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

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.

So Mad Max had a pretty middling (though still enjoyable enough) fighting system, it was awfully repetitive at times (scout a stronghold, take out perimeter defenses, punch punch punch) and the mini-boss battles were a joke (wait for attack, roll, punch).

But I had a stupid fun time driving around blowing up convoys and upgrading the car (even if it involved the tedium of collecting scrap). I put far more hours into it than it probably deserved, but I dig the world.

Geometry Wars 3 almost made my ballot, but didn't have the staying power the other games I voted for did.

Pluses: auto-aim really works great on a touchscreen, varying challenges keep things shaken up, fun things to unlock.

Minuses: I miss being bad at genuine dual stick and having to lock into a gridlike strafe pattern to keep my sanity. Auto-aim takes lots of the trickiness out of enemy management -- so instead of dodging to build up easily mowed-down enemy formations its just dodging and letting auto-aim pick 'em off. Set wavelike patterns also take some of the chaos/fun out of enemy management. Varying challenges take away from the core dynamic of these sorts of games, and make replaying failed levels repetitive. None of the unlocks really give all that much power.

The best version of GW I've played on mobile still.

Rayman adventures was my disappointment.

The first few rayman mobile games were so good, and rayman adventures went the mobile-micropayment route. Countdown timers limiting gameplay (tho not terribly obnoxiously so), a fixed relatively small set of levels, with randomized rewards, and semi-randomized level choice. So a few, like the "stealth" levels require replay because that's where the goodies are, but the same ones come up way too frequently, and all the levels where its about "figure the trick" get really boring to keep replaying. And there's not much reward for playing really well as opposed to "just ok enough." So it becomes tedious.

Arguably these are the same sorts of flaws that made angry birds 2 such a letdown -- randomized levels taking the fun out of just figuring out once a really tricky fixed level design with a lot of art to it, and also by that token, no sense of progress to new interesting levels -- just samey variations on a theme that can't be that carefully set up because they have to work with randomized combinations of birds.

So arguably 2015 was the year developers discovered how to make pervasive micropayments not really gamebreakingly obnoxious, but at the cost still of just having duller, less finely crafted games. The candy-crushification of good franchises. Lots of nitrome games had the same issue -- almost really great, but falling into an IAP-grindfest precisely when they could have put more work into opening up newer interesting dynamics. Its not that they're extracting money. Its that they've let the money-extraction mechanisms _take the place_ of where genuine gameplay should be.

Shit! Forgot to vote. Sigh

It's been years since I voted, but I always enjoy reading it.

I didn't vote either, as I'm years behind and will be until I die. I was going to prickishly ask for the system names to be actually in the entries - I'll be coming back to these in a few years when I EG buy a PS4 and being able to search by console would be very handy.

virtually everything that's listed for console, apart from nintendo games, is on PS4

http://i.imgur.com/licTBnk.png
#39 - Assassin's Creed Syndicate - Ubisoft Quebec
17 Points
2 Votes

As the owner of a PS3 and a Vita, I'm looking forward to voting in next year's C+P when my ballot will be nothing but a handful of pervy, barely-localized JRPGs.

('The slow death of the 7th generation of consoles' was my 2015 disappointment, btw.)

http://i.imgur.com/Ednsjb6.png
#39 - Dropsy - Tendershoot, A Jolly Corpse
17 Points
2 Votes

I think Dropsy narrowly missed my ballot. I appreciated its sad lonely weirdness a lot. Adventure games are kind of killing it for storytelling these days, even though I'm not a huge fan of the genre and never have been. (but I'm more comfortable cheating w/ gameFAQs than i ever was before, and better at not spoiling the next step than i used to be, so i can still enjoy the unfolding)

http://i.imgur.com/D4dIPA2.png
#37 - Helldivers - Arrowhead Game Studios
18 Points
2 Votes

http://i.imgur.com/yoRgGH3.png
#37 - Super Mega Baseball - Metalhead Software
18 Points
2 Votes

http://i.imgur.com/wJeQNHm.png
#36 - Ori and the Blind Forest - Moon Studios
19 Points
1 Vote
1 First-Place Vote

damn y'all, crickets

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#35 - Yo-kai Watch - Level-5
20 Points
1 Vote

i haven't even heard of so many of these games!

I haven't played any of these games but they look really cool.

virtually everything that's listed for console, apart from nintendo games, is on PS4

Right, but if go CRTL-F 'console'...

i'm sure there will be some sort of summary spreadsheet at the end, it'll be alright

I'll post a recap at the end and include that line

(I am aware that I've moved on from 'prickish' to 'whining' - feel free to ignore me, and thanks for running the poll!)

http://i.imgur.com/89fDqoe.png
#34 - Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger And The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist - Crows Crows Crows
20 Points
3 Votes

Wanted to play that purely based on its provenance but didn't get around to getting it. Any of the three voters want to rep for it? I note that although it got three votes none were very high, is that b/c it's short so not passion-worthy or b/c it's only ok?