My End Of 2013 Awards

Yesterday I spent hours working on a lengthy blog to mark this transition from 2013 into 2014. There were beautiful pictures, informative hyperlinks, and reams of text long enough to make even Leo Tolstoy consider asking me to steady on a bit. It was a glorious celebration of the year that was, and a contemplative look forward to the year that will be.

Then my laptop crashed, and all of it disappeared in an instant.

People (mainly Video_Game_King) will tell me I'm a reckless moron for not writing and regularly saving these blogs in a word processor, and then copying them over when they're finished. I know that makes sense, but I can't bring myself to do it. I love the Giant Bomb text editor too much. I like being able to format my work as I go, throwing in links and images and whatnot during the writing process rather than laboriously trudging back through my prose to add them afterwards. This is the price I occasionally have to pay for that ignorant preference, I guess.

So, in the absence of fancy aesthetics and detailed analysis, I'm just going to throw the list up here with minimal effort this year. It sucks not to be able to put my usual amount of care and thought into this, but I'll be damned if I'm spending literally hours re-creating what I lost. You can have this list and like it or lump it.

Follow this paragraph will be a list. This is my hand-picked list of the top ten games that I played in 2013. The usual pre-requisites for these personal awards stand - the games don't have to be ones released in 2013, I just have to have played them in the last twelve months for them to be eligible. Also, this list is not in ranked order, because I hate arbitrarily assigning rankings to these things when, to my mind at least, there's practically nothing in it. For the sake of simplicity, they're in alphabetical order instead. Let's go, shall we?

The Top 10 Games I Played In 2013

• BioShock Infinite - A beautiful game world, well-written characters and an intensely thrilling story are all reasons why I couldn't leave this off the list. I even loved the combat once the sky-lines and Tears started making things interesting.
• Borderlands 2 - I loved the first game for its shoot-and-loot premise, and this sequel delivers more of the same in a much more refined package. The ton of little gameplay tweaks and the more prominent story were welcome changes.
• Final Fantasy VII - 2013 will go down in personal history as the year that I finished Enduring Final Fantasy VII. For that reason alone, Squaresoft's most famous/infamous game goes on the list as one that defined this year for me.
• Grand Theft Auto V - A lot of the game's attempts at satirical humour fell flat for me this time around, but there's no denying I had a huge amount of fun roaming and wrecking Los Santos with Michael, Franklin and Trevor. Nobody does open-world better than Rockstar.
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds - This latest top-down Zelda doesn't just ride on the nostalgic coat-tails of A Link to the Past - it also manages to be a great game in its own right. The mechanics are solid, the lack of hand-holding is very welcome, and its gorgeous visuals had my 3DS's 3D effect set permanently on throughout.
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - Revisiting this game within the context of the entire series confirmed for me that it's far and away my favourite Metal Gear game. It still looks great, the story stands out as my favourite from the franchise, and the advancements to the series' trademark stealth mechanics are just some of the reasons why.
• Pokémon Y - In a year full of Pokémon, the latest game in the series stands head and shoulders above the rest. The leap to full 3D, the robust online capabilities, and the efforts to make the previously invisible mini-game a little more transparent just pushed it above SoulSilver to make this list.
• Sleeping Dogs - What Sleeping Dogs lacks in scope, it makes up for in its mechanics. Between the combat, the driving, the mission structure and the various odd-jobs around Hong Kong, I don't think there was a single moment where I wasn't having fun playing Sleeping Dogs.
• Tomb Raider - This franchise reboot borrows just as much from the likes of Batman: Arkham Asylum as it does from the Uncharted series. Lara is more believable, as is the more cohesive story she gets tied up in. I can't wait to see where Crystal Dynamics take this series on the new hardware.
• The Walking Dead - Telltale's adventure series got under my skin in a way I never expected it to. The gameplay may be minimal, but the narrative that holds it all together is perhaps the best I've ever seen in a game. The 400 Days expansion is definitely an early 2014 priority before I get stuck into Season Two.

There ya go - My End Of 2013 Awards. The bells and whistles may be missing, but at least the games themselves are intact. Thanks for reading guys. However you're choosing to send off this year and bring in 2014, I hope you have a great time, and wish you all the best for the upcoming year. Take care, and I'll see you around.

Dan

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Currently playing - Pokémon Y (3DS)