The Fifth Annual Coint and Plick Poll for Best Video Games of 2011 - Part Two: 51-73

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#63: Taco Fiction – in browser – 15 pts – 1 vote
Official Game Site
play it here
ZS, just now Apparently this game won the Interactive Fiction Competition in 2011.
IFDB: The following tags are associated with this game:
food (7)
gender-neutral protagonist (26)
guns (2)
IF Comp 2011 (38)
male protagonist (72)
money (4)
multiple endings (18)
restaurant setting (3)

Well, as I was the only person who voted for text adventures, this is obviously another one of mine. I actually preferred a lot of things about my other IF vote, PataNoir, mostly the more innovative conceit and use of wordplay, but this one is a really good example of polished IF. It's a fun little story, good implementation, almost no parser problems that I can remember, reasonable difficulty level for puzzles, etc etc.

Also, lol, ZS, is the source of the image for this from you?

i gave it the old college, but i suck at text adventures!

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#63: Battlefield 3 – 360 / PS3 / PC – 15 pts – 1 vote
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Sondrangerbot: to be completely honest i haven't really played this yet but i bought it and i believe it's pretty good.

Haha, yeah, you do have to get used to the language of text adventures. Once you're used to it, though, it flows pretty easily. It's also one of the reasons I kind of have the challop of thinking that old text adventures, no matter how 'classic' they are, are only good for respecting as period pieces, and are actually shitty to play, with their crappy two-word guess-the-verb parser systems.

it's no challop, infocom are probably the oldest games that feel worth persevering with nowadays

i've voted for text adventures in the past but none really jumped out at me this year. emil.y (another famous emily in text adv community i notice!), did you ever get the "secret" Taco Story ending?

also, re classic infocom text adventures -- i maintain A Mind Forever Voyaging is alltime great

Oh yeah, AMFV is supposed to be really good, actually.

I think I got the secret ending - I played through for a couple of different ones, and got what I thought was the "best" ending, where you hook up with the ice cream girl or something, yes? Can't quite remember now...

Battlefield 3 already?? Now that's challops, good work team.

seven-way tie for #56:

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#56: Anomaly: Warzone Earth – iOS – 15 pts – 2 votes
Official Game Site
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Touch Arcade
Jeff: A nice take on the tired genre of tower defense games.

JimD: I finished Anomaly Warzone Earth tonight, best iPhone game I've played in ages. Cute concept (it's a tower defence game only you're the attackers instead of the defenders) but then they actually built a really tight game on the back of that idea, and basically ended up with an old-school RTS, tweaked just enough so that it actually works well on a small touchscreen.

that game rules, they need to do more content for it.

picked that up in one of the humble bundles, should play it someday

anyone have anything interesting to say about this game? no mention of it anywhere, and i gotta admit it looks pretty cool!

yeah, I voted for that one too. I agree w/polyphonic that it is 'lacking in depth' but I see that as something of a virtue (though I would...) in a 'pick up and play' sense. no boring tutorials, just dive in and things start exploding soon enough. I couldn't play this for more than 30-45mins at a time without getting bored but it's a lot of fun in short bursts like that.

doesn't hurt that it brings back rosy memories of jackal on the NES too (this is honestly prob why I checked it out)

Yeah, Renegade Ops looks stupidly engrossing.

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#56: DC Universe Online – 360 / PS3 / PC – 15 pts – 2 votes
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EZ Snappin: My first MMO! And again, on PS3, where my mediocre stick jockey skills made this possible. I enjoyed the fights, teaming up with friends, and making characters, but for some reason the endless fetch quests and grindgrindgrind bugged me here but didn't bother me at all in Skyrim. I do wish there was more of a world to explore, as using your powers to scoot or fly or super-speed around was kinda fun.

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#56: King Cashing – iOS – 15 pts – 2 votes
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jamescobo: unfuckingbelievable. as mentioned above, it's basically Slingo + RPG character development. I can see myself sinking a LOT of time into this one.

one of those games that is totally addictive and then after 5 days of playing it you just hate yourself so much

yep.

Forks can i suggest when you get to the top ten you post one every three months in order to maintain the suspense

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#56: Limbo – PSN – 15 pts – 2 votes
tomofthenest: too short, too easy. looked lovely though.

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#56: Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP – iOS – 15 pts – 2 votes
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CraigG: This one sucked me in through pure aesthetics. It looks great, the music is great. It's style gave me a weird nostalgia for Gravity Wars, and the coint and plick adventures of the day.

ZS: Sword and sworcery ep is pretty great! Like others said, it's not so much of a "game" but it's lovely to walk around the world. The music when you awaken the dark lord of evil (or whatever the tall devil dude is called) is fucking awesome.

I should go back to that one day. I played it for about 30 min when I first got it and then never again.

me too

And me. People regularly play the soundtrack in our office though. Which maybe removed my reason for actually bothering to play it.

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#56: Tiny Tower – iOS – 15 pts – 2 votes
nhex: tI have a bit of a love-hate relationship with iPhone games, but I have to admit, I've gotten sucked into this and Words With Friends as much as your grandma. It's nothing but a number cruncher.

Sondrangerbot: because i didn't play that many games released 2011. but 53 floors gotta count for something.
Will M.: i only found tiny tower a few days ago but it immediately displays itself as 1) not a game and 2) just pure iv drip addiction -- it's like a chatbot without the nuance, that texts you, and it steals its art from fez, and vvvvvv, and basically it is everything that is the worst about """games""" on phones and i fucking hate it basically and i will probably look at it before bed. fuck tiny tower.

speaking of games that made me hate myself

134 floors suckas! and by suckas, i mean me.

I can feel the top 50 coming.

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#56: Where’s My Water? – iOS – 15 pts – 2 votes
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Jeff: I usually don't like these try and get three stars on each level types of games, but this one was alright. Better than any Angry Birds game because it just never reaches the extremely frustrating levels. Also, it's an alligator that needs bath water. That's great. It is our duty to help him out.

agent hibachi: i've only played the first screen or two of this, but my wife spent practically the entire holidays glued to her ipad playing this.

iOS is dominating so far.

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#55: Cave Story+ – PC – 15 pts – 3 votes
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tomofthenest: not a lot of difference from the original but I did play it and it's still the great lost 8-bit console game.

fennel cartwright: a very good platformer, and that is all. Platformers aren't even totally my thing but I still have to rep for this as an exemplar in its field.

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#54: Stacking – 360 / PS3 – 16 pts – 1 vote
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forks: yeah, i thought stacking was gorgeous. i only played for like ten minutes last night but i love the bizarre dynamic and the silent movie feel. You start out in a dingy train station so of course it's gonna be dim; presuming it'll open up.

polyphonic: Found the Stacking demo pretty boring, though delightfully weird.

jjjusten: ha yeah i played the demo, and thought it was cute but might get really old - but hey, burps and farts for the kids!
also it was like endless cutscene central, and as charming as the cutscenes were, i was def doing more watching than playing.

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#53: Pushmo / Pullblox – 3DS - DL – 16 pts – 2 votes
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Ian F: This slot was going to be for Catherine, with a bit about how if you're going to do boring old male commitment-phobia then full on Gothic horror with cathedrals, stabby brides and chainsaw wielding babies is the way to go. I wouldn't put up with anything in other media presenting men as clueless lying cheats and women as either marriage obsessed bores or succubi (literally!) in the same way though, and games being so far behind that just doing something different is welcome isn't really enough reason to give it a total pass. Fortunately, 2011 also had a well realised, totally sweet game about pushing and pulling blocks to climb to the top of towers which didn't have any such issues! And has cute pictures too. It also includes a well-designed rewind feature which in no way makes it any less fiendishly difficult to work out what to do but does make it difficult to back yourself into a corner without realising, which frequently comes as a blessed relief.

i'm not sure i voted cave story + but it was excellent and i really enjoyed it. lost 8-bit classic otm and i love how there's so much secret shit to do, including unlocking the basically impossible platforming final ending which you can view here and makes shmups look like shlumps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwkquZV-nkY

What's the gameplay of Stacking? Intrigued by the aesthetic style.

i liked stacking too, tho the appeal was like 90% for the aesthetics and only 10% for the gameplay/puzzles

lol xp

it's puzzle solving, mostly by picking different russian dolls that have different abilities and using them to accomplish goals (like chasing everyone out of the dining room by using the sick russian doll's vomiting skill) (nb i'm not sure that example was actually in the game, but that kind of thing)

haha that thing about 'catherine' is really good/otm

kindly bump

yep, i have free time tonight until 9 or so, so i'm going to try to knock out a few more between shower and dinner.

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#52: Hockey? v. 0.55 – PC / Mac – 18 pts – 1 vote
Official Game Site
Developer Blog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jlFo4NsQIw
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bamcquern: If you want realism, this is realism.

wut

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#51: Machinarium – iOS – 18 pts – 3 votes
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fennel cartwright: Why did nobody think of making a game that looked like that before?

CraigG: I love these games, where the reward for beating a puzzle is often just another room, and a cute animation or something. I made my girlfriend play through Samorost I & II, before we walked through this together. It's definitely more style than substance, but some of the puzzles can be brutal.

that hockey game looks awesome!

The Fifth Annual Coint and Plick Poll for Best Video Games of 2011 - Part Three: 21 - 50

Hockey? was cooL when people were still logging on to play. They don't anymore ;_;

what's the deal with Hockey?

i wish i got further than a few hours into machinarium, but i totally got stuck when i got to the open city area and never returned

I didn't know they had done an iOS machinarium - such an amazing looking/sounding game

Wait I just looked and there uh isn't an iOS machinarium?

seems to be on the ipad?

yep

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Oh well crap

Hockey? is a first person hockey game you play online with people. The appeal is in the skating and puck handling. It's not actually realistic, but it's like a realistic novel in that it feels realistic without entirely being so.

(to Nhex)

haha that thing about 'catherine' is really good/otm

Thanks! I guess it may get discussed further if it comes up further up the lists.

Pullblox is really good in its own right too though.

ah, ok bam. probably not my kinda thing

i guess it's inevitable that someone voted for catherine, but i hope it doesn't land too high up on the list. so terrible.