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niledriver

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Game of The Year 2014

Some Honorable Mentions before my Top 10 because 2014 was a pretty good year for games, even if gamer culture was shitty garbage!

Far Cry 4: It's Far Cry 3 but in the mountains and without the terrible story of white man saving a native people. Almost eked into the top 10, and is the only proof science has found that Ubisoft can release a fun product in 2014.

The Evil Within: Unfortunately plagued by technical problems (id Tech 5 is pretty bad, let's stop using it) and perhaps not the best controls, Shinji Mikami set out to make a spiritual successor to the Resident Evil series and largely did a damn good job of it. Some really creepy moments, some gorgeously gross enemy and area design accentuated by fantastic lighting work, some Japanese quirkiness. It's flawed, but there's a lot to like.

Starbound: Arrived to Early Access in December of last year, it's Terraria in space. Development is still active and having recently checked out the winter update, they're really coming along with making this a full experience. Something to keep an eye on as it progresses.

Smash Bros. for 3DS and WiiU: It's Smash. It feels better than Brawl but I haven't spent enough time with it to really include it on my list. Koopa Kids being in is the greatest thing.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel: It's more Borderlands if you like that sort of thing. I know it was the Australian team, but I think Gearbox realizes how polarizing the humor has been and are working to improve that. It still falls flat a lot of the time, but I'm mostly here for random wacky guns anyway.

my list is in descending order for some reason, and now it's unnumbered. frick it

List items

  • I've already put 100+ hours in this game that's only been out for 2 months. Isaac really got its claws in me. There are so many combinations of power-ups and different goals to work towards with each run. Even if I know a run won't be successful because the RNG is working against me, I might learn what tactics or item combinations to avoid in the future. It feels a lot like my Spelunky experience in that regard, which I still come back to even after beating Yama and essentially accomplishing everything. These games don't feel easy to master; there is always more to do and learn.

    I'm still down on the "dead baby" aesthetic as it looks like the stuff I was drawing 10+ years ago as an edgy teenager, but I got past it for the engaging mechanics. I can't blame anyone for not being able to do that though.

    I MISS THAT DANNY B SOUNDTRACK THO

  • My Souls journey pretty much started through consuming Giant Bomb's content, Vinny's Dark playthrough and Brad's through Demon. Seeing both of them screw up, die, and keep on trying was endearing. Often mistakes were learned from, yet other times frustration took over and they'd trip over the same parts over and over. But I finally started to see the appeal of what was lauded as this extremely difficult series of games.

    So I started trudging through the free copy of Demon Souls that had been lying dormant on my PS3. It was certainly flawed, with a lot of systems barely explained or completely obtuse. Despite that, it was a blast to play. Exhausting at times, but fun! I barely had enough time to complete most of the content before Dark Souls II saw release, and I wanted to be on that ground floor. There's something special about experiencing a game concurrent with everyone else. Ideas are theorized and hints are shared in a way that makes me reminisce about games in my youth. Before GameFAQs conditioned us to look up answers rather than trying new things.

    It was magic. Maybe it was the fact I hadn't played Dark Souls at this point, but I adored II. Certainly in retrospect I can look at a world that is less realized than the first game. Areas don't feel as connected, and some of them honestly feel uninspired. There are way more bland, humanoid dude in armor bosses. Even the fights themselves seem reduced to strafing and rolling to the left (or right, your preference may vary) 9 times out of 10.

    Otherwise though, the mechanics seem to have been perfected. Stats are displayed in a way that is easily understood and the menus are streamlined. A fast travel system is implemented from the word go, making long slogs to gather lost souls less of a problem. Online aspects were very functional and the community still seems very active to this day. For me, it was a fantastic Souls experience. Enough to play through up to New Game+++ on my PS3, and soon starting NG+ on PC. The Souls series is not impossible, it just presents a challenge to how you play games. That is a refreshing change that I hope to see more of, and already am.

    I got to fight Skeleton Lords, GOTY (almost it's kind of a tie tbh)

  • I've never been an aficionado of rhythm games, but as I and video games in general fell in love with roguelikes/roguelites/roguelikelikes or whatever we're calling them, NecroDancer's concept at least sounded unique.

    In execution, it's amazing. The pounding bass beats in rhythm with every step you take. Elements on-screen from the level to the enemies to the UI are all moving in time with the music too. It may be my inexperience with games of the rhythm ilk, but the way NecroDancer implements the soundtrack makes me feel engaged in a fresh way.

    The amount of items, many of which unlock through spending currency earned during a run, is encouraging. For a game that, being in Early Access is essentially considered incomplete, there's already a lot there to sink one's teeth into. It feels like a complete game now, so I look forward to what updates arrive in the coming year.

  • Yeah, I know it came out 7 years ago. It took a while for things to click, okay?

    I played TFC, Team Fortress Classic, pretty religiously back in the day. So much so that I played competitively in a clan with local friends. I'm not sure if it still stands, but I did at one point hold the record in the league for most dispenser kills in a match as Engineer. Pretty proud of that.

    So when TF2 came around with these new stylistic takes on the characters, I was a stubborn little shit about what they were doing. No more conc-jumping? No more grenades? No more EMP's?! Pfft. In retrospect, Valve really did a fantastic job in making all 9 classes viable and important to a team. Compare this to TFC where some classes were outright useless. I even think the changes they made to the Medic are a far-reaching influence on any game that features a support class. The Medigun is a really novel concept!

    Anyway, I started to actually give the game a decent shot last year and ate my words. It's a lot of fun even if it is just a hat-simulator that is barely on Valve's radar of love in comparison to Dota and CS:GO. It became the first free-to-play game I legit spent money on (don't do this, don't open crates, don't don't don't, you'll never get an unusual). I adore the characterization of everyone, even if on the surface it's just 9 people with different accents. They all have personality, and their designs that I once decried as too "Dreamworksy" are an important part of that.

    TF2 is the ideal team-based class shooter, where you can feel like a solo hero at the same time as being a valuable contributor to a team effort. I hope it doesn't die any time soon.

  • This game has a lot going for it.

    It oozes style. Sure, that style is literally just every single visual and audio aesthetic of the original Alien film, but it's OOZING. Absorbing this game through your eyes and ears has a viscosity to it. It's so rich and full of detail that it leaves me spending so much time just examining every single part of the environment. It's a love letter to Alien and that amazing dirty analog science-fiction future aesthetic.

    It scares the piss out of me. I'll fully admit that I haven't finished it. I don't know if this is due to the game being more lengthy than it should be or if being tense and on-edge for extended periods of time is getting to be too much for me. I'll finish it one day, but you just gotta be in the right mood to be terrified.

  • Console controls did not kill first-person-shooters, and Wolfenstein is the proof in that Nazi blood pudding. The shooting mechanics feel really satisfying. Dual-wielding shotguns and blasting through hallways, flesh disintegrating lasers, and Nazi fucking moon bases. Everything is all the way turnt up in a fashion that harkens back to PC shooters of golden years. It plays to an entirely different sort of nostalgia than just platforming and pixel graphics.

    Most surprising to me was that Wolfenstein includes what I'd consider the most well done story and cinematic sequences in games this year. Sure, the story doesn't end great. It's a video game ending, I'm used to them not being fulfilling by now. I'm just blown away by how well they were able to humanize BJ Blazkowicz and make him a character worth watching and jumping into the boots of. His romance with Anya feels organic and real, and they even have a sex scene that plays out on screen like a natural thing and not creepy like.. well, like the way most video games tend to portray sexual encounters. Even characters that I don't think got quite enough time to make long lasting impressions were a vital part of the experience. Especially Not-Jimi Hendrix.

    While I think a game like Spec-Ops: The Line is important to "games culture" (as toxic a thing that can be shown to be at times) to question the motives and psyche of a player perpetuating constant violence, it's nice that we can still have something like Wolfenstein. The enemies are disgusting Nazi scum, and they deserve to die. If the natural progression of these style of games is shooting every living thing placed in front of you, it'd be nice if they were reprehensible jerks. But it's important that we have room for both!

    In a year of several games that I had low expectations for that ended up surprising me, Wolfenstein might be the most striking of all.

  • Only slightly ashamed to admit how much time I spent virtually performing janitorial duties (nearly a 40 hour work week). Viscera Cleanup Detail is such a bizarre idea for a game, but there's something oddly relaxing about it. Figuring out which blood-soaked corners of a room to tackle first and leaving a squeaky clean facility behind you gave me a feeling of satisfaction I don't get from cleaning my actual room.

    Still Early Access, and the developers have been great about fixing bugs and releasing new content on a fairly frequent basis. It's cool in a way I did not anticipate.

  • The Nemesis system is a fantastic idea that will surely be in a lot of open-world type games 2-3 years from now. I couldn't give a crap about Tolkien and overdone fantasy settings, but this was still a really fun game. Arkham-like combat, stealth mechanics that aren't arduous, and the aforementioned Nemesis system that makes me hella want to kill Zuka Giggles and Rokk The Painstumbler or the guy whose name sounds like Douche.

    A licensed game that doesn't suck! With this and Alien Isolation, I'm not entirely turned off to the very concept of licensed games in the future. I'm sure that outlook will be crushed soon enough.

  • These randomly generated lose-it-all-when-you-die games really are taking over. When it's done well though, it's done well.

    You have at default a revolver with 6 bullets. Shooting your way through a technicolor neon nightmare to find items, money to buy items, and banks to secure currency for hopefully more successful future runs. It has a charming look, fantastic sound design and music by the very talented Doseone, and incentive to keep coming back. Devolver Digital really keeps publishing winners.

  • This is how to create a game that rides nostalgia. It's been said way more times in more eloquent ways than I can produce, but this game is a complete package. It plays well, it hits all the right buttons of retro gaming, the soundtrack by Jake Kaufman is the best game music of the year, and I started replaying it the moment I finished the game. Seriously, this is a gem.
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