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

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.

and 10000000!

jeff otm

puzzle quest got it "rightest" imo but i can dig if other people don't hold to that line.

And, coming in one slot ahead of Puzzle and Dragons is...

#33: The Last of Us - PS3 - 25 pts - 3 votes

http://i.imgur.com/SM5Jko6.gif

Website | Metacritic | Grantland | NY Times | Fan Fiction | Trailer

The Last of Us - it's the time of the season

it doesn't start off promisingly - for the first few sections of the game it doesn't hold your hand so much as take the controller, sit you down with a hot drink, and say 'listen, let me do this bit ok?'. but it gets beyond that, although it never quite stops giving you helpful nudges. it feels initially like it is aiming for Uncharted: Heavy Rain of Zombies but once it gets going it surpasses that low bar without effort. the basic gameplay is very simple and i did wonder if i really wanted to throw however many hours at doing the same thing over and over, but the game manages to keep contriving situations that refuse to let you just fall back on what worked last time, and that is probably the most impressive achievement. it's never scary but it is frequently intense. however it is as linear as all get out, no more illusion of choice of direction than i dunno operation wolf, so if you have a philosophical problem with that look elsewhere i guess.

supplies are scarce enough that you actually have to think about what your doing, which is essential for a game like this to work and if i'd have had to pick a place they'd have gone wrong that probably would've been it. it does look great, and the recognizable bits of boston at the start are very cool. the story and the characters and the voice acting etc are all at least reasonably intelligent but as usual the assumption is that gamers are impervious to subtlety, so none of it is what it could or should be to deserve the critical jizz.

so yeah, it is very good. it's paced so you can't put the controller down because you always feel like you're in the middle of something, but there is also a genuine feeling of not wanting to stop, of wanting to know what's next, and that's as much of a recommendation as anything imo. ― Roberto Spiralli

Finally got some more time to play this. It is really fun AS A GAME. If that makes sense. Some sections surprisingly difficult, and the game has a pretty good sense of when to dump you back at the beginning of a section and thereby let you play through seamlessly, fuelling your own sense of badassness, or when, on the other hand, to give you a break and let you keep the gains you'd got.

It basically succeeds in all the places that Uncharted failed: it has a core mechanic - sneaking, melee and a bit of shooting - that miraculously doesn't ever get repetitive; it doesn't rely on shooting galleries as set pieces or to slow things down artificially; you constantly feel just barely on the verge of being competent enough, and equipped enough, to deal with what's coming next - Tracer Hand

that's the juno game?