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

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.

I shouldn't make these decisions while I'm hungry
― tinker tailor soldier sb (silby)

oh wow! i'm honored!

http://cointandplick.com/ <-- I am just messing around with some stuff, I am not the guy who oughta be maintaining or improving the notional website in the long run cuz I am the biggest flake. Just the absolute biggest. But right now just having some fun editing some html by hand and trying out random webfonts.

also that represents like the absolute apex of my design skills right there

are we getting new games listed tnite?

like really this whole operation would be better off with someone creating a tumblr and me pointing the domain at it self xps

Played a chunk of Amazing Breaker last night. Biggest issue for me is the loading screen you get between hitting restart and actually getting to restart. It's probably about .4 of a second so it feels insane to complain about it, but there are so many other games these days that manage to eliminate it altogether, so it's become kind of essential for true just-one-more-go addictiveness.

Biggest issue for me was that I'm not very good at it, and I didn't find it engaging enough to get better. Which is weird - it's a game where the reward is a Big Explosion! - but when I got through each one I just went 'meh, what's the next one' (only played up to lvl 15). I probably played a little longer than I should just to see what wasn't clicking :)

What I didn't realise was that "Think Breakout with [..] a slingshot mechanism instead of a paddle" means "think Angry Birds", which I wasn't the greatest fan of (despite playing all the way through). Not sure why, something about it being in an awkward spot between arcade and turn-based gameplay. But I love Orbital so ¯\(º_o)/¯

Played a chunk of Amazing Breaker last night. Biggest issue for me is the loading screen you get between hitting restart and actually getting to restart. It's probably about .4 of a second so it feels insane to complain about it, but there are so many other games these days that manage to eliminate it altogether, so it's become kind of essential for true just-one-more-go addictiveness.

― JimD, Friday, 17 February 2012 10:53 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This was often raised as an issue by spectrum reviews in 1983. you'd have thought they'd have worked it out by now!

http://i39.tinypic.com/jzi1oy.jpg
#109: De Blob 2 – 360 / PS3 – 5 pts - 1 vote
Official Game Site
http://www.videogamesblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/De-Blob-2-Review-Artwork.jpg
”Who is the hot girl in de blob 2 commercial?”
Metacritic
Gametrailers
jjjusten: - My number one palate cleansing chill-out game for 2011 is a somewhat slight charmer that manages to at least bring the 360 a taste of the charm of the PS2 era Katamari stuff. INFINITELY superior to the first one, which was cute enough but cursed with the dreaded wiimote sickness and inaccuracy of play. You do have to ratchet back your pulse rate to really dig in on this one, but once you do it is full of rewards.

Was it better than De Blob? I liked De Blob for a while, but lost interest halfway through –– the controls were too annoying, and the difficulty ramped too quickly. As emil.y said elsewhere, it really sucks to die in some games, and this was one of them: the timed challenges, the lack of save options, the repeating of dumb shit and cut-scenes ... does 2 fix any of those?

^^^ This about the controls. It was super fun until the difficultly level got higher and the controls became more and more annoying to deal with.

I probably should mention that Amazing Breaker is one of my favorites of a new style of gaming that I guess you could call "intentional time wasting": it's good for commutes and waiting in offices or playing as I fall asleep and whatnot but I never felt compelled to break it out and play as relaxation. iOS games excel at this and I'm not sure how you "score" something that is diverting first, foremost and only.
I smell an essay!

In any case, would anyone argue that it ain't worth a buck?

http://i42.tinypic.com/zmbocx.jpg
#109: Dungeons of Dredmor – PC / Mac – 5 pts - 1 vote
Official Game Site
http://media.techworld.com/cmsdata/products/3292694/dungeons-of-dredmor_590_3.jpg
PC Gamer Playthrough
Metacritic
Ars Technica Review
fennel cartwright: Probably the most hilariously written game on this list. Excellent roguelike gameplay.

De Blob was fun until the "flick to jump" mechanic came in. Then it was painful. wtf were they thinking :(

Dungeons of Dredmor was okay, but in a year with Binding of Isaac...

RE: C+P website, polyphonic kinda is already doing the direct posting o the poll for years past?

huh?

jamescobo you mean?

er yeah sorry i need to eat and my mind is woobly

http://i43.tinypic.com/2zxtjt3.jpg
#109: FIFA 12 – 360 / PS3 / PC – 5 pts - 1 vote
Official Game Site
http://cdn4.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/fifa_12_screenshot_3.jpg
Metacritic
Gametrailers
oppet: I agree with most of the critical moans about this year's edition, though I did eventually come to grips with the initially frustrating new defensive controls. The single player element of this game is terrible but I've played so many great matches against my housemate that it would be churlish not to at least chuck 5 points into the pot on its behalf.

http://i44.tinypic.com/313lo4l.jpg
#109: Fisher Diver – in browser – 5 pts - 1 vote - FREE!
Official Game Site
http://cache.erstgames.com/uploads/games/pictures/VR4HZKUZEMNB.jpg
Rock Paper Shotgun
Soundtrack

http://i40.tinypic.com/vg5us8.jpg
#109: A Game About Game Literacy – in browser – 5 pts - 1 vote - FREE!
Official Game Site
http://174.120.103.90/images-freegameaccess/a-game-about-game-literacy-big.jpg
The Stranger
jjjusten: I don't really get into browser or iOS games because they all seem kinda flimsy and insubstantial to me, so maybe the reason that I dug this so much is that it spoke to me on an elemental gamer level - like we're all in on the same joke so why not just accept it? AGAGL is very very smart and very very good.

forksclovetofu: If you’re looking for a smartass, didactic way to explain the base mechanics of gaming to a non-gamer, you could do worse. I’d be curious to see this idea expanded on in more depth for an iOS game where you start with Pong and end up controlling Infinity Blade-esque characters. Non-gaming folks gotta have a starting point!

http://i44.tinypic.com/2kpyx4.jpg
#109: Groove Coaster – iOS – 5 pts - 1 vote
Official Game Site
http://bradnicholson.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/GrooveCoaster.jpg
Ars Technica
Metacritic
Touch Arcade Review
Jeff: Good music saves a hackneyed premise! I never thought I would play another rhythm game again (and especially not on iOS) but this one held my attention solidly for at least a week.

I can totally point cointandplick.com at the existing blog for now. Where is that at?

Is groove coaster worth the $3?

Groove Coaster is ABSOLUTELY worth a buck.
Three is more open to interp.

http://cointandplick.wordpress.com/

On a river bed, I found an old man doubled over holding his head. A woman was laid out in front of him, bloody and dead. When I stopped and walked up to him, he stood up and shakily held a gun to his own head. I ran up and pushed him. He dropped the gun and began weeping and then finally glaring at me angrily until I rode away. That’s not a video game, that’s a Cormac McCarthy short story.

re: de blob 2 - yeah the controls are 100% better because yknow buttons are for jumping, not jerking a wiimote around. note: i did not play all the way through, so it might suck in latter points, but its cheap now and a lot of non-frustrating fun so far.

Dungeons of Dredmor was okay, but in a year with Binding of Isaac...

Groove Coaster is ABSOLUTELY worth a buck.
Three is more open to interp.