ArbitraryWater's Best Games of 2018 that didn't come out in 2018

It's that time of year again, when people on the internet attempt to compare video games released in one calendar year against each other. What if there was a better way? What if, instead of talking about whatever video games came out in this tumultuous 365 & 1/4 day rotation around the sun, I talked about different video games I played for the first time this year? Madness? Folly? No. Well, on that front I have some fantastic news: I'm doing another old video game list after taking a year off. It's probably going to be a top 5, but who knows? Maybe I can muster a top 10.

While I will also end up making a list of games that came out this year, I think it's fair to say that 2018 hasn't done it for me quite like 2016 and 2017 did. While that has had the knock-on effect of isolating me from a lot of the big game zeitgeist discussion surrounding such important titles as "Literally every AAA open-world game" it's also meant my play time has had a pretty even split between modernity and older stuff.

List items

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  1. Divinity: Original Sin II

  I might have some (decidedly positive) things to say about the new Pillars of Eternity this year, but I'm also willing to stick my neck out there and declare that Divinity Original Sin 2 is probably the single best game to come out of the CRPG renaissance of the last few years. No joke, no exaggeration. It's just a really good complete package, from writing to combat to character progression.

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  2. SWAT 4

  SWAT 4, my favorite police brutality simulator from (some of) the people who would go on to make Bioshock, is a fantastically tense take on tactical shooting in small-scale environments.

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  3. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege

  My experiences with Rainbow Six Siege have oscillated pretty hard between some really satisfying highs and complete and utter frustration. In some ways, it feels like a compressed version of my experiences with League of Legends years ago, complete with all the implications that comparison brings.

  I'm not great at it, but the good news is the people playing unranked on PS4 aren't so hot either.

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  4. A Hat in Time

  A Hat in Time is the rare crowdfunded throwback that manages to capture the *feeling* of the games it's paying tribute to without getting bogged down in the reality of late 90s collectathon platformers like a certain other recent game.

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  5. Tales of Symphonia

  My introduction to Namco's long running comfort food RPG franchise was a mostly positive one, even if there are aspects of it that remind me why I never played a ton of JRPGs back in the day. Still, I enjoyed it a lot more than its sequel, which was an... interesting use of my time.

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  6. Tear Ring Saga

  In the context of it basically being a Fire Emblem game in all but name, Tear Ring Saga is weird. It has an even more precarious understanding of "balance" and is full of weirdly specific, conditional nonsense. But YO IT'S BASICALLY A FIRE EMBLEM GAME THAT I HAVEN'T PLAYED.

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  7. Devil May Cry

  2018 is the year I finally played through all of the original Devil May Cry. For the most part, it holds up as an interesting piece of history, even if its roots as a scrapped version of Resident Evil 4 are plainly obvious.

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  8. Wizards & Warriors

  Okay, so maybe Wizards and Warriors isn't ACTUALLY a very great game. But I'm just sort of thrilled I found another weird old CRPG from the late 90s/early 00s that I didn't already blog about half a decade ago. Maybe I'll even try and finish it.

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  9. Gears of War 2

  While not as successful as our endeavors to play through all of the Halo games last year, my brother-in-law and I have been going through the Gears of War series and generally having a pretty damn good time. Gears 2 is a pretty significant step up from the first game in a lot of ways, even if it continues to exemplify a certain brand of late 00s "brown and grey dudebro shooter" that I'm really glad we've started to move past.

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  10. Doom 64

  Specifically, the source port Doom 64 Retribution. Like Wizards and Warriors, It's not so much that Doom 64 is necessarily *great* (especially since I played it with a mouse and keyboard at high resolutions instead of fumbling around with a N64 controller at whatever sub-480i resolution the game originally ran at) but that I got to play