Your favorite games of 2013

[Shaissa]

So it is almost the end of 2013....

What were peoples favorite games and why?

For me...

1. Ni No Kuni - This has to be one of my favorite RPG's of the whole PS3 generation! I miss having rpgs like these! great story, not all about the graphics... fun gameplay... yes it did kinda rip off Pokemon a little, but it really was still amazing!

2. Fire Emblem Awakening- A series that I hope stays amazing, this game was just fun all around, if you like Tactical RPG's, I recommend this very highly!

3. Dynasty Warriors 8 - Yes I threw this game on the list... they come out with these all the time, but I still am a huge fan of these overall!

4. Tales of Xillia - Although I still think Tales of Graces was way better... this was still such a great game to play for me!

So what was everyone's favorite gamess of 2013?

 

[greenyxi]

This is tough because 2013 has been an awful year for new games imo. It's why I kept playing older ones. Still, here it comes!

Zelda: Wind Waker HD - Not technically a new game, but it's way better than the original so it's worth a mention. I love it more this time around than ever.

Zelda: LBW - A brilliant spin on LttP and a brilliant game of its own too. Loads of open-worldiness and a pretty huge change from other Zelda games. I loved it so much .

Animal Crossing: New Leaf - While it's really similar to the others, it's still really charming. Trapping animals in a square of the map and watching them squirm. Booing at the concert/comedy club. Bashing everyone so much that they constantly stomp around in anger.

Ni No Kuni - Ok, I can't decide if I love this game or can barely stand it. The battle system (entirely because of the crap AI) is damn awful. However, the world map, story, towns etc are stunning. I'll say that I really like it for the sake of this thread .

Pikmin 3 - While I've only played a tiny bit of this, it's enough to persuade me that it's the best in the series and one of the only strategy games of this kind that I can stand. It deserves an award just for that.

Ace Attorney 5 - A pretty big change from the other AA games, but still really fun. Loved the girl in a box in case 3 . Hoping for some more dlc.

That's all I can think of right now. Maybe I'll come back with some more.

 

[Mighty_Bazooka]

I admittedly have not played anywhere near as many games as I would have liked to play this year, but all the same...

Ni no Kuni - Uh yeah. 'Mazing RPG in a market where there simply aren't enough 'mazing RPGs anymore.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf - Going to agree with Mistletoe, it's pretty formulaic and doesn't really break any ground the previous ACs didn't break (even with the mayor thing), but y'know, the formula works. *nod, nod*
GTA V - Too damn good for its own good. Despite my oft critical eye toward more mainstream games...

I have not been able to play Zelda: LBW or Pikmin 3, which makes me grumpy, because I would very much like to play them :<

 

[iSmiff]

XCOM: Enemy Within - Some DLC is done just plain wrong and XCOM were guilty of this with their first DLC instalment - Slingshot. Slingshot basically added 3 new missions, and a new character which basically made things easier and that's not what XCOM is about. Enemy Within on the other hand is much better; it's a complete overhaul - doubling/tripling the length of a play through, balancing the game, sorting out some bugs (although it's still not perfect) and adding new weapons, new aliens, new features, tonnes of new maps and more! I don't often buy DLC because it's usually just stuff that they withheld from you at the beginning to drain cash from you later on but 2k does it right 95% of the time...

Civ V: Brave New World - Same company; same high quality DLC. As if Civ V wasn't in depth enough already; Brave New World adds tonnes of features with my personal favourite being the World Congress. Loads of new Civs as is expected (Poland being my personal favourite due to my style of play).. New maps, new options, new units, new techs, game balancing, new features, new wonders; the list goes on. Anyone who has Civ V vanilla or Gods & Kings NEEDS Brave new world.

Total War: Rome II - Not trying to slander a game on my list but I think this just shows how weak this year has been for me personally in terms of games. At the time of writing I only have 38 hours logged on Rome II and in all honestly - It isn't ALL THAT. What does it for me is just swapping to a generally smoother and fresher title with my only previous stop in the franchise being Medieval 2 & Kingdoms which is a good 4/5 titles ago. According to other people it was a bit of a disappointment so it shows how far behind I was in the franchise that I found it an improvement..

Grand Theft Auto V - As typical these days; GTA was pretty good - but nowhere near the level that people made it out to be with the insane hype. I've never played the online version but i've heard very mixed reactions. I'm not very far as I lent my sister the PS3 but the story so far seems pretty solid. I've met all three characters but I haven't quite enjoyed them as much as other people. I find Trevor to be slightly irritating whereas most other people love him. It's good though - I'd recommend it to anyone who likes that kind of thing but I kind of regret getting it on release day. I wish I would have waited until now where I could have picked it up for half price

Football Manager 2014 - People always ask me why I buy this game every year when it's basically the same game each time but in truth it really isn't. The changes and improvements they make every year are subtle but there are usually over 500 of them each instalment so all that subtle improvement makes up for a better game each year.

 

[Dionysos]

I’ve genuinely not played many games this year, so I might not even be able to fill out a Top 5.


-

1. The game of the year for me is The Last of Us.
I was pleasantly surprised by it. My first reaction when it was announced ages ago was ‘Oh no. Another zombie game? Why isn’t Naughty Dog doing another Uncharted?’

Since Naughty Dog typically only work on one game franchise at a time I wasn’t so keen on The Last of Us as at the time I genuinely couldn’t wait for the next Uncharted. I also generally am not too keen on the zombie genre and think that, whilst the set-up of a zombie virus works, it is quite overdone these days.

How wrong I was, however. The Last of Us really surprised me.
Firstly, the characters and the motion-capture and voice acting was brilliant.

Secondly, the soundtrack genuinely worked. They could easily have gone for the basic horror soundtrack, or lots of dramatic chords or loud noises, but for The Last of Us they went instead for emotion. The soundtrack was very sad at times, and it helped to carry the story.

Thirdly, the zombies themselves. We’ve seen pseudo-scientific causes for zombie outbreaks before (it's pretty much the zombie-staple now largely since Richard Matheson's I Am Legend - though in that they are named as vampires), and usually they are viral infections of sorts, or often a rabies-like condition. This time the approach to zombies is relatively fresh. The idea of the zombification being spread by cordyceps fungi (which actually exist and have comparable effects on many insect groups - though less exaggerated) was a very good one. The zombies were more interesting, and quite scary. In addition, they seemed to be more sensible in this game with the functioning of a zombie’s body. Sometimes in other games and films and literature, etc etc, you could shoot a zombie to pieces (off with an arm, both legs, half the torso, etc) before it finally 'dies' as a little bloodied spine-and-head caterpillar. This sort of thing makes less sense for pseudo-scientific viral infections than it does for supernatural undead. But in this game, the zombies are not like this, and if you kill the body you essentially kill the zombie, and this is more plausible for a pseudo-scientific zombie outbreak. I think this added to the horror rather than detracting from it, because it felt more realistic.
An interesting game, and I’m filled with desire to play it again whenever I think about it.

-
2. Bioshock Infinite.
I very much enjoyed this game. It opened up the Bioshock universe in a very new way. There is essentially anything that they can do now, if they want to (and hopefully if it is good). It wasn’t without serious flaws, however, and I’m not so keen on the endless arena-style combat it throws at the player, but overall it was an enjoyable game. The storyline and characters were interesting, and this one had another powerful ending. The city of Columbia was beautifully designed, and had a very different theme and set of flaws to Rapture. The retro-versions of popular music was a brilliant touch, and my only sadness is that we didn’t hear more, or see through more tears.

-

3. Grand Theft Auto 5.
The story was quite good, and I liked having three playable characters. It felt shorter than the only other GTA I’ve owned (San Andreas), but I’m not sure if that is because of the way that I played this game, or if that is actually the case.
The online play has the potential to be brilliant, and it is fun when with friends, but I get the impression that GTA are wanting to be killjoys. They seem to be detracting from the experience with updates rather than adding to it. I've read about features or harmless ‘glitches’ (that were unintended, but harmless and fun) being removed. You now cannot wear a hat with a mask, etc, but you once could.
You also cannot blow up cars without being sent to a naughty lobby, which is ridiculous when you consider the nature of the GTA universe and what the series has encouraged throughout its history.
I’ve recently also found that one of my favourite pastimes (driving a car or motorbike into a shop) is now either impossible or much harder to do. The doors don’t seem to open fully anymore. Why? Surely that wasn’t a huge issue, and if some players were tormenting people attempting to buy something for a few seconds then so what? It might make it more exciting having to fight off people and then going back to the shop. There is never enough to do online to warrant avoiding people entirely. Driving into a shop every now and then was fun, for both the driver and the person in the shop who might find the occasion funny after a few seconds.

These increasing restrictions seem very bizarre for the GTA universe. Surely fun comes first. Alas.
But… The game is still enjoyable provided that you have friends and are messing about or doing stuff, it’s just that it could easily be so much more. And the single player is very good too.

 

[Linnaete]

Papers, Please

I trust that most of you will have never heard of this game, let alone know what the heck it is. The title sort of speaks for itself. You are working for the government of a Soviet-like nation called Arstotzka, and your job at the border gate is to either allow or deny people access into your glorious country's soil. This involves looking at people's passports, ID cards, entry tickets, etc. hunting down for discrepancies like false aliases, erroneous personal information, and even whether a certain individual is a wanted criminal that ought to be detained. Each day your nameless and faceless immigration official has to do this and it gets progressively harder as each day passes, and the Arstotzka government grows more and more picky with requests and protocols.

Additionally, you have a wife, kid and another relative like an aunt to feed, keep warm, and the rent bills to be paid. The challenge of the game is obviously to do well in your job, but also to let enough people into the country to get paid. And you need to get paid for the family to stay alive - and well, for you to stay alive. It's surprisingly fun, challenging and engrossing, and I love how someone's actually made a game out of this concept. And the best part is the sense of guilt you feel with some of the decisions you make. A woman wishes to visit her son in the country, but she has discrepancies. You cannot let her in. She pleads for you to let her in. You refuse because you are a good official. =(

Batman Arkham Origins

I love Arkham Asylum. I love Arkham City.

But whereas Arkham City was a significantly different sequel, taking Batman out of this tightly-designed asylum complex on an island to an open city district area of Gotham City, Arkham Origins is a very iterative sequel. It's essentially a stop-gap release by Warner Bros, who I wager had to play it safe with this installment, otherwise fans would have been up in arms about them "ruining" Rocksteady's Arkham games. Now, there's no crime in being iterative. Fans of Call of Duty and FIFA buy their damn installments every year, and they're as iterative as one can get. There's no crime in Origins playing like the first two games, and with plenty of assets from Arkham City carried over. I enjoyed the gameplay design of the Rocksteady Arkham games and Warner Bros have basically kept it intact in this one, so what's not to love?

Well, aside from it being considerably less technically polished than the previous Arkham games. And my general distaste for franchises having to have a prequel backstory. And the most egregious turd in the corner? The online. Now, I don't care about the online, but I have to warn people that there are microtransactions involved. Now, one will immediately notice that this is a priced retail game, so why the heck are there microtransactions? Well, it gets better. The online is basically a PVP-like thing in an arena map. By paying money for the online, you're giving yourself an unearned advantage over other players. It's bullshit. I have no idea why they did this.

But still, single-player is still good. It's what matters.

Grand Theft Auto V

Oh, come the day a Grand Theft Auto game lands on my GOTY list. The only GTA game I genuinely enjoyed, even if I didn't actually finish it, was Vice City, and despite the size and scope of the follow-up San Andreas, that game was an exercise in frustration given its particular game design. I wasn't too sure what I would expect from the new one, given my initial groan when it transpired that we were about to make a return to Los Santos of all places. I grew accustomed to the more exotic locations of other open-world games such as Sleeping Dogs and Just Cause 2 that an American city like Los Angeles in all but name was one of the last places I wanted to visit, aside from yet another rendition of New York. Yet I fetched an Amazon voucher that was gathering dust and bit on Black Friday because I actually let one of the trailers suck me into doing it, and also because I liked the idea of gathering your three protagonists together to plan and execute heists.

So what exactly about the game warrants its presence here? I genuinely think it is a new benchmark for the open-world genre. I do like Sleeping Dogs primarily for its setting, but even the most diehard of Wei Shen fans will concur that its world is a lifeless shell; it's a laughable ghost town, bereft of atmosphere outside of the mission and storyline content. This game in comparison evokes that feeling of a digital environment that truly feels alive, enmeshed with an astonishing level of detail in every neon-lit and dust-ridden spot, despite the fact that it's essentially yet another American city. The character-switching mechanic is full-on glorious. I can be playing as Michael one moment, witnessing the man vainly attempting to pick up whatever pieces of his family and marriage are left. The next moment I can switch to Trevor who at that very moment is either fleeing away from the cops in a highway, or has tied a businessman to a pillar under a bridge while decrying to him the virtues of trickle-down economics. Despite the sheer satire-levels of characterisation and world-building, the characters are complex enough to disturbingly veer into the realism territory.

On top of the main story, with a large number of annoying individual missions unfortunately (heists are also disappointing, might I add), is a plethora of side content. Whereas Assassin's Creed loads the player with the same few mission types but repeated ad nausea, this game has everything from a Saints Row 3/4-like alien-shooting segment while under the influence of drugs, to a mission where I drive a car with an Italian-American actor tied up in the boot to the middle of the train tracks as requested by a couple of British nutjobs on holiday in the country. Mt. Chilliad was the best thing featured in San Andreas, and it's here as well, and even more glorious. I implore developers seeking to tackle the genre in the future look at GTA V and learn from Rockstar how you properly put together a digital open-world playground.

The Last Of Us

I've already written in length about the game a while back, and to avoid redundantly repeating a lot of what I just said, I'll try and keep this one relatively brief, as well as update on where I stand with the game.

I'll say this now; TLOU isn't exactly a game I am excitedly desiring to play through again. I had an intensely stressful time through much of TLOU, without reminding me of that basement with the generator and an army of Clickers, Stalkers and a Bloater in Pittsburgh. My basic philosophy with video games is typically to have fun (well, most JRPGs have to be an exception here anyhow...), and TLOU wasn't a fun game to play through. Now, that's a personal thing to do with me. I have never desired to get into the horror genre, nor anything very survivalist, and yet here was Naughty Dog doing its own take on it, though interspersed with rather familiar Uncharted-like shoot-from-cover setpieces. That's not to say the gameplay ride has been joyless the whole time. As tough as firefights became, particularly when ammo became scarce and human enemies more plentiful, there was always some satisfaction involved in the combat.

But as an experience on the storytelling and characterisation fronts, it's left quite the impression on me. TLOU is as a sum greater than its unoriginal parts; the parts in particular seem to have been lifted from familiar other works such as The Road, Children of Men, and virtually everything else belonging to the zombie genres. It hits you with its exploration of the human condition, as well as the theme of morality in a bleak, Hobbesian free-for-all world where society has disintegrated. Joel has single-handedly divided fans. I hold my own views on Joel and the gravity of what he has done towards the end of the game, and what I love is that I can understand why there are people who vehemently argue for the opposite side: that Joel is an irredeemable, immoral monster. Storytelling, characterisation and performance are all weaved together sublimely and I was emotionally exhausted by the end. I don't want to sound too sycophantic however, so I'll close by saying that contrary to what the diehard Sony fans say, TLOU is obviously not the greatest game ever made.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Ocarina of Time is the favourite Zelda entry of most fans. As a person of objective and empirical taste unsullied by the unwashed masses' opinions, I disagree with that, and I will always give the crown to A Link to the Past. So when it came to developing a new Zelda sidegame for handheld, Nintendo have decided to build what is essentially a spiritual sequel to the best Zelda game, instead of the mediocre Phantom "I have to come to this temple AGAIN?!" Hourglass and Spirit "Blowing into a DS mic is a dumb, stupid and broken idea" Tracks. I was sceptical to begin with, and particularly so when I first saw the 2D wallcrawling feature. It looked silly, I protested!

I needn't have worried. This and Fire Emblem (and soon, Bravely Default) have quickly justified by investment in another Nintendo handheld, and I didn't even know that you could get a 3DS game running at the glorious 60fps! Even if ALBW isn't going to dethrone ALTTP, it's a wonderful reminder of why I enjoy the Zelda franchise, and a cute little nostalgia trip. It is however, a game of glaring compromises. The game's most conspicuous strength is the flexibility when it comes to the order of dungeon-tackling, and the general freedom of exploration comparable to more recent games where the player is more constricted by long introductions and tutorials. This game isn't afraid to cut the crap and go straight to the meaty Zelda core. That being said however, there is a knock-on effect with this kind of level design. Because you can tackle the dungeons in whatever order you want, dungeons lose a bit of that tightly-designed nature, and do end up becoming a little easy and straightforward enough. I would like to see what Nintendo can do in another installment to balance scaling progression vs flexibility and freedom, but this has been a great and overdue next step for Zelda.

Honourable mention goes to Fire Emblem: Awakening. I've barely started it, so I can't comment much about it at the moment. But it's unlikely that I will end up hating the game. I will acquire Bravely Default one day, but at the moment, I'm all out on Amazon voucher credit.

Overall GOTY? Who knows. I don't want to settle on a single one. /cop-out