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Jovafy

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My favourite 2017 games

I had a similar list last year. The idea of this list is to help me keep track of games coming out in 2017 that I'm interested in playing or have played. I definitely won't be able to play everything on this list thanks to lack of money and time. When I have finished (or played enough of) one of these fine 2017 releases, I'll write up some of my thoughts about that game and rank it against other games I've played. So if I haven't written anything about a game on this list it means I have not yet played it.

List items

  • Wow! I haven't loved a game this much in a while. I watched about 18 episodes of Beast in the East before caving and buying this game but watching those episodes did not diminish my enjoyment one bit.

    The combat and gameplay in general may be a bit clunky at times but once you get to know the systems it's just fine. There were also more activities than I cared for; I didn't touch pocket car racing, underground fight clubs, weapon crafting, or most of the mini games at all. Good thing is that the game does not force you to. I did a decent amount of cabaret club and real estate though which are alright.

    The main thing for me was the story. I really liked the writing and the plot in general. It's filled with great characters, great plot points and memorable moments. And that soundtrack is banging!

    This was my first Yakuza game but after finishing 0 I was completely sold on the series. I immediately pre-ordered Kiwami, bought 4 and 5 from the PSN-sale, and started a second playthrough of 0 just to see the story again. I'll need to check a summary of 2 and 3 after I finish Kiwami and hopefully I can finish Kiwami, 4, and 5 before 6 comes out.

    END OF THE YEAR EDIT: I still love this game. During my second playthrough I went through a lot of the side stuff. In fact, I went through all of it, except one dancing side quest with Kiryu. I ended up loving the Cabaret and the Real estate, and most of the side quests were great, and I even enjoyed most of the minigames. This game is really good.

  • I used to play a lot of Tekken back in the day. Sure, I didn't know what I was doing. I just mashed some stuff out and hoped for the best. Just like all other fighting games I played. Now the situation is a bit different.

    I got really into fighting games when SFV came out. I actually started learning how to play those games. Before that I didn't think about stuff like punishing, frame advantages, startups, recoveries, mix-ups, confirming, footsies, or any of that jazz. I just did stuff and if it worked I was a god among men, and if it didn't I just had to do it more, harder, and faster. So, after putting over 700 hours into SFV, I was really looking forward to putting my new-found knowledge and way of thinking to Tekken.

    I'm really enjoying Tekken and I'm having a great time actually learning the game after so long when I first played Tekken 3. But, man, if it's tough. I picked up on the combos pretty easily, but just moving the character around in this game is difficult for me. Most of the time, I forget that I can actually sidestep. And figuring out when to sidestep and how to use that smartly is a different thing. And don't even get me started on canceling back dashes into more back dashes. But I guess that's a big thing (among others) in this game, moving tactically, and I just need to put more hours into it to learn the ropes. And I'm not complaining, learning this stuff is fun!

    Speaking of learning, I wish the game had some sort of tutorial because there are so many hidden mechanics that are not explained anywhere. Thanks to Aris's streams, I have learned so much more about this game than what the game actually told me. Sure, most of this stuff is old news to Tekken veterans but for a noob like me? The world is full of surprises.

    I also wish that the game was a bit snappier. Load times are pretty long (on PS4 at least) and why on earth do I have to sit through the loading screen again after hitting "Rematch"? And while we're complaining, whose idea was it to allow those stupid intractable customization items in ranked matches? In player matches, I'll allow it although I'd rather not, but for ranked? Get out of here with your dumb pistols, pizzas and battleaxes.

    Anyway, I'm really enjoying Tekken 7 and I'm really looking forward to getting better at it.

    END OF THE YEAR EDIT: I ended up buying Tekken on the PC too and I'm still loving it. I haven't put as much time into it as I would have liked (I'm only about a 100 hours in total) but man have those hours been great. SFV is still my game but there's something in Tekken that just gets me so turned up.

  • Man! What a game!

    After 98 hours, 104 shrines, and 180 Korok seeds I finally defeated Ganon. And I had tremendous fun all the way through. I loved just making my way through the world searching for shrines, Koroks, side-quests, materials, and cool places just to hang at. Most of the main story was a bit forgettable but all the stuff surrounding that more than make up for it. Breath of the Wild makes the whole open world exploring fun in a way that I haven't experienced in a long while.

    Other people have said it already but I think it's really smart that BotW doesn't populate your map with icons, unless those are icons that you yourself placed. I loved how the game basically says "go and figure this stuff on your own" and then applies that to most things, whether it's combat encounters, traversal, side activities, or whatever.

    I once again find myself at the situation where I'm at a loss for words when it comes to writing about a game I really liked.

    EDIT: So I had Zelda picked as an easy GOTY. Heh, Yakuza just came in and swooped that title from its grasp. And now that I've poured more hours into Tekken I'm starting to feel like I'm also enjoying that more than BotW. Looking back now after a few months, I don't think of this game with the same fondness that I do some other games. It's still a brilliant piece but I don't think I love it as much as I thought I did.

  • I never played the original (or any Yakuza game before 0) so I didn't know much about Kiwami. I fell in love with Yakuza 0 and I was super excited to play Kiwami, but unfortunately it didn't quite meet my expectations. I still enjoyed it a lot but not as much as I wanted to.

    MY biggest problem is probably there in the story. The story on its own is fine and I did like it but my problem is in the presentation. Although they have upgraded the engine and the graphics, they're still using the old mo-cap and camera angles which sometimes creates these weirdly janky looking cutscenes. It's a car crash of the old and the new.

    It also feels a bit weird how 0 had a much more modern feeling story even though it happened chronologically 17 years before Kiwami. Maybe that wouldn't be as weird if I hadn't come piping hot from 0 straight to Kiwami or if I had played the original Yakuza before. Kiwami also has some weird pacing sometimes. There were a bunch of times when I had to do fetch-quest-esque stuff running between 2 points for a while for no real reason except for stretching that stuff out. And sometimes after cutscenes Kiryu would think to himself "I should go here for no apparent reason except that the plot requires me to be there". But hey, it's a PS2 game with PS2 stuff and PS2 writing.. I can't be too mad.

    Also, I wasn't too hot on the idea that tougher enemies went down to this state where they started regenerating health and I had to do an extra special heat move to stop them. I just felt like I was being limited in the fights as I couldn't tackle them the way I wanted to. Other than that the combat and gameplay in general felt great.

  • I occasionally get that itch to do some of that golfing in those video games and Everybody's Golf is a brilliant way to scratch it. I enjoyed it all the way through and I'll keep returning to it to play a few courses here and there. It has some daily challenge stuff in it so there's something to do when I do come back.

    I was a bit disappointed by the load times which are massive. Especially when you screw up your shot early in the course and try to redo the whole thing, since there's no restart button. Also I expected to have some nice laid back fun with this game but it turns out I get extremely hyped and salty when I manage a good shot or screw up, respectively.

    I do like me some video game golf, though.

  • I usually don't like horror games. Or movies. It's not that I don't like the horror aspect. In fact, I like it. It's just that I can't stand jump scares. I'm a very jumpy person and jump scares always get me, even when I see them coming. And they never "feel good". I find them cheap, dumb, and annoying. Keeping that in mind, Little Nightmares was perfect for me.

    Little Nightmares is eerie. Its atmosphere is spooky, oppressing, unpleasant, and creepy. That's the kind of horror that I love. Little Nightmares is like Limbo and Inside but amped up. And on that note it's about the same length, which I feel works perfectly for this game. It was a great way to experience this game by sitting down in the evening, grabbing a few beers and playing through Little Nightmares in one sitting.

  • I haven't been this up and down on a game in a long time. One hour I hated it, the next I loved it, and then back to hating it. In the end, I ended up on a positive note but I can't rank it very high.

    Let's start with the pros. I loved the art style, music, voices and the world. The game looks and sounds gorgeous. Also, I liked how the story is basically just Dark Souls with bugs (as tired as that sentence is). And it was a good time adventuring around the world, finding secrets, and doing all that metroidvania jazz.

    On the downside though, I did not enjoy the controls very much at all. The platforming is clunky for the most part and the combat is atrocious. It gets slightly more acceptable once you get the charm to prevent your character from recoiling after hitting an enemy. And then again slightly better once you upgrade your weapon and its range. But then there's the problem of boss fights which you apparently have to defeat with the health you got because there is just no time to heal during those fights.

  • I was hoping Slime Rancher would be a perfect podcast-game for me, and it was for a while, but then I burned out on it. I had a good time for the most of the 14 hours I spent on the ranch but then I had no interest in going back.

    The biggest gripe was just a sense of not having any balance to the things you were doing. I could easily spend an entire in-game day at the farm doing farm stuff, which means that I then didn't really have time to explore. And if I went exploring, I had to come back to a farm that was on fire and then spend a good chunk of time getting everything back to normal.

    I often felt that the farm could use some automation to help feeding the slimes and taking off the workload from the player. Sure, you can upgrade your corrals to have autofeeders and automatic plort collectors, but then you have to keep refilling and emptying those respectively. And the tanks aren't very big for either of those so they won't help long. Not to mention your character's carrying capacity which is minuscule. I guess that's the developer's way of saying that your farm needs you and you shouldn't go on super long trips. It's still not fun having that strict of an inventory limit.

  • This is a pretty fun collection to have easy access to those childhood favorites. I'm a big Darkwing Duck fan and it's great to get to play that game again. And hopefully to suck less at it this time.

    The collection also served as a great reminder on how atrocious that Xbox 360 controller's d-pad is. Foof, I need to figure out another controller situation.

  • So, I'm kinda new to fighting games and I'm brand spanking fresh to MvC -games. It always seemed impossible to me to have any idea on what's going on on the screen but now that I've put some work to it, I'm starting to get the hang of it.

    The gameplay is fun, engaging, and seems to be pretty deep from what I can tell. And I'm having a ton of fun learning the ropes. Which is good, and enough to keep me going but there's a lot of stuff that I don't like.

    I'm not one to care that much about graphics but dang does this game look like butt. On the technical side it's fine but the models are pretty bad. With lanky Ryu with his small head and what looks like a massive beer belly. And sure these characters come from different and different looking franchises, but I just feel like there's a real hard clash with how some characters look compared to others.

    And then there's the fact that there's a fraction of the roster I'm interested in and then a further fraction of characters that I'm interested in playing. But I think I've found my team that I'm happy with.

    Anyway, I like playing it. And that's the part that I care about.

    END OF THE YEAR EDIT: So, I kinda fell off of this game. I still think it's fine. Good, even. I just don't think it's my fighting game.

  • Man, what a bummer.

    I love the original Banjo games. Banjo Kazooie is one of those games that I play through every year. When it was announced that the guys who made those games were making a new similar thing, I was super excited. Now that I've put 13 hours into Yooka-Laylee, I've decided to put it down with disappointment. No, I did not finish it. I couldn't. I had to struggle to like the game and once I got to the 5th world, I just couldn't take it anymore.

    Yooka-Laylee isn't bad per se. It's just goes off the mark more often than it should. You know, what.. There were actually plenty of moments where I exclaimed "This is bad! This is bad design! Who thought this was a good idea?"

    We all saw the quick look with Dan struggling against the first boss. I wish that was as bad as it gets but no. The second boss took probably 10-15 minutes to beat. Not because it was difficult but because the boss can take an ass-load of damage before dying. So you just spend 10 minutes running in a circle, slowly chipping this guy's health down. What a tedious thing! The third boss was alright, although I took damage for no apparent reason every time I attacked the boss. And the fourth boss was so stupidly bad that I didn't actually even want to try and defeat it.

    Then there's the fact that sometimes you have no idea what you're supposed to be doing. There were plenty of cases where I was left wondering if I needed a power that I'll get in a future stage or if I have all that I need for the solution already.

    I had an alright time running around the levels collecting stuff. For the most part. But then the controls aren't super intuitive and the camera is, for the most part, terrible. And those are kinda important in a platformer. The biggest gripe I have with this game is that it's just not all that fun to do the stuff that will net you Pagies (the things you collect to progress the game). Riding on a cart in every level and collecting a certain amount of gems? No fun. Playing a bad arcade game? No fun. Playing that same arcade game again because you have to beat the hi-score on the second time? No fun. Transforming into weird stuff and solving puzzles? Pretty fun. Transforming into weird stuff with bad controls and solving puzzles? No fun.

    On top of all that the writing isn't all that good. And I ended up skipping a whole lot of it. There are funny moments but most of the writing falls somewhere between referencing, fourth-wall-breaking, or trying too hard. In fact, a lot of the design relies way too heavily on referencing the old stuff. It's like this was developed with the idea "Hey remember this? This is like the Banjo games! It's good because we do stuff like the Banjo games! You remember those, right?" Whereas this could have been a great chance to improve on the design of those games rather than try to mirror it.

    Well, after writing all that, I'm certainly feeling a lot more down on Yooka-Laylee than I was feeling prior to writing this. But now I have a mission to find 10 better games this year, because I don't really want this in my top 10.
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