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z3wpk

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My First GOTY: 2015

My First List

So this is my first attempt at making a GOTY list. I figured that I definitely played enough games to justify a list this year. I definitely did not play as many as I wanted to. So here are so games that I never got around to.

Games That Could Have Been On This List If I Played Them

  • SOMA - My PC just couldn't run this and I couldn't justify the price tag on PS4. I'll probably play it next year, I'm just hoping it's not ruined by any of the GOTY podcasts (I know it will be.)
  • Nuclear Throne - I'm waiting for this to go on sale so I can convince some friends to play it with me.
  • Divinty: Original Sin Enhanced Edition - Some of my friends started playing this but I am also waiting for this to go on sale as well.
  • Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection - I didn't have a PS3 so I have always been interested in playing through all of the Uncharted games.
  • Invisible Inc. - I have never been too much into this type of game, but Austin's love for it made me want to try it out.
  • Pathologic HD - I always thought this game looked super interesting. Never got around to it.
  • Cradle - My PC had a hard time with this game.

Games That Just Missed The List

  • Rocket League - I had a lot of fun with Rocket League, but it just fell off for me. I play a game a two every once in a while. The updates they keep pumping out are great though!
  • Duck Game - This was a bunch of fun too! But once you play a long session with friends, it can get a little stale.
  • Until Dawn - I never actually played this game myself, I just watched Austin, Alex, and Vinny play it. So it felt kinda weird putting it in the Top 10 for me.
  • Cities: Skylines - What a great game that I didn't even know I wanted. Unfortunately this fell off for me after about a month.
  • Sentris - I had a lot of fun with this thing. Just not enough content to really justify a spot.

List items

  • When I enjoy a piece of media, I often get carried away with my reaction towards it. With that in mind,The Beginner’s Guide hit me in a way that nothing ever has before. After it was finished I had goosebumps, and for a while I could only sit there in awe. With this game, Davey Wreden really launched video games into the critical field. Having The Stanley Parable, and now The Beginner’s Guide under his belt, it puts him up there with great video game auteurs like Kojima, Schaefer, and Igarashi. The storytelling is masterfully paced and Wreden dishes out a surprisingly emotional voiceover. This is one of the first meta-pieces on video games that is successful, while other games like The Magic Circle have missed the mark on this topic. Undoubtedly, the most fascinating and terrifying (in a good way) part of this game is that it’s a painfully in depth look into Wreden’s own psyche, laid bare for everyone to see.

  • Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes received the highly sought after excellent party game award that a lot of games have recently been trying to gun for. It uses a board game aspect which is incorporated in a clever way. I personally even went so far as to print out the manual, and bind it. It looks beat up and awesome. I’ve had many stressful diffusing sessions where I’ll forget where a module section is and flip through frantically. It’s super fun and appealing to people of most ages.

  • Undertale is a game that made me laugh multiple times, which is really impressive. I don’t particularly enjoy that many forms of comedy (movies, tv, etc.) but Undertale struck a weird chord with me. It wasn’t excessively non-sequitur, and didn’t rely on your run-of-the-mill humor, which I enjoyed. I just find it so impressive that a video game (which has significantly less control over pacing than other forms of media) made me laugh a bunch. The game’s mechanics are also paced well. Once I started to get a little bored of the battles, I found myself looking forward to battles with Mettaton. Undertale took big risks that could have easily fallen flat, and I commend that.

  • It’s kind of upsetting that Dota 2 is on this list. I debated a lot in my head over this. I didn’t know if I was going to allow it to be on a 2015 GOTY list. But I thought: Dota changes the game drastically with every update, making it fresh. Dota is like a drug that’s easy to come off of, but still easy to go back to. It’s really difficult to effectively explain what makes Dota good (or bad) to anybody who hasn’t played over a certain amount of hours. I don’t know why it’s on this list. Oh well.

  • I played through all of the Metal Gear Solid games about a year ago, blasting through them in about 4 or 5 weeks. I played them in my college house, with my housemates watching most of the time. We even had a whiteboard covered in diagrams that connected characters to specific organizations or allegiances. The ridiculousness of this series was amazing and fun. Going into MGSV I expected some sort of Kojima ridiculousness, or at least some weird stylistic flare, but it was barely anywhere to be seen which was super disappointing. That being said, this game plays and looks SO GOOD. I had so much fun actually executing stealth the way that I intended for the first time in a video game, which was so satisfying. It’s just a shame that the story didn’t live up to its predecessors.

    The next two games (along with MGSV) have a recurring theme of guilt or obligation to be on this list, but I have to put them here because they were the best games I played this year.

  • Fallout 4 is my 3rd “I feel guilty that this is here” game. I loved Fallout 3; I loved scavenging through that greenish bland world while Ella Fitzgerald lulled me into a game induced daze. I impulse bought Fallout 4. I wasn’t planning on buying it because I looked at a lot of footage and thought “this looks exactly the same, with slight improvements.” Boy was I right. But I’m still enjoying every minute of it. I haven’t touched any of the workshop village building stuff, (and don’t plan on it) so the game had little-to-no new mechanics for me, but I can’t fight the urge to scavenge everything without stopping. I don’t care about the story, I just want to explore all the time.

  • After my first few days with The Witcher 3, I found myself awestruck and amazed. I didn’t think a world could be so detailed and expansive. I loved my time in it. However, after spending more time with the game’s systems (movement, combat, potions, inventory screen, conversations, and more) I just became more and more disappointed. I had many frustrating crashes which then led to long boot times back into the game. This happened so much that I became frustrated on the second to last boss fight and put the game aside, only to complete it 2 months later in a one-hour sitting, which was underwhelming. Extremely underwhelming. I didn’t seem to care about any of the characters, only the quest lines. In spite of all that, I had so much fun with this game.

  • My girlfriend and I played Her Story together, and it took us about 2 hours tops. I really enjoyed the detective aspect, and I felt like it was one of the first games that actually executed the mystery solving mechanic well. However, there was a weird unresolved feeling at the end that I know was intentional, but it left my girlfriend and I saying: “Oh, I guess we are done now?” While that was something I wasn’t used to feeling after a video game, I still enjoyed the journey, and maybe that was the point. Solving this mystery wasn’t about the outcome, but the stuff we discovered along the way. I hope more games start thinking of creative ways to incorporate different forms of media.

  • I took Cibele on and off my list a few times. While I was playing it, I felt a real sense of voyeurism and nostalgia. I felt similar to when I searched through my own AOL Instant Messenger chat logs. I’ve had my fair share of “internet friends,” but I’ve never ended up actually meeting any. I felt the same rush of romance that the main character felt when she would talk to her internet romantic interest, and that was weird for me, really weird. When it was done, I felt underwhelmed and almost betrayed. After some thought, I felt like Cibele deserved to be here. It is, again, a vulnerable and autobiographical look into a person’s life that hit me a little harder than I thought it would.

  • If Dr. Langeskov wasn’t only 15 minutes long, I probably would have had it tied with Undertale, because this was another game that really made me laugh. The voiceover was excellent, the concept was brilliant (another look into video games through the lens of comedy), and because of that the pacing was hilarious. I really just wish there was more of this type of stuff.
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