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bsclarke

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Game of The Year 2014 Users Choice

*Author's Note: If some of the words have more 'u's than you're used to, chalk it up to me being Canadian.*

2014 was an odd year for games.

It almost seemed at times to be a transitional year, a year caught between the trappings of the past and the promise of the future. I'm sure most of this can be chalked up to the ever growing development cycle of bigger games, but it seemed like fewer games could be lauded this year; fewer gaming experiences felt unique.

Gaming experiences therefore were oddly more eccentric, more niche and, sometimes, more personal. There were fewer games big games that mattered, fewer games that everyone could agree on.

So what better way to bookend a divisive year in gaming than with an odd list, a niche list, a personal list. A list of all the gaming experiences I've had and loved this incredibly strange year.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS:

The Last of Us: Remastered (PS4)

I thoroughly enjoyed The Last of Us on PS3, but PS4 is where I fell head over heels for it. I had never subscribed to the 1080p/60 fps argument until I played this version of the game and saw and felt the difference it could make. Despite not really enjoying the mechanics on PS3, the renovations changed the feel so much that I could not get enough. I beat the main campaign 3 times over, the DLC twice and I spent countless hours on the multiplayer, a facet of the game I never even thought to try on the PS3 version. The only reason is doesn't land lower is that I still consider it as a 2013 game. The myriad of changes cannot change that fact.

Grand Theft Auto V (PS4)

Speaking of myriad changes to a 2013 game, not game was improved by a next-gen overhaul this year than GTAV. The game looked better than ever, played better than ever and gave us the first glimpse of first person in a GTA game. Just as with Last of Us I realized GTAV was a good game empirically, but I was off-put by the way it handled on the last-gen. I also thought it was too-overblown, tedious and I didn't much care for the story. However the novelty of this version refused to fade like it did with the last gen version and I found myself at 100% completion before I had gotten tired of it. I even got that stupid 70 gold medals trophy. If this wasn't a 2013 game it might have found a (pretty high up) spot on this list.

P.T. (PS4)

Easily the scariest game I played all year and the most twisted pseudo party game of 2014. There is nothing better than watching your friend get so freaked out at the game they refuse to play it, usually after the big jump scare. The endgame sucks and the pixel hunt is dreadful, but no game since Amnesia has force players to put down the controller for fear of the unknown. If it was listed as a separate entity from Silent Hills in the wiki, it would probably be in my top 3.

List items

  • I pre-ordered Wolfenstein to get access to the Doom beta. I was mildly interested in it pre-release, but my expectations were quite low and I expected it to be a cheap run and gun detour before getting to The Last of Us remaster. By the end of the game that tune had changed. The first thing that grabbed me was the ease of the stealth. As a player who is compulsive about stealth in games, the flexible nature of sneaking around -- the ease of the kill, the passiveness of th AI, and the reward of getting the drop on a commander -- made what normally feels like a chore a joy. Then the story kicked in and I was knocked on my ass with Machine Games' balancing act of empathetic characters and crazy set pieces, a precarious house of cards that threatened to collapse at any minute but never did. Then came the discovery of the joy of unfettered bloodshed, of wielding two auto shotguns with bounce shells, of fighting Nazis on the moon. And the joy of the collectibles and ephemera; the alterna-universe backstory, the 'Nightmare', and the fun of cracking the enigma. Wolfenstein was a blast out of left field. It's only real flaw is that it ends.

  • This game had me rapturous with its perfect graphical emulation of the white-bred Colorado mountain town, the quality of the majority of the jokes (most of the fart jokes excluded), the outrageous amount of inside jokes and references for astute fans and the fully realized world that encapsulated it all (especially 8-bit Canada). That its also a pretty fun open-world light-RPG is a bonus.

  • The Binding of Isaac's major flaw is the hostility and opaqueness it shows to new players. When you have no characters to choose from, no understanding of the world, and no knowledge of bosses movements or items function, Isaac is as dark and threatening to you as the basement is to poor Isaac. If you stick with it though, you'll find one of the weirdest, most enjoyable dungeon crawling rogue-likes on the market. It's a perfect game for quick-fix one-and-dones or long extended sessions of trying to delve into the, sometimes literal, heart of the game. It's also one of the few games where you can genuinely say the end is merely the beginning. The more of yourself you put into this game, the more you get out.

  • I have CoD fatigue. Or at least I thought I did. I staggered hazily through MW3 thinking that it was kind of dumb to kill the protagonists they did before forgetting it almost entirely. I was mildly amused by Black Ops II, though I was very indifferent to the multiplayer and was incredibly irritated by the amount of times the single-player crashed (also that tower defense shit was shit). Ghosts single player had me in a rage from the first level (Guns in Space?!). So imagine how surprised I was to find out AW was good. In fact, at times it was flat-out great. It was nice to look at, handled better than CoD maybe ever has and actually had an interesting campaign with a little bit of an arc to the usual action set-pieces. AW taught me to love, or at the very least enjoy, Call of Duty again. Your move Treyarch.

  • Often when we remember our favourite games, we remember them through the warm prism of nostalgia. When playing old games that meant something to you inevitably you have to face hard truths. Goldeneye is clunky and ugly, Duke Nukem 3D is not objectively funny, and Dino Crisis handles like shit. Thankfully I no longer have to go back to the original version of Oddworld because New 'n' Tasty allows me to play Oddworld as I remember it. Gorgeous, hilarious, and difficult, Just Add Water captured what made the original truly great while ditching the clunky mechanics and awful enclosed environments that make Oddworld a less inviting proposition today.

  • Destiny is not great, it is not coherent, it is barely complete. However, it is beautiful, mechanically sound and, for a solid two months, pretty much the only thing I played. As frustrating as it was to grind through the endgame, tedious as it was to play the same missions over and over again, and soul crushing as it was to decrypt a purple engram, it was incredibly nice to get together with the people I love and bullshit for hours on end while killing four armed, sword-wielding aliens. And isn't that what gaming is all about?

  • More so than even than Destiny, Titanfall was the beta I played and screamed "Holy Shit!" It was fast and furious. Pure adrenal stimulation. The movement was perfectly fluid, the titans were amazing, and, for less-than-great players like myself, the additional ground swell of AI bullet fodder took some of the edge off. While the finished product feels like it could be much more, the core of Titanfall is unquestionable fun.

  • Alien: Isolation does one thing incredibly well: tension. Tension is also something that no Alien game has really accomplished before and none since the janky Alien Resurrection game have really tried. Every time the Xenomorph is on screen your blood-pressure skyrockets. Your muscles seize. You hold your breath even though, unless you were foolish enough to use the mic option, the Alien can't hear you through the TV set. The set design is also worthy of no small amount of praise, perfectly replicating the 1979 classics' sights and sounds an almost molecular level. While the gameplay is often clunky, the human and android encounters are often more nuisance than terror, and the save system is a bitch to say the least, Alien's first few hours will stick with you more than almost any other game released this year.

  • The Evil Within is incredibly flawed; the writing is stilted, the graphics have a tendency to be jagged and murky at the same time, and a lot of the combat is fucking terrible. But I found it tough to put down. It sunk it's barbed wires into my sub-conscious and kept me craving another dose of it's scatterbrained survival-horror nonsense. When The Evil Within works, from it's stealth sections to its beautifully framed evirons, it makes you wish, if briefly, that survival-horror eschewed more towards this path than the Amnesia tract the genre has been on of late.

  • Have not spent as much time with this gem as I wanted to, but so far all I can say is the art style is charming as hell and pretty much every single joke hits its target.
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