Say something negative about your GOTY

Holy crap man, I was trying to think of what my GOTY would be, and what I could say about it (I love a lot of games and don't like picking favorite anythings). Thinking back on the year and the video games that I fell in love with and the biggest saddest crimes therein, this is the one that breaks my heart more than words can say.

@video_game_king: yeah, it's a minor issue caused by my own crappy planning.

Don't Starve

After a long play session, it can be discouraging to jump right back in.

The Last of Us

Naughty Dog, as they have done in every game I have played since Jak and Daxter, believe that ramping up the combat in the final scenes of their game is best way to make gameplay intensity match story intensity. It isn't. Joel's horrible violence fits their story better, but it feels like they are trying to justify a constant method with better context instead of really thinking around the problem of endings.

My game of the year is basically just a remake of A Link to the Past.

NBA 2k14

Takes a whole lotta VC/MyTeam points to do anything significant (in MyTeam), so with things being the way they are now, you have to put in an ungodly amount of time to get a lineup that can compete on a regular basis. My heart goes out to the people that use Dwight Howard/Blake Griffin and brick every free throw attempt they get. Y'all some dumb brave souls. Oh! Gimme more player customization/2kBeats stuff, 2k!

Fire Emblem: Awakening

In a game filled with interesting characters and quality writing, it's pretty easy to pick out the characters that don't really have a lot going for them. They may seem interesting at first, but as you do more supports with them, you realize that there just isn't a lot there. My heart goes out to Say' Ri for being the worst love interest since [Insert Love Interest Here]*. Nothing is more appealing than talking about rice, Eastern attire, and cherry blossoms! Nothing. The exchanges make sense from an in-game (realistic?) perspective, but when compared to her peers, Say' Ri is seriously lacking in the Appeal department.

Cordelia gets some love as well because it isn't like Chrom is able to give it to her.

Other than the complaints listed above, both of these games are pretty solid. Give 'em a try sometime!

*4evaRise

The Last Of Us decided to delete a part of my save about 1 hour before endgame so I got frustrated, switched the difficulty to easy (I had played all the way up to that point on hard) and rushed to the end. Only negative thing I have to say about TLOU.

The Last of Us

There's not much hope that a sequel could be as good. The trifecta of Story, Gameplay and Environment isn't something they can easily repeat. I hope they do, and I'm sure I'll enjoy whatever they produce, but that's my negative: the franchise already peaked.

Just look at the Bioshock series. The original was a masterpiece. The second game doesn't really count. Then Infinite tried to be a true sequel, but it turns out that just swapping elements around isn't enough. You can't just trade under-water for floating-in-the-sky, trade objectivism for theocracy, make a new twist (because this time we know it's coming) and say bingo we did it again!

Likewise with TLOU. Adding some new zombie types and sucker punching a different set of emotions isn't likely to measure up to the first outing.

Monaco relies on the people you're playing it with, or even having people to play with. Not everyone will get a lucky break there.

Bioshock Infinite

I was sick of the combat by the end of the game. Other than that a near perfect game in my opinion.

DayZ Standalone

Needs an actual reward system or something vaguely like it for helping or working together with other people. I've tried playing nice a couple of times only to have the other player try and kill me with a crowbar when I wasn't looking.

New Super Luigi U

The boss fights remain unchanged from Vanilla U.

The Last of Us

A lot of the sections when you're forced to be stealthy can get frustrating.

No, it's a very short one early on when you get the latter for Tess, and he says "It's all relative". It kind of just lazily rolled off his tongue badly in my opinion, like it's in a forced Texan accent. That line you just said, I understand where you're coming from, and if I had to choose, that'd be the second thing, but no, it didn't bother me too much. The "It's called luck" part was fine, but that he seemed to force out the "and it's gonna run out" even though it didn't necessarily (from what I remember) fit the situation. Other than that, yeah, he did perfectly fine.

hard to say, my goty looks perfect from where I'm standing.

Ys: Memories of Celceta looks/sounds/is like ass a PSP game.

Joel's such a fucking asshole. He's doomed us all.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

It isn't DMC3 or even Bayonetta.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Waaaaaaayyyyyyy too short. I wanted more. I guess that's not really a complaint about the game per se but there you are.

my game is the last of us, the only thing about it I had a problem with was the hanging upside down, that part was frustrating.

@hatking: I do know what you mean - the tombs had real value in and of themselves; they were always worth going back for if you’d missed them on the first pass. Coupled with the audio recordings they gave a real sense of history and depth to the island. Overall I really enjoyed it... hence game of the year!

I kept secretly hoping they’d throw a real curveball and announce an ‘extra tombs’ DLC pack rather than the multiplayer focused content they went for. Ultimately I’m not even sure how that would have worked…

Gone Home

The mother's subplot wasn't as fleshed out as the others. She's the only member of that family that I didn't care about by the end.

Pokemon X and Y

The distance between I believe the first and second gym seemed to drag on a bit longer than I thought it should have, more post-game content would have been nice. Otherwise, that's it. I'm pretty satisfied with everything else.

Zelda was a bit hipster for me, dawg. It's supposed to be 'mainstream', but not once did a find an ambiguously ethnic dude that I could BRUTALLY execute with my fat ass fucking knife as he pleaded for his life. It really stuck in my craw, I don't know why Nintendo betrayed their hardkores.

@leetheor4nge: Yeah, I'm with you. I would have loved to see some more single player content. Maybe something that could bridge the gap between this game and the inevitable sequel? I think they're doing one of my least favorite things and releasing some comics to serve that purpose. But I would have even been content with something peripheral that had no narrative context, like, challenge rooms or something. I guess I can't be too hard on the multiplayer, I didn't even give it a shot. To me that game is just a single player experience (same goes for GTA V and Last of Us). But I think that's more of a personal issue than anything.

Saints Row IV

It has some pretty bad technical issues concerning frame rate and crashing. Also STORY SPOILERS BE HERE, the Keith David turn should have been a longer story line than one mission and it is forgotten.\

And I still love the hell out of that game.

Ni no Kuni's "he is the chosen one" cliche has been way overplayed in the past. That said, there are other plot elements and stories within the game that make it oh so worth it.

I hear ya. A lot of my friends get to disinterested from the early levels to ever stick with the game and I feel like if one person isn't giving it their all, then they can easily drag everyone down. It sucks because those later levels are super difficult in single-player. Its the reason why I never cleaned out the latter half of the 2nd campaign. I still love it to death though!

Injustice - the framerate is sometimes shitty on PS3/PS4.

Saints Row IV

I wish it was longer and had more new assets instead of just reusing Saints Row 3 assets.

Rayman Legends

669/700. Bet I end up getting stuck at something like 697.

Dragons Dogma: Dark Arisen

You fixed a bunch of stuff, added great new content, but those ridiculous black bars are still there.

They give you about a week's notice. If you stop playing for over a week though, someone could have packed it in. Stop for a month, you might have a whole new village.

The Last of Us: The combat didn't get interesting for me until a few hours in.

Ni No Kuni: The White Witch, chosen-one bullshit was completely unnecessary and detracted from the rest of the game. It should have just been called Ni No Kuni: Dream of the Dark Djinn and gotten rid of those terrible last hours and that boring-ass plot line. The game had a perfectly good end point and then, for whatever reason, they tack on extra shit that isn't nearly as good as the rest of the game, story or gameplay-wise.

The Last of Us: The worst part of the apocalypse is that it makes moving wooden pallets through water the only way to get from place to place.

Metro Last Light

The stealth mechanics weren't executed as great as they were in Metro 2033, and were quite underused in Last Light.

Fire Emblem Awakening

The story is boring and 90% of the characters are nothing but a collection of anime tropes

Probably half my time spent with Antichamber was running around blankly staring at things with no earthly idea what to do and making zero progress.

Also those rolling blocks don't do shit.

The Last of Us

It's a video game.

Interesting, I thought that game was way too long. A bunch of the game felt like padding, especially the some of the climbing/jumping/cranking sections.

Tomb Raider.

That wolf.That fucking wolf.

Link Between Worlds.

It needs more story and character development / interaction to break up the dungeons.

The characters were interesting, but not a lot was done with them outside of the ending bit.

The plot is absolutely thin to non-existent, and its multiplayer (which I don't like counting toward the overall experience) is very disappointing.

The driving physics in GTA5 were a massive step back from GTA4.

Bioshock:

The game moved to a headier story that was largely hidden in audio logs, and left behind the creativity of combat from earlier in the series by only giving you two weapons, and some of those weapons were beyond useless. The upgrades don't make the weapons feel or behave any differently, and it made the combat feel a lot more like a math problem than an actual "combat puzzle."

(though it could still be alot of fun if you managed it right)

ASSBROHOHO and a bottle of rum IV: pirate pirate pirate

Tailing missions, tailing missions, tailing missions, not enough of Captain Kidd and Blackbeard

My list should be better than it is because it's a bit... lacking.

Bioshock Infinite

It seemed trivial after playing The Last of Us.

I'm over the way that The Last of Us rocked my world, but the disconnect between Bioshock's story and gameplay really stood out after playing The Last of Us.

Come on guys, give some ACTUAL criticism instead of 'it ends'.

And since Dark Souls was by far the best game I've played this year, I'll cheat and claim it to be my 2013 game of the year.

I dislike portions of the game that aren't hard, but just plain cheap - there's this section in Anor Londo that is such bullshit that I actually quit playing for a while. It's when you have to go up this long chain and two archers are firing at you. It wouldn't be so bad if the arrows just nicked you and did a tiny bit of damage, but no, these are fucking anti-tank rounds that knock your ass back, and since you're on a tiny ass chain going up, if you're hit once, even if you block it, you're going to fall and die. Another example is the ghosts in the New Londo Ruins - they can attack through walls, so if you go into a house, you'll aggro them all because they can all see you through the walls and stuff. That was very unfair, and again, made me rage quit. Also the Manus boss fight - screw those cheap ass dark spells he cast, I played that fight a ton, and the only way I managed to beat him was that I got lucky as hell and he only used dark magic once.

I also dislike the complete lack of direction at times. Yes, most of the time I knew where to go, but there were times where I cleared everything I could think of, and I couldn't figure out where the hell to go. Furthermore, sometimes you get keys for doors that are halfway across the map and you don't know what they're for until you backtrack and try to find out where the hell to go.

Also, I HATE when people say something along the lines of "Dark Souls hates you, get used to it." Go screw yourselves.