If you missed any of the other parts of my GOTY countdown, you can find #10-6 here and my Honorable Mentions here.

5. Rise of the Tomb Raider: The rebooted Tomb Raider was an excellent start to the series and I really enjoyed what was going on with the gameplay and the story, even if that part got a little weird real fast. This game takes everything great from the original and makes it even better. When I’m being stealthy, I always forget that you need to move around instead of just stay in one spot like some stealth games allow you to do.

One thing to know is that while I haven’t finished the game, I decided to see where the story goes and I was surprised by how much of it I predicted was correct. I won’t talk about what happens in case you are going to play it later, but I still want to see how the game gets us to that point. The best part of the game is that you are able to look around and explore between story missions. The side tombs are all really cool looking, if somewhat short. The one I just finished was amazing to look at and a lot of fun to play around with. The puzzles found in the tombs are all about 10-15 minutes long and you feel super smart when you figure out what you have to do.

4. Rock Band 4: One of the first games I purchased for my 360 was Guitar Hero 2. I loved playing that game and enjoyed getting better at it. I eventually was able to play all but 4 or so of the songs on expert. Once Guitar Hero got a little too out there for me, I switched over to Rock Band with Rock Band 2.

I played every base game from that and fell in love with the series. This iteration was when I decided to get the entire band set instead of just a guitar. I have really been enjoying this game and have started messing around with the drum set as well. The nice thing for me is that I don’t have the rhythm required to play the kick pedal right now but they included an auto kick function so that I don’t have to worry about it. I’ll probably figure it out at some point but for now I love just being able to work with the pads and that’s all.

The final thing to say is that since I am fully involved in the Rock Band structure, I have a bunch of DLC and other games to bring into RB4. If you don’t have that, you won’t get as much enjoyment from this game.

3. Far Cry 4: I played this at the very beginning of last year and it has stuck with me since then. The gameplay is very like FC3 but even more refined. When you are hunting a tiger or rhino or other dangerous animal, you get super tense, especially because you want to get good hides so all you have is your bow and arrow to hunt with. The excitement and joy that comes from successfully hunting one of these animals is really great.

The story for the game is fine but that isn’t the reason to play this game. The core gameplay is still really good and does stealth right. Sneaking around one of the outposts of the game is amazing and so much fun to do. I would always try to do each outpost as stealthily as I could. Most of the time, if I got found, I would die and then go back to trying to do the base in a stealthy manner. For me, that would mean trying to kill a couple guys with the bow and arrow to draw some of them out, let them start heading back to the outpost and then stealth killing as many as I could before they got back to base.

Overall, this was probably the second best stealth type game of the year and I can’t wait to see what Far Cry Primal is like.

2. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: I had never played an MGS game until Ground Zeroes and I loved it. I had watched all of Metal Gear Scanlon but when they got to MGSV proper, I had to stop watching because it was difficult to watch Drew stumble around the game when there was such a simple way for him to play it. I didn’t want to become the person who tried to tell him how to play since it’s all about his experience so I stopped watching.

My time with the game was an amazing one. I loved the ability to have a sidekick with me through my travels. I settled on Quiet for basically the whole game with a little D-Dog mixed in. I tried to play as much of the game as I could by being stealthy(seeing a pattern yet) and did all I could to not be lethal in my game. I didn’t go back to S-Rank the missions I missed the first time around or anything like that but I played for at least 75 hours because I was doing so many of the side quests in between story missions.

Some people have said the story isn’t that great but I really enjoyed it. Bringing together all the disparate parts of the MGS story was always a large task but they did an admirable job with it. The new characters were all pretty great and Otacon’s dad is a piece of trash.

If not for the next game, this would have been my GOTY.

1. The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt: What an amazing game and experience this was. As you can see, I play a lot of open world games. This may be the best one I have ever played and possibly will ever play. The amount of things you can go in the countryside is amazing and the sense that you are wandering around a truly living and breathing world is wonderful to behold.

The gameplay has been refined to an excellent point and should be commended for bringing everything together into an amazing package. It was a lot of fun to get back into Geralt’s shoes and see how the story played itself out. The ability to shift between the various magic abilities and sword attacks always felt weighty and terrific.

The story was always a fun thing to experience except for the Dandelion stuff. That did drag on for too long but fortunately when I figured out it was going to take a long time I just pushed through it as fast as I could to get to the good part of the story again. The ending was an excellent way to conclude the story, even if it got too far down the path of the chosen one has to save the world.

All of these things combine to make this my GOTY.

Thanks for reading this and have a Merry Christmas. Now bring on the Giant Bomb Game of the Year deliberations.

Welcome back to my GOTY countdown for 2015. Today I’ll continue my list with the 10th-6th best games of the year. I will warn you that this will be long so buckle in for some decent(maybe?) longform writing about video games. These games are in order from 10 to 1. If you missed the Honorable Mentions part of my GOTY celebrations, you can find that here.

GOTY 2015 Top 10

10. Audiosurf 2: About 7 years ago, I went from having a laptop to a Mac. When that happened, I was not able to play a lot of my games that I had bought over the years, from Sid Meier’s Pirates, to Star Wars Galactic Battleground(basically Age of Empires with a Star Wars skin so I played it all the time and created strategies for each story level because I was a supernerd during that time of my life).

The one I missed the most though was Audiosurf. I had heard about it on the Bombcast and it was so much fun to play and compete against people who played all of the weird and obscure songs I played. When I heard that Audiosurf 2 had finally gotten support for Mac I bought it right away. The game has also improved a lot on the first one by having much better visuals, sounds and different looks for how you play it.

The core gameplay is basically the same with a few tweaks. I only play the mono mode and they actually added a new wrinkle to it. As you go through the level, instead of earning points for each block you hit as well as the combo for getting sets of blocks together you just get the combos this time. The other addition is that there are now spikes that take away pieces. You can now use this to keep your combo going because it resets the timer between combos. It adds a nice bit of strategy to where you figure out the optimal path through the song by adding through subtraction. I have been playing it about 30 minutes a day since I got it a week ago and it has earned a spot at the bottom of my list for that reason.

9. Titanfall: This is definitely a game that I played throughout the year up until the summer when I finally set it aside. I won’t say much about this game since it’s been out for a long time but it is still super fun to see your Titan fall out of the sky and then get into it and wreck shop for a little bit. The movement style is also still amazing and I can’t wait to see what Respawn does in Titanfall 2. Play this game if you haven’t done so already.

8. Halo 5: Guardians: This was a weird game for me this year. I enjoyed my time with it but I couldn’t help but feel it could have been better for some reason. The campaign was well done but the mini boss fights every so often were some of the worst I’ve ever done in my time playing games and I just eventually had to kite the boss around and use my AI allies as bait so that I could finish him off. The multiplayer felt the same way. I enjoyed it but once I felt I was done playing it, I decided that I was finished with it. This is all faint praise from me but I will say that the gameplay itself is still excellent and it was nice to see characters from the previous Halo games come back. This is a Halo game and it is even more so the second Halo game in the new trilogy. If you felt that Halo 2 was problematic in the way the story was handled, you will not like how they handle it here either. Either way, it was still an enjoyable experience, even if it has been tempered by reflection.

7. Just Cause 3: This was one hell of an experience this year. I have always been a big fan of the Just Cause series, even the first one. I love how the series has grown and done things bigger and better as things went along. Rico is still an enjoyable character to play as and the supporting cast this time around is probably the best it’s been. The way it controls is still a lot of fun and the new challenge courses they set up in this game also work really well as tutorials for how to truly get the most out of everything you have at your disposal.

The reason it’s not higher are the performance issues on consoles. I’m someone who really dislikes people who get all snooty about performance issues and I don’t normally get upset about them. However, this is one game where I really wish I had a great PC to play this game with no drops in framerate. Instead of looking at all the explosions I was causing, I always had my back to them so I could hopefully have my FR be in the teens instead of single digits. I did find near the end of my time with the game that if you were in a helicopter and flew really far above the ground, then you would be able to keep a steady frame rate. This is no good for a game that brags about how awesome the explosions are though.

Overall, I love this game and this series but I can’t help being disappointed by how it didn’t reach its potential.

6. Batman: Arkham Knight: This was a game that I knew what it was and it delivered on everything it said it would. I actually loved getting back into this world and getting back to my old ways of beating up all manners of crooks and figuring out what was going to happen. The story was excellent and while the Arkham Knight’s identity grew to be easy to figure out, it was still nice to see another way they adapted that comic story for another format.

The combat system is still amazing, even after all sorts of games tried to copy it and make it their own. The Batmobile stuff was actually pretty cool to engage with and the Riddler challenges with the Batmobile may have been the most fun I’ve had with a driving sequence this year. Overall, this was not the best of the Arkham games (that would be Arkham City) but it was very much an enjoyable one.

Come back tomorrow for the best Christmas gift of all: My top 5 games of the year. Thanks for reading and have a safe and terrific holiday.

Welcome to my Game of the Year Blog. This will take place in two parts that will be done over the course of two days. The first day will be my honorable mentions, which are games that I played this year but didn’t think warranted being put into my actual Top 10. Tomorrow will be about my Top 10 games of the year. So, let’s get to the honorable mentions. These are in alphabetical order.

GOTY Honorable Mentions

1. 

   Forza Horizon 2: This was a game that I continually went back to because I was working my way through completing all of the championship series found in the game. I would only finish two championships at a time but that would take me about an hour or so since each championship involved 4 races. This game is so well made and perfectly balances the idea of a simulator and an arcade racer. The ability to drift is easy to perform but is not like a Burnout or Need For Speed where you just hit the drift button and you go. It requires a small amount of finesse and I grew to really enjoy pulling off great drifts as I was racing. This was on my Top 10 last year but there were actually great games that I played this year that allowed me to move it down.

2. 

   Mortal Kombat X: I was super excited for this game to come out but I stopped playing it fairly soon after release and I haven’t really felt any reason to return to it. I once again enjoyed the story and felt it was a great continuation from MK9. The fighting systems are still amazingly well done and the action is just as visceral as always, if not moreso.

3. 

   Rayman Legends: This was one of the Games with Gold a while back and I had heard that it was really well done and an excellent platformer. I am not someone who played platformers much growing up and since it was free I decided to check it out. I really enjoyed the mechanics and the feel of the game. However, it was almost too much of it. It feels weird to say that but it seemed like it was trying to do everything at once. I enjoyed my time with it but it was not something that I wanted to finish.

4. 

   Smite: As someone who watches but doesn’t play MOBAs, I wanted to check this out to see exactly what a more action oriented MOBA was like. In my time playing the beta, I felt like I would need to put a lot of time into the game in order to be great at it. I got to be okay playing the game but decided I didn’t want to stop playing a bunch of games I knew I wanted to play in order to play one I maybe didn’t actually want to play.

5. 

   Ziggurat: I had never really played any rogue-lites since most of them were on PC and I don’t have a gaming PC. I decided to try this one out because it seemed like a cool concept and the QL the guys did of it convinced me to check it out. I did beat the game once but I didn’t feel like trying to finish it again after that. I know that how I played is not the specific way people go about attacking these kinds of games but I had gotten everything I wanted out of it.

These are my honorable mentions for GOTY and now it’s time to get my Top 10 ready to go. Thanks for reading and enjoy everyone’s GOTY content.

1) Money in the Bank Ladder Match: The people involved are Jeff Hardy, King Booker, Finlay, CM Punk, Mr. Kennedy, Matt Hardy, Randy Orton and Edge. The match itself is a great one that gets the show off to a great start. Some of the big spots are with the main culprits (Edge, Matt and Jeff) and they are great. One of the best ones is when Jeff does a leg drop off of the top of the 20 ft ladder onto Edge, who is laying on top of a ladder. They are really talking up Mr. Kennedy as winning 7 matches against former heavyweight champions in the past 12 months. Randy is able to hit RKOs on everyone and Edge also goes and hits spears on everyone too. The match ends when everyone else is taken out of commission and Mr. Kennedy is left. He wins and cuts a promo after the match. The match was not as good as the one in 22 because they relied way too much on the signature moves of the people in the ring and not on their ability to be creative. The coolest thing about this match is that all of the commentators were talking and doing a great job of letting everyone say their share.

2) The Great Khali vs Kane: This was a total sleeper of a match that sucked the life out of the arena. Khali got the win but he is so bad it doesn’t matter.

3) MVP vs Chris Benoit (c) for the US Championship: This is really sad watching it now because Benoit was very close to the point where he killed his family and himself. The match itself was really good though and brought the crowd back into the event. There were a lot of counters as MVP knew what Benoit was trying to do. MVP hit a beautiful superplex and started to get the crowd back to his side. MVP pulled his move where he yells out Ballin’ and the crowd joined in with him. Benoit pulled out the win after the Diving Headbutt.

4)Undertaker vs Batista (c) for World Heavyweight Championship: The crowd is ready for this match. The match is worked really well and they work really well together. Batista is played up as a huge monster and they make it seem like he has an excellent chance to beat Taker. One of the best parts was when Taker does his Suicide Dive. He as always did it really well but Batista made it look terrific by doing a great job of catching Taker but making it look devastating. I’m not a huge fan of Dave’s, but he does a great job in this match. The match ends with Taker hitting the Tombstone. This is the best match of the night so far. JBL was on commentary and we got our first HEY MAGGLE’s of our lives tonight.

5) ECW Originals vs New Breed: This was a match I didn’t care about so I barely watched it. The main thing is that during the heel beatdown of the face it was Tommy Dreamer who was taking the brunt of the attacks. The other big thing is that Matt Striker was a great seller of moves, which he did well throughout the match. The Originals won after RVD hit a frog splash for the win.

6) Battle of the Billionaires- Lashley vs Umaga: This was a pretty good match. Stone Cold was the special ref and was the most over person. Lashley starts off as the hot person and destroys Umaga’s manager who tried to save him. Lashley did a suicide dive but failed so Umaga took over. There were a lot of interferences in the match but the best was when Shane came out. Austin was knocked down by Umaga and Shane came to the aid of his family. Shane went coast to coast on Lashley and it still looked really well done. Shane then took his shirt off and had a ref shirt on underneath. JR called it COLLUSION. Trump did a terrble clothesline on Vince and the fight ended with Austin hitting a Stunner on Umaga and then Vince, who tried to sneak away. Vince got caught by Lashley and had his head shaved.

7) Ashley Massaro vs Melina (c) for the Women’s Championship: This was a very sloppy match. The whole storyline was that Melina was upset that people were giving attention to Ashley because she was in Playboy but she was Champion. Melina won with a rollup and then a catfight broke out at the end. The catfight was when the people were most into the match.

8) HBK vs John Cena (c) for WWE Championship: The crowd was very hot and into the match. Shawn and Cena were excellent and killed it the entire time. Shawn was in control from the start but Cena eventually took over. Shawn and John both got busted up at different points of the match. Shawn hit a sitdown piledriver on the steps and it looked really great. Cena put on a great match while Shawn was his usual great self. Shawn and Cena both kicked out of each others finishers but Cena won after locking in the STFU for a second time.

This was a very good show which did a better job than 22. There were 3 matches on the card that seemed to kill the crowd but fortunately the match after each of those crowd killers was excellent and brought them back in. The show itself was paced really well and had an energy that ran throughout the show. This is the first of the shows that I would say watch the entire thing and just skip some of the matches that aren’t that great if you want to. Overall, this was a

4.5/5 Run GFBs

Welcome back to my somewhat scheduled look back at the 10 best Wrestlemanias of all time, as chosen by Wrestlecrap.com. Today, their number 8 choice:

Wrestlemania 22

1. Carlito and Chris Masters vs. Big Show and Kane (c) for World Tag Team Championships: We start off with me being sad because there was a time when Big Show and Kane were enjoyable to watch in the ring. Carlito is always enjoyable to watch because he has the IT factor people look for. Kane jumped from the second buckle to the outside and it looked really great. Masters and Carlito exposed the top turnbuckle to get the upper hand. They did a great job of being heels during this match. Kane got a hot tag but was locked into the Masterlock, which Big Show broke up. Kane did a chokeslam to win. The match itself was fine but the crowd was not into it.

2. 

   Money in the Bank Ladder Match: The contestnats in it are Matt Hardy, Shelton Benjamin, Finlay, RVD, Bobby Lashley and Ric Flair. Lashley started off hot but Shelton cooled him down. Shelton used a ladder to show off how amazing he is at being crazy athletic. Flair went for the case but took a superplex off the ladder. The crowd is CRAZY INTO this match, which makes it that much better. I was getting into this match and the superplex off the ladder completely sold me on it. Lashley starts cleaning house but the crowd is all the way behind RVD. Flair is taken to the back after the superplex but he comes back out. Shelton is taken out by Lashley with The Dominator and then RVD did a modified facebuster with a chair on Lashley. Matt begins doing his famous moves (leg drop and Side Effect) off the ladder. RVD did a splash off the ladder then Shelton jumped off the top rope into the ring onto a ladder with the camera work being excellent. RVD finally won after a terrific match. I'm glad this didn't come on first since the Tag Team match wouldn't have been well received. The story of the match was great and the big spots were so well done.

3. JBL vs Chris Benoit(c) for US Championship: With Benoit in this match, its always weird seeing him. JBL started off in control then Chris took over after that. He went for the Diving Headbutt quickly but JBL turned that into a superplex. Benoit was still loved by the people. JBL began mocking Eddie since he is truly great. Jillian, JBLs secretary, is there with no growth on her cheek so that just means that the Boogeyman has already eaten it off her face. Benoit hit the 3 Amigos(which looked really bad) then JBL kicked out of the headbutt. Benoit locked in the Crossface but JBL rolled over and used the ropes to win.

4. 

   Edge vs Mick Foley in a Hardcore Match: This is just a brawl with no real wrestling skill being used. Edge and Mick both get busted open in the match. Lita interferes in various parts of the match but also takes some bumps. This was another good match that was super violent and used blood to help tell the story and not just to have it. The ending where Mick goes through the flaming table is so well done and Edge winning was really nice to see. Mick got a standing ovation as he left as this was his true retirement match.

5. Booker T vs Boogeyman: This was a weird goof match that Boogeyman won after he kissed Sharmell with worms in his mouth. Booker did a great job showing his fear of the Boogeyman during the match.

6. Mickie James vs Trish Stratus (c) for Women's Championship: People were booing Trish, which was weird. The match became a back and forth that Mickie finally won. This was during the storyline where Mickie was a stalker who had a weird craziness about Trish and there were definitely parts where Mickie did her lesbian stalker things on Trish. I had one eye on this match but it was a well worked match.

7. 

   Mark Henry vs Undertaker in a Casket Match: Mark had so much water in his hair for this match. Taker still had his long hair here and I wish he had never cut it, even though he was balding. Mark tried to use the top rope but Taker did a Last Ride off of it then did a suicide dive out of the ring onto Mark. He finally Tombstoned Mark and then rolled him into the coffin for the win.

8. Vince McMahon vs Shawn Michaels in a No Holds Barred Match: At the start of the match, JR called Shawn a young man, which made me laugh. Vince tried to cheat with both the Spirit Squad and Shane coming to his aid but it didn't work. Shawn eventually took control and then just beat the hell out of Vince. He busted him open with an unprotected chair shot and then gave him an unprotected trash can shot as well. Shawn hit two elbows during the match: one from the top turnbuckle and also from the top of a 20 ft ladder. Shawn eventually hit Sweet Chin Music and won. This match was a great way to end this feud. Shawn killed Vince and Vince laid down and took it. You could see Shawn was doing something he thought he would never do again and JR did a great job of getting this across to the viewer.

9. Rey Mysterio vs Randy Orton vs Kurt Angle (c) for World Heavyweight Championship: The first thing is that Rey had his theme song played by POD on his way to the ring. When Randy came out, he was still using this old theme, which I prefer to his new one. Kurt is one of my favorites and I love his entrances. He always has great pyro and this was no exception. He had so much of it that the match itself was shrouded in smoke. They didn't give this match much time but the time they got they used really well. People were solidly behind Kurt and barely behind Rey. This was a fast paced match with a lot of big spots throughout. Some of my favorites were Kurt giving Rey and Randy a German suplex at the same time, with Rey sent flying by Randy during the move. Angle was billed as a monster during the match and he did a great job of playing that role. Randy got to hit an RKO OUTTA NOWHERE on Kurt. Rey won after hitting the 619 and a Hurricanrana Frankensteiner on Randy.

10. Torrie Wilson and Candice Michelle: I didn't watch this match because it was the pandery women's match on the card. Jerry Lawler almost soiled himself from excitement. Torrie won.

11. HHH vs John Cena (c) for WWE Championship: Cena was firmly hated at this point. Trips was the heel in the feud but was cheered the entire time by the crowd. This was a very methodical match the entire way through. Cena never got to do his full 5 Moves of Doom set since Trips was able to stop the flow of them. They went back and forth at the end with Cena hitting an FU but Trips kicking out of it. Cena finally won by reversing the Pedigree into the STFU for the win.

This was a well done Wrestlemania that I enjoyed more than Wrestlemania 8. There were better matches that I was interested in watching on this card and I enjoyed watching it. This show earns itself a:

4/5 Run GFBs

Come back Friday and see what I think of Wrestlecrap.com's #7 Wrestlemania of all time, Wrestlemania 23. Thanks for reading and see you back here soon.

HT101

The beginning of my new series is here. How it will work is I will just go through each match and discuss my feelings about each match. At the end, I'll give it a rating out of 5 Run GFBs.

Wrestlemania VIII (1992)

This is at the end of Hogan's run with WWF at the time so they had a double main event of Hogan facing Sid Justice and Ric Flair defending the WWF Title against Macho Man Randy Savage. As I was watching, I was taking notes so that I could write more detailed information about each match and remember some of the jokes I was thinking about when I was watching it. Let's get to my thoughts:

Shawn Michaels vs El Matador (Tito Santana): This was the curtain jerker of the night. Bobby Heenan and Gorilla Monsoon are on commentary. Heenan started making jokes about Reba McEntyre and Tito before the match began. Gorilla started talking about how you could call a 900 number so you could hear from all of the winners from that night. Tito was fairly over, which is surprising since I don't really remember people really thinking much about him. Shawn was already on point with his storytelling and working through a match at this time. The match was fairly slow which did not help out Shawn show off his great abilities. Tito was using a bunch of headlocks and there were weird pinfall attempts using side headlocks. This was not a great match to start the show but I really liked Shawn, especially knowing what he was going to become.

Jake Roberts vs Undertaker: Taker was already so over. Paul Bearer was there and he was such an underappreciated manager at the time, because he did so much stuff nonverbally. Heenan during this match and throughout the night was so great in his role as a heel. At the start of the match, Jake was being stalked by Taker and he tried to figure out how to beat Taker during the match. Taker was already working on making himself into the person we would grow to love over the years. This Wrestlemania at the start is showing us what the future will look like, and actually the next couple of decades as well. The end of the match was great since Jake hit two DDTs and Taker kicked out of both of them. Taker finally hit the Tombstone Piledriver on the outside, rolled Jake inside and pinned him.

Rowdy Roddy Piper vs Bret Hart for the Intercontinental Title: This is the first great match of the night. Piper was a heel but people really loved him. I guess this was the start of the time where Bret was starting to play up how he was from Canada and the crowds started booing him here in the US. In this match, Piper was doing an amazing job of telling the story of the match with Bret doing a great job of using his skills to help sell the match physically. Piper then busted Hart opened with a sucker punch so he started to bleed from his forehead for the rest of his match. There were some REF SHENANIGANS going on towards the end but it ended with Bret winning the match as he countered a sleeper hold off one of the corners into a pin to win the match and the IC Title.

8 Man Tag: This was definitely a cool down match before the first of the two main events. It was just weird and how it didn't work out in any way because some of the people in the match were not at the height of their powers. Jimmy Hart was out with the heels and it was great to see him doing his thing. He made the match enjoyable, but that was it. The faces won and it was unmemorable.

Ric Flair and Macho Man Randy Savage for WWE Championship: The story behind this match was that Miss Elizabeth had once been with Flair and he supposedly had compromising photos of her with him. Mr. Perfect is with Flair and he is doing such a great job on the outside of the ring. Savage is truly angry, and knowing things about him from his real life, he probably was a little bit angry because of this. Flair during the match is so smooth and cocky about his greatness throughout the match. Flair gets busted open(of course) and he really played it up for the rest of the match. Mr. Perfect saved Flair after the Flying Elbow and gave him a weapon to use to try and win. However, Savage kicked out of the attempt made by Flair. Miss Elizabeth came down to the ring and was excellent in her way of conveying the feeling of what the crowd was thinking. Savage finally won with a rollup where he held onto Flair's trunks to secure the victory.

Tatanka vs Rick Martell: Now we get into the second low part of the show. This match was very underwhelming. Tatanka was very over but the early 1990s crowds are crazy and were not super smart in their understanding of what was truly good and what wasn't. The big thing I noticed was that the announcers didn't really care about the match either since they were talking about the world title match. Anyway, Tatanka won but I didn't really care.

Money Inc vs Natural Disasters for WWF Tag Team Championships: Uh oh. We have our second underwhelming match in a row. N.D. was so slow and looked like crap. I was reminded of Kane and Big Show now when watching N.D. now. Jimmy Hart was once again out with Money Inc during this match so it made the match at least a little bit better than it could have. N.D. were the faces and they won but because of disqualification so Money Inc retained the titles.

Owen Hart vs Skinner: This is what I wrote about this match: I think this match will be shorter than how long it took me to write this sentence. The other thing is that Skinner looks somewhat like Luke Harper. Owen won and now for the final main event.

Sid Justice vs Hulk Hogan: When the match started, I thought it would be better if it was a promo off. If you don't know about Sid, he is truly terrible at stringing sentences together. Here is a video of some of his more impressive botches. Gorilla Monsoon, around the middle of the match, says "Are we looking at the end of Hulkamania?" Sid then put together two sentences together and I had to pause the video on the WWE Network (only $9.99) so I could gather my thoughts. The match ends in a DQ and this is a terrible way to send the people home. The Ultimate Warrior did make a shocking return to save Hogan from a beatdown by Papa Shango and Sid but it was too little to late for me.

Now, I want to talk about one of the promos that was given during the show. Lex Luger shows up and talks about how he is a part of the World Bodybuilder Federation, the bodybuilding fed that Vince set up but was forced to shut down because of the first steroid scandal they went through. He also looked like he had taken ALL OF THE STEROIDS, he was so bulked up. The other thing that was both weird and hilarious was how he pronounced plethora. He pronounced it ple-thoor-a instead of ple-thur-a like normal people do. The final thing he did was drink milk, to supposedly tell us to always drink our milk.

This was a good Wrestlemania to start off with because it allowed me to see one that I hadn't seen this one before so I didn't know what was going to happen. There were three good matches on the card that I would suggest you see. The three are Jake/Taker, Piper/Bret and Savage/Flair. They all tell a really good story and are also pretty good wrestling matches as well.

In the end, Wrestlemania VIII gets 3 Run GFBs out of 5. Join me later this week(probably on Thursday), where I will be taking a look at Wrestlemania 22.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

HT101

It seems like everyone is doing a blog series these days so I wanted to get in on it. My fandom of wrestling is known but not well known. Wrestlemania 31 is coming up and I have wanted to continue to grow my knowledge of the WWE and this is my chance to do so. I'm going to begin watching through the 10 best Wrestlemanias as decided by wrestlecrap.com. I'll be doing it from #10 to #1. I'll do it over 2 days because they are always the longest show of the year. Tonight and tomorrow will be Wrestlemainia 8, then moving onto Wrestlemania 22, 23, 19, 14, 21, 10, 20, 3 and 17. Each blog will come the day after I finish watching the event. You can look forward to reading my thoughts on Wrestlemania 8 on Monday.

Here it is: the final entry in my Game of the Year series. Once I finish this, I'll be making my actual list where you can view all of them in one place. For those who care about spoilers, this will be the only blog of mine that has them. If you want to see my other blogs about my list, please check out the links below:

#2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10 and HM

Dragon Age Inquisition

Here we go. Let's talk about Dragon Age: Inquisition. This is the best game of the year, for me, and it wasn't really close. I loved Origins but never played 2 because everyone who I knew that played it really disliked it. When reading up and watching video of this game, I was reminded of how much I loved Origins. That was enough to convince me to buy it.

As I'm playing the game, I am continually distracted by random side quests, collecting random flowers and rocks and just other things that continually popped up. This was more than enough to cause me to not play the story missions for at least 20 hours of playtime. However, the true strength of the game is the characters that you are introduced to throughout the game. My team at the start of the game was me(Rogue), Varric, Iron Bull and eventually Vivienne. This was a time when I was dying a lot while playing. I eventually went to the forums here and started poking around to see if I was doing something wrong. I learned that I only needed one Rogue, myself, so I added Cassandra and was then able to start rolling through the game. With all of these characters, I felt they were the best characters to hand around with. Varric was terrific because he always was sarcastic and awful to those around him but as you got to know him, he turned out to care for everyone and was the way he was so people would never get close to him. When Hawke returned, you could see that Varric really cared for him and was all about enjoying his time with him.

Iron Bull is probably my favorite character in the game. With him and Vivienne in my party, the banter between the two of them is my favorite bits of conversation in the game. The respect and admiration that he treats her with, especially when he gives everyone else around him crap nonstop, it really endeared him to me. The other part of their relationship that is hilarious is that he'll do everything that she tells him to do, no matter what it is. Cassandra is a wonderfully done character because her sincerity and devotion was something that really spoke to me. The reveal that she is a fan of Varric's smutty novels was so well done and it was hilarious to see how embarrassed she was once you found out about it.

Now, the time to talk about the actual gameplay is here. The combat is weird for me. I loved the tactical feel of Origins but when I tried to do that with this game, it really fell apart for me and the AI was well done enough that I was never feeling like it was just me fighting everyone of the field. I know that some people don't like the hamstringing of everything but I feel that it works for how I'm playing. I do wish that I had access to more than just 8 abilities but I've realized that it won't change just because I want it to. The flow of combat seems to work real well with how they have the game set up for you and I really enjoy it.

The story is one that I feel works well and there are some pretty good choices that I really had to think about, including the Hawke choice where you are learning what actually happened inside the explosion at the beginning of the game. Now, I have not beaten the game yet so I don't know what the ending is like. I just finished the Well of Sorrow quest and pissed Morrigan off since I was the one who took the Well for myself. I am still taking my time through the game since I am finishing off the third of three dragons at Emprise du Lion right now.

We have now come to the end of this year's look at the best games of the year. I want to thank all of you for reading and joining me on this journey.

HT101

Before we begin, this one will be a short one since it's Christmas Eve and I'll be spending it with my family once they get back from church. If you've missed any of my other entries in the Game of the Year series, click on the links below:

#3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10 and HM

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

As a Lord of the Rings fan, I was somewhat excited for this game. I had played The Two Towers game on Gamecube and really enjoyed it as well as Guardians of Middle Earth, the MOBA-lite that they put out last year. As the reviews for this started coming in and I saw the Quick Look for it, I realized that I needed to play this game. I am very glad that I played this game.

This game has so many great things going for it that predestined it to be loved by me. I love open world games, Assassin's Creed and the Arkham games. This game takes all of them and combines them together in one amazing game. The ultimate reason this game became so great was the Nemesis system. That was such an amazing mechanic to put into the game that would drive you to become better. When I was starting to play, I was dying a lot. I began dying to certain people a lot because I was getting so mad and would die over and over again. I finally had to remind myself of the most important thing when you play a game with Batman combat mechanics: You need to have a lot of patience at the start of the game so you can then get more experience to become better. Once I remembered this, I got so much better at the game. I then only died about 5 or 6 times more from then until the end of the game. I went back and played it again on Monday of this week and was able to get right back into it. I eventually made my way into one of the strongholds and was taking on around 20 guys at once and I didn't feel scared because of how much of a badass I was. Once I got my combo up, I just started branding random dudes and then just murdered all of them.

Branding is also an amazing mechanic for the game. When you finally get it, you can then just obliterate everyone in your way. It is so much fun to brand all of the bodyguards of a warchief, go to confront him and then turn his bodyguards on him and watch the amazing happen as they did all of the work for me.

The bad things about this game are few but are enough to keep it from the top slot. The first is the story. Holy cow does it suck. There is no real reason to care for Talion but they sure do try to make you care about him. The reasons for him not being able to die are fine but its not enough to make me care. The other thing is that at some point you get too powerful and it just becomes you trying to find ways to make it fun. While playing earlier this week, I stopped playing because there was no carrot in front of me besides trying to kill or brand all of the warchiefs that were there.

With my number one game appearing tomorrow, I want to thank you for reading and I hope you come back tomorrow to learn all about inquisitions and how they come to be in the Age of Dragons.

HT101

With the top 3 being revealed starting today, I want to thank you for reading all of my Game of the Year blogs so far. It has been a lot of fun doing it and I look forward to finishing them up tomorrow and Thursday. Once I finish with my daily blogs, the list of my top 10 will be posted as well. Once again, if you have missed any of my other blogs from this year, click on the links below:

#4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10 and HM

Titanfall

When I started the year, if you had told me that Titanfall would be on my Game of the Year list, I would have called you crazy. The last FPS that I really got into was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the first game in the renaissance of the FPS on consoles. I became pretty good at that since I was playing it every day for at least an hour when I was still in college. After that, I hadn't really played much Call of Duty or other FPS besides the campaigns of some of the Call of Duty's in the past. I got Titanfall because it just seemed like it was totally different from CoD and seemed like it might be enough to get me back into a game like it. I, however, stopped playing it about a month after I picked it up, even though I had bought the season pass.

After a couple months though, I got back in when they announced that the Frontier Defense mode was coming into the game. I love me a horde style mode and the gameplay for Titanfall was still a lot of fun. With the background on my time with this game, lets talk about the gameplay and why this is in my top 3 this year.

This game is one fun game. The way it controls and how the different parts work with each other meld together so well. The movement was such an amazing eye-opener for me that I really don't want to play any other FPS' if they don't have something like what Titanfall has. When you are running toward and building and I know that I can just traverse over the building without having to go around it, I get excited. The animations that happen when you climb over the building just looks really cool as you are clambering over the building. It doesn't look smooth and it has that sort of lived-in feel that they are just doing the least amount of movement required to make their way up the building. As Jeff has said whenever he's taken a look at Titanfall, whenever you get into a Titan it looks really freaking cool. If you just climb in from the front, or you slide from behind and it grabs you, or you jump at it and your Titan grabs you out of the air, to sliding in the top through a hole at the top, they men and women of Respawn did an amazing job of really showing you that Titans are cool and will never not be cool.

We've spent a lot of time in the movement, so let's talk about everything else. The game makes great use of the guns that it has. Some people don't care for the fact that it has so few guns but I don't mind. I actually have tried out all of the weapons, which I normally don't do, so it was nice to be able to not feel pressured to just try out a few weapons and then land on one. The aiming and actual shooting works well, which is to be expected since many of these people worked on Call of Duty 4, which is possibly the best CoD of all time. The various modes are ones that you find in most other games of the same kind. I normally played Attrition but would also play on Pilot Hunter or Last Titan Standing to get some different styles of the game mixed in.

Now, the main reason that this game jumped up my list to this place is because of the Regeneration process. In order to get to the next level of Regeneration, you have to go through various challenges to be able to Regenerate. The challenges are set up so you have to use weapons, ordinance(grenades), Titan weapons and other things to be able to Regenerate. When I first found out about this, I was not excited because it meant I would need to use some guns that I normally don't use, like sniper rifles. My favorite one so far was using the satchel charge(their version of C4) to kill pilots. As I was playing and working my way through this challenge, I was super into cloaking up and then getting as close to the person as possible before I threw it and detonated it. Now, this sometimes ended up with me killing myself and the other person but it was always fun knowing that after they died, they always wondered what the hell happened before watching the killcam. The best thing about it was that whenever I actually got a kill, I would always say "F--- you" and sometimes I would cackle it was an especially amazing kill.

Now, time for the bad news. The first thing is that the community for this game has seriously taken a dive after the release of Call of Duty. On Attrition, there are maybe 3500 people in the world playing it, with most of the players being in America. Frontier Defense, which is maybe the best mode in the game, has around 500-700 people, so I can always get into a game but it would be nice to have more people playing this game. The second thing is that the scopes you get for reaching certain levels of kills are not that great. It's a really weird thing to have happen since scopes and sights are normally supposed to make it easier to shoot the gun but when you get some of the other sights they just aren't as good as the iron sights. The one that I really dislike is the holo-sight for the first SMG you unlock, the R-97. It is a super busy sight that has a lot of different lines and the iron sight is just better for the purpose that it was designed for.

Thanks for reading and come back tomorrow, where the number 2 game will bring a shadow over the middle of the Earth.

HT101