Say something negative about your GOTY

Bioshock Infinite.

The looting is super-distracting. Sometimes you're just supposed to book it. But with all the loot laying around, you always stop and pick up stuff from the ground.

The audio logs don't fit with the narrative. There's too much important information in them and it's hard to concentrate what's being said some of the time.

The Last of Us

Some parts of the world are decidedly less detailed than others; I think it is a very graphically uneven game (besides cutscenes, which always look great). Can't blame it though since it's a late generation release on 7 year old hardware. Still extremely impressive for what the ps3's specs are.

Gunpoint was pretty short.

Dynasty Warriors 8

Does nothing for people not already invested in the series.

The Last of Us. A line of Joel's came out kind of bad, and the visuals while as good as it gets on consoles in general, has a few problems here and there.

BioShock Infinite. Fuck that ghost lady.

@video_game_king: You're probably right.

I'll preface this by saying that I still have a few games I'd like to visit (Ni No Kuni, Last of Us, Dead Space 3, and others) before I go all "this is my game of the year" on something. But, as of now, I think it's:

Tomb Raider

The quick time event early on in the game sort of trivializes the tension that they are working toward in that scene. I am not of the mindset that rape or sexual assault has no place in video games, because I think that those are important - tragic - areas of human behavior to explore and I think games are a total valid way of doing that. However, quick time events do not work for building tension and terror, they are better served during frantic action to convey excitement and maybe confusion (e.g.: God of War's boss fights, Asura's Wrath). I think the scene could have been something not player controlled and been just as effective. Or, if they were going to put players in that position (which is a gutsy move, but one I think could have been very powerful), it would have worked better with direct control, not giant button prompts. "PRESS A TO NOT GET RAPED." The decision feels a little hollow in the face of the rest of the game, which is extremely well executed as a piece for empowering a once objectified character. It's one of those cases where I think it is both one of the most important games of the year, and also one of the best made games of the year.

Dota 2

The learning curve is waaay to steep. Maybe it's a bit needlessly cluttered overall.

I don't really know what my GOTY is so I'll go through what I think are my top contenders.

Saint's Row 4: I know I had a ton of fun with the game, but looking back I'm struggling with actually remembering why. It's like it was a completely bland experience, but at the same time hit the spot perfectly.

Dota 2: Online match-making, do I need to say more ?

Assassin's Creed 4: Anything that required you not to be detected. Also, it didn't go quite far enough when it came to the open world pirating.

Honorable mention, Rayman Legends: The online challenges failed to keep my attention, as they required a tad too much "grinding" to be rewarding.

Fire Emblem Awakening

Its Hard difficulty isn't hard enough and Lunatic difficulty is about as fun as stabbing yourself with a rusty fork repeatedly.

Dota 2

Phantom Lancer and Broodmother. They're equally awful.

Err... I didn't play too many 2013 games other than GTA V and SC2: HOTS and some 3DS stuff since I spent most of my game-playing time going through my backlog. I still have to play Zelda too. And more Pokemans, and finish Luigi's Mansion, and Monster Hunter... And Mario & Luigi. I really should get on finishing that stuff.

I will declare a tie. My criticism of GTA V is how little direction the story seems to have for a while. That is very minor though. I had a blast with the game. It's the first GTA since Vice City where I have the most fun simply driving around and causing trouble. Shooting gas tanks and lighting cars on fire is so much fun.

For HOTS, the single player was too easy and a couple of the new multiplayer units are pretty bad, especially the stupid Swarm Host, which enables this really awful turtle style on some maps. Outside of that their new matchmaking rating decay system has completely broken the 1v1 ladder because as soon as you don't play for exactly 2 weeks it drops your MMR. This causes those of us who have many other commitments to never to be able to progress and puts a ton of high level players in the lower ranks of ladder. This in turn makes it so low level players have to play people significantly better than them and vice versa. This has caused a lot of grief in the SC2 community. I've managed to stay near the top and mostly just face people I am supposed to, but a lot of others have not, including people much better than me.

Pokemon X Y,

Same shit.

Tomb Raider

There were too many dudes on that island for the premise by which it operated. You manage to call for help within like two days of getting there - you want me to believe that none of these hundreds of other people managed to get out enough distress calls that this island hasn't been identified for serious study by the authorities?

The Last of Us

During the sniper section, when I reached the house and got to the top floor, I had noticed the firing had stopped so I began moving through the house quietly. I reached the door of the room with the sniper and aimed the gun so I could see the two corners. As I then entered the room facing the corner, it then turned to a cutscene with him coming from the corner I had just checked. The vid below demonstrates it.

It's a nitpick, but don't cheat. When you replay Dark Souls, all the enemies that drop down and ambush you, if you look around you can see them watching you and waiting to drop down behind you. The game doing that completely broke the immersion for me.

it's not Two Brothers

The Last of Us: The ending goes against what I wanted of it, and for that reason it sucked for me!

Bioshock Infinite

Will leave to the readers, plenty of known flaws.

Still GotY

Man, if some of you thought handymen were tough on whatever mode you were playing you should have played 1999 mode. Now that was a challenge.

Spelunky:

No Online multiplayer

and

the game could have been a little more open in dropping tips on how to get to some of the cool extra stuff. Maybe randomly finding pages of a journal giving clues on how one would access the black market for example. If it wasn't for Breaking Brad Spelunky I would never had known about the Black Market. (Short of reading a walk-through of course.)

Tales of Xillia. It felt a bit linear,compared to like Vesperia and if you play as one character some parts of the story will seem sudden and might not make any sense when the events happen in the game. There's definitely one in particular where I was just said wtf is even happening to myself, they do a decent job at explaining it afterwards, but I think it only really makes sense if you see the other character's side of the story (which I'm currently working on).

Tomb Raider

@hatking completely agree with you on the use of quicktime events in this instance.

Having said that for me the biggest negative in the game is what comes next. Namely that from this point on the game becomes too focused on pitting you against human opposition not letting the full weight of Lara’s actions sink in.

I honestly wouldn’t have minded going back to killing wolfs for a bit - maybe building towards a moment where grim resolve sets in and Lara realises more people may have to die for her and her friends to survive.

Also more detailed and complex tombs wouldn't have hurt!

Man, I agree with you on the Lunatic difficulty, but maybe I'm weird or something but at one point I got used to it and even started liking being stabbed with a rusty fork... then the game switched to stabbing me with burning hot nails and I haven't played it since.

As for my GOTY...

Rayman Legends

That game was WAAAAAAAY too easy. I didn't even had to try hard to finish it 100% this time.

The Last of Us

I give you two negatives:

1. It ends

2. It's too good and I don't think I can go back to playing TWD after this. ND more or less nailed the "post-apocalyptic game with infected" genre.

I'm just curious here but the line you are refering to is that one where Joel says: "It's called luck and it's gonna run out".

If it is I actually agree. It's the only line in the game that sounds a bit forced in my opinion. It's like you can hear that Troy Baker was acting when he was delivering that line. But that is the only line in the game that bothers me a bit. Other than that Troy did an awesome job and so did everyone else involved.

Ni No Kuni: Wraith of The White Witch

It Ended.

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch could be a little grindy at times, but I enjoyed the combat so much that it didn't bother me.

Looking over my list of games I beat this year I haven't done a heck of a lot. I don't even think I could make a top ten since I never finished most games. Hell. Most of the games are not even from this year. I played a lot but those are the only ones that didn't bore me and make me give up on them. Seems like it took the end of the year to light a fire under my ass too and that seems to be where most of my play time has been.

I guess, X-Com Enemy Within is my favourite overall game. That said, I think I just had the most pure fun running around Saints Row IV as they nailed making an open world fun to get around. It was the first game I actually went around and got all the collectables because of how much fun it was to just run around in that game.

Actually, I say X-Com and Saints Row 4 are tied for my GOTY for different reasons. As for the topic, I really hated a lot of the story and missions of Saints Row 4 as I found them uninteresting, repetitive, and they offer little to no challenge once I got upgraded. As for X-Com, I really hated how once you added the new genetic mods to your guys you lost a fuck ton of customization options. I was thankfully able to find a mod that fixes it, but it's sad that I have to get a mod to fix something that seems so obvious. I was also disappointed by the lack of variety in the foreign voices they added. Maybe they just didn't translate the game to those regions and that's why they were missing, but the lack of foreign voices for many countries made it kind of pointless as only a couple of my guys could speak their native tongues and they rest had to be american.

Fire Emblem Awakening can kind of get to be a cakewalk if you do a little grinding, and then you don't have any control on defense. Replaying it on hard and Chrom keeps one-shotting Gaius on defense before I can talk to him, etc. And I wish there was more voice acting, and I wish there were more social options in the barracks.

Earth Defence Force 2017 Portable

The draw distance kind of sucks.

the game's name sounds vaguely perverted.

GTA V: The story STINKS!

I dont have a game of the year list, cus thats for suckers. But i'll play.

GTA5.

The online is a bit janked up at times. Hell last night the damn game ate my 800k car.(the online is ALOT better than it used to be though) My biggest gameplay complaint would be the shooting while driving, i mean ive gotten used to it, but why can't i aim without shooting? Why not make it the bumpers? LB aim RB shoot? The handbrake does not need to be on two buttons (it's also on A)

The Last of Us: uninspired third-person stealth action gameplay

Bioshock Infinite

Could have been shorter and had better gameplay.

Isn't that the point? You're supposed to plan for what the enemy does on their turn, because only one army can act at a time.

Shin Megami Tensei IV.

It has some of the weakest dungeons in the series.

GTA V. I have officially gotten my fill of fhe gameplay mechanics, in fact I was a bit bored by the end.

Metal Gear Rising

The Sundowner fight sucks, S-Ranks don't have clear requirements and that one section where you walk real slow can can't skip on replays.

Tomb Raider's tombs are not given the spotlight. There is generally a single puzzle because it is a single room and it is meant as a distraction from shooting dudes. But they were fun and there should have been more of them or at least longer ones.

BioShock Infinite. The Handymen fights. The ghost lady boss fight. The fact that I wanted the game to go all the way with the manifest destiny gone horribly wrong vision, but instead it kinda just becomes a back-drop to the main narrative a few hours in.

If you beat the game in Dragon's Dogma again you lose your progress in Dark Arisen.

The Last of Us

Some combat sections of the game are too trial-and-error based and require too much pattern memorization.

Fire Emblem: Awakening

For a game as unforgiving of mistakes as Fire Emblem is, it can seem a bit unfair to execute your strategy perfectly then get fucked by some 1/1000 RNG bullshit right before clearing an incredibly hard map. Also Lunatic+ is less of a challenge and more, "RNG your way through the first 4 chapters until you unlock the DLC maps so you can grind XP and overlevel all your dudes".

I think they did a good job of implied survival. I mean, it'd be a different kind of game (not necessarily a worse one) if they made you go through the process of keeping her alive (hunting, setting up camp, etc.) throughout. But as an action game I appreciate that they make you do that stuff once, to give you the gist of what's going on, and then let you focus on the direct fighting bits. And I think the skill tree actually plays really damn well into the whole 'growing as a survivor' thing. You actually feel like you've changed by the end of the game (which is also important as an empowerment piece). I think some more flashbacky type stuff "oh, this is why she's coming here already pretty good with a bow" wouldn't have hurt, but they make mention of some previous training, and I think it was probably enough. I do agree that the human violence took a toll on that game though. The shooting was kind of over the top for the feeling that game was going for, and the gory, torture porn deaths they gave to Lara were terrible. In fact, her death scenes probably would have been the worst part of the game for me if the game had been difficult enough for me to have seen more of them. As is, they were kind of rare and mostly toward the beginning of the game when I wasn't quite familiar with what it was going to be throwing at me.

Personally, I really liked the bite-sized, one off tombs. Each were their own contained puzzle, and they came off like really fucking interesting collectibles versus something like hidden packages, you know? I certainly wouldn't argue against more of them and more challenging ones though. Variety is the spice of life, right?

Man. This is making me want to go replay that game.