Because I feel I haven't liked enough games to warrant a proper list. Therefore I'm going with games that signify something new or a progression of the medium. For better or worse.
The Golf Club
This game first came to my attention when Giant Bomb did an Unfinished of it. Coming from the ashes of the Tiger Woods franchise, HB studios did what any developer would love to do when a publisher drops it - finish the product. What makes Golf Club special to me is how the game uses the cloud (Oof. I can't avoid saying that) to facilitate almost all content. As a result, once the game is up and running, you've got no more load times in store. Get in and golf. This immediacy is powerful stuff and the way it handles multiplayer is neat, too. Ghosts are kept server side so, as soon as you hit a course the game will pick a handful of rivals to compete against and their balls will magically appear alongside you. You know how in Trials you wish they'd show how a ghost tackled an obstacle instead of giving you a dot? This is more than that. It can be distracting to see another ball slip into view when you're trying to put but you have a physical marker to play against and, if you're eagle-eyed enough, another person's shot to observe.
Lastly, the omnipresent caddy is probably my favourite new character of the year. His cheerful disposition, tinged with a passive-aggressive hatred of my ability to fluff puts is amazing.
Infamous: Second Son
By no means a game of the year contender, it does stand as a marker for that period of time when, in the infancy of these new consoles, developers were simply trying to get a product out there that worked. As a result, its light on content but it does look visually appealing at times. Its more Infamous yet less. Its narrative rushes headlong from point to point with very little sense of development and your rag-tag group of followers are... well, murderous gits who have an immediate redemption once Troy Baker hi-fives them. In retrospect, though, the main mandate for Second Son was to produce a technical showpiece for the Playstation 4 and, it mostly succeeds. Its brief so it doesn't outstay its welcome like other open-world games have the opportunity to do and the animation on display is well realised. Just.. don't rush the next one out.
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
So, a few months further on, an open-world game arrived with plenty of content and a pretty sweet gimmick. It seems to come out of a Ubisoft design school but seems to know just when to reign it in to stop the game feeling needlessly bloated. And the showpiece is the Nemesis system. Ultimately, games aren't going to visually jump from generation to generation like they used to. Hence the new consoles opt for other angles. Cloud-based something, something, social experiences and, in the case of Mordor, an experiment in artificial intelligence.
Now, you can pull back the curtain on the system just like you can with anything else but that doesn't make the experience of an Orc captain waxing lyrical about how he smoked your arse 20 minutes ago any less interesting. The system, rather than being a sideshow gimmick is prevalent throughout proceedings. If you're going to succeed at that, the system better be good. It is. If you're willing to steal it, make it good.
Pro Evolution Soccer 2015
With the first year of these new consoles meaning everyone is scrambling to get to grips with it, the first whack of the axe is likely to miss. Konami did, unsurprisingly for them, take a smart decision last November by not rushing a version of their soccer series to the new black boxes. Instead they waited a year, figured out the FOX engine some more and then decided to make a FIFA clone. Its a series that has never usually been about animation but this year's edition (and to a certain extent, last year's) has placed a priority on animation which makes he players have a momentum and weight to them. You no longer can cancel animations on a whim and results in a more methodical experience. On top of this, the AI is still exceptional with teams preferring different styles of play but also having alternative strategies in place should a game get away from them.
Its still as impenetrable to newcomers as any sports game and has numerous licensing and presentation issues but it does contain the Become a Legend mode which has now developed into a full-on power fantasy and has supplanted Master League as my favourite way to waste time.
Tears to Tiara II: Heir of the Overlord
And lastly, a rant against visual novels. Fuck off. Tears to Tiara II is a tactical RPG which is so front-loaded with glacial, bollocks storytelling that I threw the towel in 5 hours into a 100 hour journey. If you want to pile that many words into a game, a visual fucking medium, write a book instead and rethink your chosen profession. Couldn't render a cutscene? Throw a couple of talking heads in there against a backdrop. The animators will be grateful of this when they get to have a real good go at making two characters walk from one scene to ..... the same scene.
Bloated, padded bullshit. If you absolutely, positively have to go down this road, offer an interesting story right off the bat and tighten it up to make the player's curiosity be what drives proceedings. If there's actual gameplay, don't obstruct the player with 45 minute dialogue chunks and then have the battle over in seconds.
This is against the Geneva convention. I hate you, Tears to Tiara.
DriveClub
DriveClub is a lesson in patience. My original plan with this game was to download the free version and then decide on a full purchase off the back of that. However, when the servers went down, I decided for the sake of reviewing it I needed to part with £35 to see DriveClub in all its broken glory. It does not drive well but its competent when you consider Evolution Studios' back catalog rarely goes near tarmac. Indeed, spending your lift developing WRC games might explain the grippy handling. The game's major hook, aside from the visuals, was the social aspects with the game entirely pivots around. Through the saga of the servers crumbling and having to be rebuilt I wrestled with whether or not to give up on DriveClub and just do away with it.
Two months later, they seem to have fixed it. To their credit, they committed to fixing this nightmare rather than letting it quietly rot behind a couch. Maybe that just says something about how much Sony invested in it or the fact that, without a direct competitor, this is THE driving game for the Playstation 4. Project Cars delayed due to shareholders, The Crew was its own mess. DriveClub stands as an example of a studio addressing a technical calamity and following through to make sure it works. And once the dust is settled, the game is kinda fun. Its not necessarily down to the driving and certainly not the AI but the fact that the challenge system is up and running gives me a reason to revisit this.
So that's my year. Roll on 2015.
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