Damn man, I'm going to miss having you around dude. I respect that you are your own man when it comes to what you like in a videogame, it's what makes reading your thoughts interesting.
Twitter ain't my thing, so I guess this is probably goodbye for now anyway.
Really sad to hear about your housing situation, that has to be incredibly stressful and it's an especially awful time of year to have to be dealing with that.
I really hope that you get some positive resolution to that very soon.
I suspect until we see the next big hardware innovation (likeliest contender being something VR/AR related or whatever the Nintendo NX does), we may just see All Star games instead of Hall of Fame games so to speak as mechanical Risk Aversion reigns supreme among the AAA publicly traded types. A new normal so to speak. If the quantity of product stays this diverse, I'm ok with that.
yeah man, I'm with you. The variety imo is what makes this year so good and that's what I'll remember most about this year. So many genres and publishers feel vibrant and that's a fantastic feeling. I just hope they all are profitable, That's the possible downside to something like this I suppose. Too many games chasing too few dollars. I would have liked to have a good chunk of these games to play in 13 &14 instead of trying to drink from the Fire Hose of awesomeness 15 that has provided. :) There's a quite a lot of games I didn't get to in time for my list.
Pillars and Axiom I've already seen on quite a few lists, but yours is the first place I've seen N++ and I think one of the very few to have Legacy of the Void on it. I got a good buddy who swears by LotV being the real deal in campaign mode as Blizzard's best ever, so it's cool to hear you think very highly of it as well.
I think what's most striking about yours to me is the placing. There are definitely some popular names this year, but the ordering this year is wildly divergent from user to user. There is no super obviousTop 3 this year for the community as their usually is (My money is still on the Safe bet of MGS V, Witcher 3 and Mario Maker being the community's top 3 once everything shakes out).
re: MGSV- Remember your rationale about Shadow of Mordor from last year? I feel much the same way about MGS V this year, in that mechanically it's so enthralling it outweighs the other nebulous bits.
fwiw I found the old Metal Gear Solid games to be mechanically frustrating as well (3 especially) and the story stuff was just really overexplained and overwrought to death. I didn't mind the zaniness, it was getting to the good stuff that was always the problem. MGS just had a nasty habit laying it on way too thick with the exposition as you said, lots of Japanese games of the Ps2 era seemed to. Xenosaga was another criminal offender. Besides the NES games, the original MGS was probably the only one I truly liked. But man this one handles like a dream. I think Kojima went too far the other way on the exposition with this one (odd to want more story from a Metal Gear game), but it still beats the never ending droning from MGS2.
@cornbredx: ah ok, so this list is basically the most memorable/notable games for you of 2015, reverse order in terms of quality.
Makes complete to me now. Thanks man for the clarification! Definitely a unique way of doing things.
I like your idea of a notable games list. In some ways that's is a more revealing way of looking back on a gaming year for historical purposes.
e.g. Do I think Destiny was a great game? Nope not really. But whenever I think of 2014 I'm going to think of Destiny because how everywhere it seemed to be.
I don't know either if 2015 belongs in the discussion with 1991/1998 etc what have you either, but I do think it's safe to say it is the best year of Generation 8 yet by far. Maybe it doesn't have many All Time Greats this year that changed the way games are played for forever types, but it's a year packed with All Stars. I feel like there 20-30 games this year that are legitimately great and I suspect there's a handful more hidden on the Vita that few will see.
One of the signs that this is a great year to em though, is I can look at your list, see an ordering and a makeup largely different from mine and still think that's a really great list!
Gotta to ask you about Metal Gear. Did you play it? That's the one big name I do't see on your list. I know it's divisive, so I'm curious what your take on it is.
I'm super jealous you got to play Rise of the Tomb Raider. I can tell it would easily make my list as well, but alas I've never been an XboX person and thus have to wait till 2016.
man N++, that's one I didn't see coming. That's cool you put it on your list, I met the developers of the original N once and they seemed like incredibly super people.
Oddly enough I've met the Axiom Verge guy before too, very soft spoken fellow but seemed very nice. He easily had the homeliest no frills booth at PAX East this past year. Just two monitors, 2 PS4s, a folding chair for himself and a Card table. Glad to see his game get some love, if there is any great aspect to this era of gaming, it's that independent creators like him can seemingly prosper alongside the Publicly Traded Wall Street Behemoths.
I really should play that especially if you think so highly of it. I remember thinking as I played the demo, why has no one ever thought to merge Contra Shooting action with a Metroidvania exploration before? But It came out on Ps4 first and by the time it came out on PC, I was engrossed in other games.
@darkbeatdk: for sure man. When japanese companies are puttin out good stuff, it's amazing out how much denser the offerings are for a give year seem to be.
Games are a better place when Nintendo, Capcom, SquareEnix ,Atlus, Tecmo/Koei, Namco/Bandai, Sega, Konami etc are healthy.
Yeah I think it's the lack of direction and main quest motivation that ultimately gets me too in Bethesda games.
I'm one of these completionist nuts, so I tend to get paralysis by analysis in a world where you seemingly do anything at any time. I start worrying too much that I screwed up and locked myself out of a sidequest, or did it in the wrong sequence etc.
Missables are the bane of my videogaming existence.
To me it sound to me like you are actually done for real with fallout 4. But maybe you can dive back in when the DLC ships?
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