The Fifth Annual Coint and Plick Poll for Best Video Games of 2011 - Part Four: THE TOP TWENTY

Stoked.

Battles 2 and 3 are WAY too close together

otm. this pissed me off enough that i haven't really played the game since /:

i stalled during the tadtones bit, but i loved everything until that part. is it worth it to power through to the next part?

The last dungeon was easily my favourite in the game. Don't remember anything particularly annoying between tadtones and there.

later zeldas seem v keen on the repetition; i've seen at least one review arguing that the dungeon-repetition in the first ds title was A Good Thing, which strikes me as awfully strange

remy if you loved it all up until the tadtones then yeah, do it. the other song gathering bits are good.

this pissed me off enough that i haven't really played the game since /:

― diamonddave85, Monday, April 16, 2012 8:17 PM (2 hours ago)

later zeldas seem v keen on the repetition; i've seen at least one review arguing that the dungeon-repetition in the first ds title was A Good Thing, which strikes me as awfully strange

― thomp, Monday, 16 April 2012 19:38 (2 hours ago) Permalink

I never finished Phantom Hourglass for that reason. The Ocean King levels were fucking infuriating, and that you were being timed in the midst of all of them unbelievable. Plus, there came a point where it offers you a save-point/teleportation-device - but considering you gained that during your first haphahazard run-through of the temple's levels, you only have about a minute left on the clock. As such, it necessitates that you do the entire stage over again to gain a couple extra minutes - long story short, miyamoto had no qualms with fucking with you.

otherwise, i loved that game and the ship sailing bits were almost heavenly

There's always been a (welcome?) element of repetition in the Zeldas though - one of their defining characteristics for me was the notes I was taking re "must remember to come back to this spot when I have arrow / bombs / hookshot"

http://www5.picturepush.com/photo/a/8047078/img/8047078.gif
#5: Glitch – in browser – 104 pts – 7 votes - 2.25 top game votes- top in browser exclusive game
play it here
glitch: a wacky new mmorpg played in browser
http://i39.tinypic.com/m7xtfk.jpg

tomofthenest: totally addictive land of doing nothing at all except holding left or right. I'm not sure how it even functions at entertainment but yeah I'll give it some points anyway..

DJP: This game was super fun until it went live, at which point all of the whimsy and goofiness just seemed... pointless.

Remy Bean: I wanted to love Glitch. I was an alpha tester. A beta tester. I participated on the forums, offered a number of suggestions to the game, a half-dozen of which were actually, deeply, incorporated. I played and played. Different play styles. Filled out dutiful bug reports. But I was chastised by a reactive staff-member for interacting in the global chat, trying to deflect the damage done by a racist troll. The damned thing is, I really made a difference, defused a potentially injurious situation, and then got slapped for it, because they didn’t want to go after the actual troll. Then, I got in trouble for making fun of the Amish. No joke; I got called out for suggesting farcical gameplay adaptions for the Amish. Some dude (boyfriend of a dev, IIRC), called it ‘religious intolerance’ and all of a sudden the game, and community, turned on a dime. It became cuddly-mountain, San-Fran based moral one-upmanship, inclusivity-as-a-competitive-sport. Apart from a shift in the general feeling of the tester’ community, I felt like the gameplay direction itself changed. What had once been a fairly open discussion with regard to the goal and purpose of the game (and a lot of its draw) suddenly became about a discussion imposing limitations and proper play pragmatics, limiting the game to a number of Actual Functions. I have no idea whether the game is closer to what Tiny Speck wants/wanted it to be, but it is a lot farther from what I enjoyed. It was fun having an influence, an impact, a clue about the direction of the game – to feel like the meta-gaming aspects were encouraged and acknowledged, that I didn’t have to play “right” or “wrong” but rather that the world was a sandbox (unconstrained) –– and not a “sandbox” (with hard limits and proper, highly codified and politicized ethical/moral dimensions). Based on the early beta work, this would have been my game of the year. Based on its current incarnation, it’ll sulk at the bottom of the list. And I won’t be going back to playing it in any meaningful way, unless something big changes in the overall design.

Nhex: I didn't predict that the first MMO I would really play in near ten years would be some kind of cutesy casual collection junk done in Flash featuring giant headed unisex monster children, but there you have it. Like others here I funded the game during beta because of the promise it showed. Though it was one of the best games I played this year (in a great year) and I still love the writing and humor, after a long enough time, it falls prey to the same problems all over MMOs have - basically, what to do when you've exhausted the game's activity list, or when what's left devolves to endless chores. Still, before the reaching that point, it's a joy to see what the developers have cooked up. And as a living game, they still have time to add new stuff all the time, and I've got a year left on this sub anyway...

planning on finishing out tonight, so hope that's cool!

In retrospect it's hard to believe I spent so much time mining rocks in caves.

Luckily Skyrim came along and offered a more graphically impressive mining experience.

xp yes so cool

so many MMOs, and other kinds of games, have somehow stumbled onto this truth: human being subconsciously crave mining rocks in caves

but only if you can do it at a rate of about 1 cubic meter per second.

agent hibachi’s Biggest Disappointment
Battlefield 3
hey, the holidays are over, time to finally boot this up, i have a couple of hours to kill. (installing) one hours later: please insert disc 2 for hd content. sure, the graphics looked great in the promo stuff. (installing) two hours later: yes! title screen. no! title update. (installing) one hour later: yes! title..jesus fuck. 1.5 gig "multiplayer" update that it says i should install anyway because of single-player bugs. (three weeks later) finally! a few hours to try this. it's fully patched. it's gonna be awesome. (zips through first few levels) oops, that rooftop sniper just got me three times in a row. i dislike this loading screen already, it's costing me at least thirty seconds of my actual life every time i die in the game. oops, got me a fourth time. oops, HARD CRASH, xbox completely locked up. fuck this. modern warfare, you win.

You have to patch shit on your Xbox?? what's the point of an xbox then

if you're going to install shit for hours on a frickin game console you could be downloading shareware from AOL in 1998 and probably have more fun.

i've got a sweet shareware Doom floppy if anyone wants it

You have to patch shit on your Xbox?? what's the point of an xbox then

what? i think maybe u don't have a clear grasp of what an xbox is?

like, i've never heard someone tout the virtues of an xbox by saying that you never have to patch a game

remember when the xbox 360 cost $5000?

It's a game console! Games come on discs or carts and you play them! I knew you could "install" Xbox games but I assumed it was mostly pretend or optional. Sounds like it's violating the game console social contract to me.

i think you can opt out of any patch, but in most cases (ie when the patch doesn't break the game) I don't know why you would want to. patches squash bugs!

oppet: The sequel to my favourite game ever, so had a lot to live up to.

So just checking, is this some "Star Trek V never happened" happening here?

― Andrew Farrell, Monday, 16 April 2012 05:14 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha, I had genuinely forgotten about the actual sequel. In my defence, my ballot blurbs were done in a total rush.

Glitch really had me sucked in for about a fortnight but then I forgot about it. Seemed like it was getting too fiddly and less fun, I think.

http://www5.picturepush.com/photo/a/8055333/img/8055333.gif
#4: Tiny Wings – iOS – 105 pts – 6 votes - 1 top game vote - top iOS exclusive game
http://i39.tinypic.com/25pu2s9.jpg
Jeff: A perfect little game. I perfectly maddening little game. I think I spent the most consecutive hours playing this, at least 6 or 7 hours straight one day.

Sondrangerbot: more frustrating than fun, more evil than entertaining but still addictive.

silby: TINY WINGS, Andreas Illiger, iOS, totally my GOTY
Tiny Wings is yet another iOS game where your one interaction is
touching the screen. You touch the screen to "make yourself heavy" as
the instructions say; your bird stops its feeble flapping and gliding
and drops to the ground. The physics simulations required to do this
chewed battery like crazy on my 1G iPod touch. A couple of the
objectives aren't fun to get.

But everything else about this game, the art, the sounds, the music, the
physics, the way it makes my brain feel every time I hit a perfect
slide, or miss one, or anticipate nightfall with mounting dread, is so
fucking on point it's crazy. Doing well makes you feel unstoppable,
doing poorly makes you feel like you are dragging your belly down the
hill just like that miserably cheerful bird. Tiny Wings is intense and
engrossing. It plays on the "die and retry" shtick employed by Canabalt,
Super Meat Boy, vvvvv etc. by not even bothering to let you die...at
least not officially. But when you're chasing that 175,000 point
objective, you can know halfway through the first island that you are
doomed. You can see yourself two minutes later, flopping down on the
upward slope of some shitty hill on island 6, tucking your wings in to
sleep, and you wonder why you didn't restart right away when you lost
your fever five islands ago. And then you retry anyway.

Tiny Wings is a one-button game but a full-body experience. You feel gravity
weighing on your tiny bird body, you feel the timing of your descent and
the exhilaration of your cloud touches in your very gonads. Tiny Wings
is like playing on a swing, pumping your arms back and forth, shifting
your weight around at the right moments to try to make the swing finally
flip over the top of the swingset, twirling you around like a roller
coaster.

There may be better games than Tiny Wings that came out in 2011, but I
didn't play them. No seriously I didn't, I did not play many new video
games at all this year. Maybe it was only Tiny Wings. But Tiny Wings was
all I needed.

tiny wings is that good??

maybe i should try it, but if it's anything like angry birds you can forget it

i played so much tiny wings im getting a lil sick just thinking abt it

a v beautiful and frustrating game

Definitely understanding what silby is feeling as regards the console social contract, but the sad truth is that this is how it's been since the first Xbox allowed installation and patching - consoles dropped the previously stringent quality standards in favour of PC's "ship it now, patch it later".

i also played way too much tiny wings. *barf&&&--__..

It's a game console! Games come on discs or carts and you play them! I knew you could "install" Xbox games but I assumed it was mostly pretend or optional. Sounds like it's violating the game console social contract to me.

― raw feel vegan (silby)

you don't have to install the game to apply a patch to it. patches are generally welcome fixes to glitches and don't take long to download. you don't have to check for them either, it automatically does that and tells you when you boot up the game that there's a patch available and asks you if you'd like to install it. seems beyond obtuse to have a problem with this. i suppose this is ilx tho.

tiny wings is nothing like angry birds. very beautiful and tranquilizing

i should definitely buy this "guide for tiny wings - tips and tricks" app i see in the itunes store for the same price as the game, right?

Tiny Wings is on my top 5 list of "games I won't play because I will get sucked in and I actually enjoy the sun on my face and the sound of children's laughter".

The other four games are all Drop 7.

uh oh

yay tiny wings!

jim I was mostly just reacting to whoever was lamenting how many hours it took to get Battlefield 3 working on their console. It just struck me as sad and weird that a console game required multiple hours of downloading and patching just to play single player. I don't play 360 or PS3 regularly (haven't owned either) so I was just surprised to read all that and then notice they were playing a console version.

oh the battlefield patch was fucking huuuuuuuuuge, which is unusual. i don't have it but yeah, takes a bunch of time because you don't get amazing download speeds. but it fixed a bunch of exploits so i guess people are happy.

that person was doing it wrong

silby's confusion is reasonable - i just bought a ps3 a couple months ago and was so confused as to why people kept advocating for getting the model's with larger HD's. i was like - do you guys really download that many fucking demos?

http://www2.picturepush.com/photo/a/8055425/img/8055425.gif
#3: Batman: Arkham City – 360 / PS3 – 197 pts – 12 votes - 1.25 top game votes
http://i40.tinypic.com/34rd5k6.jpg

EZ Snappin: A pleasure to play, and a sequel that should have left the original in the dust. However, I don't think it did. Arkham Asylum was tight and focused, whereas this is sprawling and padded. Too long (though the combat is a joy), with a lesser story though a better ending. Did like the Grundy boss battle better than any in the original.

DJP: There is nothing as glorious as leaping off of a building, soaring through the air using your cape as wings, only to fire off a grappling hook and swing onto a nearby gargoyle/ledge, then leaping off and doing it again, and again, and again. Even if they'd screwed up the story (they didn't) or had made the game viciously ugly (they didn't) and didn't have massive replayability in the various side missions and Riddler trophies and challenges (they do), the simple fact that they got swinging through a dangerous city so wonderfully correct would pardon lots of sins. That they did this and then went on to make every other facet of the game awesome is just staggering.

Nhex: There was an inevitable deflation, as much like Portal, the first one set a high bar on top being a total surprise. But let's get down to it, it was absolutely worth the wait, improved pretty much every gameplay aspect from the first game, delved further into the Batman universe, nailing that legendary feeling of being Batman. Zipping across the city to prevent Zsasz from killing a prisoner, delivering people from the Saw-esque Riddler death traps, taking time out to rescue political prisoners form being raped on the street, uncovering the political conspiracy behind Arkham City, all in a single night, of course. That near-perfect fight system is pretty hard to ruin, too. Bring on the next one.

bnw: One of the nice things about Arkham City and its predecessor, is that while it emphasizes stealth- it doesn't just limit that to "avoid guards and cameras" i.e. "move when you're supposed to, dummy". batman's stealth involves more planning and minding your surroundings.

Jeff: Enjoyed all aspects of this game. I found the fighting, both the straight up and stealth extremely satisfying. It is so blissful to string together a couple of dozen hits, batarangs, freezing, grapple, etc. Equally as satisfying to take down an entire room without a single person seeing you. Huge open world is just fun to zoom around. Catwoman parts were not as satisfying, but a nice add on to have.

Jordan: SO MUCH FUN. And then it's over.

Salsa Shark: I don't know what to say about this that other people haven't already said, so here are some scattered thoughts (very much tl;dr style):

+ Everything about this game felt so much more wider and expansive than Arkham Asylum, from the setting to the weapon and fighting repertoire to the characters who come and go throughout the story.
+ Playing as Catwoman was fun and refreshing; I'm not sure everyone was a fan of this but I thought she was a good addition to the game.
+ The side quests involving various villains were mostly fun and provided a break from the main storyline, although the punishing number of Riddler trophies and riddles is a bit overwhelming (the Riddler sidequest is the only one I haven't finished simply because I've maxed out the number of riddles and trophies I can get without using a walkthrough).
+ The villains/boss fights included as part of the storyline were also mostly fun, and a couple were unexpected. I especially loved the subway city, both in design and in the way its villain contributed to the storyline. I was initially a bit disappointed that the Joker had such a huge role again (it goes along with my general tiredness towards the Joker in contemporary Batman canon), but I got over this by the end of the game when the Joker's story began to unfold.
+ The controls were generally responsive enough that any of Batman or Catwoman's failures were entirely my own (unfortunately there were a lot of failures because I am a button-masher, not a strategic fighter).

The downsides... mostly I found myself thinking too much about the likelihood of an 'Arkham City' ever being set up -- would Gothamites not protest at losing their heritage and civic buildings to degenerates? It seems like an unlikely setup to begin with, and even more unlikely that something like Protocol 10 could be allowed to occur. Also, Hugo Strange felt a bit... non-essential.

oh crap. did that pos uncharted 3 place yet?

wow

so... Portal 2 and...?

oh right. portal 2. not uncharted 3. skyrim, obv

oh yeah, duh

jjusten’s RANT OF SOUL CRUSHING DISAPPOINTMENT
You know this was one of those years where the haterade wasn't really flowing wrt games, its been a bonus year in pretty much every category and I know that there are things I haven't even touched yet that are awesome. For a while I wasn't even going to submit a biggest disappointment, or tweak it so it was either broken ass skyrim or my own shame at my inability to not bother playing the effortless and bland Fable III all the way through, but then I looked through the nom thread one more time and realized oh shit what am I thinking?

LA NOIRE came out this year.

Lets just get this out of the way first HEY DUMMIES ITS NOT A GODDAMN GAME. Just because you can jam the disc into your gamebox doesnt make it necessarily so, and this is a throwback prime offender like i havent seen since the deathly awful cdrom era of the late 90s. I am not sure what kind of ball-lapping coke baggie gift pack they sent out to reviewers for this utter piece of unfun, but it must have been pretty amazing considering the metacritic score. Basically its GTA4 with all the levity, lightheartedness, and good times removed, but this time you dont even have to actually play a game in order to get bored out of your fucking skull. Protagonist is dull, driving is wait hold on a second WHY AM I DRIVING AT ALL THERE IS NEVER ANYTHING TO DO and the free roam aspect is WAIT WHY CAN I FREE ROAM WHAT THE FUCK. This is a game for the people out there that think that the gta series would be greatly improved as a travelogue, sorta a rick steeves of the 1950s. So ok fine you say what about the amazing crime scene investigation where you meander around a scene until some random
object of great import presents itself because shit that never happened in like a million point and click adventure games before, but this time instead of glowing halos they use this amazing new-fangled vibration technology, or do they i cant remember because the shit was so fucking dull it made no impression whatsoever. Oh and did we mention that through next gen facial wank wank avatar magic dot camera face technology we have created the most terrifying facial animation on the planet? Imagine if you will that we take ACTUAL ACTORS and cover their face with REAL RUBBER MASKS OF THEIR FACES and then have them emote with the amazing magical power of OVERACTING and then we dump that into our super-pixelator machine and let you ask them SEVERAL QUESTIONS! In a row! And if you somehow miss the fact that they are eye-twitching and wiggling their face around like a meth-binger at a broken traffic light, don't worry, you get to do it OVER and OVER until you get it right. ITS LIKE YOU ARE ACTUALLY THERE except it isnt because the clues are about as subtle as a hammer to the fucking face, and honestly there was one lady that i interviewed where i swore her head was going to whip right off her neck because of her furtive glancing. But wait, I am being unfair, because i forgot
to mention the totally pointless side missions which seem to entirely involve climbing buildings or shooting teenagers in the face for joyriding a car and cracking wise. And yeah, I know, its all about the story or some such bullshit but man cmon i got 400 movies on my netflix instant queue and none of them make me patiently drive a car around or meander around a railroad yard until i find a wadded up tissue of great importance, so no thanks. IT SUCKS. ITS AN INTERACTIVE MOVIE. GET OVER IT.

phew cuz uncharted 3 was my DISAPPOINTMENT OF THE YEAR

Nathan Drake is a creepy creep