My gaming year in review

I decided I wanted to write something for the games that I played this year, but I didn’t want to do the vanilla blurbs for each game, or write a top 10. Instead, here they are, all the games I’ve played (for more than an hour or so), plus one thing that’s stuck with me from them, plus how you should play them.

Editing will happen some other time probably never, because I want to finish this and post it.

Also, I think only five of these games actually came out this year. Look, I'm behind the times.

Saints Row, 3 and IV:

·       This was the best gaming experience I had in all of 2015. I’ve laughed plenty at games, but this is the funniest a big-budget game has ever been for me, and the humor keeps up for tens of hours. The gameplay may not be challenging, but it feels great, especially in SRIV when the team really understood their systems.

·       Keep a notebook nearby to write down the best lines, and drink every time you do.

Digital: A Love Story, Analogue: A Hate Story, and Hate Plus

·       The biggest drag of most visual novels is their interface, with character portraits slightly changing their expression as you click through a waterfall of chat boxes. Christine Love doesn’t fall into this trap: Digital is played out in a DOS interface, through BBS messages and console commands, and Analogue and Hate Plus are storytelling-via-Wikipedia. Digital especially brings its 90s setting bone-deep with the interface.

·       Put aside your cynicism and let yourself fall a little in love through your screen. Also, be prepared to look up info about 13^th-century Korean society.

Transistor:

·       If you aren’t playing with the Limiters, you aren’t playing right. The combat in Transistor was unexpectedly amazing, after we were all expecting it for the story. Playing with the Limiters – additional negative effects or events, like Halo’s skulls – forced me to engage with the millions of possible power combinations, instead of just finding favorites and using them exclusively.

·       Don’t play all the challenge rooms at once. Get through the entire game, start a Recursion (New Game +), then go through all the challenge rooms. They’re great puzzles, but you’ll get so sucked into them that you’ll lose track of the plot.

Europa Universalis IV:

·       Is there a better way to learn the mosome of tives of a historical culture than to face the same challenges? I never would’ve learned about Ming China’s problems with rebels and steppe tribes if it weren’t for EU4, and from there it’s easy to see some of the fears that haunt modern China.

·       There are two ways to play Europa Universalis: Either you play for eight hours at a time, for forty hours per game, with a TV show going on your second screen, or you don’t play Europa Universalis.

Risk of Rain:

·       One of my dream games to make is a roguelike platformer, and although my game would have more emphasis on personality, RoR plays brilliantly in that vein. I don’t think it has the randomness to be thought of as a true roguelike, but it’s another good entry following up on Rogue Legacy.

·       It’s less how you should play it, than how you don’t need to: You don’t need a wiki. In most roguelikes, new items have confusing functions, and you need a wiki to really understand their intricacies. This is just a personal evaluation, I admit, but I greatly prefer how simplified RoR is, with a limited list of abilities, specialization, and items.

Hotline Miami:

·       This is actually the first time I can claim indie cred: I was playing Cactus’ games back when they were shmups about shooting the rebellious, escaped eyeballs of humanity. It’s pretty easy to see the through-line of style in Hotline Miami, the eye-melting colors and pulsing music.

·       Don’t play this game drunk or high. Seriously. It might seem like a good idea, because whoooooaaaaaa maaaaaaaan the coooooolooooors, but this game is difficult and you will lose.

Beyond Earth:

·       There’s a line in an old Irrational Interviews podcast where Brian Reynolds says that Alpha Centauri was filled with all the political fever-dreams from his 20s. Beyond Earth, on the other hand, has… different colors? Minor mechanical differences? This was the most flavorless 4X I’ve played more than a few hours of, and as a result it helped me figure out my problems with 4X games. I could play Europa Unversalis for years because it lets me rewrite history, but there’s no story to be written in Beyond Earth.

·       Play this as a raw strategy game. The mechanics are good, there’s lots of room for planning, so you’ll enjoy this if you pore over wikis and search out optimal strategies.

To The Moon:

·       I keep comparing it to Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle. To The Moon is extremely beholden to the JRPG style, not just in the gameplay, but in its tone. The perspective characters (the scientists) emote just like you’d expect a JRPG protagonist to do, and they’re the weakest part of the game as a result. The lens through which we view the story is weak, but when we start looking past the lens, the story we see is spectacular. Except the ending. Still got problems with the ending.

·       

Play it in one sitting if possible, linger on the piano melody, and keep Kleenex nearby.

Halo 3 (again), ODST, Reach, and Halo 4:

·       Halo 4 is probably the best Halo game that’s ever been made. The encounter design feels as inspired as the original trilogy, but without stupid-frustrating enemies: No giant sacks of health like the Brutes in large groups, and barely any Hunters. The story retains the galactic implications of the original trilogy, but benefits hugely by keeping the operational area and list of characters very small. There isn’t a wasted inch of narrative in that game.

·       All of these are games to be played over a weekend, each taking two six-hour sessions. You won’t get rusty, the story won’t be stretched out over too many sessions, and you won’t be stuck on one encounter for the majority of your session.

Gone Home:

·       I played this on January 1^st of 2014, so it counts.

·       (Spoiler warning) I think I’ve had exactly one friend come out. I’ve known people who I assumed were gay, and I know friends who are gay or trans, but I’ve never watched someone go through the process of accepting themselves and re-identify themselves to their friends and family. This game is the closest I’ve come to seeing that.

·       Play this in one sitting, then sit on your hands checking the clock until Life Is Strange comes out.

The Wolf Among Us:

·       If a branching storyline lets you define the relationship between two characters, but that relationship is one of the linchpins of the story, how much does that hurt the narrative cohesion? Throughout The Wolf Among Us, I felt that the romance/partnership between Bigby and Snow was a key emotional beat, but player decisions could easily torpedo that relationship. I haven’t replayed the game with different choices, so I could be misinterpreting it, but having the ability to completely destroy a plot thread is strange. Possibly empowering, but without being sure of the breadth of possible outcomes, mostly just awkward.

·       Take it slow. Dig into the atmosphere. Click everything. The Telltale engine, from the pacing of its character animations to its cel-shading, will never be better used than in this jeu noir.

Star Trek Online (Disclaimer: This is one of my company’s games.)

·       

How much raiding and team content is needed before level cap? There are some queued team-ups available in the lead-up to the level cap, but it’s not until then that you pull the cotton balls out of your nose and WHOAH that’s where the Dyson spheres, the Borg hives, the dinosaurs with guns, that’s where all the new smexy is. I don’t have an answer for this, but it struck me as odd that all this content was just at endgame, after about twenty hours of leveling in solo content.

·       Play this with TNG on the other monitor. Duh.

FEZ:

·       I think this is the last of the indie darlings from the XBLA era that I hadn’t played. There’s an era of games I think of, and even though FEZ came out much later, I group it with Braid, Bastion, etc. That era is interesting to me because all these acclaimed games were coming out on XBLA, but I was locked in on the freeware; now most things except the art games and game jams have gone paid, and the indie movement is still going strong. The pricing structure changed, the art didn’t.

·       

Don’t read any spoilers. Seriously. Just keep playing until you think you’re done with the game, then give it another hour. You sunk fifteen hours into FFXIII because “it gets way better after that”, you can afford to spend an hour flailing blindly trying to figure out what’s next.

Tales from the Borderlands:

·       Is there a better example of conversational combat than the con in the first episode? Between this and the quasi-trial in The Wolf Among Us, this rode the line for conversation that gets ridden in the best stealth games: high tension, with the knowledge that you’ll have to live with the consequences if you slip up instead of instantly failing. All too often conversational games either have no consequences, or just restart you if you make the wrong choice.

·       Play with the barest idea of the plot of Borderlands 2. Only watched the trailers? No worries! Handsome Jack is bad, Vaults have cool tech, Pandora is a frontier madhouse of murder. You’re good to go.

Dungeons and Dragons and Secrets of Zir’An:

·       I ran a combat-heavy DnD campaign for my co-workers, and a series of heists in the Secrets of Zir’an world for my friends. I may have cross-pollinated some puzzles at certain points.

·       Don’t prep. If you’re spending more than an hour preparing your adventure, your players have to be 100% on board with following your narrative. If your group’s characters shine in Firefly-esque banter and seat-of-your-pants flying, you should be improv’ing as much as they are.

League of Legends:

·       I have played probably over 700 hours of this game, and I still can’t transfer my knowledge into playing consistently better.

·       If you’re going to play this, make sure you eat food before you play, otherwise you’re going to look up hours later and realize that, maybe, your crappy play was because you were cripplingly hungry. Personally, I can’t afford to spend three hours a night playing LoL anymore, so I’m taking a break.