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

fascinating game. Causes me high levels of anxiety. I guess that's it's aim.

I loved my first couple of hours with it but haven't been able to bring myself to go back to it yet.

Might be wrong but I feel like it's unusual for a game to place this highly in a P+C while still averaging less than 10 points per vote?

Loved how the story is slowly revealed through the game and how seamlessly the gameplay decisions affected the story. With a lot of games where player actions decide the story, either the gameplay or story is really lacking at the expense of the other, or they don't find a good way to integrate the two, but PP did everything right.

is papers please, like, a whole game? of game-y length? i thought it was a 20 minute flash experience, but i think that's because i confused it with a game of similar vibe where you edited a newspaper

i mean mpq was (shamefully) my top game but if it's our number one on this that's gonna really say a lot about the state of both contemporary gaming and ILG in general

at least next year it'll likely be surpassed by Dark Souls II. Maybe.

i have questions about that game as well but that can wait i guess, what number of playstation are we on now again

#4: Batman: Arkham Origins - PS3/X360/WiiU/PC - 76 pts - 6 votes - 1 top game votes

http://i.imgur.com/KRk1zIY.gif

Website | Metacritic | Guardian | Ars Technica | Craftsmanship | A Retelling | Gameplay | Commercial

Batman: Arkham Origins takes us out on our third adventure with the Dark Knight, this time in the form of a prequel. Batman finds himself hunted by eight deadly assassins on Christmas Eve, each vying for the 50 Million dollar bounty placed on his head by Black Mask, Gotham’s Kingpin of organized crime. - Royce Dean, Canadian Online Gamers

(Spoilers.) The true climax of Origins comes about 80% of the way through the main story, where the (wholly unsurprising) central villain, The Joker, has been revealed and caught. This begins a bravura playable sequence in his mind with a monologue that in no uncertain terms details his falling in love with Batman, punctuated by the language of Arkham's third person movement and combat engine. This sequence alone made the game a worthwhile proposition for me.

Much of this game is a reuse of assets from Arkham City, down to even revisiting miniaturized versions of the neighborhoods from that title. The elements, enemies, and settings are competent as they have been, but it's the brand new set-pieces - particularly the Firefly section near the end of the game - that hint at a potential if WB is willing to take a risk and get away from the now well-established Arkham aesthetic and tone. (I hope that the rumors of a next-gen Silver Age Batman title from Rocksteady are true.)The detective mode/flashback crime reconstructions are very well put-together, and the fan in me does like seeing Batman fight an endless army of crooked cops in old Gotham. This game certainly didn't NEED to be made, but it could have very easily been a complete throwaway title from a sub-studio without the various glimmers of newlight it does have.

And I can't understate this: Flawless Freeflow combat is possibly the greatest single gameplay invention of the last half decade. The theatrical synchronicity between game action and your physical controller movements was magnificent in its original incarnation and has slightly deepened and improved over the last two games; it was nearly perfect from the very beginning as it was. It's still thrilling ballet. I'll play a dozen more games with this engine easily, but I'm still glad they gave a stronger effort to the story and characterizations in Origins. - Nhex

This game was a ton of fun for about 90 minutes and then I never played it again. It's super comfortable and fits directly into the gameplay style of the rest of the series. - DJP

I'm sure a lot of people won't rate this because it's really more of the same... whereas I guess I rate it precisely because it's more of the same. Also, I thought the Deathstroke boss fight was really fantastic (so much that it ranks among my all-time favourite boss fights).

I feel like the Deathstroke (it always takes me awhile to figure out that he's not Deadpool or Deadshot) fight was a pre-cursor to my current obsession with Dark Souls, at least until I turned hints back on. - Jordan

5 points for the boss battles being decent. The rest of it you played before. Except here Batman grimaces and grunts a lot to prove he is young and angry. - bnw

I swear to god that Papers Please gif was looping last night. :(

haha, no, just own it! single loop GIFs are rare and commendable

is papers please, like, a whole game? of game-y length?

Took me 4-5 hours to get one ending, so sufficiently gamey IMO

#4! on behalf of my test cases i thank u all

Here comes the first game in our poll with more than one first place vote...

#3: The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds - 3DS - 81 pts - 5 votes - 2 top game votes - Top 3DS Exlusive

http://i.imgur.com/YN2Sl01.gif

Website | Metacritic | NY Times | Game Informer | Eurogamer | Fox News | Fan Fiction | Let's Play | Trailer

A Link Between Worlds takes the fundamentals of the series' 16-bit era and flips its design conceits on their head. Nintendo has taken its most sacred cow and pushed it out into a more open world with all the terrifying freedom the series has never had. The result? The best Zelda game of the last twenty years. - Arthur Gies, Polygon

Another dimension added to the game is the use of stereoscopic 3D. Unlike many 3DS games, Between Worlds still fully runs at 60 frames per second when in 3D mode, and the game simply looks better with the depth of the 3D effect. This game really shows that all games are not created equally in terms of 3D on the 3DS, the quality difference between the two uses of the effect in Link Between Worlds and, for example, Pokemon X & Y, is striking.

More so than just a superficial addition to the game, however, many of the game’s dungeons are significantly vertical, and the stereoscopic effect is an effective way of both giving a sense of height, and maneuvering Link through the various obstacles in front of him.

It isn’t unplayable without the 3D effect (I certainly turned it off more than a few times when my eyes got tired), but this is absolutely something you should play on the 3DS and not the 2DS if you have a choice. Also, the game looks much better on the actual screen of the 3DS than it does in any trailers. - Daniel Kaszor, Financial Post

Bringing the joy of exploration and discovery back as a central element of Zelda, plus some of its most intricate and tightly packed dungeons ever - classic. - if

Certainly the most fun I've had with any Zelda game in a really long time. - salsa shark

A very enjoyable Zelda game with a nostalgic trip. A lot has been said about the "revolutionary" ability to visit dungeons in any order but I found the game to be pretty linear even with that mechanic. - diamonddave85

new Zelda best one since Wind Waker imo, no tutorials or annoying helper, can explore & tackle dungeons in pretty much any order. - Zappi

i missed one... i thought i still had 3 on my ballot. time to look back...

ah there it is. #3 would've been too high for ridiculous fishing! missed it because of bioschlock unfunite

Will, thank YOU for contributing to Origins!

Whose quote was #3? Also, DJP, totally recommend you go back to it for those choice bits

I like Roberto's Papers Please comment about how the game gets in your head, very otm

look in the credits for me! only takes like 15 goddamn minutes!

whose quote ... on batmang? that was salsa shark

And, to conclude...

#2: Gone Home - PC/Mac/Linux - 120 pts - 7 votes, 3 first place votes

http://i.imgur.com/997i4TC.jpg

Website | Metacritic | NY Times | PC Gamer | Polygon | Emily Short | PAX | Let's Play | Trailer

You spend the game in a familiar first-person style, exploring the house. The story unfolds as you pick up scraps of paper, notes, letters, photos, cassette tapes and other bits and pieces littering the house. Sam also narrates a series of journal entries that serve as the main vehicle for telling the story.

With these storytelling elements you learn a lot about the Greenbriar family and what is going on in their lives. But the game also respects the player, much as a really great book respects the intelligent reader, in that it lets you put a lot of the pieces of the Greenbriar puzzle together for yourself and form many of your own conclusions.

Though more of a story exploration game or a piece of interactive short fiction, Gone Home (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) weaves its touching story with such deft and narrative grace that it is hard not to be sucked in immediately. - Steve Mullis, NPR

its difficult to communicate emotional truth, and in some ways more difficult to communicate how having emotional truths conveyed to you feels. 2013 was - maybe, kinda, sorta - the year of THE FEELS a shorthand for the complicated mix of nostalgia, longing, understanding and loss that certain types of media invoke in their audience. gone home makes me think about people who say things like THE FEELS, about the way that shorthand can condense and simplify these snarled emotional states, about the duality of signs. - Lamp

This is my favorite type of game: wander an atmospheric environment, find clues, and piece together a narrative from them. But I was a little disappointed by how slight it was. I preferred it when the story unfolded from found objects, not the audio tapes: the mom and dad's storylines gave me more of a thrill of discovery & sense of accomplishment than listening to Sam lay out all the details every couple minutes. But there was a lot of good writing in this, and I'm also just happy that the game is resonating with so many people, given the subject matter. The soundtrack's good, too. - reddening

i thought gone home was shit tbh ― Mordy

Possibly the most a game has ever been enhanced by playing it on inferior technology, because for me playing point and clicks in deserted worlds which make my PC creak = instant trip back to the last time I was doing that in 1995. So maybe it came off more pitch perfect than even intended, but I don't have much time to play games and absorbing me in a story this much in three hours impressed me more than anything else in 2013. - if

Which of course means....

this game made me realize that i can no longer play FPS games anymore due to motion sickness /:

#1: Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign - iOS/Android/PC - 130 pts - 8 votes - 4 top game votes

http://i.imgur.com/LpPdkQ0.jpg

Website | Metacritic | Touch Arcade | IGN | Tips and Tricks | Licensing | Quarter to Three Forum | Dramatization | Trailer

Marvel Puzzle Quest Support Group

The game’s awful free to play mechanics actually obscure an excellent puzzle game. The game play is as strong as any match game available across any platform. You begin by choosing a team of three characters, heroes or villains and take the fight to the Marvel Universe. Each character has three special abilities that correspond to the colored gems on the board. Thor, for instance does the most damage when matching red, yellow, or green gems. The more gems matched, the more damage your character does to the other team. The gems you match are also collected for special attacks, ranging from electric countdown arrows, to summoning demons. - Hannah Means Shannon, Bleeding Cool

This horrible, horrible game got its hooks into me early on, hitting my "collect 'em all" buttons as well as putting together a simple, intuitive match-3 game with enough strategic combinations in the early stages to make all sorts of playstyles viable. Of course, certain characters were grossly overpowered once they hit maximum level and made most of the game boring (hi dere, Astonishing Wolverine), to which the developers responded with a one-two punch of a nerf bat followed quickly by hilariously broken enemy scaling that rendered half of their events unplayable. None of this is a complaint. - DJP

I've never played an MMORPG and I don't intend to. But I accidentally started playing this game about matching tiles and it turned into an MMORPG. There are characters to level, goodies to collect, events to participate in, chances to knock other players flat. They keep changing everything and everyone gets mad no matter what they do. That's how you _know_ its an MMORPG. Also, I can't stop playing. - s.clover

a game that is engaging, rewarding, and fun (engaging like heroin, rewarding like tip wage in Texas, and fun like a party you didn't really want to go to but did because you were worried it might end up being kinda great and you'd have missed out (spoiler alert: party did not exceed original expectations)). - Will M.

See my comments on Puzzle & Dragons, but throw in Spider-Man and PVP. They've learned a lot from that game (I'm saying this charitably, as I'm hooked on it as well, and they deserve credit for their own additions - but in a lot of ways, it's a shameless reskin), and half the fun is the strategizing and bickering on our ILG Marvel Puzzle Quest Support group thread. Unfortunately it's still suffering from balancing issues a few months after launch, but it's still a fantastic grind. - Nhex

click click click what did you say? ah damn it only 20 ISO-8 - Euler

I'll do disappointments later, thanks everyone

Hahaha, I think both of those top two will cause some consternation.

Well done, everyone, a good rollout. Thanks, polyphonic.

If you like pictures but not words

http://imgur.com/a/4COnd

This person disagrees with our results:

https://www.wildtangent.com/blog/2013/12/popular-plays-the-6-best-match-3-games-of-2013/

Excellent job, polyphonic. Great roll out.

Happy to see Zelda as the top 'blockbuster'. One thing I like to talk about when it comes to LBW is how fun the mechanics are as a result of the 60fps, the bouncy animation, the quick and agile Link, which makes routine journeys w routine slaughter of enemies fun. And when it gets harder I found myself thinking of schumps with the tight and fast navigation of enemy projectiles on a 2d plane. 'Tight' just about sums it up.

nice work poly!

suggest banning all of you

except poly. great rollout! :)

lol at "dramatization"

that joke was courtesy of bnw

less terrible than other lists

this list was super fun, thanks very much

Interesting list this year... thanks for coordinating everything poly.
'Gone Home' sounds like the sort of thing I'd enjoy, I've never heard of it before now.

akin to voting for our best meal of the year as a 1/2 pound bag of m&m's?

This is the list of a group that largely plays games on the bus or in a second window imo

reaally don't like Gone Home (after watching a friend play it), but enjoyed this roll-out for sure!

nb: i was playing a game of mpq as i read these last few posts and also as i pretended to actually work

This person disagrees with our results:

https://www.wildtangent.com/blog/2013/12/popular-plays-the-6-best-match-3-games-of-2013/

I am assuming that all of the games listed were developed by Wild Tangent ;) which means they... made six match-3 games in 2013. Gross.

Fantastic supporting material in particular for this rollout, thanks for going the extra 108921348 miles on this one!

i watched a Let's Play of Gone Home and was preeeeeeeetty intensely bored by the first hour of it.

I cannot imagine watching someone else play a game like that would actually be fun.

I haven't played Gone Home but surely a Let's Play goes completely against the point of it? Like, the game is entirely about exploration and slowly putting pieces together... I can't imagine watching someone else doing that is even vaguely interesting, but GH is a game I image I would love.

xp or, what Will said.

*imagine

Will M Ballot:

20: Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch
15: Gone Home
10: Grand Theft Auto V
10: Antichamber
10: State of Decay
10: The Stanley Parable
10: Rogue Legacy
5: Ridiculous Fishing - A Tale of Redemption
5: Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign
5: Papers, Please

^ I still feel really weird aobut this ballot but i can't think of anything I'd change :S

01) 30 points - Drive on Moscow (iOS)
02) 15 points - Europa Universalis IV (PC/Mac/Linux)
03) 15 points - 868-HACK (iOS)
04) 10 points - Agricola (iOS)
05) 5 points - Rogue Legacy (PS3/PS4/Vita/PC/Mac/Linux)
06) 5 points - Fiz: The Brewery Management Game (iOS)
07) 5 points - Papers, Please (PC/Mac)
08) 5 points - Candy Box(Browser)
09) 5 points - Rymdkapsel (iOS/Android/Vita)
10) 5 points - Grand Theft Auto V (X360)

good work polyphonic! I'm going to give MPQ another go...