Best of 2017
Let me tell you how the game about sad cats was my favorite of the year and I thought Mario was boring and not fun.
List items
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I'm a college dropout in a shitty nowhere town who's local friends all moved on while I continue to be an annoying dipshit, convinced I'm constantly bothering my friends with how shitty and immature I am while still trying to grow as a person. This game hit me very close to home (right down to Mae's mom being my mother exactly) but it ALSO has interesting characters and the most natural dialog I've seen of any similar game that's come out in recent years. The art is also really appealing to me and I enjoy just hanging out in this game's world.
Night in the Woods really Isn't the game I thought I'd still regularly be thinking about at the end of the year considering the amount of quality games that were released, but here I am. 2017 was wild ya'll.
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"A visual novel about gay asian girls playing baseball and falling in love."
I'm neither an asian nor a teen girl, but some of this game was relatable in terms of relationships for me. I spent most of 2017 grappling with the confusion of learning I'm bisexual and had a crush on a friend, along with my usual depression. It was a tough year for me, and having having my dipshit friends around a lot was really important to me while I was dealing with my emotions; I was a complete mess and they really helped me get through it. Since this game has genuine sounding characters and dialog about 4 idiot friends getting each other through life I found myself really enjoying my time with it. Butterfly Soup was very cute, charming, and apparently a ton of people really related to it, so that's good to hear. This game was needed in the miserable dumpster fire that was 2017.
Also it's just really funny.
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The story about robots and androids finding their way post humanity is some good sci-fi that provides a nice universe, interactions, and philosophically depressing personal bullshit I love, but it's the parts where NieR uses the fact that it's a game to do things no other does that sets it above for me. It's impossible to explain without ruining it, but Yoko Taro is the only dude who uses video games to do cool shit you can only do with a video game and does it in a way that feels very much personal. I hope he gets to keep making things.
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Yeah, CS:GO came out in 2012, but I've played these games since 2000 and this year was the first time I put SERIOUS time into this game. Like really serious time. Like, I have 1155 hours on record with this game and 900+ of that was in 2017 kind of time. I played this game so much this year I briefly entertained the thought of making a run at going pro after I quit my job and had a ton of free time. Oh by the way I also got really into watching it as an esport because it's really easy to follow, the commentary does a good job of letting you know what's going on, and there's almost always a match you can easily watch at any time that's over within an hour.
Hey know what? I think CS is still the closest any FPS has ever come to true perfection, in fact. Everything about how it functions as a team game, the shooting, mechanics, and rules work better than any game I can think of outside of like Quake 3 deathmatch. Also the devs keep updating it consistently through the year. CS will always be the king of shooters.
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Hey all that stuff I said about dealing with a depressing year emotionally somewhere around Butterfly Soup. Stormblood made dealing with that easier.
I'd be lying if I didn't admit most of my enjoyment from this game comes from just playing dress-up with my character, but Final Fantasy XIV knows exactly how to make people like me love their game by peppering it with all the nostalgic crap I love from the other 14 games, and Stormblood keeps that going. The music is still incredible, the fights only seem to get more crazy and fun to play, and there's a constant steady drip of new things every month or two.
Stormblood doesn't do anything crazy or new, even for an expansion, but it's solid quality and what I play to just chill and have a relaxing time without having to worry about anything other than which hat goes better with my outfit.
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The music is very good, the world is very good, the characters are very good, the story is okay, and the dungeons are kind of not good. Also I'm sick of the part in the beginning of Persona games where I can't do anything and I keep getting told to go to sleep. I'm mostly getting sleepy writing at this point and am sick so I'm being lazy here, but Persona 5 is very good as is most of the Persona games, but some stuff like the dungeons really pushed it from being more than a #5 for me.
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The first game I ever played was Mario, but my dad hated games and the NES lived at his house while the Genesis was at my moms, so boy I played a lot of Sonic growing up. Look we make fun of edgy 90's shit now but Sonic was cool as hell when you were like, 5 at the time alright, I promise. For real.
Sega finally just gave me what I wanted and made another old Sonic game. Yeah there's some new cool stuff they added but I honestly don't care about that, because they just made another old Sonic game so none of that other shit matters. THEY MADE ANOTHER OLD SONIC GAME.
My only beef is some of Sonics new friends are in it and the only bullshit friends of Sonic I wanna see are the Chaotix.
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I used to play a lot of Guilty Gear on the Playstation, but never really came back to it because I just fell off fighting games. I was in a hotel drinking and watching the Giant Bomb Quick Look for Rev 2 and was like "YEAH THIS LOOKS DOPE" and ordered a stick right then. That decision turned out alright.
This game looks INCREDIBLE, and honestly most of my enjoyment just comes from how pretty the game is and how much I like the character designs, but hey it also plays real good to boot! At first Guilty Gear looks impossible to understand, but the game comes with tons of good tutorials that not only teach you how each character plays, but situations in fighting games, how to deal with them, and terms you might be unfamiliar with.
Sometimes I just wanna listen to ripping guitars while mashing out sweet looking combos with the tiny anime pirate girl who's weapon of choice is a giant anchor 3 times her size.
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Man, Cuphead LOOKS awesome. It plays real good too and is super fun and challenging and rewarding, but MAAAAN, just LOOK at it.
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I'm gonna be honest, I kinda hate this game. The first couple months I played it I would regularly complain to my friends that we should just be playing Battlefield 4 or something because the shooting is the same (it is) but I at least had more fun with the dumb vehicles or something, I guess.
I can't express how much of the last 6 months were me getting frustrated with things like:
-Lag so bad I die at the start of a match because my guy reloads his pistol 5 times
-The circle is very badly designed at the end of the game because it just lands on someone sitting still, guaranteeing a victory in some situations
-My bullets just don't seem to do anything to a guy I just dumped an entire clip into a foot from me
-Shooting my friend out of the car who's in it while I'm leaning out firing nowhere near him
-My screen shaking around violently for no reason 50% of the time I get into a firefight or aim down the sight
-Shooting window frames my gun is clearly over
-The frame rate randomly crawling even though my PC is more than capable of handling this game at the lowest settings in a terrible resolution
-A LOT MORE I CAN'T REMEMBER RIGHT NOW
But hey, when the game actually came out I was surprised that they actually fixed a lot of the game breaking problems I had with it, and it seems to be mostly a real game at this point. That being said I still feel like I could just be playing any other shooter with similar gun physics like Battlefield or ArmA that would frustrate me less because I wouldn't get screwed by things like bad luck, and could still get the experience of weird wacky things happening with my friends.
My friends all play this game every night, and that's enough reason for me to have fun with it, also It's actually alright now that the game is released... sort of. Good enough for this list.
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I'm putting this as an extra on my list because even though I really disliked the main quest, side quests (I never saw any) the combat, and basically everything around the part of the game where you explore, I did REALLY enjoy the exploration and stuff like cooking. Trying to stay warm in the snow or not get zapped by the lightning while I climb this sweet giant mountain to see what's on the other side was something that kept me entertained for far more than I ever thought I would be in an open world game (I hate them) The only problem was I never found anything interesting on the other side of that mountain...
The puzzles were fun too!
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