The Fifth Annual Coint and Plick Poll for Best Video Games of 2011 - Part One: 74-109

Not in the boss battle :)

Andrew: I DO get that in other places (most notably of late in pottery) but when it's so rich in a game that it defines how I'm enjoying it it feels worth noting.

and no, emily, you're right on. I like that high!

you can't work out how to answer those duelling questions! the game won't give you the right replies until you've done whatever it is that the swordmaster wants that i've forgotten.

Maybe we should save the soul talk for when it undoubtedly places tho.

eh, i like open discussion.
Though i would like to urge everyone to shell out a buck and get Amazing Breaker; it is great fun and will keep you enthralled for at least a week.

I would but I've heard that it's a "bottom feeders and afterthought" :P

Haha, I think you guys are taking my MI reference too seriously.

xp well hell, so is catfish and I'd give up caviar for that anyday.

NV: with Souls, you CAN intuit how to handle a situation. Sometimes it's blind luck, sometimes it is repetition and sometimes it's skill. What no one mentions about those games is that once you get through the first five hours of banging your head against a wall, the difficulty doesn't exactly ramp. It's consistent but YOU get smarter and better at understanding the confines and tricks. The potential for loss is great enough that you work harder to learn and harder to survive.

is amazing breaker playable on an iphone screen?

Amazing Breaker was made for iPhone actually; I keep waiting for a universal update but none on the horizon.

Also: Will ANYONE else rep for Brink? It looks like cookie cutter Halo to me.

nah i was just funning about Monkey Island but it's an obvious point that the puzzle solving in that kind of game never changes in approach, only in degree, and there's no real learning and grwoth taking place.

none of this makes MI not great, just different

Ok I have shelled out my first cold hard cash as a result of this poll for amazing breaker, didn't even try the free version first.

The puzzle that ultimately did me in for MI was opening the telescope and using the flint and the lens and the gunpowder to blow up the dam to flood the valley to lower to dead body so you can get the rope and climb down into the ravine to get the paddle for the rowboat so you can visit the cannibals. I couldn't figure out how to blow up the dam after solving every other puzzle in that game on my own and I finally broke down and bought the walkthrough (lol pre-internet walkthrough availability days).

dude i probably rang a helpline at some point in MI

All my undergrad friends were playing MI at the same time; we sometimes went to the phone box and spent a night's worth of beer money ringing people to ask if they had answers.

it's an obvious point that the puzzle solving in that kind of game never changes in approach, only in degree, and there's no real learning and grwoth taking place.

I guess that's sort of true? But there is definitely a method of learning about what that approach is, how to solve the puzzles you're presented with. There's a conceptual framework being built - yes, you could brute force the game by trying to combine literally everything but it's better to think laterally (though actually, MI is a bad example here, as some puzzles I only ever solved through brute force).

lol i deleted amazing breaker last night without ever playing it X:

That was a problem I had with the newer Telltale Monkey Island games. I no longer have the patience for the kind of brute force trying to solve puzzles, or trying different things dozens of times until something worked (and hearing the same recorded dialogue each time). Maybe because the gap between those and the last MI game I played (number 3) was so large that I forgot how to enjoy that kind of puzzle solving? Interestingly I never lost my joy in playing IF maybe because you don't have to sit through prerecorded audio + video but can just scan the text telling you that the approach didn't work.

yeah i only briefly looked at that last MI thing but it seemed like 10 minute unfunny cut scenes with a bit of pixel hunting in between

Mordy thats a great essay, made me think of my favorite review of recent years (and one which made me buy the game which is awesome), the destructoid perfect score for Deadly Premonition

http://www.destructoid.com/review-deadly-premonition-165168.phtml

particularly the last several paragraphs which kinda hit the thing you're looking for i think

Oy, yeah, I hate cutscenes. I also tend to play with audio off and have found that a lot of people don't even bother captioning their cutscenes, so they are even more dismally dull. An intro and an outro is enough, and even those aren't necessary.

i am looking forward to Breaker feedback. It's not the best game ever, but it's my favorite iteration of the "use a slingshot to knock shit down/blow shit up" mechanic

loved the essay mordy

in past month or so (since i finally bought a current gen system) i've been really into gaming again and one thing i feel is really missing is good writing on the subject. compared with my other obsession (music duh), this area is definitely lacking but also presents an opportunity. i'd love to see ILX writers get together and do a Stylus-esque website on games.

for example, i'd love to see an essay by difficult listening hour expanding on the struggle to get games running on Wine. i've definitely been there: recently i spent hours tweaking config files to get Oblivion running on my Mac under Wine. when i finally got it running, it turned out that ALL the character models had black skin, like 0x000000 black, and yet i still played through the game. i feel like a good writer could be able to explore why it is that we can spend hours trying to get games running 'good enough' and still be able to get the same amount of enjoyment as if it had been played on a top of the line machine

OK let's do it. Z S is full o'beans, he can set us up something. I've got a domain I'm not using.

if anybody wants to workshop essays throughout the poll, send me a draft and I'll integrate articles amongst the results.

and sure, I'd write about gaming every now and again myself if everybody starts a site. I hit up m@tt to try getting on the g@m3!nf0rm3r teat with a sample piece and never made the grade, sadface.

Though Mordy, you should forward him your piece for the front page "industry professional" slot and see if he's interested.

im in if i can host "jjjustens sweary corner of exuberance and hatred"

can I do capsule review/impressions, because I don't have the patience to write more than 100 words at a stretch

Forks Video Game Haiku

If you argue that
Deadly Premonition sucks
you hate fun, don't you?

did anyone other than me ever actually play deadly premonition btw?

i really wanted to abbrev the name but yknow

er i did and i couldn't get past the first ten minutes
i honestly needed to try harder

forks I would be up for revising and fleshing out the thing I wrote for my ballot if you have time to do an editing pass on it/you think it is worth it!

cointandplick.com is available fwiw

Breaker feedback

I played through the trial back when it came out. It was pretty fun but it didn't really make a huge impression on me. I thought the overall design of everything other than the cool crystalline structures was sort of ugly and clunky. But it's worth a dollar for sure.

oh yeah dude if you dont hate the first 45 minutes you dont have a pulse, but think of it as a test to keep the unwanted out. after that its all gold xposts

i am basically too poor to play new games (and the only current-gen console i own is a wii anyway, which isn't a console it's a netflix box) but i rearrange my canon a lot and gchat to (sympathetic, usually) friends in the middle of the night about betrayal at krondor or unreal tournament or beyond zork or whatever, so i am always up for writing general stuff/stuff about older games.

i think the reason i put so much time into grappling with wine bullshit is that it reminds me of spending so much of my adolescence trying to find (and then coax into operation) games i could play multiplayer with my best friend who lived on another island and had a mac. (what am i saying. we still do this, except now it's linux-to-mac, so it's even more of a frustrating abstract exercise. the only game that's ever really been reliable is good ol starcraft.)

if you guys start a website, i'll solicit contributions from a buddy of mine who is a for-real published poet, and has written poems inspired limbo and dark souls (i know how that sounds, but they're cool). also some essays iirc.

silby, go for it.
and somebody should squat cointandplick.com imo
and put up furry porn

your first haiku was better

I shouldn't make these decisions while I'm hungry

Happy to redirect the DNS to whatever someone wants to use to actually run a website.

hahahahahaha awesome

did anyone other than me ever actually play deadly premonition btw?

actually playing through this right now! (but very slowly.) twin peaks + silent hill + shenmue - what's not to love? except for the long stretches of totally broken gameplay, I guess.

love the solo car conversations to... whatever they named the DP equivalent of agent cooper's diane!

still, I can't help but wish the whole game was just about hanging out in this weird, off-brand twin peaks town and there weren't any of the zombie 'horror' bits. (do these get any less tedious btw?)

oh well.

Now you got me intersted. I like silent hill games despite the terrible game mechanics.

yeah, the mechanics are prob even worse than in silent hill. but the game is funny and has personality and that counts for a lot in my book.

it's also not particularly scary. I guess it gets a little creepy sometimes. maybe.

silent hill 1 is still the scariest game I've played. gave off a permeating dread; no cheap scares. (haven't played any of the sequels)

did anyone other than me ever actually play deadly premonition btw?

I played about five hours of it.

Also I made people watch the first 30 minutes of the game like five times.

found it - this guy: http://www.eyezmaze.com/grow/v3/index.html

yeah those grow games held my attention briefly too but they seemed like mostly just trawling thru trial and error

really striking visuals tho iirc

I couldn't deal with Wonderputt at all. It's beautiful, but I couldn't get anywhere with it.

The Eyemaze Grow series contains some of my favourite web games ever. But yeah, I get that they're not really 'game' games. I suppose the thing I like the most is that failure is often just as awesome as success.

I almost voted for Kingdom Rush, but to be honest, I found it more annoying than a lot of TD games - if I get stuck I do like to be able to improve through grinding in that sort of game. Puzzle-based stuff I don't mind agonising over but anything aside from that I do like to be able to force my way through if I have to.

holy crap ok maybe we're moving a little too fast now. the space between entries was to give us some room to talk, ya know...

honestly i'm kind of i'm the only one who voted for MK! along with Portal 2 it was the major AAA release in the early half of the year. if you have ANY fond memories of MK 1-3 you gotta play it, it's just ridiculous stupid fun in the single player modes, and the multiplayer is better than all the old MK games (not saying a lot there i know but still)

i mean, is there any other fighting game that unifies every single character into one coherent story mode, forcing you to play as everyone through the same plot? and they don't even cheat by making you replay events, the story keeps moving on as you move from chapter to chapter. yes, it is the dumbest story ever, but i'm still in awe of how hard tried with it (I heard MK vs DC might've done this but i didn't play enough of it to see
)

Scribblenauts: neat, worth a buck i'd say

Zen Pinball: i'm totally obsessed with this on xbox now, and the iOS version controls surprisingly well

second paragraph: kind of surprised

holy crap ok maybe we're moving a little too fast now. the space between entries was to give us some room to talk, ya know..

Yikes, sorry! Yeah, agreed it was a little fast today, but I wanted to move us forward in the results since I had been slow recently. Once we get into the top results, I'll definitely slow it down a bit (while trying to remain consistent in the rollout).

This is good. All good.

it's cool man! i'm happy you're back yo

trying to remember how many of my awesome choices i have left - spoiler: if i had played it before C&P voting i would have had rage in my top 5 for sure, but i have the feeling it might not place. DONT ANSWER THAT, i hope i am wrong, but if im not, its really worth a shot, dudes that kept saying that it is a short game are doing it wrong, because i am 15 hours in and havent even gotten to the second major settlement yet. and oh shit does it look O_Omazing.

see now if it does place you can farm this quote

So many games I have never heard of! <3 this

i voted for wonderputt! totally playable and fun imo. i want a sequel immediately.

i would have voted for ico/shadow of the colossus if i had a ps3. i'd love to play sotc again, and i've still never played ico.

I got ico/shadow of the colossus at xmas time. I've only played a small bit of shadow of the colossus and it's certainly beautiful but I have definitely had issues with the camera that make the game more frustrating than it needs to be.

i didn't mind it the first time around (on ps2), but maybe i've been ruined by decent game UI by now

this reminds me of my reaction to the beyond good and evil 360 port - super excited until i spent a bunch of time staring at walls or getting nauseous as the turn ratio ratcheted out of sync.

i couldn't hang with that one either

yeh i was a bit disappointed when i replayed SOTC over xmas
the clunkiness of the controls didn't help, but i think the main problem was that the game is at heart a puzzle platformer, and once you know how to do the puzzle part the rest of it becomes kind of rote - there was only one colossus i didn't immediately remember how to beat :/

#76: World Cruise Story – Android – 10 pts – 1 vote – Top Android exclusive

lol something so sad about that

― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Wednesday, March 14, 2012 5:05 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha i know, i would have played it ON IPHONE but i needed that 4G mang

it is literally the only game installed on my phone so it is sad, lol and appropriate

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