haha, no, just own it! single loop GIFs are rare and commendable
― Karl Malone, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 17:46 (ten years ago) link
is papers please, like, a whole game? of game-y length?
Took me 4-5 hours to get one ending, so sufficiently gamey IMO
― Vinnie, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 18:02 (ten years ago) link
#4! on behalf of my test cases i thank u all
― Sam Malone, no relation (Will M.), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 18:11 (ten years ago) link
Here comes the first game in our poll with more than one first place vote...
― polyphonic, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 18:24 (ten years ago) link
#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
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
― polyphonic, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 18:25 (ten years ago) link
i missed one... i thought i still had 3 on my ballot. time to look back...
― Sam Malone, no relation (Will M.), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 18:36 (ten years ago) link
ah there it is. #3 would've been too high for ridiculous fishing! missed it because of bioschlock unfunite
― Sam Malone, no relation (Will M.), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 18:37 (ten years ago) link
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
― Nhex, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 18:48 (ten years ago) link
look in the credits for me! only takes like 15 goddamn minutes!
― Sam Malone, no relation (Will M.), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 18:53 (ten years ago) link
whose quote ... on batmang? that was salsa shark
― polyphonic, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:11 (ten years ago) link
And, to conclude...
― polyphonic, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:12 (ten years ago) link
#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
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 /:
― chive on you crazy diamond (diamonddave85), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:13 (ten years ago) link
#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
― polyphonic, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:13 (ten years ago) link
I'll do disappointments later, thanks everyone
― polyphonic, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:14 (ten years ago) link
Hahaha, I think both of those top two will cause some consternation.
Well done, everyone, a good rollout. Thanks, polyphonic.
― emil.y, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:16 (ten years ago) link
If you like pictures but not words
http://imgur.com/a/4COnd
― polyphonic, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:17 (ten years ago) link
This person disagrees with our results:
https://www.wildtangent.com/blog/2013/12/popular-plays-the-6-best-match-3-games-of-2013/
― polyphonic, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:20 (ten years ago) link
Excellent job, polyphonic. Great roll out.
― EZ Snappin, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:22 (ten years ago) link
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.
― abcfsk, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:24 (ten years ago) link
nice work poly!
― PSY talks The Nut Job (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:44 (ten years ago) link
suggest banning all of you
― Karl Malone, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:44 (ten years ago) link
except poly. great rollout! :)
lol at "dramatization"
that joke was courtesy of bnw
― polyphonic, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:47 (ten years ago) link
less terrible than other lists
― no war but glass war (Lamp), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:49 (ten years ago) link
this list was super fun, thanks very much
― anonanon, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:50 (ten years ago) link
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.
― salsa shark, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:53 (ten years ago) link
akin to voting for our best meal of the year as a 1/2 pound bag of m&m's?
― bnw, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:53 (ten years ago) link
This is the list of a group that largely plays games on the bus or in a second window imo
― polyphonic, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:55 (ten years ago) link
reaally don't like Gone Home (after watching a friend play it), but enjoyed this roll-out for sure!
― festival culture (Jordan), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 19:59 (ten years ago) link
nb: i was playing a game of mpq as i read these last few posts and also as i pretended to actually work
― eric banana (s.clover), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:02 (ten years ago) link
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!
― Sam Malone, no relation (Will M.), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:03 (ten years ago) link
i watched a Let's Play of Gone Home and was preeeeeeeetty intensely bored by the first hour of it.
― Karl Malone, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:03 (ten years ago) link
I cannot imagine watching someone else play a game like that would actually be fun.
― Sam Malone, no relation (Will M.), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:05 (ten years ago) link
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.
― emil.y, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:06 (ten years ago) link
*imagine
― emil.y, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:07 (ten years ago) link
Will M Ballot:
20: Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch15: Gone Home10: Grand Theft Auto V10: Antichamber10: State of Decay10: The Stanley Parable10: Rogue Legacy5: Ridiculous Fishing - A Tale of Redemption5: Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign5: Papers, Please
^ I still feel really weird aobut this ballot but i can't think of anything I'd change :S
― Sam Malone, no relation (Will M.), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:09 (ten years ago) link
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)
― Karl Malone, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:11 (ten years ago) link
good work polyphonic! I'm going to give MPQ another go...
― Angkor Waht (Neil S), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:11 (ten years ago) link
i am part of the problem
Card Hunter (Browser)Cookie Clicker (Browser)Device 6 (iOS)Paint it Back (iOS)Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time (iOS/Android)Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign (iOS/Android/PC)Ridiculous Fishing - A Tale of Redemption (iOS/Android)Spaceteam (iOS/Android)The Room Two (iOS/Android)Knightmare Tower (iOS)
― PSY talks The Nut Job (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:12 (ten years ago) link
xposts yeah, you're probably right about that!
― Karl Malone, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:12 (ten years ago) link
Gone Home seems to fail at all the things that video games are uniquely good at (telling a story through gameplay, letting you inhabit a character/world and feel involved, fun) and instead gives you a bad story made even worse by putting it in a game-like structure.
― festival culture (Jordan), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:16 (ten years ago) link
my ballot
Spaceteam 10 GOTYNi No Kuni 10GTA V 10Ridiculous Fishing 10A Dark Room 10Icarus Proudbottom 10The Last of Us 10Clockwork Cat 10Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons 10Impossible Road 10
― polyphonic, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:16 (ten years ago) link
My ballot:
Counterfeit Monkey (Interactive Fiction) - 30Ollie Ollie Oxen Free (Interactive Fiction) - 20Cursed Treasure 2 (Browser) - 10No One Has to Die (Browser) - 10A Dark Room (Browser) - 5Black Crown Project (Browser) - 5Candy Box (Browser) - 5Clockwork Cat (Browser) - 5Cookie Clicker (Browser) - 5Doctor Who: Legacy (iOS/Android) - 5
― emil.y, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:17 (ten years ago) link
Gone Home just sounds boring. No qualms w the Marvel game at #1, that game is damn fun. Sometimes I am glad for the free-to-play mechanics because when I run out of revives and free health kits, I can just call it a day.
― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:40 (ten years ago) link
I think I'm just irritated at Marvel because my gf has been addicted to another free-to-play match 3 game (Candy Crush....sigh.....) for months and i want her to either pay more attention to me or play a better game
― Karl Malone, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 20:59 (ten years ago) link
NEEERRRRRRRRRRRRDDDDDS
― Corpsepaint Counterpaint (jjjusten), Tuesday, 11 March 2014 21:02 (ten years ago) link
post yr ballots yall!
― Karl Malone, Tuesday, 11 March 2014 21:06 (ten years ago) link