BAKOON is on Twitter as BAKOON, and in the world is Oliver Leach, an artist in California. He was asked to make a list of the games he liked this year and why. One time he puked on a Popeye arcade cabinet at a roller rink.
I hope you like my choices for the Best Video Games of the Year 2014, here on the Giant Bomb website. Thanks again for checking out my choices for the games.
10. Hohokum
There are isolated sequences in it that are beautiful in a way that feel precisely economical and effortless at the same time. The title sounds like a street name for a drug made from Santa Claus semen, maybe it gives you Christmas dick or something. I hope all of you have a great holidays. Also the sense and use of color in the game is very nice. It is pointing at the idea of a game that is as fun and visually interesting as Katamari Damacy and then pointing at itself and nodding at you. You agree with it more or less, to its face anyway. You are just glad someone wants to make something like that, so you smile at it as it nods. You play as wiggle snake, which some of you might enjoy.
9. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor: Lord of the Rings Tournament Edition
It feels really expensive, which is a nice experience sometimes, like you are really getting your money's worth. I fell asleep during the second Lord of the Rings movie and didn't watch the third or read the books but i liked this, because it is fun and pliant and eager. All of the safe and tried and tested gameplay components that it is constructed out of are really polished and pieced together well. The addition of the artificial intelligence system that makes all of the shreks you murder remember you and hate you is the thing that makes it better than it maybe deserved to be. It is a hardy, satisfying meal of comfort food from a chain restaurant and your waiter is an elf. The same can be said about Dragon Age: Inquisition, except the elf has a boner and wants to talk about it.
8. Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions
It didn't give the same reptile brain zeroing in on the whole screen at once burning palm technique type of feeling that the original Evolved had at first. Felt needlessly convoluted. By the end of the (difficult but fair) ‘adventure’ mode, that feeling was reversed and I felt like I was stronger, as a person. Honorable same-genre mention to Crimsonland, specifically on the Vita. It is going for twin-stick shooter Doom aesthetic but the weapon set feels Rise of the Triad for serious. The fact that this sort of experience can be had on a handheld machine now is amazing and good.
7. Nidhogg
It feels like a Commodore 64 adaptation of the final scene of a really intense lost Georges Franju film.
It is a grindhouse game, more than any other recent title that comes to mind (fuck House of the Dead: Overkill, fuck that dumb game). It is creaky and kind of clunky but a smooth and tight experience is not the goal of the thing. I recall comments from the gamesman who made it, the Resident Evil man, saying his aim was to return to the ideal ‘survival horror’ game, and it shows. It is a pastiche of not only visuals and gameplay elements dug from the history of the genre (RE, Silent Hill, a good deal of Siren, moments of Clock Tower) but also jammed full of specific horror film signifiers, as well. Most importantly, there are sequences in it that gave the impression of (but not necessarily completely achieving) the golden moment of a great horror experience: the sensation that it is relentless and is going off the damn rails.
5. Velocity 2X
It is fun in an aggressive and complicated way. The gameplay made my brain feel strange, like it was using parts it usually didn't, due to the juggling of similar but just dissimilar enough control schemes. The story is incomprehensible, which enhanced that sensation. It is an exhausting experience that feels satisfying when completed, like sports would be i guess, but I wouldnt know, because I'm not a fucking narc.
Had a nightmare about an off brand Chuck E. Cheese in Florida, run by drug dealers I heard about. Somebody got their belly cut open in the ball pit and was yelling for help in there, but everybody was just watching, parents and kids and everything. They are bad places and this hasn't really been addressed in a satisfying way until now. Outlast feels like one of the flood of shitty found footage horror films that came out (are coming out) due to the success of Paranormal Activity and are all set in a fucking asylum, and the rationale to keep filming an hour into it is always really dumb (not to necessarily put those down, i watch every single one of them). Five Nights at Freddy's reminds me more of the weirder and much more successful examples of the genre, like Cannibal Holocaust or some of the segments in the V/H/S series or etc. It's funny, too. Amnesia wasn't funny, neither was the Alien game or Penumbra, or any of the other Clock Tower style horror games. Horror can be addressed in a lot of ways, it is nice to see that there are new horror/horrific (startling?) games trying different tactics. It plays like a scary 3D chess version of Tapper, the arcade game about beers.
The ‘helpless first-person being chased by a horrible thing’ thing is getting sort of rote at this point (everything in games is rote what a fucking dumb thing to complain about, but still), but the aesthetics of it are incredible. It's a 20 hour cargo cult of a thing extrapolated out from the handful of interiors in the original film and that is Cool. I hope they do the Donald Sutherland Invasion of the Body Snatchers game next. DLC where you play as the dog with a guy's head.
2. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
I had a job where I fixed projectors at an art school and nobody every needed a projector fixed so I played The Binding of Isaac until my eyes bled. Finally playing it with a controller was like realizing I could drive with my hands instead of with my feet on the damn steering wheel. It is a good game, that's what I say.
1. Mountain
The concept of a game that will not be completed until we are dead as a species is a very interesting concept. I played a song on an invisible piano and then it started snowing. A piece of bread appeared.
X - Illegal Alternate Choice - E.V.O.: Search for Eden for Super Nintendo
You play as a fish who eats steaks until it can evolve into a much better fish. You become many things. You are large and contain multitudes, but like life, once you become a bird there is no going back. You can be a person, and a mermaid, and an eel, and a dinosaur. It's better than any game released this year. Fuck it, Soul Blazer too. And Actraiser. And the Punisher game, the one in the arcade. Time is relative. What are numbers, anyway? Hammerin' Harry was originally the Japanese Total Recall licensed arcade game. You played as Arnold Schwarzenegger killing your construction worker friends after you go berserk from a botched memory job from those brain butchers at Rekall. All of this is completely true.
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