GOTY 2015
What a season, what a season. Video games happened this year! So much so that I didn't even get to all the stuff I wanted to. Maybe I should've spent less time playing old games. Oh well.
I don't really have much else to say about this year, but it was solid. More like this, please.
Other games from this year:
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China - I do like me some stealth games. It doesn't execute quite as well on the whole 2D stealth thing as Mark of the Ninja, but it's still a good time. Additionally, the art style is tremendous. It's a really unique look that looks great throughout.
Guitar Hero Live - I could never get this game working for some reason. My guitar drops connection to the little dongle occasionally, which makes playing the game rather difficult! Maybe it has to do with the overcrowded airwaves in this apartment or maybe my hardware is just bad somehow, but either way it's not ideal. Additionally, I cannot for the life of me get the game calibrated right. I have tried over and over and never gotten it to a place that felt good at all. Maybe it has something to do with the aforementioned guitar problems, but it seems like the calibration drifts around constantly. You'd think a problem like that would be caused by TV postprocessing, but I have all of that turned off and Rock Band is always rock solid. It's mystifying. It seems like it would be a cool game to try out, with the way it mixes up the standard plastic guitar gameplay, but I can't really play it as is.
Contradiction: Spot The Liar! - If you haven't watched the GBEast guys play this one, you really should. This game is everything that an FMV game should be. It takes itself exactly as seriously as it should; the kind of game you want to stick with both because you want to see the next silly thing and because you're interested in where the story goes. I would love to see a continuation.
2015's Old Games of the Year:
Dota 2 - There's really nothing left to be said about Dota at this point. It remains a great game to both play and watch, and I really appreciate how much Freezy Frog is willing to blow everything up from patch to patch.
Diablo III - I continued to play a whole lot of Diablo this year. Blizzard keeps cranking out great patch after great patch. I would really like to see a second expansion in 2016, but the game has certainly not lacked for content, as it's been supported tremendously well with big patches all year.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords - The original Knights of the Old Republic is one of my favorite games of all time, but I somehow never got around to playing the sequel. The somewhat random update the game got this year to add Steam Workshop support and modern resolution support was the perfect excuse for me to finally go through it. The verdict: man, I would have loved to play the game this would have been with another year of dev time. Lucasarts famously forced Obsidian to make KOTOR 2 in 14 months in order to ship for holiday 2004, and it really shows. The difficulty curve is tremendously uneven, plot points just appear and disappear without explanation, and some of the dialog is straight up broken. (I played the game with the Sith Lords Restored Content Modification, which no doubt is responsible for some of that) But underneath all of that, the story they're trying to tell has a lot of interesting questions to ask about the nature of the Jedi and the Sith, among other things. I can see why Austin cites it as his favorite game of all time. It could have been every bit as great as its predecessor and it's a shame we'll never get to see the version of it that could have been.
Star Wars: The Old Republic - Since no one seems interested in giving us the proper Knights of the Old Republic III that we deserve, I'm stuck with going to MMO Land to satisfy the remainder of my KOTOR thirst after finishing The Sith Lords. In May, Bioware launched an event called Epic Story XP that provided 12x experience from class quests. Update 4.0 more or less codified this boost by making it permanent. This made it possible to complete each class story by only doing the class quests, dramatically reducing the time commitment for each one. As a result, I spent a lot of time playing TOR this year, and even found myself deciding to play TOR instead of current stuff like Tomb Raider. It's no KOTOR III, but there is some cool stuff in the class stories and I've been having a lot of fun working through them one by one.