by frontman12
The close calls for 2023 were Dredge and Hogwarts Legacy. I only just started Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, but my initial impression hasn't been particularly strong.
I decided to again revisit some of my favorite games in addition to playing the 2023 releases I was interested in. As a reminder, I pick favorites from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and 30 years ago to replay. Last year I played two games from each year in question. This year, however, I only played The Last of Us Part 1 to represent 2013 (although the remake was technically released in 2022). I had intended to replay Splinter Cell: Blacklist, but just didn't get around to it.
Showing 1-10 of 15 items
1993 Favorite #1 (1993 GOTY list #7) - February 1993, Konami While attempting to create top ten lists for some of my earliest gaming years, I listed any game that I even remembered playing. Since I was only 8 years-old in 1993, I didn’t have the budget to really ball out of control with my game purchases. And in some years in the 90s I didn’t even play ten unique games. All that to say, I really hated trying to play this game again. For the entirety of the time I played this game as a child, I never completed the second stage (The Western Movie), and playing the game again brought all that frustration back to the forefront. Buster has this strange momentum as he jumps and dashes and I’m not sure that I ever got accustomed to it. Even though I had access to save states while playing this on my modern PC, I still wasn’t interested in putting more effort in.
1993 Favorite #2 (1993 GOTY list #8) - September 1993, Virgin Games USA Oh God - ditto the above. The Spot (I guess we’ll call it that) also has an odd sense of momentum, and its body is so small that it’s difficult to tell whether you’re touching a damaging obstacle or not. There are times that you just swear its gloved hand grabs onto a balloon or rope in the air only to just miss it and quickly fall down. However, the biggest issue with the game is the camera. Imagine if whenever Mario jumped to stomp a goomba, the camera followed him up in the air such that you couldn’t see the goomba any more. This is a constant issue in Cool Spot, and you’re always unexpectedly landing on things that hurt your soft little Spot body. I stopped after reaching stage 4, entitled “Off Da Wall.” Cool Spot is cool, so the levels have cool names, you see.
2003 Favorite #1 (2003 GOTY list #6) February 11, 2003 - EA Pacific I enjoyed playing Generals back in high school, although the “General Abilities” (abilities that can be used to change the battlefield that are mostly unrelated to your actual base) made my friends want to skip the multiplayer component. Nonetheless, I found these abilities exciting to use in the single-player campaigns. I played a few missions of the USA campaign this year, but got a bit stuck on the mission “Blue Eagle.” Despite my love for real-time strategy (RTS) games, I’m quite a poor player, and I tend to mass powerful, identical units rather than build a balanced force. In some games this works well, while in games like Generals where individual units are weaker, it is a liability. I found the GLA, the faction meant to represent middle-eastern terrorists, to be an exhausting enemy. I enjoyed what I played, but marvel at how Red Alert 2 remains a superior RTS despite being released three years earlier.
2003 Favorite #2 (2003 GOTY list #9) November 18, 2003 - Ubisoft Paris XIII was my first taste of cell-shaded graphics, and it really captured my imagination when I first played it. I thought it was exciting to be inside of a comic book and loved the written “Nooooo” and “Aghhhh” that accompanied enemy deaths. At one time I was nuts about first-person shooters, and I’d try and play every one that was released as long as the critical reception wasn’t abysmal. I did get quite far during my replay this year, to chapter 14 (of 15). At this point, the game’s lack of precision began to affect my experience. In this section (entitled “SSH1”) I was supposed to traverse an area without being detected, but I felt that I got too little feedback from the game about whether I was visible or not. Unfortunately, the cutscenes also featured no sound on my modern system, so I missed David Duchovny’s legendarily blasé performance.
2013 Favorite #1 (2013 GOTY list #3) September 2, 2022 - Naughty Dog As I mentioned above, this pick could be considered cheating. I had some extra motivation to pick this game as well, since The Last of Us TV series premiered on HBO (or “Max”) in January of 2023. I wanted the story to be fresh on my mind, and to be able to compare the scenes in the show to those in the game. Anyway, The Last of Us (the game, but also the show) is outstanding. The gameplay of the series exceeds that of every other Naughty Dog IP, and the story has a tight and narrow focus that serves it well as opposed to the bloated Part 2. I find it challenging in both games to witness the miserable decisions made by the playable characters in cutscenes and in terms of the overall story direction, but Neil Druckmann has a specific story he wants to tell and by golly he’s not letting YOU get in the way. I loved the post-apocalyptic world and the survival horror gameplay, but there are times when I wondered why Neil didn’t just direct a film.
#10 - October 31, 2023 - Don't Nod Like a lot of folks, I was pretty surprised to see this emerge from the developer who brought us Life is Strange. Even more surprising coming from Don't Nod is the weak writing featured in the journal entries and in-game missives. The central climbing mechanic of the game is well done and the pillar that you’re climbing is visually compelling, but it really would’ve added something to the game if I were to find interesting lore pieces upon reaching each new threshold. The other things that the player can engage with - the murals, conch shells, and stacking stones, are equally dry. However, I did enjoy witnessing my character’s interaction with the ballast (the small blue creature that accompanies your climber), and then learning about the fate that befell the species. That climbing, though! I delighted in strategizing a way to ascend these varied surfaces (where do I jam my pitons!?), and found the alternating trigger style of control to be tactile in a way not often seen in non-VR video games.
#9 - April 12, 2023 - Pmurph Games Golf has always translated well to video game format, but I began to look a bit more actively at golf releases after Golf Story won my heart in 2017 (and Sports Story broke it in 2022). Golfinite is a very solid, arcadey golf experience with a fun twist - you can purchase balls and abilities that allow you to modify your shots. These include things like “aftertouch,” which pushes your ball slightly in a direction you choose after it lands, and drop, which makes your shot fall rapidly in the case that you’ve overhit it. While at first I was reluctant to use these skills and wanted to play the courses like a “purist,” the courses are tuned to make them necessary and I had more fun once I embraced them. You’ll often use a few of them in concert to conquer a particularly difficult hole, which makes you feel like Tiger Merlin. Lastly, the developer Pmurph Games is quite an active presence in the game’s community, adding an additional putting distance setting upon my suggestion.
#8 - July 21, 2023 - Nintendo EPD/Eighting Outside perhaps the original run of SNES Donkey Kong Country games and the Yoshi series (Super Mario World II, Yoshi’s Crafted World), Pikmin is my favorite Nintendo franchise. There’s something exciting and calming to me about navigating these compelling spaces littered with human detritus only to slowly and systematically collect each piece. My first and second experiences with Pikmin were playing the co-op modes in Pikmin 2 and Pikmin 3, but 2023 marks the first time I actually owned a Nintendo system when a new Pikmin game was released. Pikmin 4 was a great time, and reminded me a little of 2022’s Nobody Saves the World in terms of how there is an ever-expanding list of goals for you to meet. You’ll often locate survivors in dungeons, and these survivors will end up having specific tasks they’d like you to complete (structures erected, survivors saved, different types of enemies defeated, etc.). I also loved Oatchi, who gets better and better through upgrades until he’s a one pup wrecking machine. The only reason the game doesn’t rank higher for me is because there were a lot of modes I didn’t like - dandori challenges for starters, but especially the night missions and dandori battles. These modes demanded frantic direction and introduced a lot of chaos. The developers seemed to recognize that these aren’t for everyone, and provided players with the option to skip dandori battles and have an NPC crewmember complete them for you. I only began using this option towards the end of my time with the game when failures became much more common, but these sorts of skips never feel good for a player to use.
#7 - April 27, 2023 - Eleven Puzzles After playing developer Eleven Puzzles’ free cooperative puzzle game Unsolved Case in 2022, my co-op partner and I were anxiously awaiting this more substantial release in 2023. I love the game’s concept, that you and your co-op partner are detectives that’ve been drawn into a killer’s trap, as well as the game’s stylish comic book-style artwork. Outside of one ill-advised puzzle that involved “wind predictions,” the puzzles were challenging while remaining intuitive. My co-op partner and I are anxiously awaiting the next game from Eleven Puzzles entitled Parallel Experiment, which is slated to release in 2024.
#6 - August 15, 2023 - Hungry Couch Games Over the years I’ve developed a fondness for top-down shooters, which I think is due to the amount of information I’m given to work with. I can often see around walls and create plans in ways I could only dream of in an FPS, which gives me a feeling of power and control that I tend to crave in video games. Although the combat areas are often too big in Black Skylands to give the player the same sense of control, it couples its top-down shooter gameplay with an open world in such a way that it got me in a stranglehold. You’ll travel from island to island in a skyship, clearing them of raiders and collecting resources and items. The islands are cleverly designed and often require deft use of your grappling hook to navigate. Upon clearing these islands, you’ll witness them change colors on the world map from red to blue. You can use the resources you find to upgrade your ship and the weapons you prefer to use, while you can equip up to three amulets and multiple powers to further enhance your playstyle. The game includes a number of wonderful quality of life features, from your moth’s ability to transport resources (or you) back to your ship from anywhere to the ability to teleport your skyship from one fuel station to another. Lastly, the story is really more compelling that it has any right to be. If you like the style of open world games developed by Avalanche Studios, I’d feel comfortable saying you’d like Black Skylands.