Ninth Coint & Plick: The ~60 best games of 2015 according to ILX

I'm not really a genre stickler but I do think the term 'game' implies competitive/goal oriented elements in addition to free play ludic elements. It doesn't mean that games that don't involve competitive elements shouldn't be played, or voted for, etc just that there's an expectation I have when I sit down to play a game that lately has been thwarted/frustrated by games that don't have those elements.

*something something Wittgenstein mumble mumble*

i would like to like IF more than i do; there's something about updated choose your own adventure books where my attention wanders too fast.
i blame the internet

IF is a double whammy problem in the age of ADD internet use. Reading and puzzle solving. Both quiet, long processes.

Sorry all! Work :S I'm back

http://i.imgur.com/Mzmxmkh.png
#50 - Splatoon - Nintendo
10 Points
1 Vote

Splatoon looks fun but i will probably never get a chance to play it

http://i.imgur.com/khwJbpj.png
#50 - Talos Principle - Croteam
10 Points
1 Vote

I'm not big on competitive shooters in general but Splatoon was so cheerful and so damn fresh in style and execution I had to get into it. And the single player, while short, is a lot of fun and something I really hope they build on in future sequels. Like there were touches of Mario Galazy level ingenuity in platforming, boss fights etc - I think they could work with that foundation and end up with a masterful single playe rexperience.

Great looks
Great music
Great ink concept

http://i.imgur.com/5UdxC8f.png
#49 - Fran Bow - Killmonday Games
11 Points
1 Vote

http://i.imgur.com/r5R5j2m.png
#46 - Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions - Lucid Games
12 Points
1 Vote

Just started playing Geometry Wars 3 recently. Pretty badass and hard as hell. Like an ever-evolving Super Stardust.

They still make these huh

http://i.imgur.com/MDjJSbC.png
#46 - The Curious Expedition - Maschinen-Mensch
12 Points
1 Vote

http://i.imgur.com/iI1tGad.png
#46 - The Room 3 - Fireproof Games
12 Points
1 Vote

Don't know what curious expedition is

http://i.imgur.com/sHTZhn5.png
#45 - Pillars of Eternity - Obsidian Entertainment
12 Points
2 Votes

ah, my first vote. tbh i only played about 10 hours worth and then got distracted by life/another game and never came back. but i didn't play too many 2015 games, and i enjoyed my time with PoE, so i threw it on my ballot to pad it out a little. i imagine anyone with even a minor interest in games like Baldur's Gate would absolutely love it. for me, the idea of those kinds of old school western RPGs sounds better than the actual experience of playing them.

http://i.imgur.com/9rU8yqF.png
#44 - Invisible, Inc. - Klei Entertainment
13 Points
1 Vote

funny that my vote was the only one for Talos Principle, that's one i haven't played but enjoyed watching at a friend's place and really want to get to in 2016.

similar for Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, which i fully intend to ruin my relationship over, but so far i've only watched on Youtube.

Yeah I've watched quite a bit of Keep Talking.. on youtube. Not sure I'll play it but it's a great idea.

I sunk some time into Invisible Inc and enjoyed it quite a bit. I probably should have included it on my ballot. definitely worth the download, esp if the price has dropped since release.

http://i.imgur.com/hRMY5Zy.png
#42 - Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth - Nicalis, Inc., Edmund McMillen
14 Points
1 Vote

http://i.imgur.com/U48IkYI.png
#42 - Mad Max - Avalanche Studios
14 Points
1 Vote

^^^ the last game i ever did qa for (hopefully ever)

u guys are such weirdos how am i possibly the only votes for curious expedition, binding of isaac expansion, invisible inc and renowned explorers?!

http://i.imgur.com/b9T28vp.png
#41 - OlliOlli 2: Welcome to Olliwood - Roll7
14 Points
2 Votes

sell me on curious expedition and renowned explorers

That's it for today!

A fun bonus for today... some of you filled out your "disappointments of 2015" and here were the results:

Mentioned twice
Fallout 4
Star Wars Battlefront
Broken Age
Beginner's Guide
Not having time to play games/nobody playing games

Mentioned once
Tale of Tales quitting game design
Life is Strange Ep. 5
The slow death of the 7th generation of consoles
Telltale's Game of Thrones
Rayman Adventures
Her Story

u guys are such weirdos how am i possibly the only votes for curious expedition, binding of isaac expansion, invisible inc and renowned explorers?!

― Mordy, Wednesday, February 17, 2016 2:49 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Answer for me is that none of those are available for PS3 or Vita (aside from pre-expansion Binding Of Isaac). Plus that thing where I've still played very little that was released last year.

Broken Age
Beginner's Guide
Not having time to play games/nobody playing games
The slow death of the 7th generation of consoles
Telltale's Game of Thrones
Her Story

I've played more of Broken Age than I have of any other 2015 game that I didn't vote for. I'll keep on keepin' on but I'm not overly impressed thus far.

Wait, maybe I did vote for it. It wasn't very high on my ballot if I did.

lol @ three of my favourite games of last year being on the disappointments list.

em, will you rep for her story / beginners guide? or will anyone?
i found both to be clever, reasonably well executed failures.

i'm with you beginner's guide, emil.y (assuming that was one of your 3). i loved that game.

xpost we had a short discussion of beginner's guide here - The Stanley Parable - but i'm not sure it would change your mind

i liked her story! i found it fell squarely into the "nice surprise" department & not the "disappointment" one.

curious expedition is v evocative, w/ brutal mechanics (party wipes are super common), themes of colonization/exploitation (that are problematic in-as-far as they are a part of the game mechanics but never whitewashed - i'll talk more about these in a sec), weird supernatural elder gods type stuff, ok dice game combat mechanics. essentially each round you pick a place to go explore. you land your boat and there are various sites you need to find around the location. as you walk you lose sanity points. lose enough sanity points and terrible things start to happen to you including murder, cannibalism, theft, delusions, etc. you can regenerate your sanity by sleeping at various outdoor locations, or in a village. each location has villagers who represent the indigenous people. if they like you you can trade with them, rest at their village, recruit them (indigenous recruits generally will not move on w/ you since they want to stay home but you can convince them under some circumstances). you can also piss them off by killing local animals (who give trophies that can be traded for goods as well as meat that with a cook you can use to keep your sanity up), by stealing from their holy sites, raiding their crypts, etc. if you piss them off enough, they'll send out hunting parties to destroy you. yr party members can have various negative traits like racism, sexism, alcoholism, schizophrenia, kleptomania, pyromania that have various consequences. at the end of each location you pick a new perk, either donate your treasures and other finds for either cash (to buy supplies) or influence (the measure that ultimately determines if you win the game), and then recruit, get missions, etc, and repeat. each place gets increasingly more difficult. there's a lot of variety and all the places are procedurally generated. a v complex game w/ some problematic + provocative themes that acc to steam i've played 59 hours of this year [steam hours are always so embarrassing]

I will definitely rep for both Her Story and Beginner's Guide, but I might wait on a longer explanation of why until they place.

Actually I probably can't expand much more on Beginner's Guide than I did in the linked thread - my post was a bit waffly but basically got to the crux of the things I loved about it.

i voted her story as my disappointment both bc of the things we discussed above (that it's not really a game /in my eyes/) and bc while some of the story and performance was captivating at the time in hindsight i mostly remember brute force trying to find all the videos - and getting less and less back as i uncovered more and more. the big reveals came early on and then they were never seriously built upon (at least to my eyes). i think i wrote a longer thing about it that i included w my ballot.

i think something i really liked about Beginner's Guide was that it made me want to try to make my own game. like, coming away from it, i thought "hmmm, maybe i'll try to learn some really basic 3D modeling and make a weird game that takes place in one room or something." i can't think of many other games that prompt that same reaction.

i quit her story after an hour and i finished beginner's guide but i wish i hadn't.

i'll probably talk about it more when it places, but Life is Strange Ep. 5 was my big disappointment of the year. LiS was by far my favorite game this year, i ended up watching multiple Let's Plays of each chapter after playing it myself just to see how people reacted to certain painful choices. but after spending four episodes building up this elaborately detailed mystery, they ran out of money and put out a trite, truncated ending that has left me agitated ever since it ended. like, i refuse to accept that it's the real ending, and i'm convinced that someone over at DONTNOD has a bullet-point summary of how the plot with (vague spoilers) the Prestons and Pan Estates and the storm was REALLY was supposed to play out, and i won't be satisfied until i see it.

it sucks because i enjoyed episode 5 just fine, even the stuff they did on the cheap by reusing old assets ended up being really compelling. but there was so clearly supposed to be a different conclusion to the mysteries! it clouded all my enjoyment.

also i played Her Story in a group and i think it was the ideal way to experience it. we spent a lot of time theorizing and arguing over wtf was going on.

i played it in the dark on a laptop in 1-2 hour sessions at 2am and was pretty decently creeped out esp. by the flickering light behind the "monitor"

i was enjoying life is strange but stopped playing it after my punk bestie asked me to prove i could time-travel by predicting some mundane events of the next few seconds, and after successfully predicting a dropped glass, a speeding cop car, and some miscellaneous arrivals and departures, i misidentified an insect that was about to appear as a fly rather than a roach. "it's a sad day in alex-town," my friend said, and wouldn't believe i could time-travel. i thought "oh right, adventure games" and quit. i may still go back to it at some point; i probably would have already had everyone not been so down on the ending.

haha, i really want to say "pick it up again, it gets so much better!" but i'm duty-bound to note the diner sequence is followed by an even more terrible sequence where you search for bottles in a maze-like junkyard. BUT the last ~30 minutes of episode 2 is, like, the game moment i spent the most time thinking about/talking about all year, completely worth the clunky gameplay beforehand imo. and episodes 3 and 4 are really strong.

also i missed it the first time i scrolled through the thread, Fran Bow was on my ballot. it's a gory children's book come to life, Alice in Wonderland-esque, and just super weird and grotesque and interesting. it was created by a two-person team in sweden and i think it turned out really well considering their limited resources.

for ppl curious about cities skylines it is free this weekend on steam. it's kinda a perfect game for only one weekend of play so i highly recommend checking it out. and if you're ready to mod it look for all the soviet era architecture (esp the tenements).

my ballot

25 /// The Executive
20 /// Downwell
20 /// Tales From The Borderlands
20 /// You Must Build A Boat
5 /// Landsliders
5 /// Pocket Mine 2
5 /// Blades of Brim

i couldn't vote for it in good conscience but i played a lot of pocket mine 2 last year

I honestly don't remember my ballot as I used the online form. I gave the most points to Jackbox Party Pack 2, Goat Simulator, and Q.U.B.E., and all of the ones with < 5 points are mine. Also htoL#NiQ and Heroes of Loot.

s.clover, a werewolf high-five to you for voting The Executive, that was definitely in my top 3 for the year

The Executive: a good game made great thanks to off-kilter artwork and story, and a difficulty curve that's just right for a long time until the upgrades peak out and you have to just have much better reflexes than I happen to.

Downwell: One of the nice things about mobile is the opportunity to revisit old genres and see what would happen if you mixed their sensibility with certain more modern notions of gameplay. Downwell is effectively a game that its shocking was never invented for the C64, but, which if it had been, would have been one of the great games of all time. Twitchy, with lots of subtle interaction complexities built on a fairly minimal set of objects and enemies, and an actual sense of progression and a go, albeit one that seems daunting to actually reach. And for all the tightened gameplay, an upgrade progression that only works per game and still makes sense.

YMBAB: Almost all other combat match-3 is effectively strategic, or at least provides lengthy move-counters. Here, every second lost matters as the screen ticks forward, whether you swipe or not. So gameplay moves from being primarily about the "best" thing than about doing something, anything, as quickly as possible, and occasionally looking for the match you actually need. There are a few other great mechanics here as well (but they're also effectively held-over from the prior game) -- in particular, picking the number of quests and tying them to variables in the difficulty level means that you get more interesting shake-ups in gameplay (with the modifiers _really_ changing the careful balance of the game) and also the ability to dial back "just a bit" when things seem impossible, to unlock one or two more upgrades, and then make a run at them again.

Landsliders: I voted crossy road as the 2014 game because it took me a year to realize just how influential its "actually free to play but pay to spin for characters" model would be, and landsliders, by a studio founded by people who had first been at crossy road's, is the best of this sort in this year. Novel gameplay interaction, huge variety in levels and potential challenges, the openness to play in a variety of styles, either racing to the top or trying for every last collectible, or just trying to unlock one or another particular cache for the hell of it.

Pocket Mine 2: A lottery ticket in a box with monetization on top. I probably played this more than anything else in the first chunk of the year, before I ran out of most of the not-impossibly-grindy-to-unlock content. The big thing you unlock as you go along is the ability to get longer games with more blocks destroyed before your pick breaks, feeding the "next time i can do a bit better" sensation. Eventually this backfires and games just feel they go on too long, and that's the end of that.

Blades of Brim: Another mobile grinder, this one probably played more than anything else in the second chunk of the year. By the Subway Surfers developers (SS by the way still being one of the games I see most played by other people on my daily commute) it takes 3d-lane-change-endless-runners about as far forward as i've seen -- from 3 lanes to a fairly arbitrary number, from a few levels (SS was one of the first to really open up the vertical space) to again lots and lots. And the combat mechanic -- not too challenging, but enough to transform swipe reflexes. You can't approach enemies directly without rolling, or but you can approach from the side. And then when you get a chain of flying ones and end up hopping between them slashing as you go! I think the devs are as confused as to why it didn't catch on as the next SS as I am, so they've rebalanced and changed core gameplay a number of times now. Hearts used to regenerate -- now they stay gone. Used to have three simultaneous quests -- now just one. I don't know if this is really that much better than other endless games. I know I get less bored of it, and that I bothered to get my skills up to a level where occasionally I pull off something just feels really fluid and nice, and technically well-executed, and where I had to think at least a few moves ahead to get there, and that that freedom compares positively to something like temple run where its much more "read the terrain, do the one possible correct thing." But I don't know if that's what too many other people want from and endless runner.

to the detriment of my mental health i'll probably give all those a try at some point

19 /// Ori and the Blind Forest
My computer exploded around 3/4ths into this but it was still amazing. This was a year where everyone made a Metroidvania, and this was by far the best.

13 /// Undertale
Possibly overrated at this point, but I still got a lot of enjoyment from it.

12 /// The Room 3
Great puzzles. Shame about the attempt at a story.

11 /// Grow Home
Great idea let down a bit by some fiddly controls.

10 /// Crank
An entertaining and short idler.

9 /// Dropsy
I need to finish this. First two hours were great.

8 /// Agar.io
Simplest waste of time of the year. Downside: memes, trolling encouraged.

7 /// Broken Age
Also my disappointment of the year. An acceptable adventure that seems stuck in the past.

6 /// Her Story
Hypertext fiction lives on, I guess? Probably the best of this limited type of storytelling.

5 /// Trimps
Avoid this game. But I got suckered into it, so it gets the minimum points.

Had a blast playing some Rocket League last night. There is a new free mode called Rocket Lab out now (which replaced the hockey-like Snow Day) and it is a couple of Tron-inspired tracks that are a whole ton of fun! One of them is designed like a horseshoe, with the whole field looping in on itself, so you can fly through your goal and end up coming out through the other side's. Total game-changer.

whoa, that's awesome! i didn't like Snow Day at all, but that sounds much more fun.

after playing exclusively 3v3 since i got it, i recently switched over to 2v2 and it's like a brand new game.

yeah Snow Day was a kind of a pain to get used to. this has the same physics but a totally new playing field.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3LS-8925xs

!! those maps look awesome

'that map' i mean, lol

PSN sale this week has Life is Strange complete for $10, will probably grab it.

oh hey that's a good price.

Super Mega Baseball and Towerfall are both listed as Free now. Not even discounted to free. Not sure if they implemented some sort of freemium model or not but those games are both so good.

they're not, it just shows up that way on the store when you already own a game on your account

oh. shouldn't it say Purchased?

they need to fix that, v confusing

yeah, it's ballsed

Their whole online presence is a disaster on a number of levels.

the psn store is so weird. some days it seems integrated into the ps4 os, and then other days it seems like it's like html or something

For instance, here's a helpful hint: game sales sometimes last longer than a week but they often disappear from the sale page after the first week. Why? Anybody's guess. You just have to trawl through all of their game listings to see hidden stuff that's discounted.

Sunless Sea part of a Humble Bundle at the moment: https://www.humblebundle.com/humble-indie-bundle-16

sold.

CPX - TENTH ANNUAL COINT & PLICK 2016 nomination thread