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Life Is Strange is a very special game for me for very personal reasons that I don't want to get into in a public way. So, taking that into consideration, I will try to explain why I feel so strongly about this game without getting into that.
Life Is Strange is a game that did something that no other narrative based game has ever done for me. I'm a very stoic person. I have a hard time empathizing with people and characters in media. I play a game and realize I am playing a game, and have a difficult time getting immersed in something so much that I forget that it's all fiction. Life Is Strange changed that. I really felt for these characters. I really felt for the town of Arcadia Bay. I couldn't stop thinking about Max and Chloe days after I had played the new episode.
Life Is Strange tells the story of a feeling everyone has experienced. A feeling of regret. The feeling you get when you think "What if I had done this?"
"What if I had told her not to go out that night?"
"What if I hadn't said that to him?"
"What if I had stayed in school?"
It toys with your human desire to know the other option. The choices that are delivered are often very heavy and do have severe consequences. People can die. You can change that. It gets into a very meta area by the end, and ultimately concludes in an ending that I was very pleased with, because it was the story I made. It was a personal ending. The whole journey was what I chose and what I wanted.
Life Is Strange is a very special game. It's such a special game that I worry I will never play another game and feel the way I felt during these 5 episodes. But I'm okay with that.
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I spent a lot of 3rd grade drawing Mario levels and planning Sim City 2000 cities. I never got good at city buildings, but hey, after all these years one of those things I can finally act on.
Super Mario Maker isn't perfect. It doesn't have EVERYTHING that I would like in a Mario Maker. But damn if it isn't close.
I have issues creating things. Music, programs, game design; I am never happy with my work, and I'm anxious of what others would think, so I just never do anything with it. Mario Maker changes that. The toolset they give you is not only so easy to use, but placing blocks and items is just FUN. The audio cues that trigger when building a level make creating a game. It makes it less about hard thought and more about feel and intuition (though there are a ton of levels that certainly did have hard thought put into them.)
The 100 Mario challenge is great and where I spend most of my time. While I wish you could filter things out, like autolevels or water levels, I still love going through these gauntlets and seeing what crazy ideas people put on screen.
Mario Maker is a special game. I'd say it's even a game worth buying a Wii U for alone. It is a phenomenon, and I don't see it going away any time soon.
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Undertale is a divisive game and seeing it this high either makes sense to you or it doesn't. While I think that it is certainly getting overhyped and blown out of proportion, it doesn't change the fact that there is some genuine charm and creativity here, and it makes for a phenomenal package.
It sucks having to make sure when someone is about to play it that you have to give them a list of what to do to get the real ending, because reaching the end and finding out you have to replay the whole thing again is a real bummer and takes away from the charm of this game. Like, I would love for someone to play this knowing NOTHING, and see what happens, but most likely what would happen is they wouldn't adhere to the route you need to take to get the fantastic ending and one of the most memorable boss fights of RPGs of late.
The music, the characters, the environments, and the story itself are all very well done. The alternate routes you can take make for some crazy moments and a boss fight that I am still attempting to this day. The whole metagame aspect of it is a special thing that few games have done well.
I don't know, putting what I think about Undertale into words is difficult. I don't even like what I wrote just now. It's hard to put my feelings into what I really mean and not have it come off as "This is the best game ever made" or "This is overhyped garbage and has a lot of issues and is fundamentally broken from the description in the store before you even buy the game." So I don't know. That's all I can really say.
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The Metroidvania genre is one of my favorites. Axiom Verge is a masterpiece that I would place right up there with Super Metroid and SotN. The game does such a good job with creating the lonely atmosphere that these games NEED to be successful. An experiment went wrong, and I'm now stranded in a foreign environment, with nothing but these mysterious giant AI robot things to guide me. Exploring the world feel great. The powerups give you that "A-ha!" moment of realization about where you can go now. The puzzles and mystery were fun and well implemented, and used the game mechanics perfectly. The only real complaint I had was that the difficulty ramps up instantaneously upon entering one area, and it doesn't let up afterwards.
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Splatoon was one of my most anticipated games of the year, mainly for being a brand new Nintendo IP. And I was not let down.
The basic gameplay is so well thought-out and balanced. I thought 3 minute rounds would be way too short and simple for a fun competitive game, but 4 minutes would've drug on, and 2 minutes would've been way too short. The character customization, varying weapons, and continuous addition of free content kept me checking into this, something that other multiplayer shooters haven't been able to do.
Oh, and the single player stuff is what it is. I had my fun with it, but yeah, it could have been more. That last boss though is PREEEETTTTTYYYYY great.
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They did it! They actually made a sequel to Yoshi's Island! After all these years I thought they had just forgotten abou-
Huh? Yoshi's New Island? What's that? Yoshi's Island 2? Never heard of it. Yoshi's Story? Please get out of my house.
In all seriousness though, I had no interest in this game either, and mainly bought it because the amiibo bundle was increasing price on Amazon and I found it in a store at retail price. And everything about this game is fantastic. While I had worries that it was going to stick to it's homemade aesthetic a little too hard and just have a soundtrack of jangly guitars and whistles, I was pleasantly surprised upon entering a cave level, and the fort levels, and the castle levels.
The game recognizes what made Yoshi's Island great, and builds upon that, without being too overt and hamfisted about it going "HEY REMEMBER THIS HUH HUH HUH????? HERE IT IS AGAIN!!!!!" It takes concepts from those previous levels, that are very familiar, but evolves them and turns them each into something new and special.
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Monster Hunter was a series I always wanted to get into, but never could, due to the obfuscation of mechanics and leaving a lot of the game to the truly hardcore who devote hundreds of hours to it. 4 changed that, and playing on a New 3DS helped a ton too. Playing this reminds me of the early 2000's when me and friends would get together and play PSO, and I actively try to find games that will be able to give me the same feelings I had back then. This is the closest I've found, and I love it for that.
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Downwell came out of nowhere and I'm glad it did. There isn't much to say about it other than the fact that it is some of the most fun I've had playing a mobile game ever, though I wound up playing most of it on PC with a controller. Once you learn how to stay in the air, it is one of the most satisfying feelings I've felt this year.
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Fallout 4 is mostly what I wanted from Fallout 4. I got a huge open world with tons of weird locations and questlines that send me down a rabbit hole of being 200+ hours in and I haven't even touched the main story. I got silly encounters and improved combat which made shooting legitimately fun, even though I was using a VATS based build, I would forget about it and just play it like Destiny. I got a bunch of fun new characters that made me actually use companions for the first time in a Bethesda game.
What I DIDN'T get, however, outweighs the good. I DIDN'T get a solid performance. Playing Fallout 3 on 360 felt like black magic. How did a world that big get put onto a console with 256MB of RAM? But it is 2015 and I should expect a solid 30, especially inside of buildings, where there is so much less to render. But instead I was playing part of that at sub-20 FPS. I DIDN'T get to play the game how I wanted due to a diluted speech system. A system that used to be so complex and open based on all of your stats and perks that conversations would take close to 10 minutes to prod into every option. I found myself mashing through most of the dialgoue as it was trite and simple and I didn't really find myself interested at all with my options of Yes, No, Sarcasm, and More Info.
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I thought MGS4 was the perfect end to the MGS franchise (well, the proposed original ending at least, the one that was tacked on at the end is mediocre in my opinion.) Regardless, when MGSV was announced I didn't care. And with each new trailer that seemed to build insurmountable hype for the rest of the world, I did not care. This ultimately wound up being an impulse purchase for me the day it came out, and after 150 hours, I wasn't sure how I felt.
The gameplay was easily the best MGS has been, but then again I was really frustrated with certain aspects of the game, like the credits in front of each mission, spoiling what little story there was, or even certain fights/mission designs, which felt messy and had no real way to do them other than to cheese it (the final mission, which took me over 4 hours to complete, due to poor Quiet AI and shots from tanks that somehow snaked their ways through doors and windows to hit me right where I was taking cover.)
Gameplay aside, I play MGS for the ludicrous anime story, and was so distraught with the drought of story until you hit the end of the game, which was actually the single part I liked. Leave to Kojima to make one of the most modern games tie directly into his very first title and answer a question I had since I was a child about Metal Gear. Ultimately, I was left with a sort of bittersweet taste in my mouth. The game was extremely flawed, and was missing a lot of what I love in Metal Gear, but what it DID deliver, was, for the most part, well executed and a fine send off for Kojima and his series.
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