Coint and Plick 2014 - The Seventh Annual ILX Video Game Poll

#67 (tie): Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag – PS3/PS4/X360/Xbone – 10 pts – 1 votes

http://i.imgur.com/8fSCEND.jpg

Website | Metacritic | Action Trip | Quarter to Three | Hydro | Trailer

I'm currently at 70% in Black Flag and, yeah, really enjoyed it so far. I've only played a tiny bit of the first AC, so the whole thing is quite fresh to me. There's been a few too many 'follow this person and don't get caught' missions, but the creeping around, knifing guards in the back stealth stuff never gets old. Mostly I'm just enjoying sailing to desert islands over choppy seas as the crew sings shanties, and pickling fights with big fuck off Spanish galleons loaded with booty. - DavidM

Finished 4. It kicked major ass. Still too many "follow that man - oops, you failed!" sections of the story, but everything outside the story was a blast. Now I'm wandering around with a group of thugs killing every guard in Havana. Good times. - EZ Snappin

pvz2 was a lotta fun while it lasted. i went thru all the levels except didn't unlock all the keys in later worlds.

then they updated and got rid of the keys, but i really am not excited about going back and playing the stuff that's opened up since.

the new linear worlds are sorta dumb too -- wish there was a middle ground.

king cashing 2 would have been another big disappointment for me -- the line between random enjoyment and random grind is sorta thin. ditto tower of fortune 2. or maybe i'm just through with that mechanic. got the space thing from the same devs -- war of the eclipse, and that also just felt somewhat brutal and dull (but then i'm terrible at twitch mechanics so...)

#67 (tie): Let's Play: Ancient Greek Geometry – Browser – 10 pts – 1 votes

http://i.imgur.com/rCKzcCD.jpg

Game | Official Blog | Games That Teach | Gameplay

ℝolliℵg M∀th Thr∑a∂

ruler & compass constructions were the original video game. after masturbation maybe. just about as much fun too! - Euler

pom gets wi-fi looks so awesome!

ancient greek just missed my ballot. expected to play it for a few minutes, ended up spending the better part of a workday trying to hide it from my coworkers.

do you work at Cool Jock Studios or do they just prefer babylonian math

ironically the vg studio i work for doesnt like it when i play vgs instead of working which is weird right?

do u really work at a vg studio?

yes indeed and i am fully expecting the title i worked on for ~18mo to show up somewhere in the 40s on this list

if you made marvel puzzle quest i hate you and can i please have a blue spidey cover

I will lol if you suddenly get a flood of blue Bagman covers

fuck no i dont work for d3p but i saw job apps on their site and i was like fffffffffffffffffffffuuuuu i would get so many covers if i got that job$$$

(there was one job in specific i wouldve fully applied for if i were american)

Please tell me you worked on deadly premonition: the directors cut

#67 (tie): Nimble Quest – iOS/Android/PC/Ouya – 10 pts – 1 votes

http://i.imgur.com/66LVijR.jpg

Website | Metacritic | Apple N Apps | Modojo | Trailer

not a classic by any stretch but it was the perfect toilet game for me this year & so that's...a lot of time. also think of my vote as partly a vote for Tiny Tower, same company but I didn't start playing Tiny Tower until this year. - Euler

I had a spree on nimble quest this weekend, I got the demon and the forest freak and everybody has 2 stars and it is devastating. Until I get to graveyard 2 and shit gets completely out of hand - but that's how the depths felt, and the castle before that, so I know I can overcome once I get over the fact that all the other levels are totally boring now. Oops. - El Tomboto

i like the gameplay, but sort of wish there was more going on. - s.clover

oh shit I forgot about Nimble Quest

ha, another game I played a lot of but forgot about! it's pretty good, but I hit that wall too, I think around Graveyard 2 also. "perfect toilet game" indeed!

#67 (tie): The Last Door: Chapter 1 - The Letter – iOS/PC – 10 pts – 1 votes

http://i.imgur.com/mu6yC48.jpg

Website | Metacritic | 148 Apps | Gamespot | Trailer

A horror point&click adventure, a little cheesy and trope-heavy at times, but overall I was surprised by how disquieting it managed to be! The intro alone was some heavy shit for something so pixelated and basic-looking. - reddening

Oh, yeah, that series is quite good.

i also forgot about nimble quest, despite sinking about 5-6 hours into it, at least. graveyard 2 was my stopping point as well. fucking graveyard 2.

i think that was the "all right, pay us NOW mwuahaha" gate that's not in Nimblebit games, but it's lot of other F2Pers

#67 (tie): The Room Two – iOS/Android – 10 pts – 1 votes

http://i.imgur.com/Vv7c3HE.jpg

Website | Metacritic | Arcade Sushi | CNET | Trailer

Like the original, each level of The Room 2 locks you in a single location and tasks you with solving a series of connected puzzles. But this time around they're much more complex. Puzzle boxes are still in place, of course, and they're as intricate as ever, but the challenges now include everything from working typewriters and crossbows to model pirate ships and tarot card tables. Each room has multiple objects to interact with, and you'll be moving back and forth between them constantly — opening a panel on one object could have an effect on the other side of the room, and figuring out how these things interact with one another is immensely satisfying. When you solve a puzzle in The Room 2, it really makes you feel clever. - Andrew Webster, The Verge

I WISH I WORKED ON DEADLY PREM :(

i probably don't need to be as cagey as i am being. just having my irl name attached and talking abt stuff on """social media""" cd get me in trouble. it was batman. and by "worked on" i mean i wrote test cases. hah.

(xposts to jjj)

sometime i will hop on my sock puppet & let ppl ask me questions on ILG if there's interest.

every time i see something about these games i think it's referring to the 8bit game tribute to The Room, as in Tommy Wiseau: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/547307

I unlocked all the characters in Nimble Quest; is that past Graveyard 2? I suppose I could play it to see; is it ever a bad time to retreat to the toilet?

i write test cases for a living, wish i could do it for video games or just things generally related to batman.

i think it's referring to the 8bit game tribute to The Room

I thought about including some Room jokes tbh

never heard of the last door, may try it.

#67 (tie): Their Angelical Understanding – Interactive Fiction – 10 pts – 1 votes

http://i.imgur.com/6THAHeF.jpg

Game | Blog | Puppystuff

My favourite Porpentine of 2013. I like the way that she'll rehearse themes on twitter, spending a day or two trying out endless variations until she finds the one that resonates best, so that what goes into the games feels very distilled. Casino zone! - Gravel

#67 (tie): Thomas Was Alone – PS3/Vita/Linux – 10 pts – 1 votes

http://i.imgur.com/UBFZATQ.jpg

Website | Metacritic | Gamespot | Thunderbolt | Trailer

Thomas Was Alone is far more charming than it has any right to be - kingfish

... the smugness of Innocent smoothies in game form - zappi

hotline miami/thomas was alone ... there is no point in congratulating designers for making ugly looking shit. im not a frame rate asshole, but i also dont want to keep rewarding people for art styles that were born out of limitation in the early days, not laziness. and lets be fair, the mario games are beautiful. no one 15 years from now is going to make art based on this shit, because its garish and ugly FOR THE SAKE OF BEING GARISH AND UGLY. or in the case of thomas was alone, because somebody didnt want to hire a pixel artist. if you are a game reviewer, do me a favor and jam a nintendo stylus in your eye the next time you try to use "minimal" as a positive term, it just encourages these assholes. - jjjusten

How do you cry to blocks? - FullOfFlail, 8 days ago

damn jjjusten dropping the hammer

i agree with you about 90% -- "minimalism" as a word is ridiculously overrused, it implies artistic merit when there often isn't any... BUT BUT BUT there are SOME examples where the "minimalism" is actually, like, artistically valid and totally a decision and p rad. i'm thinking of some of (SOME OF) jason rohrer's work, and in a sort-of-not-really-roundabout way deadly prem. shit on iOS that looks "minimal" just to look more like iOS is p despicable, and the fuckton of stuff that came out around the birth of x360 "summer of arcade" is navel-gazing circle-jerky ANTI-ART of the likes that will ensure that the medium will never, ever actually attain any sort of "artistic relevance."

neither of those games are ugly!

i really like the way hotline miami looks (as discussed above) but otherwise i generally agree that minimalism often just means no aesthetic vision worth discussing. on that note, braid is like the ugliest game ever made. by contrast, Michael Brough games are "ugly" but gorgeous + aesthetically perfect in their ugliness.

i definitely don't wanna shit on Thomas, haven't played it and it seems like people don't like the art for the wrong reasons. Meant it more generally (looking at things like Threes on one hand and things like Retro City Challenge or Meat Boy or whatever on the other).

Hotline Miami looks super cool PRECISELY b/c it is not "minimalist"!

And Braid was kinda hideous but at least it was hideous in a new, risky way -- imagine it looked like meat boy, ugh ugh ugh

The character design on Braid was weird, sure, but the backgrounds were so pretty!

#67 (tie): Tearaway – Vita – 10 pts – 1 votes - TOP VITA EXCLUSIVE

http://i.imgur.com/TjHNYVv.jpg

Website | Metacritic | Metro UK | PlayStation Lifestyle | Trailer

Tearaway is a world of rustling paper constructs, crinkling and curling and flapping with the lovingly hand-touched flutter of stop-motion animation. Everything here is made of paper. The trees, the cities, the sky, the creatures. A windy seaside city with frothing waves clutching at the shore is rendered entirely in paper. Confetti is the currency. Sometimes you’re tasked with using a simple system of cutting shapes out of construction paper to lend this world your own interpretation of fire, stars, or snowflakes. - Tom Chick, Quarter to Three

Tearaway is fun - Sgt. Biscuits

I haven't finished Tearaway yet but I voted for it, played another chunk today actually and I love it more and more. I think it has a great solution to the user-generated-content idea, which has always failed before for me because it's usually off in its own little corner and I never bother spending any time there. But Tearaway regularly insists that you stop platforming for a minute to customise the way a scarecrow's face will look for the rest of the game, or to decorate a pig you're about to ride around on, or to design a flag that'll then keep appearing through the rest of the level. There's a lovely bit where you enter the snowy level (it's still a 3D platformer after all) and an NPC says "bah, white snowflakes are boring, design us a more interesting one" and then the snowflake you make becomes all the snowflakes that drift around that whole mountain. The further you go into the game the more it feels like you really are running around in a world you've made yourself.

Also the music (and general atmosphere) are LOVELY, it's perfect English pastoral (recorders, modal scales, occasional mentions of mummers etc). So that all pushes my buttons too.

Plus the fun hardware-based gimmicks like getting you to poke your fingers through the back of the console right into the screen etc, all lovely little moments.

Can't recommend it enough tbh, I scored everything with a flat 10 points this year but this was actually very close to being my game of the year.

many xposts, but do ppl on here play fallen london???

the art in thomas seemed really tied to the gameplay (at least for the characters). like i can't imagine the same game if there were actually interesting looking main character sprites?

^ yeah this exactly, ilthe game dynamics actually require the character design to be that way, it's not just aesthetic laziness.

#66: Animal Crossing: New Leaf – 3DS – 10 pts – 1 votes - 1 top game votes

http://i.imgur.com/RT3jv0t.jpg

Website | Metacritic | Guardian | Toronto Sun | Wikia | Trailer

Same as most Nintendo stuff these days, this is just the same game again except a bit better. In the past though I've always played solo and the fun has come from sending rude notes to cute bunnies. What made it great this time was playing it as a proper family game, we had two parents and a child all living in the same village, working towards shared goals, competing in bug hunts or fishing tournaments, comparing furniture collections. One letter I got from our little lad was so amazingly cute that it wasn't just a favourite gaming moment ever, it was probably a favourite parenting moment. So yeah, my game of the year. - JimD.

hi will m i also w0rk for a vg gjbdfgjdbf;gkjd i am terrified to post this

i rly need a new username but i've branded this one so well!!

hahahahaha WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO US

many xposts, but do ppl on here play fallen london???

― cardamon, Friday, February 21, 2014 1:34 AM (14 hours ago)

It's been included in the poll a couple of times. I think most people got bored of it, though, but I still play it sporadically.

for me i see no real separation between hotline miami and retro city rampage in pure ugliness, in fact i could have included retro city rampage in the same rant - again, part of my ire for hotline is that it just straight up should NEVER have been ported to console, its basically unplayable imo. or i suck. or both.

wrt thomas was alone, the minute i saw "minimalist design" and "narrator" i knew it was not a game for me, as the worlds biggest hater of that super narrated thing from last year that i have apparently blocked from my memory. so, the biggest and only draw of a game is the awesome (hint: probably not awesome) narrator? well make a fucking text adventure then.

you did include it, i just got rid of it. sorry!

retro city rampage is purely directed homage/reference/Family Guy-style 8-bit ugliness, won't argue for that one, it is what it is

hotline miami though is this delicious stew, everything from the grotesquely detailed bloody pixel animations and the weird intense music and the saturated colors, it's all quite deliberate and artful, if often ugly. side note: i wonder the creators were into skateboarding as kids, the aesthetic definitely reminds me of that era

bastion, that was the one from last year i hated. wise old narrator bullshit blahhhhh

like portal i guess has a narrator of sorts, but its done right, nearly everyone else gets it horrendously wrong, i get the feeling that the stanley parable might do it pretty well but my mac is the equivalent of a treadle driven sewing machine at this point so i will never actually know.