Despite spending the last ten days fussing about a GOTY list, like there's nothing else that happens in December, I'm actually postponing any GOTY material until after the 18th. My family comes to town that week, and with it a belated birthday present. If it's a 2016 game I figure I have about a week to play it - after my family leaves, of course; I'm not that antisocial - before the Xmas rush and the site's own copious GOTY coverage. There's also the matter of The Jackbox Party Pack 3; I purchased it during Black Friday on the strength of its new games, but I've yet to test it out with a room full of people. Once I've done that, I should be able to determine its place on my list. It's funny how I started this paragraph being blasé about GOTY before launching into an intricate plan to expand on it further, but then I'm a complicated guy.

What's also complicated is my current journey to figure out which game had the best music this year. With most of the GOTY side-categories Giant Bomb presents each year, I'm only half-focused on the outcome: best character, best story, best moment all require that you've played the games in question to fully understand why they deserve that accolade. Soundtracks are a little more abstract; it helps to know what sort of scenes/environments/drama is going on while a track is playing, for sure, but you can also stick the whole soundtrack on in the background while you work and get a gist for what it's aiming for, as well as the overall quality of the music itself. I pay a lot more attention to new video game soundtracks for this reason, and that means bouncing between each of the major contenders to figure out which one I like most. The complication here is that two games were released in Japan that will - Lord willing - find their way to English-speaking territories sometime in 2017. These two are Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 and Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana: two of my most anticipated JRPGs for next year, from two series that regularly provide superlative VGM soundtracks. Having taken a gander (a listening gander?) at the two OSTs in question, they're indisputably brilliant. My quandary therefore is determining whether they should count as this year or next. I'm leaning towards the latter, which will make determining this year's OST slightly more difficult - and slightly disingenuous, if I'm being honest - but we need rules for an award as important as this. I guess?

New Games!

Wild Guns Reloaded is the remake/remaster of an excellent Natsume shooter for the Super Nintendo. It's uncommon that we see graphical revamps of SNES games, for whatever reason, but I'm hoping this one sets a precedent for many more to follow which deserve a new audience. As far as I can tell the Reloaded version will now feature simultaneous four-player - including two new characters - as well as additional content. Nintendo seems to think it can sell decades-old SNES games for ten bucks a pop, and I'll be curious to see if that parsimonious practice works for anyone else.

Potential GOTY Stardew Valley is coming to consoles this week, after almost an entire year as a computer exclusive. I'd be curious to see if this version of the game has any new features that would then be introduced back into the PC version, sort of like how the graphically similar (and equally mechanically dense) Terraria turned out. At any rate, it's a game worth getting into if you've been waiting for the console version, though keep in mind you'll probably forget which day it is once you finally stop playing your first session.

Super Mario Run is an endless runner game featuring Mario, and is Nintendo's second big foray into mobile gaming after that thing with the augmented reality Pokeballs that no-one cared about. I suspect Nintendo is hoping SMR becomes the new Flappy Bird, but I have some doubts. They haven't been good with portable Marios of late.

Here's a sad fact about Don Bradman Cricket 17, and the Don Bradman games before it: Don Bradman himself died fifteen years ago. Unlike John Madden, though, the death wasn't covered up with an uncanny facsimile comprised of three turduckens stacked on top of each other in a suit and tie. You can read about dead Don on the Wikipedia even. Bloody RIPper in peace. (I have no opinion on the cricket game itself, unsurprisingly. I suspect the GB team will have to bring in Danny O' Dwyer, but it's getting close to the end of the year so who knows if he's too busy.)

Wiki!

Well, I polished off that NES 1987 project. The last few releases went unexpectedly fast, so I managed to get a headstart on the AGDQ 2017 project and checked off most of the games that will be streamed on the event's first day.

If I'm going to complete this project before the event begins on the 8th, I'll need to figure out how to expedite this process. The most sensible way is to skip games I know are already "Twitch-acceptable" even the wiki page has a few (hundred) cases of the 2nd person or releases with missing company info to sort out. If a speedrunner is about to run Ocarina of Time, let's say, I probably won't need to check that page beforehand to make sure Twitch can find it on their database. It'll be there. Less notable games, like the free Indie dual-stick shooter Hyper Princess Pitch, might be lacking any releases and/or body text, and we'll occasionally hear from developers that their game isn't on Twitch because the page was lacking either of those elements. It'd help if we knew exactly what Twitch wanted for their equivalent database, since it draws from our own, but we don't. And no-one over there ever feels like talking to us. So it goes.

At any rate, I'm going to leave the big stuff for now and focus on all the smaller games. Mostly Indies, but a few obscure console games too. I'll be sure to avoid fangames, hacks and parodies though: there's a few of those in the GDQ schedule for funzies, and we don't accidentally want those to appear in our wiki. We do have some standards, after all.

After AGDQ? Well, I have a couple more SNES projects lined up for 2017. A small one followed by a large one. It'll be a blast to hang out with the SNES again, even if it's only been a few months since we completed "Super 1995". I'm also considering a project where I source a whole bunch of title screens for their respective company pages, but I'm not sure how far to go with it yet. Some company logo splash screens, like Konami's iconic wave logo, were around for so long that we don't really need a hundred identical iterations of it in the wiki. Others, like Iguana Entertainment or Sega or Sunsoft, would frequently have fun little jokes on their logo screens depending on the game. That idea is definitely only in the preliminary stage for right now.

Evoland 2!

I think Evoland 2 got a raw deal last year. The game has its problems - how could a game so with so many genre shifts not? - but it's such an ambitious and impressive project for a small Indie team and definitely not at all what I was expecting. I discussed last week how it would frequently jump between genres for its set-pieces, creating one-off instances of a genre type and then dropping it once the novelty had worn off, but each one of those must've taken a considerable amount of work to properly balance and configure. It's not easy creating a brawler with responsive controls, or a shoot 'em up with at least three boss fights which all need programmed bullet spreads to memorize, or a card-based mini-game with some degree of strategy. Some work better than others, for sure, but at the risk of spoiling the surprise appearance of a specific genre, I want to enumerate just how many times the game flips the script:

• Top-down action-adventure: The game's default mode. You're controlling the protagonist directly as they run around swinging their sword at enemies. The game doles out occasional levels and lets you buy equipment to boost your stats, so it also fits the admittedly loose definition of an "action RPG". I'd perhaps liken it to Illusion of Gaia: right down to how there's only three stats of note - attack, defense and HP - and how you acquire special abilities that allow for expanded traversal but can also be used to combat enemies and bosses.
• 2D side-scrolling platformer: The game's second most frequent mode. Some dungeons are entirely shown from the side, and involve a lot more puzzles based on jumping and avoiding spikes and other hazards. The RPG elements remain intact, as do the special abilities, but there's a much greater emphasis on the environment being the chief aggressor rather than hordes of hostile creatures.
• Shoot'em up: The game has two shoot 'em up modes; a vertical one which befits the "bullet hell" appelation and a side-scrolling one that is integrated into the platforming mode above. The vertical shoot 'em up sections are a bit rough, since they take place in the future where I had constant framerate issues. You do not want framerate issues in a twitch shoot 'em up, if that needed to be said.
• CCG: Evoland 2 has a collectible card game which comprises one of several collectible types, the other being "collectible stars" (useless), maana (used for upgrading companion abilities) and orikon ore (used for crafting the game's ultimate equipment). The card game itself has the player draw three cards per turn, then either tap the card by placing it in one of six spaces on a grid - there's a front row of three and a back row of three - or burning that card for the maana. Every card requires maana to invoke, and often you'll need to burn the cards you drew that round to afford a better card in the future. Like many card games, each card has a HP and an attack score, the former for how much damage it can take and the latter for how much it damage it causes per round. Any undefended damage goes straight to the player's HP, and the goal is to remove all your opponent's HP. Fairly straightforward, but the level of challenge can be all over the place: the main issue is that you don't get to choose which cards to use in your deck before going in, so any of them will randomly appear. Opponents, however, have limited card pools and sometimes have nothing but killer high-level cards. Still, it might have more depth to it than either of Final Fantasy's card games, and that's not bad for a mini-game in an Indie RPG.
• Rhythm: Yeah, the game has one of these too for a single boss fight. I never could get around DDR controls on a D-pad: hitting up or down when the two are side-by-side does weird things to my brain. The fight in question is extremely forgiving though, so I just went with three buttons and let the other one fail every note. The game's got good music though, so at least it was tolerable.
• Match-3: This was unexpected. There's a whole Puzzle Quest pastiche in one area, where you have to defeat six opponents of your choice before taking on a tougher boss. I'm not kidding about it being Puzzle Quest either: there's colored blocks to remove in trios, and they go on to power various special skills once you've eliminated enough blocks in the right numbers. You can also screw over your opponent by matching lines of four or more, which immediately gives you an extra turn. Shiro Games didn't have to compromise a thing to make this entire puzzle game fit in here, which probably says a whole lot more about the Puzzle Quest series if I'm being frank.
• Fighting: This mode ran into the same issue of the shoot 'em up, in that it took place in the "future" era which had a lot of framerate issues. It's a one-off boss fight, like the rhythm game, and a fairly straightforward one. I didn't check to see if you could pause the game and consult a command list, but instead went with regular shoto configurations and, lo and behold, the protagonist knew all of Ryu's moves. Once you start spamming shoryukens like a scrub Ken player, the battle itself isn't absurdly tough.
• Brawler: Distinct from the fighter mode, the brawler mode has you run around a pirate island beating up pirates. Each has an approximate equivalent in the Double Dragon/Final Fight universes. There's a mohawked character with a chain whip who is reminiscent of the Lindas from Double Dragon 2, for instance, and there's more than a few bald bruisers to watch out for. Amusingly, there's also a fast-paced Bruce Lee ersatz that makes his trademark "whoo-hah" noises, but also throws shuriken because who can keep all those Asian cultural distinctions straight? Very subtle joke on how often kung fu and ninjas got conflated back then. I actually found this mode to be one of the better realized, because you get drip-fed new attacks to try out that don't require a whole lot of extra functions: punches need one button, jumps need a second, and everything else (flying kick = jump then attack, uppercut = jump and then jump again after you land, spinning kick = jump and then jump again at the crest of the jump) uses a combination of the two.
• Turn-based RPG: For a single dungeon. The dungeon itself resembles the post-apocalyptic future of Chrono Trigger, so it's no surprise that the turn-based RPG mode that takes over also resembles the same game. There's an ATB gauge, and the placement of the characters on the screen are often important due to the coverage of various AoE attacks. The protagonist doesn't have special attacks like his companions do, but can instead perform a combo attack with anyone else whose ATB gauge is full. The enemies are all these little spider robot things and floor turrets, so it's definitely true to the source material.
• Turn-based strategy: A whole section of the game is dedicated to a series of Fire Emblem style SRPG battles. You're given a special guest character for this area, and can also recruit and upgrade regular soldier units for a bit of extra help. I made almost all my extra characters archers, because my main crew were more than capable of standing at the front to draw the heat. Especially the guest character, Colonel Dalkin, whose special skill is to defend every adjacent unit from harm. As with the turn-based RPG mode, the game cleverly recontextualizes your companion's special skills for this new format. The battles are simple enough and there's no penalty for letting a character die - even the nameless recruits come back to life for the next battle - but the game goes all in on this format with at least six or seven battles with various different strategies involved with regards to ambushes, pincer attacks and flanks.
• Bomberman?: For no particular reason, you're forced to use bombs for one dungeon instead of the standard sword, and the bombs all explode with the cross shape you might expect. This is a dungeon full of minecart puzzles too, so it takes some time to navigate through. There's nothing as elaborate as "flame up" power-ups or the like, but every zone resembles Bomberman's oddly specific grid format. They also sneaked some Creeper enemies in here too, because I guess they're also something that explodes a lot.

When you consider all the above genre changes, the three (or four) graphical modes that represent the different time eras and a total runtime of around 20-30 hours, there's evidently a lot of work that's been put into the game, far more so than the brief series of genre convention jokes that comprised the first Evoland. It can lead to a lot of hit-and-miss instances, but there's no denying that folk should've given Evoland 2 more attention last year. Me included, I suppose.

Go! Go! GOTY!

If you stroll over to this contents page, you'll notice that the table is filled with another week's worth of 2016 game reviews. I had to cheat for the last three, revisiting some frontrunners for my GOTY to crystallize my feelings on them. Overall, I'm glad I took the time to fit in those extras, and I'm especially grateful for the review copy I received of Her Majesty's SPIFFING from one of its developers. That's not something that happens to me a lot. My whole bit is to sagely review games with a critical eye, not yell at them in a squeaky voice, so no-one's champing at the bit to get my take.

Grow Up: Very much more of the first, though the series hasn't been around long enough to burn all its goodwill on identical annual iterations quite yet. I suppose it's just a matter of time where Ubisoft is involved, though. Grow Up has a few important additions, some tweaks elsewhere, but I did find the larger focus on horizontal traversal a bit strange given the name. The different climates didn't really feel sufficiently distinct though, and I don't think the game was made particularly more impressive by simply adding to the amount of landmass available. I suspect the next game, if there is one, will continue across multiple planets each with their own distinct hurdles - maybe one with more gravity, another with very harsh climate conditions like a lava planet, one that will allow for underwater travel perhaps. I'll leave that to Ubisoft Reflections to figure out, but I hope there are more significant strides taken with the format next time.

Let It Die: I apparently didn't get far enough into this to start seeing the really wild shit, but Let It Die has a lot of potential as a genre-typically harsh hack-and-slash roguelike. A lot of its systems are designed around being purposefully transitory: old character builds are quickly outclassed by new builds that you unlock after bosses, items and equipment fall apart with alarming regularity forcing you to live item drop by item drop, most of your hard-earned resources can be stolen from PvPers or spent keeping you alive, and death is frequent and occasionally unavoidable. The game insists, nominally, to let these things die as you move ahead, and that you need to embrace how fleeting so much of what you would normally rely on really is. This transitory sense of progression is at the heart of the roguelike experience. You also have people with laser yo-yos and a skateboarding grim reaper with an inscrutable accent, so we're not entirely out of the Suda51 wheelhouse here either. It's a game with potential, though not one I see myself returning to any time soon. Roguelikes never really were my thing.

Her Majesty's SPIFFING: It's a shame this comedic adventure game isn't a bit longer, but it's easy to see where the crowd-sourced money went. The game's got a great 3D look to it, equivalent in budget to a late LucasArts game, and the humor is mostly on the right side of the "hit-and-miss" spectrum. It definitely feels incomplete as of right now, so I'm hoping the developers earn enough revenue to continue the story.

Stardew Valley, Dark Souls III, Hitman: I didn't glean a whole lot revisiting this trio, but it did confirm that all three are still excellent games and worthy choices for a GOTY, irrespective of which one I eventually settle on. I suspect I'll spend a lot of the next year and those to follow catching up with everything 2016 had to offer - I have a 2016 wishlist that's close to 40 games now - but I can be happy with the list of ten I have now. That list will see a lot of adjustment in the years to come, I'm sure.