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

#41 (tie): State of Decay - X360/PC - 20 pts - 2 votes

http://i.imgur.com/mkp2FPt.jpg

Website | Metacritic | Quarter to Three | IGN | Trailer

State of Decay - Anticipation

Janky, weird, busted, charming. I was lucky enough to finish this game without it screwing me with its terrible gameplay so maybe I'm rating it higher than I should but I had a lot of fun with it. Loved the concept, from the permadeath on characters to the weird basebuilding/material gathering to the support call-in mechanics to the "persistent" (aka: it checks your clock and makes things happen when you load the game again) world. Best B-game of 2013! - Will M.

Anyone else playing the SoD DLC, Breakdown? It's pretty great. I loved the original game, but once you learned the mechanics it grew to be pretty easy, and this sandbox dlc increases the diffuculty significantly, making it much more challenging. My game of the year. - musicfanatic

Next week I'm going to try to get 11-40 all wrapped up, and then top ten following week.

another one of my votes - never quite fulfills its promise but the closest thing yet to an immersive open world zombie game

never got around to SoD but i still like the idea. maybe someday.

Pom Gets Wifi was pretty hilarious

#39 (tie): Rogue Legacy - PS3/PS4/Vita/PC/Mac/Linux - 20 pts - 3 votes

http://i.imgur.com/aBrTeS0.jpg

Website | Metacritic | Eurogamer | dpad | Trailer

Took me a while to get into this, but once I did it was fantastic. I kinda wish that the genetics stuff was a bit more involved (like, breeding in/out skills, instead of just getting randomly handed flaws every generation) but the actual gp gets really fun once you get the best classes (aw yeah lich king) and some decent equipment/runes. I've beaten 2/5 bosses, hope to finish this game soon! - Will M.

oh i forgot about this game. i thought it sounded cool. imma check this out.

Ultimately I wanted to like Rogue Legacy more than I did, but it's a solid game. It suffers a little in comparison against recent games like Spelunky and FTL (which I couldn't fully get into either). I'm going to give it another try soon

#39 (tie): Card Hunter - Browser - 20 pts - 3 votes

http://i.imgur.com/jMLjstJ.gif

Website | Metacritic | Darkstation | Videogamer | Trailer

Dorky, lovable and deep, Card Hunter has an earnest love for its subject matter. Whether it’s in the little exclamations of “Adventure!” and “A-ha!” from its dungeon master, Gary, the complex systems that make up its turn-based, card collection design, or in its descriptions of caverns and sorcerers’ towers, this is a game that’s built on Dungeons & Dragons foundations and isn’t afraid to show it. - Edge

top fun - no lasting appeal and ran its course pretty quickly, but still top fun - Roberto Spiralli

NEEEEERRRRRRRRRDDDS

I enjoyed(but still haven't finished) SR4. I do think on reflection that the game suffers for being too close to SR3. The character stuff is fun, tho

3 votes!? guess i'll have to give this a try at some point

card hunter is great! it's like single player CCG + tactical d&d style combat

nb i got up to like level 15 or 16 and then quit bc some of the adventures got way too hard/tedious (esp restarting a 5 part adventure for the 4th time bc you can't get past the 5th part)

#38: Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon - 3DS - 21 pts - 1 votes

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

Website | Metacritic | Telegraph | Slant | Trailer

In the new 3DS sequel Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, the green-clad Mario brother is pulled back into the ghostbusting business. The ghosts are going haywire, you see. It's up to you round them up. You do this by unloading a charge of your flashlight on ghosts, and then using your trusty Poltergust 5000, a ghostbusting device that straps onto your back, to suck the ghosts up. That's not all you can do with it, though. The Poltergust 5000 has two functions: vacuuming and blowing. Like in the first game, you use these abilities to poke and prod your way through rooms. Who knew so many of the world's problems could be solved with an overpowered vacuum? - Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku

This is just a really cute game that I want to convince lots of people to play. This game looks great and there are so many sweet, thoughtful details in this, like how Luigi hums along to the theme music and how items in a room react when they're near the vacuum. The ghost-sucking physics of the vacuum are pretty satisfying and most of the boss fights are good fun (most -- there's one pretty irritating one). Supposedly the multiplayer is really good but I haven't had a chance to try it. - salsa shark

21 points, you son of a bitch!

haha

Haha I was hoping there'd be at least another voter on that one to mask my awful vote allocation :( SERIOUSLY THOUGH WHY HAS NO ON ELSE PLAYED AND VOTED FOR THIS GAME :(

*NO ONE ELSE :(

Don't feel bad, there are hordes of Luigi's Mansion fans out there... for some reason. I am intrigued though, I hope it's better than the GameCube version.

That screenshot alone looks like ten times more interesting than anything in the original game, for instance

I always want to play all the handheld games in this poll but realistically I can't talk myself into buying a 3DS or a Vita. I have enough stuff.

I never played the Gamecube one so can't comment, but I seem to recall the reviews agreeing that it's much better than the first.

That Dark Moon is better than the first, obviously. I can't type a thought comprehensively today.

#37: Fire Emblem: Awakening - 3DS - 22 pts - 1 votes

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

Website | Metacritic | Edge | Inside Gaming Daily | Trailer

A fun tactical RPG with good replay value. I've sunk a lot of hours into this one. - diamonddave85

oh man: the new fire emblem is probably the best game released last year in mechanical terms. that requires more explanation but i am saving that for my in-depth gamefaqs mechanics faq. - Lamp

"Fire Emblem Awakening on the other hand is the best in the series & an amazing piece of work, fully deserves all the plaudits its been getting" ... "but wtf with everyone's feet?!?" - Zappi

lamp do you really write gamefaqs faqs? i want to believe

lol zappi

#36: Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective - Browser - 23 pts - 2 votes

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

Game | Polygon | Rock Paper Shotgun | James Turrell | Speed Run

Video games as art, video games about art, video games about bad video games, about taste, art about taste, about mortality, anti-art, anti-taste about anti-art. Consumerism. Hell. - s.clover

Weird Twitter in game form. - reddening

Hahaha.

in retrospect maybe i should've voted for that, because it was one of the games i was happiest to know existed last year.

#35: XCOM: Enemy Within - PS3/X360/PC/Mac - 23 pts - 3 votes

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

Website | Metacritic | PC Gamer | Game Informer | Trailer

Ideally would have been part of original game but it sure adds a lot of cool toys. It gives enough content that playing through the game again feels rewarding and still somewhat fresh. - bnw

good expansion to already excellent game, added some good extra features and missions. very happy to have excuse to play again. - Roberto Spiralli

#34: Puzzle & Dragons - iOS/Android - 25 pts - 1 votes - 1 top game votes

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

Website | Shonen Jump | Pocket Gamer | Trailer

Match-3 Heaven.. or Hell? It's not surprising how influential Bejeweled was on the casual game space, as also being one of a long line of Match-3 games. But the following generation of these games has really spawned from the original Puzzle Quest, making these match games truly addictive with stat progression and inventory, leaning on the endless looting/crafting/leveling from Diablo. Candy Crush Saga got all the attention this year, but it doesn't even come close to the variety and effectiveness of P&D, the child of Puzzle Quest and Pokemon. With a co-op social element, fresh dungeons, monsters, and events every week, I've been locked into this game's tendrils for about six months and indefinitely into the future. - Nhex

Glad we got past what I'm sure is the only match-3 iOS app on C&P 2014

Did you already forget Dr. Who

i did

More like Dr Who?

Well, if nothing else I pushed Puzzle and Dragons past Bubsy 3D

I have no regrets though, not hard for me to vote this one as GOTY, blew my match-3 mind

Wanted to like P&D but it's one of the ios games that just fails to even boot up if I'm offline, which I am for 70% of my commute each day, which is the only time I play ios games. Seriously, the WORST thing about gaming in 2013 is the number of ios games that now do that (or ones that don't do that but won't let me listen to a podcast in the background while I play them because they think their 45 seconds of shitty looping music is so great).

Otmfm

Looking at you Hexagon.

So otm, both points

More like Dr Who?

man i shoulda voted a straight match 3 ticket this year just because i could

match 3 games are the worst videogaming trend. it's not that they're all uniformly terrible (bejeweled is obv an alltime classic, and marvel match 3 was at least compelling from an IP standpoint) but how many of these games do we need???

http://www.ilxor.com/s.pnghttp://www.ilxor.com/s.pnghttp://www.ilxor.com/s.png

I get what you're saying, Mordy, but can't you say the same thing for most simple mechanics? Like, physics games, tower defence, currently Flappy Bird knock-offs?

i guess one difference here is that a lot of the match 3 games i try (including P&D) don't really add enough to the simple mechanics to differentiate it from every other entry in the field. tower defense in some ways even worse at not updating the gameplay at all from knock-off to knock-off, but it seemed much more prevalent a few years ago. so many match-3 games someone could (as mentioned above) theoretically make a ballot of only match 3.

Need best match 3 game poll.

You have games like Zuma and Monsters Ate My Condo, which are kind of different mechanics. But still the spirit of matching three is there. I like the ones with RPG elements like Dungeon Raid and Puzzle Craft.