---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| spekkeh's game of the year 2014 |---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Mario Kart 8 ; This game ending up first came as a total surprise to me. It's the eighth in the series, and I'm the kind of guy that thinks Portal 2 was wholly unnecessary and took away from the self contained genius of Portal 1. Still, the original Super Mario Kart was on my ten greatest of all times list (which was also quite the surprise when it released seeing as I've never been interested in racing games and haven't since) and paired with Mario Kart 64 some of the most fun I've had in multiplayer gaming. Of course that was over twenty years ago. I'm old now, multiplayer moved online and my interest waned. The same goes for the series, iterations came and went and while I played most of them, none grabbed my attention. Truly this series should be put to rest I thought. Well I take it back. Mario Kart 8 is the greatest Mario Kart and therefore as worthy as anything of inclusion in a greatest of all time list. Everything about this game is an absolute delight. The colors and locales burst off the screen, if you're feeling down, it's impossible to stay grumpy when you load up a track. Even more so than the oft-touted graphics, this game has in my opinion the best soundtrack since Mario Galaxy 1 (maybe better? maybe of all time?). The person who thought it was a good idea to have a jazzy big band score a racing game is both completely mad and an absolute genius. Listen to the electric guitar solo right after the sax took it away
in this rendition of Rainbow Road 64 and pretend it's not the best thing ever I triple dare you. Heck I'm listening to the complete soundtrack right now. Sorry if I come off as euphoric every now and then, it has that effect. But that's not all, the lavish attention to detail in the characters and interactions spawned the famous death stare meme that made it to mainstream news channels and generated the most fun NeoGaf thread of the year. And then there's the online. Nintendo has gotten a lot of deserved pouncing on their paltry online, but Mario Kart 8 nails it. The hypnotic tune, the spinning globe with little Toads in space, but above all seeing all the Miis stand around in the lobby. More than any multiplayer game I played you get a real feel for the people you're interacting with (without being told in purple prose what they're going to do to your mom). Gosh I'm racing a dad, three students, a five year old and a grandmother? Well then, prepare to stare in the soulless eyes of Donkey Kong as I accelerate away from you all. Final score: 10.
2. Bayonetta 2 ; As a game design researcher, my PhD research was about how to best align game design with the human cognitive system. In cognitive psychology, theres the well-known concept of the Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two, which states that humans can store seven bits of information (plus or minus two obviously) concurrently in their working memory. Any more than that, and your brains simply cant cope and you start making errors. Im pretty sure Bayonetta 2 violates this heuristic practically all throughout the game. Sometimes, like in the battles with Masked Lumen, by a factor ten at least. Yet somehow it works. Whether its by clever cueing, or that among all the noise you start discerning and reacting to meta-patterns, like harmonies in a musical piece. Actually I wouldnt be at all surprised if turned out that most of the game plays itself and were just pushing buttons like a confused chimp in a nuclear power plant. It doesnt matter. Playing Bayonetta 2, your mind, your fingers, your mouth, your bodily proprioception, everything is working in concordance and at upmost concentration to do a single thing. To go: oooooooooooh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit what the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck am I seriously doing thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis I am holy shiiiiiiiit that really happenedddddddddddd. And its awesome. Final score: 10.
3. The last of us: Left behind ; I actually much preferred this DLC over the original game. The pacing is better for one, focusing more on storytelling and less on shooting, and intercutting between different times, which makes the rather linear story more cognitively interesting and to add some levity to the gloom. Ellie is also simply more engaging than Joel to me. But above all I found TLoU:Rs crafting mechanic to not really work for the game. Much like Bioshock Infinite, this game layer on top of the storytelling actually takes me out of the immersion. You follow an NPC through a building, every turn they take you go into the opposite direction because you just know theres loot there, killing any sense of forward momentum. Left Behind still has this in the more gamey areas, but by cutting to another time period the developers were able to focus on an I think much more interesting environmental storytelling. Where going off the beaten path would lead to deepening of character relationships by picking up things from the environment unrelated to game systems. Yes TLoU:R also had lookout areas that would trigger some kind of cutscene, but this felt different. Final score: 9.
4. Shadow of Mordor ; I was certainly not hyped for this game. Looking at how this game was a simple revenge story featuring copious decapitations, I was certain Tolkien must have been spinning in his grave. Im not dead yet myself, but if I were, Assassins Creed designs certainly make me spinning in my grave. From the screenshots, the game initially looked like a dead Caragor too. But the drought was huge and the thirst equally so, so I bought it just to check out the Nemesis system. Im not going to lie, much of the score is how much I like the innovation. Ive always been a bit of a detractor of Grand Theft Auto games, even though I liked some of them. The template just doesnt work for me. Here they have this great sandbox, all these systems, and they dont do anything meaningful with it. Nothing sticks (apart from the template itself as everyone lazily copies it). Shadow of Mordor is different. Im going to be bold and say Shadow of Mordor is the first actual sandbox game ever released, as your actions carry over from one mission into the next on a systems basis. The story has emergent qualities without devolving into open-ended simulations, as these qualities neatly tie back into the authored storyline. I think its wonderful and am interested to see how far devs can take this. It helps that the game itself is no slouch either. I liked that they didnt go overboard with the open world, its sufficiently open without making traversal protracted and boring. I really liked the way they gave form to Mordor. In the movies, Mordor is essentially a cartoony place of evil. All ugly and foreboding and never an actual place. Here the designers took that aesthetic and gave it a kind of rugged, Scottish like flavor, making it beautiful in all its ugliness. Yes I could live here then, but first I have to find Glug Pig-ear and put his head on a stick. Final score: 8.
5. This War of Mine ; I have only gotten a couple of hours into this game, so this one is a bit preliminary, but I really like what they did with this serious game. So many war games are all about gung-ho jingoism shouting and headshotting your way through foreign lands. Its nice, dont get me wrong, but its also trite, cliche and doesnt at all speak to the complexity of war. This game on the other hand has a much more human focus and, most importantly, is able to conjure up really tense and somewhat emotional experiences in the game without you firing a single shot most of the time. This is not only an accomplishment for war games, but actually for any game, where so far the only way to make us care for the protagonists motives is when he is the chosen one / Space Jesus on a quest to personally save the universe. They really nailed it with the night time scavenging where youre going through derelict houses. Am I really stealing the last food from an ailing grandmother? The game is able to make you care for people who only have very minimalistic backgrounds, which is no mean feat, but at the same time Im wishing for something more of an authors hand. Is the narrative going anywhere? The game is also slightly clunky at times. The first time I encountered another human being I didnt really know what to do, should I press the fist button? Before my mouse could move over to the button, my protagonist was mortally wounded and died shortly after. A bit of trial and error when it should be about wits the most. Still pretty good. Final score: 8.
6. South Park: the Stick of Truth ; A nice little game that captured the essence of the cartoon series greatly, that means scathing satire, but sadly also a lot of fart and anal jokes that go on for far too long. I was appalled that the game was censored here (still am), but I also dont really mind that I didnt have to play an abortion minigame thank you very much. The game is at its best when its lampooning the game medium itself. The Canada section especially is probably the most hilarious any game has ever been. The rest of the game has slightly less of a raison detre however and I was particularly disappointed to find very little meaningful exploration. Finally you could wander into all the boys houses, but all there was were some references to old episodes. I guess we should just remember the good times. With wood elf weapons. Final score: 6.
7. Dragon Age: Inquisition ; At the turn of the century, there was something of a heated debate between two camps in Game Studies. It was about whether games should be viewed from a narratological or a ludological perspective. In short one group said that games should primarily be seen as an evolution of interactive stories, whereas the other group contended that games should be seen and studied primarily as an evolution of board games and play. Of course this being the humanities, much of the discussion was polemics for the sake of polemics. Games are about playing and about having a narrative experience at the same time.
Still, when you think about the games that are out there you can kind of see that they represent two ends of a spectrum. (Its more like Discworlds L-space, but humor me). On one hand of the spectrum, you have the more gamey games, which are about playing within rules, often interacting with systems and getting high scores or competing with others. On the other hand of the spectrum you have the more interactive experiences: less intricate systems, but cognitive interest derived more from the story and setting. Bioware started on the gamey side of the spectrum, using all the systems from classical Dungeons and Dragons, but over the years gradually moved over to the interactive experiences sides, streamlining their games, cutting away systems and instead focusing on inhabiting a character in an interactive story. This is undoubtedly a very unpopular opinion here but I think that has absolutely been for the best. The problem with having game systems is that youre always striving for optimal solutions, max xp, max strength, max damage modifier because game systems are to be learned and taken control over. Within a certain context, theres only one way to play and no reason not to do it. On the other hand, youre not really roleplaying until you can make mistakes in line with your players alignment. In Mass Effect you can push a witness out of a window. Is this a good idea? Probably not. But its exactly what dickhead Shepard would do, so out you go mister. As a personal anecdote, in my teens I was the Dungeon Master of a group of AD&D nerds. I always saw the rules as a sort of necessary framework (we didnt play with a board or figures, purely verbal) in order to make the shared storytelling possible. The adventure was key. However, once every few months one of the players could take a turn at being the DM because I wanted to hear how they approached storytelling. Without abandon they would give themselves legendary gear after huge xp drop. Afterwards our games would play out something like this: [elaborate setup to eerie cave monster] a giant scorpion suddenly creeps from behind the corner, Ha! Doesnt matter. Im wearing a ring of 100% poison resistance, okay Im swinging my epic broadsword +10, oh 100x critical hit damage, cave monsters dead.
. From their perspective it could be expected that theyre min-maxing the systems for assured survival (actually I killed them all off next game). From my perspective, the storytelling died when it became a slave to the system.
In order to appease the crpg complaints, it seems like Bioware shifted back on the spectrum to the ludological side. So now we have a gamificationor actually, a
pointsification layer pasted on top of the traditional Bioware formula. Power, influence, xp, everything you do fills up bars, and these bars need to be filled in order to continue on with the story. This has two problems. First, in providing a gamey gratification (power +1) Bioware at once seems to have dropped any aspiration of making their quests intrinsically satisfying. 90% of the quests (outside of the main campaign) play out like this: go to mission marker, get plain text file, go to other mission marker, defeat a few monsters, get plain text file, power +2. The stories themselves are not cognitively interesting because they contain no twists, no relationships to your character, no deepening of bonds, and above all they dont have an effect on the main campaign other than opening artificial progression gates through the Power currency. And its just that: a currency. The final battle plays out exactly the same whether your inquisition has 2 or 300 Power, further cementing that it has nothing actually to do with the story. Second and most importantly, now that a gamification system is in place, you start optimizing this. Minmaxing the system, minimum amount of traversal, maximum amount of Power. You no longer go through the areas out of the intrinsic motivation to explore, you go through them to hoover up Power. This game should be called Dragon Age: Janitor.
It has nice scenery though, well thought out characters and even though the main campaign suffered from the same ending exposition as Mass Effect 3, at least that part was a hoot. Too bad it was only ten odd hours in the sixty five it took me to finish it. Final score: 6.
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Some games that did not make the cut:
x. The Last of Us: Remastered ; Even though this was the first time I played the game, I feel it belongs to 2013. Its a nice game but of course greatly overhyped by GAF, I also thought Left Behind was a better package. Final score: 8.
x. The Wolf Among Us ; Already voted for this game last year. Final score: 8.
x. Hohokum ; Love the concept, but to me this game lacked GameFeel, an appreciable oomph to go with the interactionthink particle effects, cascading sounds, rumble etc. Final score: 5.
x. Infamous: Second Son ; Not bad. Also not good. Looks pretty but not much more. Final score: 5.
Yikes 5 A4 pages text.