Game of the Year 2015: Arriving Late, but Not Fashionably So
By dricas 0 Comments
I don’t generally write game of the year stuff (or game stuff in general), but 2015 feels like a special year for games. Enough really good games came out this year that I get the feeling that people will look back at it as one of those great years in gaming. It seems like no matter what kinds of games you are into, something neat came out that would interest you. Here’s a few that I enjoyed this year.
While I haven’t spent as much time with this game as I would have liked, my short time with it was enjoyable enough for it to earn this spot on my list. The Dragon Ball franchise is nearer and dearer to my heart than I would care to admit (thanks mostly in part to childhood viewing sessions with my brother) and XenoVerse plays with the long-running series’ timeline and characters enough to keep any fan happy. That combined with a pretty robust character creation system and fun multiplayer make Dragon Ball XenoVerse earn a respectable number 10 on my list.
I have mostly been a jealous sideline observer of the recent local couch multiplayer indie game trend due to most of these games having either nonexistent or poor online support. I also have a hard time getting people crowded around a gaming machine at this point in my life, so even when I do pick up these types of games, I rarely get a chance to play them as intended. Duck Game bucks this trend, however, and has pretty good online support, making semi-frequent multiplayer sessions of this game with friends much easier to set up.
And every multiplayer session of Duck Game I have played has been blast. The frantic pace of the game and its plethora of zany weaponry make it feel like a fast-paced, real-time Worms crossed with Super Smash Bros. Every session also left me and my friends in fits of laughter, as unexpected hilarity happens in almost every round. The rounds also tend to be very short, so even if you do get killed, you’ll be back in action in no time.
This fast-paced, goofy fun makes Duck Game feel like a shotgun blast of light-hearted joy to the face. Also there’s a dedicated quack button. Quack quack!
Sim racing is a fairly new hobby to me. When I first decided to give it a try in mid-2014, I bought a wheel and a subscription to iRacing.com, which was a trial-by-fire sort of thing for sure. I actually ended up really enjoying it, despite the initial learning curve. There’s something about spending hours practicing with one car on one track and tuning both the car and your driving style to be just so that I find to be oddly relaxing. But before I could get to that level, there was plenty of crashing and frustration as I learned how to wrestle a race car around a track in one piece.
I mention this because I think sim racing can be somewhat hostile to newcomers. Most race sims are just pure simulators more akin to flight sims and train sims in the sense that they don’t have many traditional “gamey” trappings like career modes or a sense of progression. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, mind you, it just can be somewhat overwhelming to have a ton of cars and tracks thrown at you without any idea of where to start.
Project CARS stands out from this as it has an actually pretty good career mode that takes you through the full career of a race car driver, starting with go-kart racing and ending with Formula 1-style open wheel racing and Le Mans style prototype racing. This combined with a nice UI and a general ease of use makes Project CARS probably the friendliest racing sim for beginners to the genre. It’s also a ton of fun for more experienced people as well.
Shame Wii U owners were shafted, though.
Most of my play time with Kerbal Space Program was actually in the game’s alpha and beta stages. But now that the game has finally been actually released as a final product, I can see myself putting even more time into this amazing game. There’s a certain sense of pride that you get from iterating on terrible rocket idea after terrible rocket idea until you finally make a rocket that is slightly not terrible enough to actually get to Mun and back that not many games can achieve.
It’s also one of those games that is as complicated as you want it to be. It’s possible to both be satisfied with simple to-the-Mun-and-back rockets, and to have the urge to dig deeper and make ridiculous expeditions into the deeper planets in the solar system and experiment with space stations and docking and modded content and all kinds of stuff like that.
Kerbal Space Program is a shining example of how sandbox building games like these should be made.
If you had told me prior to the E3 reveal of Splatoon that Nintendo’s freshest new IP would be a multiplayer-focused third person shooter, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. Nintendo’s notoriously bad online support seems like it would have set Splatoon up to fail, but somehow they managed to make one of the most unique and gleefully fun shooters in recent memory.
There’s still some weird Nintendo-y hangups with the online system, such as the low number of maps in rotation every day in comparison to the game’s now decent total number of maps, but that’s honestly not enough of a hindrance to really detract that much from the game.
I can’t close this section on Splatoon without mentioning its awesome soundtrack. At times the game’s funky fresh beats sound like something straight out of a Jet Set Radio game, which is a definite plus in my book.
Rocket League is probably the closest a game has ever gotten to simulating what it feels like to actually physically play a sport.
Or at least that’s what I’ve heard others say, since my fat ass hasn’t actually played a physical sport since volleyball in high school gym class, but I definitely believe it. There’s a certain amount of ungainly shifting around of your supersonic rocket-powered battle-car that you have to do in order to smack the ball in your desired direction that is a lot like gyrating your unshapely, stupid body in a way to hit a ball in a real sport (or totally whiff it most of the time, in my case both in real life and in the game).
When you actually manage to connect with the ball in the right way to make a sweet aerial goal, or actually succeed with a frantic last-ditch attempt at stopping your opponent from scoring on you, you feel like a million bucks. It’s these types of moments that propel Rocket League to one of the best games of the year for me.
The city-building genre is one that is near and dear to my heart. One of my first gaming obsessions was SimCity 2000, with its sequels SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 also stealing a lot of my adolescent time. With the disaster that was the most recent SimCity game, I had all but given up hope on the genre ever making a comeback.
From these ashes rose Cities: Skylines with a fresh new take on the genre. It takes the best bits of the old SimCity games and a few of the small number of good bits from the newest SimCity game to make a game that is just a joy to play. While it can be weird to manage at times, the road building tools are pretty much everything I’ve ever wanted a city-building game’s road tools to be since I discovered all the weird hacky ways that people would come up with to make complex highway systems in SimCity 4’s limited grid-based system.
The game’s extensive modding support is to its great benefit as well. A lot of the small, weird things about the game can be fixed via Steam Workshop mods, as well as the ability to add new buildings and road types to make any kind of city you can think of. I’ve added enough modded near-future buildings that my cities now look vaguely cyberpunk-ish and that’s awesome.
3. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
This game is a real weird one for me in the sense that my initial reaction to it was so overwhelmingly positive that I thought it was a surefire GOTY for me, with me souring on it slightly over time due to the weird microtransaction stuff that Konami’s done and the fact that its immense length honestly made the game feel like it overstayed its welcome a bit for me (I still haven’t beaten it yet, though I plan to soon).
But that’s not enough to make me think of it as anything less than a phenomenal game, however – it’s still number 3 on my list, after all. While it’s a pity that the story is really lean when compared to previous games in the Metal Gear series, the gameplay picks up the story’s dropped ball and runs with it.
Lots of open-world games like to tout that they give players TOTAL FREEDOM™ to do WHATEVER YOU WANT™, but MGS V is one of the few games that actually make good on that promise. Any base can be tackled from any number of ways, and most gadgets have at least some kind of a use, even the more gimmicky and joke ones. It really feels like the game can accommodate any kind of play style, from my preferred style of stealthy nonlethal super spy stuff to the loud, fuck-you-you’re-all-dead-now, guns blazing approach, with no play style feeling unloved or useless.
It’s a pity that Konami has burned its bridges so thoroughly with Kojima and the game industry in general, because I would have loved to see what could have been made in a follow up to this game.
Super Mario Maker is an incredibly special game. I almost don’t even know where to begin with how good it is, so I’ll start with the obvious. The creation tools are as intuitive as you’d want them to be, with you simply clicking the blocks that you’d like to place and dragging them across where you’d like them to be. The different games you can make levels in the style of (Super Mario Bros. 1, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario Bros., to be specific) all behave pretty much in the way you’d expect them to and take advantage of the things that are unique to each game. And while sharing and exploring levels could definitely be better, even with the launch of their new bookmark site, it’s not terrible either.
But what makes Super Mario Maker so special to me is how it forces players of the game to think about game design. Exactly why do those enemy-spam levels suck? Why do those expertly-planned puzzle levels work so well? And how do I make levels that good? These are all questions that players of the game come to at some point, even the ones that don’t really make any levels. It’s really rare for a game to make people think about games in this way, and even rarer for it to come from an industry giant like Nintendo. For these reasons, I see myself coming back to Super Mario Maker for many years to come.
By the time you scrolled down and saw this as my number 1 pick of the year, you probably either rolled your eyes and groaned or nodded your head in agreement. It’s so weird to me that this game is as divisive as it is. Not because I don’t see why people can’t like it – if its sense of humor and characters don’t grab you, you probably won’t care about the story, which is the main appeal of the game – but rather because it’s just a humble little game that doesn’t really seem to me like it tried to become the phenomenon that it has. But none of that really matters, honestly, at least not to this list. What matters is what it is that makes Undertale so special, and why it was my favorite gaming experience of this year.
When you first see the game, it’s pretty easy to dismiss it as yet another retro style indie game that does nothing but vainly attempt to pull on your nostalgic heartstrings. Yet, while I am definitely a huge fan of EarthBound, the game’s main inspiration, Undertale does so much more than just violently nudge you and scream, “HEY, REMEMBER THE 90’s, KIDS?” It takes the expectations that old RPG games have implanted in your brain and fucks with them. Wanna kill some monsters to grind for levels to get some higher HP to make the game’s bullet hell battles easier? Well, they all have unique personalities and relationships to other monsters that you’re callously slashing away for your own gain, you asshole! The game will call you out on that in more ways than you would expect. It might be easy to read that and think it’s just gimmicky bullshit, but you’re going to have to trust me when I say it does it in a way that is genuine and interesting.
The game is also funny as hell. I’m going to steal what Austin said in his review of the game and say that the humor feels less like a joke being told to you and more like just bullshitting with old friends. The game utilizes its humor in such a way that it endears and disarms you to the game’s cast of characters enough to make you give enough of a shit about them for you to genuinely care when the game gets dark and serious.
And boy, that ending. The good ending to Undertale is genuinely one of the best endings to any video game I have ever played in my life, if not the best, and I don’t say that lightly. The stakes get raised ever so gradually until it dramatically spikes in such a way that genuinely captivated me in a way not many games (or any work in any medium, really) ever has before. I know the phrase “rollercoaster of emotions” gets thrown around enough when talking about this game to be groan-inducing for even its biggest fans, but there’s really no other way to describe it.
To anyone still skeptical of the hype around the game, I would recommend you just cast all your expectations aside, both negative and positive, and give the game a try. It’s not expensive and isn’t much of a time investment. If it’s not for you, then hey, that’s okay. Not everything is for everyone. But if Undertale grabs you, it doesn’t let go until the very end, and takes you an amazing journey along the way that was not only my favorite game of 2015, but one of my favorite games of all time.
Games I Wish I Had Played/Played More Of In 2015: Invisible, Inc., Her Story, Grow Home, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, Downwell, DiRT Rally, RaceRoom Racing Experience (not a 2015 game but whatever), and MGS V (like I said, I still haven’t beaten it yet despite my ~55 hours dumped into it). I probably missed out on more cool games than that, but that's all I can think of at the moment.