The Mento Game Awards: 2014 in Review

Welcome everyone, to the Mento Game Awards! This should be a fairly compact award show this year, given that I didn't play a whole lot of new games, but there's always a handful I need to commend and others to decry, and that means handing it over to my favorite incompetent hacker and... oh man, did I leave @vinny's Dark Souls character in the final MVGX comic I did last year? Uh-oh...

Best 2013 Game of 2014

Top Eleven:

Well, I threatened to put together an entirely incidental top-ten list for 2013 games I played this year, and there it is. Obviously, if you were going to be a consumer that waits for price drops, you're going to be around six months behind the curve, which means a lot of worthy titles bleeding over to the following year. I still have copies of plenty more 2013 games left to try too, including The Swapper, Assassin's Creed IV, Tales of Xillia and others, so we're not done with that year by a long shot. Nor, I suspect, will I be done with 2014 for quite some time to come, despite being generally lackluster comparatively.

Let's just briefly touch on this alternate top ten: Pikmin 3 goes first, because I love the Pikmin series to bits, and though it felt a little underwhelming compared to 2 it still looked gorgeous in HD and still had more or less the same level of craft and ingenuity. Switching out purples and whites for rocks and flying didn't make a huge amount of difference, but the absence of dungeons and what felt like a major scaling down of items and areas was a bit more of a bummer. Gunpoint was a little Indie game that got in, did its job and got out with a great deal of finesse and little to criticize. Remember Me I enjoyed quite a bit in spite of its flaws, because it had creativity for days and in an ideal world might've received an amazing sequel that ironed out all its problems, sort of like what happened to the original Assassin's Creed. Super Mario 3D World is another charmer from Nintendo's flagship series, though is again another Mario off-shoot facing diminishing returns from figuratively hitting the same POW Block one too many times and despite 3D World's charm, it began to lose me towards the end with its unwarranted difficulty spike. BioShock Infinite was like Remember Me, in that it had plenty of great ideas and looked amazing but I didn't so much care for the repetitive execution nor the relentless racism (I get it! They're bad guys! They like owning people of color and doing mean things to them!). Toki Tori 2+ and SteamWorld Dig were great, compact open-world puzzle-platformers that often required some deeper thinking, Warlock: The Master of the Arcade was a serviceable if not quite superior attempt to reboot Master of Magic, Starship Damrey was an interesting first-person horror game for a system that usually hosts nothing of the sort and Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe was a major nostalgia boost for me that kept me hooked on air (space) hockey for longer than I'd care to admit. Finally, because I did play it last year, we have Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons following up the rear at 11th place. Hey, don't look at me, it just happened to land there.

Bucket List Tick Off of 2014

Nominees: Deadly Premonition, Wizardry 8, Metal Gear Solid, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, Tales of the Abyss 3D.

Going further back, deep into the pile of shame that somehow continues to grow faster than I can deplete it, we have the Bucket List Tick Off of 2014 for games that I've been meaning to try for many years now, and finally knocked out.

Deadly Premonition is the clear winner, because it allowed me to finally experience the site's second longest running series (collectively speaking). That meant a whole bunch of new (for me) Ryan content too, and the value of that cannot be overstated. Wizardry 8 is a CRPG heavy-hitter that felt like a gap in my moderately dense CRPG history, like Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines and Planescape: Torment were last year. Metal Gear Solid, which I preferred over its sequel, introduced me to a series I'd stayed clear of for far too long, and I was beginning to feel like that guy who's never seen Star Wars. That also meant more great site content I'd finally allow myself to watch too, so due credit there. Trails in the Sky and Tales of the Abyss are just two JRPGs I've been meaning to play for ages, and I so rarely find the time for super long anime adventures these days. Man, do I miss being a teenager with a PS1 and a summer that went on forever. That's probably the oldest old man thing I've ever said.

Best Soundtrack of 2014

Nominees: Shovel Knight, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Dark Souls II, Jazzpunk, Magicians & Looters. (Hon. Mention: Super Smash Bros., which is disqualified for being mostly remixes)

Slim pickings this year. Either that or I wasn't paying much attention. Most VGM continues as it has in the past, fitting their respective games well but not really going out of its way to be memorable or unique. Shovel Knight's was uncommonly good, with composer Jake "virt" Kaufman using something close to the NES's sound chip to create a lot of jams that are too darn earwormy. Clearly the guy learned a thing or two about catchy NES music when revamping the DuckTales soundtrack for WayForward's recent reboot. Wolfenstein: The New Order's "Metal with a capital M" soundtrack just demands your attention, even over all the gunfire and bombs and colossal Nazi war robots, and it makes the softer stuff stand out all that much more during the game's handful of quiet moments. Dark Souls II is, again, sort of doing what Dark Souls did but slightly worse, in this case because without the lore there's not a whole lot to link the (otherwise fantastic) orchestral tracks to their respective boss fights. With almost all of Dark Souls's bosses (excepting the few random monsters put in there for flavor), I got a sense through the music of the sort of entity I was fighting, whether it was mournful (Sif or Gwyn), angry (most of the demons) or grimly duty-bound (most of the knightly types, like Ornstein and Smough). Jazzpunk's soundtrack was a lively and espionage genre-congruous salsa/electro and I respect the hell out of it even if it's not my kind of bag, and Magicians & Looters surprised me with how much I liked some of its music later in the game.

Here's a short YT sample of what you can expect to hear in these five games. I'll look forward to other best soundtrack lists from GB users who played a lot more new titles this year (looking at you, @majormitch):

Shovel Knight: Strike the Earth! and Danse Macabre.
Wolfenstein: The New Order: Prototype and Bridge Theme.
Dark Souls II: The Pursuer and Skeleton Lords.
Jazzpunk: Opening and The Part With a Map.
Magicians & Looters: Undermountain, Castle Looter and Morgopolis (NB: These are Bandcamp links. And the last one's really dumb.)

Weirdest F'n Game of 2014

Nominees: Jazzpunk, Go! Go! Nippon! ~My First Trip to Japan~, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Sayonara Umihara Kawase, NES Remix 2.

A Mento Game Award staple, I give a shout out to the game that confused and bemused me the most, either due to an off-beat visual style, a bizarre script, or anything else that could make a game stand out from a crowd, albeit by yelling the loudest about how the CIA was stealing its brainwaves. Despite some competition from Go! Go! Nippon!, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Sayonara Umihara Kawase and NES Remix 2, all of which were weird but in a manner that anyone familiar with where those games came from could expect, Jazzpunk is the winner here. Every non-sequitur joke made a twisted kind of sense, but so rarely could you anticipate what that joke was until it happened. You could talk to a box and expect it to say something about the La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo in a growly voice, but probably not something backwards in Japanese about hair-curlers. Yet it never got so absurd for the sake of randumb, pulling just short of the "Tim and Eric line" into pure pointless idiocy that so many others of its comedy Indie ilk collapse into. These were actual jokes, and they were good ones. But, you know, weird as well.

Of course, the real answer here is Metal Gear Solid 2, despite technically not being a 2014 game. We'll be coming back to that one with a different award, so don't you worry.

2014 Game With The Most Knight Bosses

Nominees: Dark Souls II, Shovel Knight.

Shovel Knight, a game about knights where every major NPC boss but one is a knight, had less knight bosses than Dark Souls II. Just saying.

We'd better run the list down, in case you think I'm exaggerating or something. Rules: I'm including recurring boss fights and multiple opponents. "Knight" refers to any heavily-armored humanoid, preferably with one of those badass slit helmets like what my avatar's got. There's spoilers for both the above games, naturally:

Shovel Knight: Black Knight (x3), King Knight, Spectre Knight, Treasure Knight, Plague Knight, Mole Knight, Tinker Knight, Polar Knight, Propeller Knight and, hey, let's throw in Mr. Hat and The Phantom Striker too = 13.

Dark Souls II: The Pursuer, Dragonrider, Old Dragonslayer, Ruin Sentinels (x3), Flexile Sentry, The Smelter Demon, Twin Dragonriders (x2), Looking Glass Knight, Velstadt, Throne Watcher & Throne Defender = 14. Doesn't account for DLC.

Game I Had the Most Fun Being a Huge Jerk About

Nominees: Metal Gear Solid 2, Metal Gear Solid, Dark Souls II, Deadly Premonition, Go! Go! Nippon!.

This is a new category this year, but I'm thinking of making it a regular one like Weirdest F'n Game. In the past few years I've gone from writing blogs about larger subjects generally connected to the games I played that week, to screenshot LPs, to essentially a bulletpoint list where I'm jus' sassin' 'bout what I see. What's alarming is that these "reaction blogs" have been some of my most commented-upon this year, far more than the LPs or the daily review blog series. I'm starting to appreciate the fact that the youth of today prefer brevity to long-winded explication and ratiocination, though I'm not quite at the point where I'm MST3king a video in real-time like the big YouTube names of today. Maybe that will change, but I'll need a better computer first. Would anyone read the sarcastic subs of an annotated video, I wonder?

Anyway, the above list includes a reaction blog for Metal Gear Solid and two (1, 2) for Metal Gear Solid 2, written in response to Dran and Dew's MGS misadventures, a couple (1, 2) for Deadly Premonition which began this whole new lo-fi format of being snarky about weird games. Go! Go! Nippon! saw a fairly horrifying multi-part LP series and Dark Souls II an ongoing critique of its boss fights (though the previous award summarized that whole blog series pretty neatly). MGS 2's was the most fun to write, and I continue to partition it to match Metal Gear Scanlon 2's episodic progress because, darn it, the La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo can't suppress what I have to say about how dumb that game gets. No doubt it'll be followed next year with MGS3 (and maybe 4?).

Best Game for a Babby Console

Nominees: Super Smash Bros, Mario Kart 8, NES Remix 2, Sayonara Umihara Kawase, Tappingo.

Another series staple, wherein I judge the best Nintendo game I played out of an increasingly irrelevant loyalty to a developer that helped define my youth. Honestly, though, Nintendo had a great year irrespective of any pity awards, pushing out a lot of incredible 3DS and Wii U exclusives that, naturally, I didn't get around to because I'm cheap and Nintendo games never seem to drop in price. I did play enough 2014 games on those platforms to scrape five nominees together though, and I suspect (well, know, since I already published my GOTY 2014 list) I'll be discussing my abusive relationship with Super Smash Bros. in more detail elsewhere.

As for the others, well, Mario Kart 8 is also on that GOTY 2014 list with more elaboration if you're curious. NES Remix 2 was an improvement over the original, thanks in part to a better selection of games, but Jeff makes the inescapable point that there's way more they can do with that concept than the few, largely tame unusual mix-ups they have already. On the other hand, I've always felt the point of these Remixes is to introduce a sort of "Cliff Notes for NES Games" to younger generations so they can appreciate how those old NES games played and how they would inspire modern game design (if you've seen that viral vid of teenagers playing Mega Man, they could use the help, though they seemed to be catching on fairly quick). Indies zero, the third-party developer Nintendo hired to produce the series, began with the Retro Game Challenge (a.k.a. GameCenter CX) franchise, creating retro-style games that were meant to invoke an era of being a kid with an NES, a spare afternoon and a bunch of Nintendo Powers for hints (or a 30+ year old comedian with a bunch of 20-something assistants, as the case may be). NES Remix is really more of an extension of that idea, just with some extra silliness thrown in. Sayonara Umihara Kawase was a minor coup for lovers of obscure Japanese games, a niche market Nintendo's getting better at courting (though they could go one better and localize Fatal Frame IV and V already), as the Umihara Kawase series had been exclusive to Japan for twenty years now; this new one was an anniversary release, in a sense. It's too weird to explain in brief, so look up some videos. Finally, Tappingo was a neat variant on Picross that might interest anyone who has exhausted the Picross e series on 3DS and wants something new. Tappingo already has a sequel out, in fact, though I've yet to try it.

Best New Character

Nominees: Vella (Broken Age), Glory (Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall), Shield Knight (Shovel Knight), Vienna (Magicians & Looters), Joy (Murdered: Soul Suspect).

Always contentious, the Best New Character award goes to whatever collections of polygons and pixels that somehow let me forget, however briefly, that they aren't just polygons and pixels. Obviously a well-realized character with clear motivations and personality helps, but I'm also fond of creativity and maybe a heaping helping of badassery too. I mean, who wants to play as, or alongside, someone who can't take care of themselves?

Broken Age's Shay's a bit wishy-washy and passive for my liking, even if he is attempting to thwart an omnipresent and potentially malevolent computer in much the same way as Chell did before him, but Vella is a far more proactive agent of her own escape from the bizarre rules she is forced to live by. Refusing to be some hideous monster's lunch, she defies tradition to attempt the impossible and kill it so no-one ever has to dress up in a ludicrous cake dress to be Cthulhu's afternoon snack. She's courteous and kind to those she meets, but is driven by her goals to the extent that she has little time for BS like hylophobic lumberjacks. Maybe a little less goofball than most people want in their point and click protagonists (she's no Guybrush), but I like a no-nonsense protagonist in my adventure games. Dragonfall had a bunch of great characters, from aging German punk rocker turned shaman Dieter to the gruff female orc commando Eiger, but I liked Glory most. Presented as a taciturn gothy mystery, Glory's various skillsets--she has short-range shotguns and bionic claws on prosthetic limbs, but is also adept at healing--are almost at odds with each other. It's when you dig into her traumatic past that things start to make sense, and she was one of the most fun new characters to explore in terms of backstory. Warning: it gets super dark. Shield Knight is the driving force behind Shovel Knight's quest, and also the source of the game's best story moments, including Shovel Knight's uneasy dreams about leaving her behind. That she turns out to be the damsel in distress, the big bad and the badass combat partner simultaneously is a pretty great twist. Vienna's one of three apathetic, detached and somewhat psychopathic teen protagonists in Magicians & Looters that the player can switch between, but is presented fairly early on as an athletic Bruce Lee type who becomes the default choice for people like myself who go into SpaceWhippers with a focus on exploring every nook and cranny. Her martial arts make her a fun character to fight as, but it's her acrobatics and higher jump that really appealed most. She even has a dive kick. As for Joy, well, I thought Murdered: Soul Suspect wasn't too bad in story terms, and while Joy is essentially Ellie Mk. 2 as yet another streetwise ingenue who doesn't particularly care to follow the advice of any adult, she's a better character than Tortured Tattoo Cop Ronan. She also runs rings around him in their conversations, rolling her eyes at his attempts to be some slick noirish gumshoe.

Best Octurbo Game

Nominees: Lords of Thunder, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, Ys IV: Dawn of Ys, Dungeon Master: Theron's Quest, Dungeon Explorer II.

I spent a whole month playing TurboGrafx-CD games, so I might as well pick one out as the best of the bunch. While I certainly respected the quality of Rondo of Blood, enjoyed my brief time with Ys IV, was completely weirded out by Dungeon Master: Theron's Quest's reimagining of a classic childhood staple of mine and was impressed with the much improved Dungeon Explorer II, I think Lords of Thunder and its unforgettable metal soundtrack is what resonated with me most. Should I ever find myself in the unlikely position where I can buy a TurboDuo, Lords of Thunder will be the game I'll get to show off the system to people. It'll be easier than trying to find a TGCD copy of Rondo anyway, since that's Japan-only.

2014 Game of the Year

Winner: Super Smash Bros. for 3DS

This, I realize, is a hard Number One to justify even with 2014's meager offering for the new console generation-impaired as well as underwhelming headliners in general. Especially since I never got around to playing it with other people, or trying the supposedly superior Wii U version. It speaks to my psychology as a gamer, someone who loves a game where I can: explore a wide depth of content; discover new options and make constant alterations and evolutions to my playstyle; have many short-range goals to chase after; build towards an eventual state of completion instead of having my interest eventually burn out; and never get too boring or slog-like along the way. My favorite games of all time, Dark Cloud 2 and Master of Magic, had all these aspects in spades, and so does Smash Bros to perhaps a lesser extent.

There's enough nuance to the characters where you can find out certain strengths and weaknesses in their move selections, but are never overwhelmed with button presses and combos to memorize that you only ever end up playing two or three and getting real good with them: anyone can play any Smash character effectively if they use smash attacks and B+Up to recover from getting knocked off, but it takes just a little more effort to see each character for what they're worth. Likewise, each stage is different and has its own characteristics for the savvy player to exploit. The revamped Classic mode always provides some variation, there's hundreds of challenges and trophies to pursue and the 3DS's Smash Run is actually quite enjoyable in the way an action RPG eventually becomes; as you get stronger, you find you can start to stand your ground with bigger enemies and reap some real gains in terms of stat boosts and drops when you finally defeat them, not to mention the satisfaction of defeating foes you've run away from for so long. It's not the perfect Smash experience and I miss the lunacy of Brawl's Subspace Emissary (Smash 3DS could've used more boss fights too), but I always find myself getting giddy when a new Smash is on the horizon. More so than a new Mario or Zelda these days, even. But hey, like I've said in the past, I'm probably just playing it wrong.

Anyway, if you wish to read my full GOTY 2014 list, just go ahead and click that link. I've got a few more blogs lined up for the rest of this year, so I'll see you all again soon. Thanks for reading all my MS Paint squiggles again this year!