CaptainPlanet over at Overbuff (formerly at Planet Overwatch) writes an Overwatch Meta report on the state of Eleague play that is a great read if you're really into the game. If you’ve ever dabbled in online gaming before, you’ve probably familiar with the concept of “metagaming.” If not, it’s quite simple: metagaming refers to a game’s generally accepted strategy that has been developed by the community outside of the game itself. In the case of class-based games such as MOBAs and shooters, it includes what characters and team compositions become generally accepted by the “pro” community over time. While the vast majority of gamers don’t play at the ELeague skill level, the Meta developed by these players does eventually trickle down to the rest of the player base.

There are pros and cons to players reading into the Meta of a game. On some level, the knowledge developed by pro gamers does help to instruct those of lower skill levels on how to get better at a game. Unfortunately, it also has a lot of side-effects. From “experts” suddenly growing upset if players don’t pick “Meta characters” to players trying to adopt strategies they don’t understand, many learn the wrong lessons from the Meta.. The following is a very quick guide into clearing up some popular misconceptions about Overwatch’s Meta. These are of course my own suggestions. I am not a pro gamer. I am not on a competitive team. Many of you are probably better players than I am.

2 DPS/2 Tank/2 Supports

This is the most commonly accepted piece of the Meta that has trickled into every level of play. The general suggestion has been to ignore Blizzard’s categorizations of Attack/Defense/Tank/Support and instead pick based on the roles of DPS, tank, and support. While most get the basic concept, many still don’t get the underlying philosophy of this team comp related to character synergies. You’ll get into a game, your team will pick Genji, Tracer, Roadhog, D.VA, Mercy, and then be yelling at you to take a support while you’re trying to explain to them that this combination probably isn’t going to work, and it will generally get ugly.

To start with, I’m going to reclassify the cast based on role:

• DPS - Soldier 76, McCree, Tracer, Reaper, Pharah, Genji, Bastion, Junkrat, Widowmaker, Roadhog
• Tank - Reinhardt, Zarya, D.VA, Winston, Mei
• Support - Lucio, Mercy, Zenyatta, Ana

Completely out of the Meta: Symmetra and Torbjorn

If you’re a Roadhog player and you’re about to yell at me that you’re a tank, you are not a tank. Roadhog is a DPS “off-tank” at best. If Roadhog attempts to fill the role of a tank and stand in front of your team and soak up damage, he will still die under focus fire no matter how much you heal him while having the side-effect of serving as an Ultimate farmer for your opponents. Simultaneously, Mei is not DPS. If you play Mei as a DPS character, your team will struggle. Mei is a pseudo-tank that creates walls rather than acting as one.

You can additionally break each of these roles down further. Tracer, Genji, and Reaper are flankers, while McCree, Soldier 76, and Widowmaker are long-range hitscan characters. Tanks fall into “tank” and “off-tank.” Finally, supports fall into roles of “primary healer” and “DPS/healer hybrid.”

As you’ll notice, there are a lot of DPS options here. This is one of the reasons many on this list are ranked low or have fallen out of the Meta. Your team composition is typically built around your DPS picks. It is difficult for instance to pair a Mercy with a flanker like Genji or Tracer. In addition, if you pick 2 DPS flankers, your back lines are vulnerable to the other team’s flankers. Outside of Control maps, you typically want one flanker and one hitscan or projectile DPS.

You need a primary tank, which unfortunately is a role limited to Reinhardt and Zarya right now (Blizzard desperately needs a third tank to break up the staleness of this role right now). There are different options for the “off-tank” role. D.VA and Winston are divers/flankers, though D.VA can fill multiple roles. Mei can offer your Reinhardt a reprieve to recharge his shield, help divide teams with carefully placed ice walls, delay point captures with her healing, and has an ultimate ability that can completely shut down capturing a point. Finally, Roadhog fits in the role of pure power. He probably needs to be paired with a Reinhardt in higher level competitive play and is more meant for Defense and Control.

And then there’s support. Here’s the short version: you need a primary healer (Mercy or Lucio) and a hybrid support (Zenyatta or Ana). If you pair Mercy with Lucio, your team likely lacks enough damage potential. If you pick Zenyatta and Ana, that might work a little bit better, but you’ll still struggle to provide consistent healing.

McCree vs. Soldier 76

This is the most commonly misunderstood piece of the Meta right now. Players look at the Meta report, see McCree near the top every week, and are then convinced they need to play him. The reality is McCree’s effectiveness is only realized in the hands of a player with high accuracy. Think of it this way: if Soldier 76 is the game’s Call of Duty character, McCree is from Counter-Strike. For every good Counter-Strike player, there are ten good Call of Duty players.

The simple reality is most players would be better off picking Soldier 76. He’s more forgiving, has a better overall kit, and his Ultimate is generally better. McCree’s kit is actually considered one of the weaker in the game right now with his Flashbang being the one standout . His value comes when you start hitting half your shots and can consistently pull off headshots. Only then does his DPS actually become worth the tradeoff of Soldier’s versatility.

Why some characters aren’t in the Meta, or “Please stop picking Junkrat on attack; you’re making your teammates want to kill themselves”

Going back to what was mentioned earlier, the DPS bucket currently has nine or ten options depending where you want to put Roadhog. There are two slots on a team for DPS picks in the most commonly accepted team comp. Simple math demands that certain characters in this group are not going to receive much play at any given point in time.

To start with, Blizzard’s initial attempt to create a “Defense” class has been ineffective. Snipers in general have not been in the Meta for a while as they can’t easily contest points and offer more inconsistent DPS production. Or the game’s two snipers, Hanzo is currently more viable as Widowmaker’s scope takes too long to come up to be effective in peek battles. However, the consistent DPS production of a hitscan character like McCree is generally going to win you more games than the occasional Hanzo hot streaks.

Bastion has always been the newbie bane of Overwatch, but is a sitting duck against a more experienced team. Unless protected by a Reinhardt shield, he’ll get decimated by long-range characters or a Genji or Reaper flanking him. Then there’s poor Pharah. Changes to McCree and the rise of Zenyatta’s Discord Orb pushed her out of the Meta until the most recent patch.

Finally, there’s Junkrat. If bad Hanzos were the bane of season 1, Junkrat is the villain of season 2. Despite Junkrat never enjoying success in the Meta, he is as of this writing the tenth most-selected character in competitive play. Unfortunately, many players consistently get the Gold Medal for damage and assume they’re playing well. In reality, Junkrat is the king of trash damage. His damage often isn’t actually leading to frags, and while it might charge his Ultimate faster, it is simultaneously charging the Ultimates of the other team’s supports who have better Ultimates. More importantly, trying to work Junkrat into a team comp is extremely difficult. He’s basically a DPS character, but he’s slow, struggles to target many characters, and needs to be babysat as he’s possibly even more vulnerable to flankers than some supports.

This all being said, at the Gold and Platinum level, these characters have value if properly utilized. Pharah is a perfectly fine pick so long as the other team hasn’t picked multiple of McCree/Soldier 76/Hanzo/Ana/Widowmaker. “Desperation Bastion” can actually buy time if deployed at the right moment. Even Junkrat has his uses. However, before picking these characters, you need to learn when to use them and when to switch off of them. You might pick Junkrat at the start of a competitive match thinking, hey, I’m not that good, but at least I can lob grenades and quickly drop Reinhardt’s shield. But your pick is a bit selfish, as now your team has to work around you by either giving you one of the valuable DPS slots or having to give up a healer or tank to make things work.

As a final note on this subject, Torbjorn and Symmetra are essentially “builders,” which is a role that hasn’t found success to date in Overwatch. Symmetra does have some small value on point A defense on some maps, but you have got to talk it out with your team before you pick her and be ready to switch off of her as soon as you lose the first point. Please don’t pick Torbjorn in competitive play. Your teammates will thank you.

The reasons you’re losing probably aren’t Character-specific

The final thing I want to say about understanding the Meta is that there is more to it than just character selection. In most situations, teams struggle because of poor fundamentals. The most common reasons I see teams lose are:

• Team composition is poor and characters don’t synergize well
• A player takes a high-skill character they’re ill-equipped to play
• The team fails to protect supports
• The team utilizes poor positioning throughout the match
• Teammates fail to take advantage of focus fire opportunities
• Players constantly trickle in rather than engaging as a group
• Teams make poor use of their Ultimates

Only a few items on this list involve character selection. For every team that loses because of poor team composition, I will show you two or more that lose because they let their supports get relentlessly divebombed the entire game. By all means, understand what characters the Meta suggests and incorporate it into your game, but don’t just assume your team needs a Genji because that’s what the pro team would use in a particular spot. Don’t force someone to play a Zarya you don’t know how to play. There are still strategies that work on the Gold/Platinum level that don’t work beyond that. Don’t justify your terrible Hanzo this way of course, but if you are legitimately good as him, and be honest with yourself if you are or not (i.e. Gold Damage because you fired into Reinhardt’s shield all game means nothing), pick him. Just maybe warn your team ahead so they don’t hate you.

I hope this was of use. Please feel free to drop me any questions or leave any comments below. If you’ve found this of value, let me know! I may yet write what amounts to an intermediate guide to support play in Overwatch If others find this of use.

I generally hate reviewing multiplayer games. While reviews offer static windows into what content is at a point in time, multiplayer games, especially competitive shooters, are fluid experiences that continue to evolve. While single player games may be patched post-release, the core game remains the same. Multiplayer games continue to change and evolve. How a developer curates their game over time is at least as important as how the game plays at launch. Team Fortress 2 is so different today from what it was when it was first released almost ten years ago that those original reviews for the game barely apply. In fact, Team Fortress 2 no longer occupies the space it once did of the king of casual shooters, n

The original Quake and its mod capabilities are still responsible for what feels like about every modern multiplayer FPS mode and convention still popular today. Two of these mods in particular stand out the most: Capture the Flag (CTF) and Team Fortress. Team Fortress, created in 1996 by the trio of Robin Walker, John Cook, and Ian Caughley, was the more casual experience of the two. Whereas CTF was more of a pure test of your shooting skills, Team Fortress introduced the concept of classes and the different playstyles and strategies they brought to the gaming experience. Players who were less skilled at aiming headshots could play a Medic or Engineer. It was more difficult for singular players to dominate a game as every class had a counter to it. And the variety of team compositions every game featured created a fresh experience most every game.

Over the years, Team Fortress evolved into Team Fortress Classic, and eventually Team Fortress 2. I have personally played the three of these games more than any other FPS game series. Team Fortress and later Team Fortress Classic basically got me through college (along with the lesser-known classic Starsiege: Tribes). The intense combination of addictive, simple to understand gameplay, casual feel, and match variety has always been my jam. But at some point, Team Fortress 2 changed into something that was no longer what it originally was or what I wanted from it.

Valve eventually had the idea to add inventory to Team Fortress 2. It all started with the Gold Rush Update in April of 2008, which added three new weapons to the Medic’s arsenal. Over the next year, the Pyro, Heavy, and Scout received similar additions. Then in May of 2009, the world was introduced to the most infamous of all online gaming inventory items: hats. From that point forward, inventory options grew at an incredible rate. The popularity of inventory items among the core audience and the financial success of its related microtransactions eventually resulted in the June 23, 2011 announcement that Team Fortress 2 would be going free to play.

Inventory became both a blessing and a curse to Team Fortress 2. While it added more variety to gameplay and allowed it to go free to play, it also added an extra level of complexity to a previously simple game. Part of the charm of vanilla TF 2 was how you knew exactly what each class did. If you saw the big meaty dude with the chaingun, you knew he was a walking wall and you couldn’t face him up close. You knew his weapon, how to counter him, etc. With different loadouts for each class, players had to worry about unlocking inventory items. It became a much more complex game for newcomers to process. I personally haven’t played Team Fortress 2 in so long I can’t even attempt to convey what the modern game is like. Mind you, for a game now almost a decade old, Team Fortress 2 still maintains a pretty impressive player-base of 50,000 to 80,000 players at any time.

That brings us to 2016 and Blizzard’s new MOBA/TF-inspired FPS, Overwatch. The game openly wears its Team Fortress influence. On a basic level, one can point to characters such as Mercy and her healing beam, Junkrat and his grenades and remote-triggered concussion mines, and Widowmaker, the game’s most prototypical sniper, to see classes inspired by Team Fortress. With that said, Overwatch is smartly designed to appeal to what Team Fortress once was as opposed to what it is today. And this is where Blizzard in 2016 has managed to out-Team Fortress TF 2. Turning to their MOBA experience, they use more diverse characters that cover the range of the game’s four roles to achieve the effect of inventory without the complexity. Instead of having one Medic with multiple loadouts, you have three different medic choices.

Even though Scout, Heavy, and the rest are cartoonish representations of what their classes are, the visual flair and memorable voicework of each character was one of the best additions to TF 2. Overwatch takes this to its next logical conclusion with its colorful and expressive cast of characters. From the bright and cheerful Tracer, the over-the-top grimdark known as Reaper, to fan favorite pro gamer D.VA, each character has a level of care (save a few perhaps less thought-out outfits) put into their design that attracts you to them. And much like what Team Fortress once was, you immediately know what each character you see is and how you should attempt to fight them. And to add to that, Blizzard's long history of character and art design is on full display here. While they're only cosmetic items, new skins actually feel like a reward. This especially holds true to the game's legendary skins which are the most unique and well-designed. Players earn loot boxes every ten to twelve matches, and although it suffers from the duplicate item issue that plagues most loot boxes, it isn't too bad.

By spreading a variety of playstyles into different characters, Blizzard has also made a game that is casual friendly. Between simple controls, the ability at any time to bring said controls up on screen at the push of a button, and multiple tutorial and practice modes, it doesn’t take long to grasp the basics of a particular character. And this element is vital, as Overwatch is a much tougher game to overcome character deficiencies than many of its counterparts. Anyone who has played a Genji and tried to take on a Winston knows that you need to execute flawlessly to come out ahead.

This is where Overwatch is most influenced by MOBAs. Every character has at least one hard counter. The aforementioned Winston struggles to best a Bastion or a Reaper. The jetpack-propelled Pharah is in turn a perfect counter to Reaper as well as the likes of Mei and most of the game’s tanks. But then in turn, Soldier 76 and any of the game’s snipers counter her. And so on. This dynamic encourages players not to settle on singular characters. It also adds a strategic layer of if and when you should switch characters during the match. The penalty for switching is the loss of any stored ultimate meter, so liberal switching is ill-advised.

But while this design philosophy might be the game’s greatest strength, it also represents its greatest vulnerability. Overbuff publishes a weekly report on the state of the game’s Meta. In spite of their best efforts, Blizzard has struggled to make more than half the cast viable at this level of play at any given point in time. In fact, statistics have shown only eight or nine characters on a weekly basis comprise the vast majority of picks at this level of play. And this has started to trickle into casual play as well.

Why are we seeing these trends? It starts like this: teams have six slots to work with. Teams can’t win at high level play without at least one support unit. During the first two months of play, Lucio and Mercy dominated this role due to Zenyatta’s slow speed and health. So in mid-July, Zenyatta was re-balanced. However, this re-balancing made him too good, he ended up taking Mercy’s spot as the most-played character and Mercy disappeared from the Meta. In addition, since he combos well with Genji, there has been a significant rise in Genji play the past two weeks at all levels.

Thus far, it can be said Blizzard’s success rate with their balance changes has been mixed at best. The best character change was to D.VA. By altering how her Defense Matrix functioned and making several changes to her ultimate ability, she has been brought in line with other tanks in the game. The almost comical antithesis to D.VA’s re-balance success though is McCree. Since launch, there have been three separate attempts to buff, nerf, or otherwise change the way he plays. Early on, his Fan the Hammer turned what was meant to be a flanker defender into a tank buster. So Blizzard nerfed this ability only to find they had made him too weak. Instead of fixing this ability, they increased his effective fire range as a misguided attempt to deal with the rise in Pharah play. However, the rise in Zenyatta picks combined with McCree’s newfound range abilities resulted in Pharah disappearing from the Meta rather than becoming balanced. And since McCree now countered Pharah, Soldier 76 likewise saw a significant drop in play as Pharah is one of the key characters he was meant to counter.

So let’s go back to team composition. So you’ve committed one slot, possibly two to Lucio and/or Zenyatta. Now you need at least one tank to soak up damage. Right now, all five tank characters are perfectly viable. That leaves two to three picks. For various reasons, Symmetra, Bastion, Tobjorn, and Hanzo have never seen much action in high level play. In a game of counterpicks, you’re going to pick characters countering the heavily played characters. So if I can counter Pharah with Widowmaker, McCree, or 76, but McCree also gains me counters to Tracer, Reaper, Winston, and Lucio, I’m going to take him over the characters that counter the Bastion or Torbjorn nobody is playing.

Right now, high-level Overwatch encourages teams to clash in six vs. six skirmishes rather than a series of individual battles. Characters that can get to the action (or bring it to them in Roadhog’s case) are going to win out in this type of play. So if you go back to the rise of Genji play, his best counter is Mei. However, Mei is one of the game’s slowest characters. Instead of concentrating on DPS, she freezes characters that come within range of her so teammates can eliminate them. This isn’t really of much help when there’s a Reinhardt blocking your ice gun with four damage dealers behind him. In fact, with the exception of Junkrat, the entire defensive lineup in the game is seeing almost no play at a high-level right now because the tanks take more damage, the attackers deal more damage and have similar HP, and save Widowmaker, they take too long to get around the map.

So that’s the issue with the game at the high level. That brings us to the casual gamer’s bane: the matchmaking. Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan has an in-depth post you can read if you’re interested in the nuances of how it functions. / Early on, I can attest that the matchmaking experience was mostly pleasant. Over time though, players have found that quick play matchmaking is obsessed with achieving win-loss parity over setting up matches based on skill. Instead of consistently offering fun, competitive matches, the game has been known to stick you in a set of five, possibly ten or more matches where you will be on a team that gets stomped to bring get your win-loss record back in line. That might sate the algorithm, but it’s hardly an enjoyable experience for the player.

Of course, the best way at the moment to get around this is to play in a group, but this, combined with the game’s balance issues are where even just under three months into the game you can see early potential for it to get away from Blizzard. For the game to enjoy the type of long-term success Blizzard wants from it, it has to remain fun for not just high-level players, but also casual gamers. For all the reasons it has attracted players with its variety of characters and playstyles, balancing high-level and casual play and making both experiences fun requires Blizzard to walk a tight rope at all times.

In spite of any listed issues, the game is still easy to recommend for the moment. Having spent over eighty hours and over six hundred and fifty matches with the game now, I have spent at least an hour as all but five characters. Despite some nights which are so frustrating I want to stop playing, the game remains addictive and engaging. Overwatch has the blessing of what Team Fortress once was in it. Now the question is can Blizzard avoid the curse.

Boy has 2016 been a year thus far.

Vinny's favorite tagline for the Beastcast might be slightly sardonic, but it is hard to remember a better period of time for video games in recent memory. The quantity and quality of games in the first half of 2016 has been astounding. At this point, the current generation of consoles is in full swing. PC gaming is still going strong. From sequels to originals, from AAA to indie, just about every area of the industry is firing on all cylinders at the moment. I'm basically going to gush about a lot of video games for about two-thousand words, so I can't help you if that’s not your bag.

XCom 2 Got Me Through Snowpocalypse

XCom 2 released just in time for the biggest snowstorm of 2016. Thanks to our glorious digital future, I was able to purchase the game, go shovel, and return an hour later to spend the rest of the day parked in front of my TV. And thank god for the Radeon R9 390 I purchased last Fall, as this game was shockingly a resource hog, especially at launch. This was also the first big AAA game that gave my new Steam Link a workout, and I was pleasantly surprised how well it held up. Save one or two occasions, the game ran lag free from my downstairs PC to my upstairs room.

As for the game itself, I was addicted to this game for the next two weeks. I played it obsessively during every spare moment of free time up until the point I finally finished the last mission of the campaign. It's a shame between its early year release and the numerous technical issues it had at launch that it has been somewhat overlooked, because XCom 2 is a better game than its predecessor in most every way.

Clearing the Backlog

Like many others, I used the early months of 2016 to clear out ye ol' gaming backlog. I managed to finish up the first two Danganronpa games, Xenoblade Chronicles X, Cibele, Shadowrun: Dragonfall, Rebel Galaxy, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Affordable space Adventures, and Bloodborne: The Old Hunters. But most importantly of all, I finally got around to playing The Talos Principle. If for some reason you still haven’t played that game, you owe it to yourself to pick it up. This is especially true when it is regularly on sale for about $10 on both PC and PS4. The Talos Principle quickly became one of my favorite five games of the past few years. From its insidious, yet fair puzzles to its creative and surprisingly emotional narrative, this is the best puzzle game since the original Portal. In some ways, it even resulted in me perhaps liking The Witness, which I would play a few months later, a bit less.

TellTale's Tree Bares Fruit

Both Campo Santo and Night School Studios were formed by ex-TellTale employees, and the first game from each gives a glimpse into what that studio could be doing if it wasn’t caught up in their current release cycle. Sure, Tales From the Borderlands broke up a streak of mediocre (Wolf Among Us) and uninspiring (Game of Thrones, Walking Dead Season 2) games, but the studio’s output in recent years has become a little formulaic.

Firewatch is a first-person adventure game heavily focused on the dialogue between its two leads, Henry and Delilah, and the writers are able to use this level of concentration to make the pair the two most intriguing, believable, and relatable characters of any game released this year, at least in my opinion.The story works for the most part, even if it has some issues toward the very end.

Oxenfree meanwhile was a more traditional experience, but one which features without a doubt my favorite dialogue interface in a modern adventure game. If you check that game out for no other reason, it's worth at least taking a look to see how snappy it feels to have dialogue presented in smaller snippets in a way that doesn't take your eyes constantly away from the action to read dialogue choices on the bottom of the screen.

The Soul Still Burns

You can’t talk about the first half of 2016 without touching on the final entry in the Dark Souls trilogy. For me, Dark Souls 3 was about as satisfying a conclusion as one could hope for to one of the best series in recent history. While it didn’t quite hit the high standards of Bloodborne (keep in mind Bloodborne is my favorite in the series), I do think it might be the most fun game featuring the actual “Souls” title to play at this point. Most notably, I think this represents the best base game set of bosses FromSoft has ever produced.

Marvelous May

The two weeks from May 10^th until May 24^th produced three of the best games of 2016 thus far. Starting on the 10^th, we saw the release of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. After Uncharted 3 left a rather sour taste in the mouths of many fans, enthusiasm for this game seemed mixed at best. The departure of Amy Henning, writer of the original trilogy, certainly did little to inspire faith. Thankfully, Naughty Dog added enough new gameplay mechanics to the existing Uncharted game formula, while at the same time offering a more complex and thoughtful narrative than the series has previously featured. Cap it off with the fact it’s one of the best looking AAA titles ever produced and the result is arguably the best game in the series and a far more satisfying conclusion than Uncharted 3 was.

Blizzard meanwhile finally unveiled their big multiplayer class-based shooter: Overwatch. Overwatch is not just a financial hit for the company, but a bit of a cultural force. From a spirited conversation around video game rear ends to endless Play of the Game meme videos to Blizzard taking on Pornhub, not a week goes by without the game appearing in force on social media. Oh, and the game itself is also addictive as hell. Whether you sneak in a quick game or play for hours, there's something about the way everyone can find something to do in this game that makes it recapture a lot of what made Team Fortress 2 so great a decade prior.

And then there was Doom. I could gush about Doom for another two-thousand words, but that review I wrote was probably enough as is. While I'm not going to rank every game I’ve played to date, Doom would be my personal pick for Game of the Year thus far. There's not much else to say other than I'm still amazed this game is not just good, but as good as it is given the awful lead up to launch it had.

Come December, don’t be surprised if these three games combine for the majority of Best Game of the Year awards.

Severed: The Biggest Surprise to Date

Even as someone with a deep appreciation for DrinkBox's previous works, I did not follow the development of Severed. I ended up buying the game almost completely on faith after seeing just a few screenshots of it, as the art style immediately grabbed my attention. As much as I like Guacamelee, Severed is on an entirely different level. The combat is simple yet challenging, the art style is gorgeous, and the game’s sparsely yet emotional narrative is one of the best recent examples of minimalistic storytelling, a style that has unfortunately been copiously copied without much success. Save Persona 4: Golden (which is a bit of a cheat anyway), Severed is my favorite game to ever be put out on the Vita and my favorite handheld game since Link Between Worlds.

Severed will be coming out for the Wii U this summer. Amusingly enough, the Vita is about the only major gaming system in North America with a lower install base than the Wii U. Check it out if it in any way looks interesting to you.

Disappointments

Even in a strong year for games, not everything can be a hit.

The fortunate aspect of a good year for games is that I've had so much to play, I've been able to resist ordering games at launch and thus avoiding the most notable disappointments. Battleborn and Star Fox Zero were telegraphed. I keep thinking about getting Mirror’s Edge Catalyst just because of my love of the first game, even despite the collective “eh” that game was released to. But with that said, I do have to say other than the nuclear hot messes surrounding Mighty No. 9 and Street Fighter V's launch, we haven't had too many complete duds to date.

My personal biggest disappointment is a game that, thankfully, most people seem to like: Hyper Light Drifter. Given my love for Zelda, the Souls series, and indie games with unique art styles, you would think that game was made for me. Unfortunately, the combat didn't feel great until almost the midway point of the game when you had enough upgrades, the controls around chain drifting were unnecessarily restrictive with their timing, the exploration was an exercise in unrealized potential thanks to most collectibles being the same thing, and the story and lore were underwhelming.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment of 2016 though wasn't a game, but an aspect of it: the narrative of Fire Emblem Fates. Setting aside the overall mundaneness of the Fates games themselves, the result of all that added emphasis on storytelling and attempt to tell a more grandiose story was Birthright telling a generic, paint-by-numbers tale and Conquest being the most rage-inducing, slapdash, insulting take on grey morality in a video game in some time. Considering these games followed the excellent Fire Emblem Awakening, I’d go so far as to say the narrative of Conquest is my actual pick for most disappointing aspect of a video game of 2016.

My Top 10 Thus Far

The advantage of me being busy the past week was I got to sneak in a few more games before having to name a top 10. The other advantage to listing a top 10 right now is I don’t have to rank these games, as this list could change depending when you ask me. So in no particular order, here is my top ten thus far:

• Doom
• XCom 2
• Uncharted 4
• Overwatch
• Inside
• Severed
• The Witness
• Dark Souls III
• Firewatch
• Oxenfree

I'm dreading having to figure out a top ten come December. We're already at the halfway mark, so the odds are against at least three or four of these games being on a final list. The thought of a game like Dark Souls III or The Witness not being even a top ten game of this year for me is mind-boggling. I think I’d actually take this list here over my top ten from 2015, and that was one of the strongest years in recent memory!

The Best Time to Be Playing Video Games

My time right now (other than when playing Overwatch) is split between three games: The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna, Salt and Sanctuary, and Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE. I'm also just getting started on Rhythm Heaven Megamix. I have a few recent purchases set aside for once I finish with those: Zero Time Dilemma (hey it finally shipped!), Stardew Valley, and Unravel. And like many others, I'm looking forward to early August when we finally get our hands on No Man's Sky.

So I hope you all enjoyed this little recap of the year so far. With so many big second half releases like No Man's Sky, Dishonored 2, Titanfall 2, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, South Park: The Fractured But Whole, and Cuphead, there's still plenty yet to come before we close the book on 2016. I hope you're all enjoying video games in 2016 as much as I am.

And don't forget my most anticipated game, Phoenix Wright: Spirit of Justice is coming out in September! No? Maybe that's just me…

The 999 series has been one of the most critically acclaimed and cherished cult series of the past decade. Originally debuting in 2009 in Japan and a year later in the U.S., it told the crazy time-and-reality-bending tale of nine people kidnapped and forced to engage in a life-or-death room escape game. After Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward was a financial disappointment, fans were left for years believing the series would forever remain unfinished. That is, until July of 2015 when the final chapter of the series was announced to much anticipation.To celebrate the launch of Zero Time Dilemma, Aksys sold a "Limited Watch Bonus Edition" for the Vita through both Amazon and Gamestop. A year later, that decision would turn what should have been one of the most celebrated goodwill releases of 2016 into a public relations disaster that has hundreds of fans decrying Aksys and its partnering retailers.

The situation began on June 24th, when Aksys’s official Twitter account sent out the following Tweets:

Further reassurances were offered by Aksys’s Senior Sales and Marketing Manager Dan Halen:

With every indication that games would still be delivered on time, reaction to this news was fairly positive. Things were fairly quiet until a Tweet went out on the 26th:

With release day, the 28th, now approaching, both Aksys's Twitter account as well as Dan Halen's account started to indicate they did not have as much control over the situation as they had initially indicated. At this point, Halen Tweeted that Amazon had stopped responding to his texts and calls. On this same day, Aksys's official account seemed to lay blame for any release day shipping issues on Amazon:

Tuesday the 28th finally arrived, and customers quickly noticed that their orders were not being fulfilled by either Gamestop or Amazon. Separate threads on Gamefaqs, NeoGaf, and our own thread on Giant Bomb among other sites started to fill up with various complaints. Ire toward Amazon in particular quickly grew fierce. Some customers were receiving emails asking for approval to delay shipment of the game, while others received nothing. Customers who tried contacting Amazon Customer Service had wildly inconsistent experiences. For the most part, customers reported general confusion from the various representatives they spoke with. If Amazon was aware of the situation, they did not appear to pass this information down to the people who needed it.

By the afternoon, Aksys was forced to admit that, in fact, Amazon had only received some of the shipment they needed to fill their pre-orders.

Reaction was needless to say not terribly positive to this. By this point, Aksys’s attempts to communicate the issue had only led to further confusion. In addition, they had, if not entirely intentionally, thrown one of their retail partners under the bus for a problem they were not responsible for. Important to note is at the time of writing this article, the Tweets on the 28th were the last Tweets sent out by Aksys or Dan Halen on the subject.

On June 29th, Amazon finally broke its silence on the issue when it sent out the following notification to customers:

We're contacting you about your order for Zero Time Dilemma: Limited Watch Bonus Edition Vita. We recently learned of an unexpected delay in getting the Limited Edition Bonus watch included in your order from our supplier. We’ll be shipping the game without the bonus watch and will ship the bonus watch as soon as it becomes available. We're very sorry about this.

….

To help make up for the inconvenience, we've added a $10 promotional certificate to your account. This amount will automatically apply the next time you buy an eligible item shipped and sold by Amazon.com.

So it seemed as if a resolution was finally coming. Unfortunately, not much has changed since that point in time. Despite the inference that copies of the game would soon be shipped out to those who ordered the Limited Watch Edition, only those who ordered the standard edition have had their copies shipped to them.

As someone who pre-ordered the Limited Edition Vita version, I decided to try contacting Amazon this morning to see if there was any additional information on what was going on. After speaking with three customer service reps, one who was from "Amazon’s Leadership Team," I was unable to even get as far as many of the customers who contacted them earlier in the week. In fact, I couldn’t even get one of the three reps to seemingly acknowledge the actual problem. Despite showing each of them the email I received from Amazon, explaining the whole messy situation, and showing them that the standard edition was in stock on the web site, the only thing each representative kept repeating to me was the Watch Edition was not in stock, that they had no information, and that they would not look further into it. If I can take a moment to editorialize just a bit, I’ve worked both ends of a Help Desk, and let me tell you, nothing sets off already on-the-edge people than giving them an impression you just want them to go away. But two of the reps did throw me a $10 store credit to try to get me to go away, so there's that.

As for Gamestop, less has publicly been stated regarding the situation there. Based on various Tweets and message board posts, some customers are reporting receiving a notification saying Gamestop will send the game out soon and will send the watch out at a later date. Other customers more recently have begun reporting that their orders have been cancelled. The last Tweet from an Aksys representative regarding the situation at Gamestop was on the 27th.

While the situation has been bad with the Limited Watch Edition, even the regular edition of the game has been somewhat difficult to find. Best Buy’s website has listed the Vita version as out of stock since launch and even the 3DS edition now reads the same. Gamestop's website has stock of both editions of the game, but in-store copies of the Vita version have proven somewhat difficult to locate. Based on the web site, neither of my local Gamestops have the game in stock. Two within fifteen miles do, and another four do between forty and fifty minutes away.

For some, the most tone-deaf moment came when Aksys's PR rep announced on Twitter that a small batch of Limited Edition watches would be on sale at Anime Expo.

While the roughly two-hundred watches anticipated to be available would hardly cover pre-orders, it left already jaded fans justifiably miffed that these were not being used to cover customers who had already made purchases. To be fair, the profits of these watches will most likely not come close to recouping whatever lost money Aksys has already incurred from these events.

So many basic PR faux paus have been committed by at least one party during this entire series of events. From publicly blaming business partners, releasing incomplete and inaccurate information just leading to further confusion, not taking ownership of the issue, not being able to get everyone on message, and so on, it has been a perfect storm of every way you’re not supposed to handle a crisis. To make matters worse, we’ve gone from confusing messaging to no messaging whatsoever in the past two days other than Gamestop’s seeming reverse direction in cancelling pre-orders. It's not right to speculate on what went wrong as none of us have the information to do so, though I will say it's possible Aksys didn't understand what they were asking Amazon and Gamestop to do as inventory/sales systems don't always handle what they were asking in the cleanest of ways.

It is unfortunate that a game born out of wanting to please a small group of loyal fans has been marred by these events. And unlike so many recent video game launch issues, none of this is the fault of the game's developers. Early reviews for the game are quite positive. The game currently sits at 87 on Metacritic for the Vita version and 82 for the 3DS version, and 98% of Steam user reviews are positive. One can’t help but feel for Spike Chunsoft which took a big risk even putting out a third game in a series that had never been a smash hit for the studio, and quite clearly they deserve none of what has happened. Zero Time Dilemma’s U.S. release should have been a slam dunk of good will for everyone involved. Instead, it will go down as one of the most bungled video game launches in recent memory.

Saved games are kind of like officiating: the subject most often comes up when something has gone wrong. I had been playing Rebel Galaxy for about twenty hours when my save was corrupted. Apparently, a bug has existed for a long time with the game that several patches still hasn’t squashed. This bug results in mission cargo getting stuck in your hold, which also results in you being unable to complete certain mission types. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter also had a rather annoying autosave feature. There wasn’t anything drastically wrong with it, but there was a point where the game went a healthy forty-five minutes for me without saving due to when and where it would save. These two games got me thinking a lot about the subject of saved games.

Even though saved games aren’t a particularly sexy game mechanic to discuss, the evolutionary history of them is certainly interesting. Every person who played console games during the cartridge era likely has a story about losing a saved game. Back then, games like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy used save batteries. According to DK Oldies, there are just over fifty games that used save batteries. There really wasn’t much to what these early games could do with saving. There was only enough room to allow for typically one to three saves after all. Other games used some form of password system in lieu of saved games. Despite how annoying those passwords could get, pen and paper were often more reliable than say my Final Fantasy cartridge ever proved to be.

Computer games on the other hand had access to disks they could write to. Either they could write to a floppy disk, or later they had access to hard drives. For the most part, these games employed manual save systems. The only limitation for the most part, unless a certain amount of save slots was designated, was how much free space you had access to. The only games that tended to buck the trend were Roguelikes, which were the domain of crazy people. Okay, so they weren’t actually crazy.

Rogue, Hack, and the rest in this genre followed core design philosophies that saved games were only meant for suspension of play. The idea was that if you could easily return to some form of recent checkpoint, it removed a great deal of tension from the game. This contrarian saved game philosophy perhaps more than anything else gave birth to the numerous variants in saved game designs ever since.

One of the most noteworthy games I can recall that was stuck in the middle of this debate was Alien Versus Predator which was released on PC in 1999 to a mixed reaction. While most elements of the game were praised, the game featured a fairly atypical design decision: there was no in-level save feature. The developers wanted to create a sense of tension around every corner with their game to mimic the Alien movies. If you could simply reload to a checkpoint or save point from a few moments earlier, they argued it would remove that tension.

Opinions on this decision were needlessly to say sharply divided. While today that might seem weird given the mainstream acceptance of alternative save mechanics, this was one of the earliest examples of a higher-profile game following a design philosophy similar to Roguelikes. The backlash toward this decision was sufficient enough that when the Gold Edition of the game was released a year later, the developers added in a saved game function.

The impact of the Rogue like saved game philosophy can be seen in countless modern games. Games like Dark Souls offer a singular game save per character which is automatically updated on a consistent basis. Games like Crypt of the Necrodancer, Spelunky, and Rogue Legacy have come up with new twists on how to follow the core tenants of Roguelike saves while still offering an ability to maintain progress between deaths. Many games feature hardcore modes which enforce Roguelike save mechanics on the player. Save functionality has over time become a key element of gameplay design rather than simply a means of tracking progress.

At some point though, autosaves in lieu of manual saves became an “in-thing” with games that didn’t really take advantage of it. My memory tells me this coincided with the advent of hard drives on gaming consoles. Figuring out the history of this is a little out of the scope of this blog post. While games often had and still do to this day have an autosave file while also allowing the player to manually save the game, some started to see autosaves as sufficient.

While this manner of checkpoint system offered a great deal of convenience, the player implicitly trusts the developer on two key points: checkpoints are sufficiently frequent, and saved games are stable. With access to manual saves, if one saved game is corrupted, an earlier one is typically available to the player to restore. With autosaves, well, you get my situation with Rebel Galaxy. Infrequent checkpoints are perhaps the more common issue. Alien: Isolation (what is it with save systems in Alien games?) is perhaps the game that most recently found itself the subject of this complaint. Many players complained about losing over half an hour of progress at various points.

It is not as if unlimited saving doesn’t have its own issues. Fire Emblem Fates and XCom 2 are both recent strategy games for which unlimited saving mid-mission can compromise the experience. Most players have heard of the term “save scumming,” the practice of loading an earlier save to undo a result the player didn’t like. While almost any genre can be impacted by this, the strategy genre might be impacted the greatest by this practice outside of Roguelikes, but those typically require actively manipulating files. This is even more applicable to games like XCom 2 and Fire Emblem which feature permanent death (though in Fire Emblem, this is only true on Classic mode). Part of the thrill of these games for many players is that any character can die at any turn.

While it’s easy enough to dismiss players engaging in save scumming as refusing to play a game properly, it isn’t always necessarily the case that the game is optimally designed around save limitations. For instance, XCom is fairly rigorously balanced around the ebb and flow of combat and losses. Units have fewer experience levels. They top out at a certain point. Replacement units are available at a reasonable cost, and can immediately use leveled equipment.

Fire Emblem on the other hand is much more rooted in the RPG genre. Units range from levels one through twenty and also can be promoted to advanced classes. Losing too many units early on starts to lock you out of child units (in recent titles) available later in the game, which become your primary means of resupplying your ranks at some point. There are some methods of getting around this mind you, but let’s leave that aside for a moment as this is not really meant to be me railing against Fire Emblem, which is a series I like a lot. Fire Emblem has less of an ebb and flow to this and more has a brick wall you tend to hit if you lose too many units along the way. For years, many complained about the series’ permanent death mechanic. This resulted in Casual mode being introduced in Fire Emblem: Awakening. In Casual mode, units are not permanently lost, but rather are lost for the rest of the battle.

After playing both Awakening and Fates, I’m not sure the developers have figured out how to balance these two different options yet. Short of playing on Lunatic, there are few times in the game you’re in danger of your entire party wiping in one battle on Casual. And are Casual players looking for an easier game, or are they just not a fan of the permanent death mechanic? It’s interesting to step back and realize much of this is rooted back in how the saved game functionality of Fire Emblem works.

After writing this, I still have no good answer as to why both Rebel Galaxy and Ethan Carter only offer autosave functionality. Unlike many examples referenced here, neither game utilizes save functionality that impacts gameplay. I will likely always be in the camp that thinks games should default to allowing manual saving unless there is a design mechanic justifying an alternative. For all the convenience of autosaves, there are just too many examples of something going wrong for my liking. Maybe I’ve just never gotten over losing my Final Fantasy save so many damn times.

Every now and then when navigating the site, I glance over at my 2014 Game of the Year list and think about how much my opinion on some of the games listed there have changed. For some time, I've wanted to experiment by revisiting this list and seeing what has changed. So I've used the first few months of 2016 during the lull in new releases to finally catch up on things and now feel pretty good about writing this.

Before I get into this breakdown, let me cover the big games of 2014 I still have yet to play. As far as I can recall, I only have two significant titles remaining: Divinity: Original Sin and Wasteland 2. While I could wait to write this after playing these two titles, I honestly have no idea when that will happen given the length of each. It's also kind of not the point of this experiment to permanently nail down what my favorite games of 2014 as that's always going to remain rather fluid. I also haven't played several episodic games like Kentucky Route Zero, but I don't really count those as 2014 games.

I'm going to skip covering entries that remained largely the same. The one exception I'd like to mention is Shadow of Mordor, which is a game that I have always been conflicted about. And yet I feel like on some days I like it more than I remember, and some days it's the opposite. I still hate its lack of difficulty levels. I still hate the fact it squandered the Lord of the Rings license with a dreadfully dull narrative. I still hate that the last hour is one of the worst final acts in recent video game memory. On the other hand, it still has some of the best combat in a game since its release. And eighteen months later, the Nemesis System remains unique and one of the best new gameplay systems devised in recent memory.

So let's start with the bottom of the list. My relationship with Dark Souls II is a rocky one. In some ways, its weird for me to add it back onto a 2014 top 10 list because it was the 2015 release of Scholar of the First Sin that made me come around on it. However, it isn't necessarily the remixed elements of Scholar that caused this, but the fact I finally played the DLC areas. Some people seem to hate these sections. For me, they finally made the game work. These sections were far more creative than the main game's content. While the main game's bosses were all over the place in quality, the three DLC packs featured some excellent boss design (not counting the awful yet optional Gank Squad of course).

The game that my opinion of has changed the most with is Persona Q. My opinion on Far Cry 4 and Smash Bros remains largely the same. These two games simply got bumped to make room for other entries. Persona Q on the other hand was a game that I was immensely enjoying back in December of 2014. Little did I realize that I was only through about forty percent of the game at that point. Nor did I realize that the other three-fifths of the game was going to just be a lot more of the same. Persona Q is a game that overstayed its welcome by a good thirty hours at minimum. It is the ultimate definition of a three out of five star game.

There are two other new games to the list that I hadn't played by the end of 2014. The first is Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut. After playing so many recent RPGs that seem to be trying to out-Skyrim one another by sacrificing everything else in the game to the altar of sprawling open-worlds, I really appreciated playing an RPG that had some concept of structure and pacing again. This is not me trying to say open-world RPGs are inherently inferior or worse, but that tight, forty hour RPGs have become a bit of a lost art, and this is a particularly good one.

Boy do I love The Talos Principle. That game had the unfortunate timing of coming out in the middle of December, thus missing out on awards season. It's a shame too, as honestly I love it so much I almost gave it the top spot. To put this in perspective, Bayonetta 2 was the only game I really "loved" from 2014, so Talos is quite a bit above Shovel Knight for me.

The last thing I'll mention is how far Inquisition has fallen since I originally played it. While I still like the game, I have since realized a lot of that was both related to timing and the lack of a quality Bioware RPG in almost five years. Inquisition unfortunately suffers from pacing issues and open-world bloat, as well as a tepid final act that seems to be just about wrapping things up as quickly as possible.

If nothing else, this was a good reminder of what top ten lists actually are and why they're not worth getting worked up over. Opinions on a work are always going to change over time, and trying to nail down exactly where something falls on typically an exercise in futility. I'm sure I'll finish Divinity or Wasteland 2 at some point and want to change my top ten list again. So feel free to comment on this with either your own list of what has changed since calendar year 2014.

Wing Commander: Secret Ops is a free, downloadable, fifty-six mission episodic follow-up to Wing Commander Prophecy released in 1998

All of the information in that sentence is correct, and yes, even at the time it seemed just as crazy as it does today. While Steam and Half-Life 2 are largely credited with firmly establishing digital releases as the way of the future, Secret Ops predated it by a full six years. And while developers had dabbled with episodic gaming prior to 1998, it wasn’t until the mid-2000s when Telltale would popularize the format for the mainstream, a full eight years after Secret Ops. And to top it all off, the game was free! So how did such an insane project come into being?

In a 1998 interview with Gamespot, (Dunkin) Origin general manager Neil Young offered two reasons behind Secret Ops. The first reason he offered was that they “wanted to do something for the user’s support for the Wing Commander products.” A skeptical response to this might be that they were trying to win favor with the fanbase, and given what was going on with the series at the time and the industry at large, you would not be wrong to suspect that may have been a factor.

Prophecy is a somewhat difficult game to contextualize. The first Wing Commander game was released in 1990. Wing Commander II would follow shortly thereafter. While both games sold well and firmly established the series as one of the best on PC, it was the games that would follow that the series is most remembered for. Wing Commander: Privateer, a spinoff game more in line with open-world space exploration games like Elite or the modern date X series games came out in 1993. But it was Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger that would be the defining moment of the series. Roberts switched from in-engine cartoonish cutscenes to full motion video. And while most FMV efforts at the time were cheap and featured amateur actors, Wing Commander III featured the likes of Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davis, Thomas F. Wilson, and Malcolm McDowell. A similar in vein sequel soon followed in 1996 titled Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom. Both games were critical and commercial hits and are still regarded to this day as perhaps the best games to feature FMV ever made.

However, Roberts would leave Origin in 1996 after the release of Wing Commander IV to form Digital Anvil. Wing Commander III and IV had done just about as good a job as one could ask of concluding the primary conflict of the series and wrapping up any lingering narrative loose-ends. Meanwhile, while Wing Commander had enjoyed little competition outside of the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games during the first half of the 90s, 1997 and 1998 would see the release of Descent Freespace, Independence War, and even Rogue Squadron and Colony Wars on consoles. Prophecy thus represented a critical juncture for both the series and for Origin.

While it’s difficult to find anything approaching reliable sales figures numbers from that time, Prophecy was thought to be a step back in sales. While both Wing Commander III and IV were said to have sold around a million or more copies, Prophecy was said to be closer to 700-750k. Meanwhile, while review scores were largely positive, the fanbase was somewhat split on the direction of the series. While Roberts had moved the series to being much more story-focused in the previous two games, Prophecy dialed back the amount of FMV and the budget spent on it in favor of gameplay focus. While it’s incredibly difficult to remember objectively how fans reacted to this direction, I recall reaction in fan circles being rather mixed. Though it is not the best snapshot of the time, Wing Commander III and IV certainly seem to be remembered more fondly than Prophecy has been.

The other reason offered by Young in the same interview was that the company wanted to prototype a new digital distribution system. In the same interview, Young spoke of Origin wanting to make extensive use of this system to deliver content to users in the near future. What the extent of those plans might have entailed unfortunately is left to some speculation, however, 1997 also saw the release of Origin’s incredibly successful granddaddy of the modern MMORPG genre, Ultima Online, so one can make some guesses as to why digital distribution would be something the company was exploring.

Most digital game content that was available during the mid to late nineties was fairly insubstantial. With the average consumer limited to 28k to 56k modems using dial-up Internet, it was difficult for many consumers to download files of significant size. Small-scale demos comprised most downloadable gaming content up through that point. Total Annihilation is typically seen as the first modern video game to feature the modern concept of DLC with its Core Contingency expansion. (Total Annihilation Information) Core Contingency was released on April 30th, 1998, mere months before the release of Secret Ops in August of that same year. So for the sake of perspective, while Core Contingency was more akin to an expansion pack Secret Ops was more of a full-scale free game release.

Secret Ops was released episodically over a period of seven weeks. In order to fit the game into a more reasonable file size to accommodate Internet download speeds at the time, the game utilized in-engine text-based cutscenes in place of FMV. The player no longer had the ability to customize loadouts unlike previous entries in the series. For those unfamiliar with the series, the Wing Commander series is famous for featuring some of the most complex mission trees in the history of video games. Based on your successes in any given mission, the game would push you along different narrative tracks and missions. While Secret Ops lacked dialogue choices and branching narrative based on those choices, the mission and narrative path you moved along was still decided based upon your successes and failures in missions.

If you want to see a short demonstration of just how complex this could get, consider this scenario: you start in the Courage System. If you succeed or fail, you still move on to mission 2. No matter how you do in that mission, if you succeeded in mission 1 you move on to mission 3a. If you failed mission 1, you move on to 3b. And so on. If you want to see the full extent of this branching structure, I suggest checking out the excellent mission guide from Wing Commander CIC. Needless to say, while the developers were forced to dial back some of the branching structure the series was known for, they did their best to maintain the feel of a full-scale Wing Commander game.

So how was the actual response to the game? Secret Ops was freely available for only a short window. While I cannot find any reliable download numbers, it is unsurprising that many players at the time struggled to download such a large game in such a short window of availability. I was fortunate enough to have parents willing to allow me to both tie up the phone line and leave my computer running overnight, so I was one of the lucky ones able to download the game. Secret Ops would later be included in the Gold edition of Wing Commander: Prophecy. Finally on August 11^th, 2008, Wing Commander CIC would make the game freely available again via their web site (We've Got a Secret).

In a lot of ways, Secret Ops, the free follow-up, feels like the more appropriate successor to Wing Commander 3 and 4 than Prophecy was. While Prophecy was largely heralded as a quality game, it felt a little long in the tooth. For a series that was famous for innovation and pushing the boundaries of gaming conventions, Prophecy basically was the third one of those games. Meanwhile, Secret Ops was such a crazy new idea that one has to wonder how the team ever got it greenlighted in the first place.

Unfortunately, Origin would close its doors forever in 2004. Truthfully, the company had died years before then. Its final published title, the much maligned Ultima IX: Ascension, was released 1999. While the company remained open for several more years to continue to maintain Ultima Online, only one title, the cancelled Ultima X: Odyssey, received significant development. Though Secret Ops’ narrative appeared to bridge the story between Prophecy and the next game in the series, the only Wing Commander titles Origin was known to be working on after its release were a sequel to Privateer and a multiplayer “sequel” to Secret Ops that was cancelled early in development. A Gameboy Advance port of Wing Commander Prophecy done by Raylight Studios did come out in 2003, and an Xbox Live Arcade game by Gaia Industries called Wing Commander Arena would be released well after Origin had closed its doors forever.

Secret Ops ended up being rather prophetic. In the following two decades after release, both digital distribution and episodic release formats would prove to be two of the most successful evolutions of the video game industry. The fact that Origin Systems substantially experimented with both of these concepts years before most of their contemporaries would suggests a very different path the video game industry could have gone down if the release had been more successful. Just consider for a moment that the company was owned by Electronic Arts, whose Origin storefront would not be released until 2011, many years after Steam had become the predominant PC gaming storefront. Whether Origin had pushed the digital format before technology and infrastructure were ready for it or if their efforts were a casualty of a studio that would soon find itself in financial trouble, Secret Ops is sadly a footnote in video game history rather than the precursor of the modern gaming industry that it deserves to be seen as.

Works Cited

Dunkin, Alan. All About Wing Commander: Secret Ops. 24 June 1998. 29 February 2016. <http://www.gamespot.com/articles/all-about-wing-commander-secret-ops/1100-2464010/>.

Total Annihilation Information. n.d. 29 February 2016. <http://www.tauniverse.com/ta/>.

We’ve Got a Secret. 11 August 2008. 1 March 2016. <http://wcnews.com/news/update/8848/>.

I enjoy writing. Though I ultimately pursued a degree in Computer Science, my best subject in school was always history. Even though I didn't go to college for it, I ended up taking just shy of the necessary amount of courses to pursue a history minor. The great thing about taking collegiate-level history courses is that they really help you improve at writing long papers in a short amount of time.

While I was in college I wrote fairly amateurish reviews for an anime review site that is sadly no longer around. I also spent about 18 months working for an anime company as a subtitle timer and script editor. So for a while, I had the opportunity to continue to employ my writing skills. When all of this activity stopped however, I experienced a fairly significant break in writing to any substantial degree.

A few years ago, I went through school again to attain my MBA. As I returned to writing substantial papers, it quickly became apparent how rusty my writing skills had become. Since I graduated, I've been looking for an excuse to engage in new writing projects. So late last year, I had the insane idea to start writing reviews for every game I was playing at the time. Well, my plans quickly fell apart during the Fall. It all started when I decided not to review Halo 5 because I didn't feel as if I spent enough time with the multiplayer. Soon thereafter, I just started making excuses to not write reviews of several games.

So for 2016, I'm going to try this again. I posted my first couple reviews this week. Next week, I should have reviews up for XCom 2 (I'm about 40 hours in at the moment) and Firewatch. I'm currently also working on Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls. A lot of this will continue to be catch-up work from 2015 and even 2014. My goal is to keep reviews to about 1200-1600 words, as that's about the right count before they get too lengthy.

The other nice thing about this project is at times, I need to remind myself of the perspective of the reviewer and how difficult it can be to remain consistent in scoring. I am sure I will get a few wrong.

If anyone at any point has any feedback or questions on this bout with insanity, feel free to contact me. I appreciate any and all critiques.

1. Xenoblade Chronicles X
2. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
3. Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
4. XCom 2
5. Firewatch
6. Cibele

Ending a story is hard.

Consumers of any storytelling medium have a tendency to place a disproportionate amount of importance on the ending of a story. There is of course logic behind this. A story’s ending after all represents the final moments an audience has with the author’s work. And yet, you are far more likely to hear “the ending ruined it for me” than a comment about the first chapter of a book or the first ten minutes of a movie ruining the story for someone.

As stories in video games have become more complex, so have ending systems. RPGs in particular have given birth to complex ending trees. If you look up the potential ending states in any Bethesda game, you will see over a dozen ending states for quests, characters, or cities. Each ending state can have multiple endings, and the composite of all these different potential mini-endings are numerous potential “endings.” It’s a neat little bit of tricky that allow developers to advertise dozens upon dozens of endings. But open-world RPGs are not the only genre to feature unique ending mechanics.

I picked two games to discuss here: Silent Hill 2 and Mass Effect 3. Let’s start with Silent Hill 2. There will be spoilers for both games, so you have been warned. You play as James Sutherland, who has been brought to the town of Silent Hill after receiving a mysterious letter from your dead wife Mary. James has the goal of reaching the Lakeview Hotel, where Mary and James spent a vacation together that was special to the couple. That journey represents the entire game. If you haven’t played the game, you should stop reading this and go play it as Silent Hill 2 is a masterclass in video game storytelling.

Silent Hill 2 is not the first game to utilize something like the ending system it possesses, but it remains one of the more unique implementations of it. There are six endings in the game, though three of them are only available on additional playthroughs and are less important. The three primary endings are referred to as “Leave,” “In Water,” and “Maria.” Throughout your playthrough, the game keeps track of several player actions. These include how quickly you use health items to restore stamina, how quickly you pursue story objectives versus wander throughout the game world, if you listen to certain conversations fully, and if you examine certain game objects. Not much changes in the final section of the game; the final boss does differ based on which ending you have earned, but that’s about it.

What makes the endings so fascinating is that they represent three potential contextualizations on the story you have just played. Your actions throughout the game are used to determine James’ motivation for killing Mary. In the “Leave,” ending, James is able to come to terms with killing Mary. His talk with “Mary” at the end of the game results in him forgiving himself and leaving the town. In the “In Water” ending, James has similar motivations, however is so racked with guilt over killing his wife that he commits suicide. In the “Maria” ending, James’ motivations take on a more sinister tone, and he is more unwilling to confront the fact he killed Mary. He becomes drawn to Maria, the town’s spiritual realization of a younger, healthier, and quite frankly sexier Mary.

From a top-level view, this all sounds fantastic. With its mechanics laid bare, the player can logically understand why they received the ending they did. And yet, if you play the game for the first time completely unspoiled, boy does it come a bit out of left field. Silent Hill 2 is a survival horror game. The genre teaches you to conserve health items. Why would the player not examine a knife or not examine a recording of a conversation? Those are natural actions in any game featuring exploration. In some ways, it almost feels as if the video game medium failed Silent Hill 2 and not the other way around in this regard. Even in the context of playing Silent Hill 2 at the time of release, its ending mechanics are at war with the ways gamers had been conditioned to play games by its contemporaries.

That said, the endings of the game are beloved. Time has been very kind to Silent Hill 2, as it moved from a pretty well-received game with solid sales numbers to what’s considered a classic. Why is that? Why are gamers so keen on this game’s endings and its ending system that they hold Silent Hill 2 up as an example of everything right with ending design?

Let’s move on to Mass Effect 3 for a bit before we discuss that. I will admit I possess strong feelings about this game. Mass Effect 2 remains one of my favorite games of all time. Mass Effect 3 is maybe the game I have been most disappointed in ever. It represented so much squandered potential that it would take an article much larger than this one to fully convey my feelings toward it. And yet, I will come to its defense in this regard: the endings are not the problem with that game. Allow me to explain.

There probably aren’t many people around unfamiliar with Mass Effect 3. Bioware’s initial promise on the first Mass Effect was a trilogy of game featuring a vast array of choices that would impact not only the individual games, but the story of the entire trilogy. So when the final minutes of Mass Effect 3 ensued, and suddenly a glowing space entity presented Shepard with the decision to destroy all synthetic life, control the Reapers, or to merge all life into some form of synthetic/organic hybrid, it’s natural to think a lot of people lost their minds. Instead of particular choices impacting the ending, the game presents the player with an aggregate scoring mechanic of all decisions known as “Estimated Military Strength,” or EMS for short. Each decision point in the trilogy resulted in a positive or negative impact on Shepard’s EMS. The EMS score determines what endings the player has access to. In order to get access to one particular ending, the player needs to play the game’s multiplayer mode. There were not enough points in the game to otherwise reach a score high enough to access it.

Here’s the interesting thing: the ending systems of Silent Hill 2 and Mass Effect 3 really aren’t that far apart. The only mechanical difference is Silent Hill 2 calculates an ending and hands you it, while Mass Effect 3 calculates endings available to the player and lets you choose one. One could reach the conclusion that the issue was allowing the player a choice, but that’s a bit of a stretch. Would simply being presented with one of Mass Effect 3’s endings have made the endings work? Not really.

The issue is Mass Effect 3 told a flawed story from the moment the game started. Shepard’s goal in Mass Effect 3 is to build the Crucible. What is the reason for this? Nobody knows, but for some reason the Protheans thought it was a good idea. But you never really learn anything about them (unless you bought the Javik DLC, but let’s leave that atrocity aside for the moment). So while Earth is being glassed, Shepard runs off to complete an entire game full of side quests and story missions mostly about other things. Never before has a video game presented a sense of urgency so early, and then at no point stressed it as important. The Reapers may be the great galactic menace, but prepare to spend half the game fighting a terrorist group and their anime cyber ninja. And all of this leads to three endings stressing themes that are largely off message with what’s going on.

Mass Effect 3’s endings were not failures because of the mechanics they used, but because of their content and the story that led to them. It felt like a narrative departure from what the games had presented to that point. The three (later retconned to four) endings lack any insightful commentary on prior events. The control ending feels like the option meant for a Renegade playthrough, as at no point does it seem like a good idea in that universe to grant any singular person or group that level of power. So if the Paragon playthrough’s endings are seen as Destroy or Synthesis, the Destroy ending flies in the face of all of Shepard’s efforts find peaceful co-existence with the Geth. But does that mean my Shepard wants to play God with and rewrite the DNA of every life in the galaxy? I can actually better understand the point of view of people who enjoy the game’s story more than people who say just the endings are the issue.

At the end of the day, does Mass Effect 3’s ending mechanics really work much differently than other Bioware, Bethesda, or Witcher games? There are slight variations in ending count and where decisions are presented that determine the ending, but that’s about it. Mass Effect 3 was simply lazy, bad storytelling that resulted in a set of endings that reflected that.

The “Choose an Ending” solution to branching endings has perhaps gotten a bad reputation. Much like certain narrative devices such as mind control and amnesia/memory loss, we have an initial negative reaction as these devices are so often poorly utilized. It does not mean they can’t be used effectively though. The recent Jessica Jones Netflix series uses mind control brilliantly to examine themes of consent. The Bourne Trilogy and Memento are all fantastic movies. Danganronpa 1 and 2 both use memory loss to tell interesting stories.

I remain concerned that gamers have become so wrapped up in the mechanics of endings that authors may seek to modify their stories as a result. In the case of presenting the player with a final choice that determines whether you receive one of several endings, there is nothing inherently wrong with this mechanic. After all, if you present one, two, or even several decisions earlier in the game that determine your ending, it’s inherently the same mechanic. You just decide on your ending earlier. If there is no particular merit or theme being explored through multiple endings, what is the purpose of them? Are we trying to reduce video game storytelling to having all the merit of choose your own adventure books out of a misguided need to ask for authors to surrender more narrative control to the player? There is some value in this for certain games, but It would be in error to pursue particular mechanics as the universal solution to how to end a video game.

This has been a seminal year for gaming to say the least. I barely had time to even touch my back catalog of games with how much came out this year. I probably ended up playing somewhere upward of 40-50 games, which might be the most I ever played in a single year. Even then, there are still a handful of games I didn't get to that I really want to. I decided to write an blog covering the games I played this year for whatever it is worth.

2015's Old Game of the Year

Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin

Runners-up: Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Destiny: The Taken King

While Scholar of the First Sin is technically a 2015 release, it is mostly just a remix of the original Dark Souls 2 with one new boss and a little more story filled in. Playing Souls 2 a year removed from the high expectations put upon it along with the remixed levels and all of the DLC packed in certainly helped. Don't get me wrong; this is still the weakest entry in the Souls series. But at least now there are days I might tell you I like it as much as Demon's Souls.

Meanwhile, I finally got around to finishing Danganronpa this year. It's a shame its gameplay is so mediocre, as that's the closest game I've ever played to recreating Phoenix Wright. Meanwhile, Destiny got a lot of much needed love and attention this year and has finally started to become the game it was supposed to be in the first place.

Best Looking Game

Ori and the Blind Forest

Runners-Up: The Witcher 3, Rise of the Tomb Raider

Ori is a damn work of art. Every single last frame of that game has so much craft and beauty that it's mind boggling. Never has the comparison to "playing an animated movie" been so apt. I'd go so far as to say Ori is the single most beautiful looking video game I've ever played.

Best Story (no spoilers)

Life is Strange

Runners-up: Her Story, Tales from the Borderlands

I'm not going to dive into the stories of these games as the last thing you ever want to do is spoil a good story for someone, but I'm rather going to just comment on the fact that 2015 has been a breakthrough for storytelling in video games. From the three titles mentioned to Soma to Undertale to Cradle and beyond, this has been the first year I can ever recall that we were given more than two or three games with stories above the level of say a Hollywood popcorn flick.

Best New Character

Chloe Price

Runners-up: Fiona (Tales from the Borderlands), Inspector Jenks (Contradiction: Spot the Liar)

The strength of Life is Strange's story hinges on its two lead protagonists. This is even more the case for angst-ridden, teenage screwup Chloe Price. Chloe represents a very difficult type of character to write. It's not just about hitting a grey area with the character, but hitting a sweet spot in writing such a broken human being who can act stupid and irrational, and yet possesses enough positive qualities that you want to do anything in your power to help them. Vital to it all is the phenomenal performance of Ashly Burch, who is asked to hit about every point on the emotional spectrum throughout the story.

Best Music

Ori and the Blind Forest

Runners-up: Metal Gear Solid V, Crypt of the Necrodancer

Based on the day of the week, I could take either MGS V or Ori as my pick for this category. These are two completely different soundtracks to be sure. Ori’s beautiful orchestrated soundtrack is sweeping in nature. Whether a scene portrays a sense of dread, a feeling of calm, or a sense of loss, Gareth Coker’s score is able to evoke any emotion the game asks of it. What puts the score on another level though is how music is used far more than spoken dialogue to convey . Metal Gear meanwhile features such a wide breadth of music that it could compete almost twice over based on its original score as well as its licensed music.

Best Surprise

Until Dawn

Runners-up: Life is Strange, Splatoon

The fact that Until Dawn even finally came out is kind of a surprise in and of itself. The best surprise of all though is that it’s one of the strongest titles of 2015. The game realizes the promise of the many attempts of David Cage to make QTE-driven adventure game where choices and actions have consequences.

Most Disappointing Game

Just Cause 3

Runners-up: Evolve, Halo 5

I wrote a lengthy review covering my feelings on Just Cause 3. It is the singular game I played this year that felt on the level of say one of 2014’s biggest disappointments. While many of us were anticipating a Saints Row the Third style leap in quality, we were instead given an entry that seemed to learn little from Just Cause 2’s flaws. Meanwhile, the console versions suffered from possibly the worst load time issues of the current generation.

Evolve ultimately was a game too reliant on having a group of people playing their classes exactly right to have any fun with it. Meanwhile, it was rotten with microtransactions. Halo 5 feels the most egregious letdown of a disappointing Fall season for AAA shooters, especially after the mess that was the Master Chief Collection. Halo 5’s campaign was mediocre at best. Meanwhile, numerous game modes were missing on launch, while the Req system severely impacted Warzone mode. 343 Studios dropped the ball on this one after the mostly quality Halo 4.

My Eleven Through Twenty in Rough Order

• Special mention: The Beginner’s Guide – I am not going to even start on a “is this a game” discussion, but the game is so subjective it’s hard for me to rank it.
• Arkham Knight – This is a case of a game that would have been actively better by just removing content.
• Mortal Kombat X – The best fighting game of the year, but then again it was a relatively weak year for fighting games.
• Axiom Verge – Midway through the game, I thought this would be in my top ten for sure, but the last third of the game fell flat for me.
• Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate – One of the best entries in the series, but it doesn’t do enough new to rank higher.
• Cities: Skylines – Now we’re getting into the contenders. Cities was the Sim City game people have been craving for the past decade.
• Kerbal Space Program– If I played more of it, it might be in my top ten.
• Her Story – My 7-14 games are honestly not far apart, so it got brutal starting here. While Her Story didn’t end up higher on my list, it remains one of the most important games of the year and something I think everyone should play.
• Tales from the Borderlands – While I adore Tales and think it might be my favorite Telltale game to date, that game engine is starting to impact these games so negatively that it’s hard to look past.
• Witcher 3 - Let me get it out of the way right now: I like the game. My not putting it in my top ten is not to be contrarian or to get a reaction. It was really tough trying to decide between it and several other picks for the final few spots on my list. It just missing my top ten is more about how strong this year has been than anything else. This is my way of asking you to keep reading and not hate me for excluding it.
• Until Dawn – I so badly wanted to find a spot for it in my top ten, as I’ve not only played it and enjoyed it, but have watched three LPs of the game from start to finish. Even now I want to swap something out of my top ten for it. #TeamEmily

My Personal Top Ten Games of the Year

10. Rise of the Tomb Raider – I was not a big fan of the 2013 reboot, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that Rise of the Tomb Raider addressed most every major issue I had with the first game. Rise is one damn good looking game that benefits from a greater focus on exploring and raiding tombs.

9. Rocket League – In a year dominated by forced eSports, this was a case of eSports done right. Rocket League is one of those great “easy to pick up, but hard to master” examples. Matches are short and exciting, thus even when you’re getting your butt kicked, the pain doesn’t last that long.

8. Splatoon – Nintendo of all companies managed to produce what is easily 2015’s best multiplayer shooter. Splatoon has been a breath of fresh air. The game oozes style. It is approachable for players of all ages.

7. Undertale – Gamefaqs’ Greatest Game of All-Time. It may not actually be my personal favorite game of all time. It’s both charming and witty, and it manages to do things I didn’t think GameMaker Studio could do. I suggest going into it while ignoring the insane hype surrounding it.

6. Fallout 4 – I am an unapologetic Fallout fanboy, and so it’s no surprise I have enjoyed this game. While the new settlement building system didn’t really come together and there is still too much jank, the shooting now actually feels really good.

5. Ori and the Blind Forest - Any one of my top five games feels like a Game of the Year in most years. Ori is the closest a game has ever come to a high-quality animated movie being realized in video game form. The game evokes about every emotion on the spectrum through its brief six to eight hour length. Most importantly, the game isn’t afraid to actually be challenging, yet still includes ample enough checkpoints that you rarely get stuck.

4. Bloodborne - After the disappointing effort that was Dark Souls 2, Miyazaki put together what is in my opinion FromSoft’s best game to date. While Bloodborne sacrificed some amount of character customization and world building versus the Souls series, the faster paced, more skill-based combat more than made up for it.

3. Metal Gear Solid V – Whew boy. I thought MGS V would easily be my Game of the Year after finishing it. Sadly, Konami’s meddling with the game post-launch means that the amazing first month I spent with the game is difficult to ever replicate. Story issues aside, Metal Gear’s gameplay is among the best the genre has ever seen.

2. Mario Maker – Infinite Mario levels is a very good thing. Mario Maker represents Nintendo‘s ugly stepchild console finally realizing its potential. The game’s level building tools are so simple and intuitive that they put every other game of this type to shame.

1. Life is Strange – Long ago, I grew comfortable with the fact that storytelling in video games is, at best, simply about being entertaining. While there has been the occasional Last of Us or Silent Hill 2, these games come along so rarely that you expect to see maybe a handful of them a decade. Life is Strange just goes for it in a way video games just don’t.

I grew up on adventure games. It is a genre that represents me maybe more than any other. Life is Strange ultimately takes the promise of 2012’s excellent The Wakling Dead and fully realizes that potential. DontNod utilizes the episodic format here to its utmost advantage in a way Telltale has never quite fully figured out how to.

I could blab on and on about how much I adore this game. Sure, it has its warts. But there is such genuine honesty on display here. No gaming experience this year invoked the emotional responses this game got from me. When I finally set the controller down upon finishing it, I knew I had just finished my Game of the Year.