effectively a “perfect” run of the game (although, it won't be!) The new system allows for some really interesting and astounding new patterns (animated gifs warning) to be thrown at you. Also, incredibly hard! This is without doubt one of the hardest games in the series on any difficulty. Despite that, it's fantastically fun- each spell becomes more like a puzzle to solve rather than a simple barrage to weave through, each one requiring some study and testing to figure out the optimal strategy. Each spell you clear is a huge victory and you can feel yourself growing with each step in a far more noticeable way than the other titles. Pointdevice also allows you to save your progress and come back to where you were so you don't have to burn yourself out on That One Spell You Just Can't Clear. Getting stuck on Clownpiece's first survival spell will immediately show the benefit of being able to drop out- dizzy! Speaking of Clownpiece, she's fricken adorable and I love the story behind her outfit choice. The fandom kinda exploded when she first showed up and were denigrating her design for being too wacky, but trust in ZUN- he knows what he's doing and, with context of the translated details, even American Flag Fairy makes sense. I could go into it here but I guess that's too much for this article huh? (Please ask please ask) I'm also really impressed with how the Pointdevice Mode was integrated into the story, and reflected in the music too. The battle against Junko is, to all parties, a fight the player can't possibly lose- so rather than the usual hard-hitting Huge Fight Against Unhappy Odds heard in previous titles, the final boss theme carries an almost arrogant sense of triumph. The final stage is so cool, and has a wonderfully cinematic moment over the Sea Of Rains (which incidentally is a very cool callback to the SSiB manga) as the Earth rises in the background timed perfectly to the swell of the music and incoming barrage. Finally, on a fanboy note (hahaha just kidding this whole screed is fanboy-powered), Sanae returns as a playable character and I love her so much. I'm so, so happy she got to go to the moon. All in all Touhou 15 is a superb entry in the series and if you've never played one before, absolutely do not start here as you will be crushed into powder. - Oracle Of Seasons Oracle of Ages was in last year's Games Of, but I didn't finish this one! I think I played it too soon after finishing Ages, and it also felt like the weaker of the two titles. The season mechanic didn't grab me much, although the underground dudes are really cute. I should get back to finishing this game really, but it'll be some time before I do. Since it uses the same everything as Ages, I imagine my impressions will be the same as that, so read my entry for that in last years thread! - Prof Layton 2 It's Layton again! No, really. It's the same game, with different puzzles in it. That's no bad thing, it just makes it hard to talk about it in a way that isn't repeating myself. The story's resolution was absolute tripe again just like the first game, but it did include a very exciting sword fight. Also- Professor Layton is an absolute asshole. He gets away with it because he's so polite and nonchalant about it, but he really is a cock when you pay attention to what he's actually saying. I love it- he's one of the best-written arse-bastards I've ever known and it's wonderful. - Nintendo Badge Arcade Extortionately expensive F2P, but the physics of this crane game are really nice to play with and you do get a generous amount of free goes at it. It's nicely presented with a rabbit clerk talking to you throughout, and each crane machine has a different layout to play. Don't have much else to say about it really- you probably already know if collecting badges for display on your menu is your kinda thing. - Pokemon Rumble World Fun enough in small doses- it's pretty mashy without a lot of variance, but it's a nice timewaster. Possibly because it's early on, I'm finding that the enemy pokemon level up really fast which is annoying- I no sooner catch a decent level pokemon I like than it's already too weak and I have to go catching again. Also the randomness will get annoying to collectors, with boss pokemon catchable but only a low chance of it happening. - Pokemon Picross Argh! Okay, let me preface- I fricken LOVE Picross games, and I fricken LOVE pokemon, so this was really exciting for me when it was announced. It was the most exciting thing in that Direct for me and I realise that makes me lame and I don't even care. The free-to-play stuff is frustrating beyond belief, but also admirable in a way... Pretty much everything you do costs in-game currency Picrites to perform. Picrites come to free players in drips but really, there's no way you can rely on free ones. I'm actually stuck in the game because I ran out of picrites and can't afford to unlock any more levels to get more. There's a daily puzzle that awards 3 picrites (up to 13 at later levels) and the next 5 or so missions will cost 70 to unlock... Yeah, it's like that. Honestly I'd prefer they'd dropped the first level batch as a free demo and made the game a standard retail title or released it as Generation Packs rather than this carrot-stick style. There's some really nasty money-sinks that the game throws at you without much explanation that I will warn you of here. Firstly, you will be told about the Alt-World early on, in excited tones which make it sound like a good deal. Alt-World puzzles are the same puzzles in the normal game with harder rules- you don't get any rewards for completing them and they are all repeats. It costs twice as much as opening up a new set of puzzles does and is only at all worth considering after you've done everything else. At some point you'll find a mega pokemon puzzle, but to do these you need to buy the 500 picrite Mega Pencil. I have seen a total of two of these mega pokemon puzzles in 10 worlds (out of 30-odd). Again, only worthwhile when you've run out of things to do. These two sinks are so connivingly placed and sold that it really left a bad taste in my mouth. Then again, you can't buy more than $30 worth of picrites as the game will give them to you free of charge after this, which is the cost of a standard retail release, so that's pretty neat... it makes the drip-feed stand out more, though. For reference, I bought 800 picrites with the special one-time offer there is available- was about £3.50. I feel like that's a reasonable price for what it's got me, without spending on the alt-world or megas. But, you know, it's Picross. If you like Picross, you'll love it. And I do. - Transformations Oh, no, wait, I didn't play this yet... or even start making it. Heheheh, but you're gonna love it when it's done. Trust me. Be excited. __________________ Twit - Tumbl - T...Steam

12-16-2015, 12:12 AM	#2
mauve So Dreamy Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Someplace magical Posts: 6,863	The Banner Saga: Viking Oregon Trail. I'm in a love-hate relationship with this game. On the one hand, it's beautiful and has some great character design, and the decision-making is actually really tough. On the other hand... I feel like there's almost no point in getting to know or like half of these characters since so many of them die out-of-combat due to stupid decisions or plot reasons, so I end up wasting Renown Points to level up characters who will blindly jump off a cliff or get crushed by dead robots while I'm trying to figure out how to keep everyone from starving to death. Don't get me wrong; I'm enjoying the game so far, but as time goes on it feels like less and less of the game has anything to do with me and my decisions. Tales from the Borderlands: I. LOVED. THIS. GAME. I was incredibly skeptical about Tales from the Borderlands at first: How on earth could you make a Borderlands game, a franchise which exists almost solely on stupid humor, over-the-top violence and excessive randomized loot drops, as a point-n-click adventure?! The answer? Let Telltale Games do it. I ADORED every minute of this game. The characters were great. The humor was great (and it fit into the style of the original games!). The voice acting was great (PATRICK WARBURTON). The writing was great. It was short, yes, but it managed to accomplish everything it needed to accomplish, and it didn't fall into any of the standard plot traps I expected it to fall into. Plus Telltale employees wrote Handsome Jack better than actual Gearbox employees did in Borderlands The Pre-Sequel. He was just as condescending, conniving and car-salesmanesque as you would expect. Bravo, Telltale. To be fair, it has major technical issues, at least on Mac. It ALWAYS starts in an overly-huge resolution so I can never see the start menu. I had to toggle in and out of windowed mode in order to get it to reset to a resolution that would actually fit. Gemini Rue: Uuughhhh..... I really wanted to like this game. I'm a fan of Wadjet Eye Games, and so I picked Gemini Rue and Primordia up for cheap in a Steam Sale. Wadjet Eye didn't actually write this game; they just published it. And it shows. I know a lot of people like this one a lot, but I found the characters to be too fanfictiony. The bland, doe-eyed boy who is being forced to become an assassin in an eeeevil experiment laboratory, and the gruff, "doesn't trust anyone because TRAAAGIC BACSTORYYY" gravely-voiced former gang assassin who's now trying to be a good guy. To be fair, it took me quite a while to figure out the story's big plot twist-- I had it figured out about ten minutes before the actual reveal. And the game handled the ability to switch between characters/storylines much better than Broken Age did. Also Abe Goldfarb is back. I begin to think that all Wadget Eye published games feature Abe Goldfarb. For some bizarre reason, characters from Cowboy Bebop are hidden as easter eggs in the game. Rather than amuse me, I found this a bit disappointing: It was like this lackluster game was holding my nostalgic favorite anime characters hostage in a depressing and grim world. Booo. Broken Age: Act 2: Another disappointment. I'm honestly not sure why this took so long to produce. The majority of maps, characters, and items are directly recycled from Act I. The story was... okay, although not fantastic, but it made characters I enjoyed LESS likeable. Shay just came off as being kind of a jerk. Really, there's two big problems that stand out most of all for me. The first is a mechanical issue: Unlike Act I, Act II forces you to switch between Vella and Shay and to use things you supposedly learn from one character on the other's world. This wasn't utilized in Act I, and I think it worked better that way. Everything you did was based on what that character themselves learned or knew. In act II, you are forced to make use of knowledge that the characters shouldn't have. This really tears you out of the story. Rather than "being" Shay or Vella, you become just the all-knowing third party making your puppets dance. The other major issue for me was the reveal of Shay's parents. If this was handled any other way, it would've been a great reveal. The way they DID handle it just felt like the devs were lying to you the whole time. Throughout the first half of the game, Shay refers to the "Sun" as "Computer," going so far as to insist that she's not his mother and is an AI that has gone rogue. The player has no reason to think otherwise. Suddenly, in Act II, oh, wait, she's a real human that's really his mother and SHAY JUST SUDDENLY CASUALLY REMEMBERS THIS in an "oh yeah, my real human mom HAS just been two doors away from me all this time and I totally knew that" moment. This could've been really cool if A) Shay honestly had no idea these were real humans and got to meet his parents for the first time or B) Shay DIDN'T EXPLICITLY SAY THESE WERE COMPUTERS and left it vague enough for the player to assume they're robots until the big reveal and they realize Shay just has such a horrible estranged relationship with them that they might as well be robots. As it was, it just felt like the player was lied to. Primordia: This more than made up for the disappointment that was Gemini Rue. Atmospheric and interesting, Primordia featured a dystopian future inhabited by half-mad robots who formed cults around what little they remember of humanity and its relics. The first half of the game, wherein the player is wandering a sandy wasteland and exploring the mysterious world, is much better than the second half, which takes place entirely within a robot-city that's about six streets long. It lost steam at that point. The atmosphere is moody and oppressive, and the world really drew me into it. I especially like your character's sidekick, Crispin, who will give you hints when you're stuck if you talk to him. He also gives crass remarks if you pester him for hints too often. OH! And the main voice actors are Logan Cunningham (the narrator from Bastion and the voice of the Transistor) and Abe Goldfarb (IN. EVERY. WADJET. EYE. GAME.). Shadowrun: Hong Kong: As I said in my Steam review, this game falls at the exact middle point between Shadowrun Returns and Shadowrun Dragonfall. I enjoyed it, certainly, and it features Harebrained Scheme's fantastic writing and characters, but it's just a middle ground between the two older games. The ending was a little disappointing too. Still, I have no regrets for buying/playing it and will probably replay it with another class. My troll mage kicked ass though. Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown: A cheap ripoff of the Harebrained Schemes games, only halfway converted into an MMO. Horrible voice acting and a semi-decent character creation process (but only a few character portraits per race, so your character NEVER looks like your portrait, especially if you're an ork or troll), with a watered-down combat system. It's sorta fun to kick around in, but can't hold a candle to the Harebrained Schemes games. Quantum Conundrum: I'm not really sold on this game and I don't know why. It's cute and the writing is charming and funny, but it just didn't hold my attention long enough to make me want to struggle with the more difficult puzzles. I haven't played it since August. I STARTED playing it in August. Technobabylon: I'm still torn on this one. Another game published but not written by Wadjet Eye. I really liked the beginning with the unemployed computer hacker-- she was an interesting character and I liked the introduction to the Trance and how it affected peoples' lives, but then the narrative switched over to a stereotypical older cop who doesn't trust new technology and doesn't play by the ruuuuuules and added story elements about a new holy war and stolen embryos and a bunch of other stuff, and I just want to go back to the hacker girl and maybe learn more about this MindJacker who's killing Trance users. I'll definitely go back to this game and finish it, but I'm not as hooked on it as I've been to other Wadjet Eye titles. Portal Stories: Mel THIS GAME IS SO GOOD. IT IS ALSO FREE AND ANYONE WHO OWNS PORTAL 2 ON PC SHOULD PLAY IT. The writing is great, the environments are great, the puzzles are DEVILISHLY hard some times, it has custom skins for Mel (the player) and a fully voice-acted Personality Core, and there's lines for Cave Johnson (and whoever they got to voice him did a really excellent job), and I THINK Valve has officially accepted the story as canon. Don't quote me on that though-- that's just the rumor. Anyway. Play this. Aperture Tag: The Paintgun Testing Initiative: Wow, this was a banner year for Portal mods. This was a very challenging and very interesting take on Portal, which focuses almost exclusively on the Gels used in the second half of Portal 2. Really creative stuff, although story-wise it's not as good a game as Portal Stories: Mel. The mechanics don't always work exactly as intended, which can be frustrating. Still, it's got more custom voice-acting and a wacky sense of humor. Legends of Heroes: Trails in the Sky: I picked this up because the reviews were almost entirely positive and gushed about the great story and compelling characters and incredibly long playtime. I'm not entirely impressed, to be honest. Maybe I'm just not far enough into the story to really get into the "good, interesting characters" part, but so far the only interesting thing is that the JRPG heroine is the outgoing, strength-based leader and the JRPG hero is the quiet, even-tempered and diplomatic one. And even that's not super unique. I dunno. Maybe it'll get better later. I'm only 2 hours into the game. Nidhogg: Fun but frustrating. Surprisingly (and hilariously) gory for a sprite game. Crypt of the Necrodancer: I bought this on a whim, fully expecting to ragequit it forever as soon as it got too hard, but I'm really enjoying it. I usually die over and over and over again, but the music is so catchy, and the gameplay is very fun, and the levels randomly regenerate every time I die so I'm never actually repeating anything. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic It was really good--- up until the ending. Then it was just super disappointing and lame. Invisible, Inc: This game builds so much tension and suspense! I love it. It's very short-- Maybe 3-4 hours total-- but that actually works really well for the game. You get a random assortment of missions spread across the globe every time you play, and you only have 72 hours to prepare for the final mission. "Hours" translate to distance you can travel, so you have to decide whether to focus on multiple missions in the same part of the world, or to cherry-pick fewer missions in distant lands that might have better payoffs. And if you don't prepare well enough, you could land yourself in an unbeatable final mission and have to start again. Add to that the fact that missions are turn-based and have randomly generated maps, so you can never memorize a building's layout and you can't make educated guesses about where your target might be. Every round of play in a mission, the alarm level raises, which brings out new enemies, raises the difficulty of hacking, and other unpleasantness, so you have to decide how long you want to stick around collecting resources you'll need for your next mission. The entire game is basically a suspense movie, and every decision you make is the equivalent of the movie hero screaming "DO I CUT THE RED WIRE OR THE BLUE WIRE?!?!" Battleblock Theater: I remember complaining about how easy Super Mario Bros Wii-U was. Battleblock made up for that. It is one of the few games I actually regularly ragequit, yet I still come back to it. Super fun, and also super enraging. Cute character skins, the best narrator/writing, and good music. __________________ Yoo Hoo!

12-16-2015, 01:53 AM	#3
Overcast Cinderella Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Trespassing in the graveyard Posts: 3,076	Hotline Miami 2: I had walked into this somewhat expecting more of the same, but there was a wildly different tonal sense as I walked through this. For a lot of people I learned this created dissonance and aggravation but for me it kinda slowly simmered in me to a boil before extinguishing the fire and leaving me feeling dark and distant. This is probably my favorite game of the year, and the finale to the series I never knew I wanted. The Beginner's Guide: I had just finished Undertale and was so full of emotions when I learned one half of the guys who had made the Stanley Parable had made another walking simulator. And I was forced along another emotive roller coaster that left me grasping for answers at the end, in a way he wanted me to. Playing me like a damn fiddle in a strangely perfect image of theme as game. Dominons 4: Finally a game I can describe with more than just emotions. There is an interesting feeling to this game, as if you are building your own internal mythological concepts as you play a god trying to attain supergodhood in a war of dominance. There is some pre-set mythos but a great deal is all you. I also got to watch the process of PF consuming a game and mastering it in like a week, which is always fascinating. Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin: I liked Dark Souls 2, I know that is kinda made an awkward grab at a lot of the concepts of Dark Souls without actually reaching the bar but it was something that felt mechanically improved despite it. It was fun to play, and with Scholar you got to see the game in a perhaps more finished format than you may have initially imagined. It still doesn't quite reach the setting depth that Dark Souls had, but with the addition of everything in this version it finally approaches about as close as I think it will ever get while still being as ambiguous as you might expect of the series. The Age of Decadence: Finally. It's finally done. I've been playing a half finished game with a little more content continually for the past couple years but they finally did it. AoD can be a little clunky, sometimes overtly difficult in a way that seems luck based or unfair, but the story is something deeply fascinating, vacillating from court intrigue to lost knowledge that has become something arcane, to just raw violence to solve your problems. I love the setting and story and if you can get past how horrifically ugly the game is, and I easily can, there is a ton to love here. Pillars of Eternity: There is something of an oddity here, I liked this game, but I don't think I was in love with it. I honestly felt the same way about games like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. My favorite game of the Infinity Engine days was Fallout, and my favorite Bioware DnD adventure was Neverwinter Nights, so by nature I kinda just prefer my games to be less oriented on group dynamics and more on concentrating on your character with the option of assistance. The balance of the game though was definitely more toward having that group around, and unlike Baldur's Gate it never really branched into the outright ridiculous as far as classes go. There was a bit missing, and the story had a less than satisfying ending. I enjoyed the journey though, and I'd appreciate more. __________________ Time to bust out the glow sticks!

12-16-2015, 06:00 AM	#4
Arcanum Strike the Earth! Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Canada Posts: 3,185	I can never remember the games that came out from January to April/May when it gets to this year roundup time, so I looked at my steam product activation history and made this list. Then I realized how massive this list is (which isn't even the full list of what I played this year), so I'm going to keep it rather short for each title because holy shit do I get a lot of games. Dying Light This is actually a really solid zombie game. The melee combat feels pretty good, which is usually a hard thing for first-person melee systems to accomplish. And night time in the game is genuinely terrifying with the super zombies chasing after you. I only have two complaints about the game. While the parkour is fun it seems a bit more grounded in realism than other parkour systems in games. Specifically there is no horizontal wall run, which is disappointing since you have these esoteric weapons to kill zombies with, but you can't fiddle with gravity a bit to make wall runs possible. The other complaint is that mid/late game, when you have really powerful crafted weapons, night time is no longer scary because you can fight the super zombies. Then a little later you get the grappling hook, which trivializes the parkour system and the need to scout the best route on the fly, and allows you to avoid any punishment if you screw up a jump because you can just zip back up to where you were. This made late game extremely boring, and because of that I never actually finished the game. Grey Goo Pretty fun RTS. More macro focused than StarCraft 2, and I've seen it compared to the Supreme Commander (never played that game so I wouldn't know). The factions are neat and have somewhat unique mechanics, but the different units didn't really feel all that different resulting in pretty similar playstyles. The story mode was really fun and challenging, and the cinematics were gorgeous. Sadly the multiplayer community was practically non-existent from launch, so I had no incentive to keep playing the game. Evolve I played this game during its betas and absolutely loved it. I bought it despite the shitty DLC model, and had some fun for about a week or two. For those who don't know, the game is asymmetrical multiplayer where one person is a monster against 4 hunter players. The monster needs to flee the hunters and eat NPC creatures in order to evolve and become stronger so that it can start hunting the hunters. Sadly the game became stagnant thanks to the poor matchmaking. I would win 90% of my games as the monster because of how people failed to grasp the need for teamwork as the hunters, and my games as a hunter were awful because of the same reason. The few times there was teamwork with a good monster to fight, the game was fantastic. But nobody wanted to stick around to learn the game, coupled with the DLC disaster, and the active player count plummeted within weeks, making decent matches even less likely due to massive skill gaps. Sunless Sea Holy shit this game is good. Absolutely fantastic writing, amazing atmosphere, and just overall extremely enjoyable. The naval combat is a bit lackluster, but that's more of a side distraction than the main focus of the game, which is exploring the Sunless Sea and going on adventures on whatever islands you find, recruiting officers onto your ship, trading, going insane, managing resources, and cannibalism. Highly recommend this to anyone who doesn't hate reading. Dragonball Xenoverse Spectacle Dragonball Z fighting game. It's pretty flawed, but is still a really fun game if you're a fan of the series. Ori and the Blind Forest Absolutely beautiful game. It's a Metroid-light game that has a simple story, an adorable protagonist, and beautiful art. Not as much exploration as typical metroidvania games, hence the "-light," but still a very enjoyable experience. GTA V It's Grand Theft Auto. Not really much else to say. Really fun game, the story is solid with interesting characters. Multiplayer was neat for a bit, but it really shines if you're playing with friends and all of mine slowly stopped playing so I did as well. Witcher 3 Holy shit this game is amazing. It deserves all the awards and praise that it has been getting. Morally grey quests with no morality system built in the game to let you know X choice gives Y karma. Your choices have consequences, that's all the feedback you get, and it is amazing. The writing is phenomenal, the game world is gorgeous, the combat is extremely satisfying. I could gush over this game for quite a long time. My only complaint is that once you get around level 20+ you can get some really powerful skill builds that trivialize a lot of the combat. I ended up purposefully gimping my build to keep it enjoyable. Other than that, this game is the best RPG I have played. Freedom Planet The best Sonic game since Sonic Adventure, and it's not even Sonic. This game was originally made as a Sonic fan game, but it grew into its own thing and I'm really glad it did. It is a fantastic 2D platformer, has a cliche but still interesting story (mostly due to the characters), and plenty of replayability thanks to multiple playable characters with unique play styles. If you liked the old Genesis Sonic games, then give this game a shot. Duck Game 2D arena duck combat. Best played with friends. You can join random games online, but it's not nearly as fun as being able to laugh at the ridiculous moments that happen very frequently with 3 of your friends. Ronin Interesting 2D action game with some stealth elements. You move around the level in real time, but when you are spotted by an enemy time freezes and the game becomes turn-based with simultaneous turns. You can see where enemies will be shooting thanks to their laser sights, and the only way you can move around the world is by jumping. It essentially turns every combat encounter into a puzzle, and allows you to perform some crazy ninja maneuvers that would normally be extremely difficult if the combat was all real time. The game is pretty short, and there's not much incentive to replay it once you beat it, but it was an enjoyable experience while it lasted. Rocket League Best sports game of the year. It's soccer with rocket powered cars smashing into the ball instead of people kicking it. Plus they just added a hockey mode. Words can't even do justice to how amazing this game is. Hell even video doesn't do that good of a job. I know, I watched gameplay clips and didn't get why my friends were playing it. Then I tried a friend's copy through steam's family share and instantly bought own copy. Titan Souls Shadow of the Colossus meets 2D meets roguelikes. It's a neat game but I have one problem with the game which is that your respawn point is far enough from bosses to be extremely annoying. In a game where you die in one hit, you need to be able to restart the scenario almost instantaneously. Super Meat Boy does this, where death is easy to come by but restarting a level is instant and painless and feeds into the "one more try" mentality. In Titan Souls when you die you need to walk 5-8 seconds to get back to the boss arena. That doesn't seem like much, but when you are dying 10+ times against a boss it really adds up and is needlessly frustrating. Warhammer Vermintide Left4Dead but melee focused, and with classes. This is another game that does melee combat right. It's also the first game to shamelessly clone the Left4Dead format, and I'm okay with that. L4D is a fantastic game, and I'm surprised it wasn't successfully cloned sooner. The game also features a loot system to get you that dopamine fix and keep you playing. Also the devs are actively listening to their community, and plan on expanding the game with more classes and possibly more enemy types (currently you can only fight against Skaven, rat creatures). Transformers Devastation It's a character action game by Platinum and it plays like a character action game by Platinum and that is fantastic. Really fun game, multiple characters that are different enough to give you some variety, but similar enough to allow skill to carry over between them. Story is your typical sunday morning cartoon fare, and it is wonderfully fitting. Environments are a bit repetitive (for example you traverse the exact same city map in a lot of the chapters, just doing different objectives in it), but the core gameplay and boss fights are amazing. Highly recommend this if you're a fan of Platinum, G1 Transformers, or fast paced action games. DmC Devil May Cry Oh my god this game is terrible. Got it through a Humble Bundle and figured I would give it a chance despite hearing bad things about it. If you haven't played many character action games before then I'm sure you could enjoy this game. But anyone who is a fan of CAGs like anything by Platinum, or any of the previous DMC games, will most likely not enjoy this game. It's just not a DMC game. Rebel Galaxy You can't take the sky from me. Neat space combat/exploration/trading/questing game with an amazing soundtrack that constantly reminds me of Firefly. The game's combat pretty much takes Assassin's Creed Black Flag's naval combat and puts it into space, and it works really well. One thing to point out is the game is limited to a 2D plane, so there's no up/down navigation or exploring, but it doesn't limit it as much as you think. The game knows it's an arcadey space action game, and doesn't pretend to be anything else. StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void The conclusion to the SC2 trilogy. I enjoyed my time with it. The story was decent, the missions were interesting, I finally got to play a campaign as my main race, and finally everything got wrapped up. Multiplayer also underwent a lot of changes, and I haven't had time to play enough to adjust to them. The games start really fast now thanks to an increased starting worker count, and matches get really hectic really fast. Abyss Odyssey This 2D brawler game has some really neat concepts like procedurally generated levels, some roguelike elements, and multiple characters with different playstyles, but all of it is held back by the sluggish combat. It's slow, it feels unresponsive, it wants you to combo enemies but it doesn't give you the tools to do so beyond a few hits. It just feels not good, and I couldn't keep playing the game because it bothered me so much. Just Cause 3 Explosions! Guns! Jets! Explosions! Grappling hook! Wing Suit! Parachute! Explosions! Boats! Helicopters! Explosions! More explosions! This game gives you plenty of tools to have a fun time, and then leaves it up to you to have it. If you capture every settlement in the most efficient way you will probably get bored super faster, it's up to you to get creative and make it more entertaining. Likewise the story isn't anything to write home about, and is more of a way to gradually introduce more challenging enemies (like a tank that has an energy shield) and to occasionally have a cool set piece. __________________ POS Almighty has spoken.

12-16-2015, 08:33 AM	#5
Kyanbu The Legend Local Rookie Indie Dev Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: New Jersey Posts: 5,497	Been very busy so I haven't played much but there are two I'll bring up. One that I played from start to finish this year, and the other is more of a game I've played on and off since 2011. Which I'll review later on. WildARMS XF (PSP/Vita) Cross fire is a neat little TRPG and the last entry in the long standing WildARMS Franchise. It's kind of the FFT of the series in my opinion. The story focuses on Clarissa and Felius Arwin, a pair of young drifters whom are trying to get their mother's sword back after it gets stolen by a lone drifter and skilled swordsmen, Rupert. Their chase leads them to the kingdom of Elesius. Where one simple rescue mission to free a town from bandits results the two being dragged into a country wide conspiracy involving the King, the Royal Council, The church, and a sea of corruption and treason. While the game is set in a western world with wild west inspired designs that the WA franchise is known for. Clarissa is the only one who carries a gun. Granted it's a very special gun but still. XD The story is pretty decent. A bit cliche but enjoyable none the less. With some memorable characters and moments. "Katrina" being my favorite character mainly because of one amazing moment and everything after it. XD Gotta love Evil Katrina lol. Gameplay: Like I said before, it's a TRPG similar to the likes of FFT. While having it's own take on the genre. battles take place on hex grid maps of various sizes. You pick up to 6 of your characters to place into battle. Like FFT and most of TRPG. XF uses a class system. Each character has their own unique class tied specifically to them. All in addition to numerous classes to chose from for new recruits or changing your main characters jobs to fit your current mission. And here's where things get a bit unique and annoying in some cases a bit too early on. Each battle through out the story is set up like a puzzle. After being given a brief summary on the field, the enemy, and the objective. It's up to you to solve the map. To do so you will have to change your character's class to ones that have the skills you need to complete the mission. Fortunately you do not have to grind to use all of the skills that class has. Because each class has complete access to all of it's skills from the get go. Simply equip the class you need and you're good to go. But should you level up a class for any given character, that character will learn a skill from that class. Which you can equip to said character. Equipped skills can be used regardless of what class your character currently is. Allowing you to mix and match skill from varies classes to make your characters more versatile. Maxing out Classes isn't too bad as each class level caps at 7. And most vital skills are learned by Class level 3, though it does pay off to max them out to unlock each classes hidden skill. Not necessary but they can be helpful mid to late game. But unfortunately the only time you get a lot of experience is through story battles. Going back and replaying a map won't get you much experience. Though aside from class leveling, you'll rarely ever need to grind as the game is very dependent on you using the jobs it wants you to use for each given mission rather then you being at a specific level. Making each battle unique at the expense of you losing quite a bit freedom of choice when it comes to playing styles. You still have some leeway but that falls mainly on how many of your characters have mastered a class, or at least learned some skills from different classes. Some of these missions have fairly simple objectives like "rescue everyone without getting seen" or "get to point B, on the map". Others more complex and challenging. With some maps being fairly difficult a bit too early on. like late Chapter 1 early where you have to make good use of stat debuffing or you're not winning as the game will sometimes and very intentionally put you up against enemies that are not only way above you but can stat buff them selves... And this is happens in chapter 1 and chapter 2 though it's not so bad compared to the first time. And there are points in the game where you can be very easily put in a bad situation if you haven't been stocking up on new gear and items as well as learning "Emulator" skills (this game's version of "Blue Magic") from enemies later on in Chapter 3. As frequently as possible whenever you can. As the game loves putting you in chain battles without the option to go to town an buy gear/items. Especially in Chapter 3 oh dear god I got pretty close to a dead game because I missed a chance to learn a Emulator skill from a certain enemy during a story battle. Resulting in me fighting enemies without the spell they are weak against. And they had high defense and hit like trucks! Damn those golems!!!!! be sure to learn "Electrigger" ASAP! as it makes this point of the game go by a lot more smoothly. As the Golems are x2 weak to it! Especially when cast by the Emulator Class thanks to their "Exploit Weakness" Skill. By the way, the game doesn't tell you this UNTIL it's too late to get the skill. It just assumes you went out of your way to get it before hand... thanks Labyrinthia...-_- Fortunately it's not too hard to get a good balanced team set up. So the game actually gets easier towards late game (chapter 4 onward). And there are a few skill combinations that can break the game in half though they require a bit of class grinding. There's also one more thing. the VP bar, which depletes every time your characters move. Each character has their own VP stat. Each one varying depending on what class that character has equipped. Should you VP bar hit 0, your character will become fatigued. meaning they'll take damage at the end of their turn. Kind of like poison. Fortunately this won't kill your characters. At worst they'll be down to 1 HP. Unfortunately if you don't plan your moves out carefully or keep VP items and VP recovery skills handy. This can become a problem should your mission drag out too long. But despite popular belief. This is not really an issue. You take very little damage per turn and that's only when the VP bar is at 0. Which will take a while to happen. and it resets whenever you revive a character during battle anyway for the most part. Also for WA veterans, I'm afraid to say there are no Summons in this game that you can use. Though they do play a role in this world's lore and story. You just can't use any of them. All in all, WildARMS XF is a fairly decent and challenging TRPG. With a interesting take on the Class system and some interesting missions as a result. But the game's difficulty curve is too hard in the beginning while being almost too easy towards the end (during the end of the last battle before the Final Chapter. You can literally win the battle by doing absolutely nothing aside from moving all of your units as far back from the starting point as possible... I'm not kidding and the game even encourages this in what ends up being an anti climatic but very poetic victory that's full of irony XD). A decent story, a some what lovable cast with questionable voice acting. And great Sound Track, and many memorable moments that'll make you smile, cry, and probably rage. 7.8/10 (Good) __________________ Last edited by Kyanbu The Legend; 12-16-2015 at 08:47 AM.

12-16-2015, 02:25 PM	#7
Bard The 5th LW Feelin' Super! Join Date: May 2009 Posts: 4,191	Undertale: Had a charm to it that I feel catapulted it to my favorite game of 2015. Gameplay was fun, but I'll say the soundtrack/dialogue/design of it all was hat one me over. Its a good display of what someone can create on a low budget with simple mechanics. Bloodborne: There was some intangible quality about Bloodborne that bugged me. I liked the gameplay for the most part, but bits and pieces of it felt unfinished, and the plot kinda falls off a bit after the midway point. It was still enjoyable though and I think a Bloodborne 2 might be able to address these flaws someday. I'll probably get the DLC at some point down the road as well. MGS5: I admit I still technically haven't beaten it but I think Ive played enough to make a judgement. As far as gameplay goes, MGS5 knocks it out of the park, but I think its missing the intangible 'something' even more than Bloodborne. I haven't played most of the Metal Gear Solid games (I missed MGS2-4) but I still remember loving the codec calls and boss fights from Twin Snakes and Revengeance, and this game just felt empty in that regard. Had a really strong base but it didn't build on it enough presumably because they were paying Keifer Sutherland by the line. Fallout 4: I haven't had the time to dive into this one yet so my judgement is to be taken with a grain of salt. Like Bloodborne and MGS5 it also has fine gameplay but I'm not fond of the way it handles the main character so far. I felt that FO:NV handled the protagonist perfectly - it gave little detail and let you put your own identity on them. This game feels like it doesn't really want you to roleplay at all so far. You can be sarcastic or mean, but your characters options are all the same. Maybe it can still win me over though. Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin: The Sequeling: Colon, the colon: Only putting this at the bottom because its a remake. I honestly think I enjoyed DS2 more than BB, and the DLCs helped in that regard, although I didn't care much for Frigid Outskirts. Basically, one small game with simplistic gameplay that won me over through pure charm and a bunch of bigger games that I feel had pretty solid gameplay that failed to have charm.