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

http://i.imgur.com/wJPFrAE.png
#13 - Alto's Adventure - Snowman
40 Points
5 Votes

gorgeous game. the mechanics are not so dissimilar from tiny wings, but the music + the visuals are so good. the controls feel perfect. i 100%'d this one and i'll still go back and do a runthrough.

http://i.imgur.com/8IgigZ4.png
#12 - Sunless Sea - Failbetter Games
41 Points
3 Votes
1 First-Place Vote

Alto! I played that, made it to level 40 or so, pooped out, it got hard. but yeah it's beautiful and the controls are great.

I voted for Crank! didn't stick with it like trimps but I don't think it had a long end game

btw I saw that cookie clicker got updated! it even made French newspapers for some reason. looking forward to seeing it place here in 2016

i hate everything you represent

one of the year's best. takes place in the same canon as Fallen London. the writing is, as you'd expect, exquisite. the gameplay is so unusual - slow, meditative, strange. it's fun, but you definitely do have to get used to the pace. and i'm not sure i love the roguelike elements (it's brutal, easy to die in the beginning and some of the early game stuff can feel repetitive) but once you start to make progress there are so many cool niches and things to do. xxp

I am your enemy, Will M

alto's adventure is a fun little timewaster. as mordy mentioned, the controls are spot on and it just feels right.

Sunless Sea looks awesome, that's definitely going to be on my list

srsly tho if you haven't played sunless sea yet i cannot recommend it strongly enough. i placed it just below curious expedition, invisible inc, f4 and binding of isaac, but in some ways it's better than all of those in terms of effortlessly conjuring up a brand new setting, afaict a totally distinctive genre - it's really groundbreaking and hard to overstate it.

hey check this one out u guys

http://i.imgur.com/qMdJqyL.png
#11 - Fallout 4 - Bethesda Game Studios
47 Points
5 Votes
1 First-Place Vote

it's kinda like the ludic version of slow eating or whatever it's called, slow reading. it's slow gaming.

bullshit xp

how is f4 not goty? guys. how.

like i get that it's reiterative but... here's what i wrote about it in my ballot:

My top two votes are both reiterations of games I have given the #1 spot to in the past. It attests to the repetitive nature of video gaming in 2016 but also to how successful these games originally were. Fallout 4 is gorgeous. The violent urban environments are immersive in a way that I’ve never before experienced in video games. Much of the game can turn into a drag (building settlements, trying to figure out why a woman in post-apocalyptic Boston has an Irish accent) but in terms of marrying the aesthetics of Fallout 4’s bright post-apoc counterfactual history to the geography of Boston the game is a gorgeous tour de force. The shooting isn’t too bad either.

there are 10 reasons F4 is not GOTY (xp)

also it gave me terrible motion sickness but even that did not stop me from pouring tens of hours into it

I bought fallout 3 a few years ago, I'm hoping to play it in 2016, then maybe I'll play new vegas, then maybe fallout 4 in 2020 or so.

wow, i feel bad that i didn't put F4 higher on my list. tbh it was kind of a strategic thing because i assumed it would be an easy top 3, but i do think there were a few better games in 2015.

the shooting is the only thing that salvages F4 imo, that game is such a fucking slog.

per my twitter feed a few months ago:

- I haven't liked a Bethesda fallout game ever because I thought these games had nothing to say. But after killing my 436th opponent I realize

- Maybe these games are a statement on the meaninglessness of literally everything ever

- Because Goddamn I play a bunch of video games & none of them make me more acutely aware of how much time I am wasting g doing virtual chores

- Funny picture I wish existed: normal-sized person lying on shaq's bed

8 of my 11 votes have already placed and i'm not certain the other 3 will as well - i've never felt so outside the ilg hivemind!

and then my friend replied with this

imagine a world of infinite possibility... Now imagine you have like 3 interesting verbs and constantly need desk fans

xp it's jsut because you didn't pour 30 points into anything, only 20 ballots y'all know how it is

TOP TEN TIME

http://i.imgur.com/W6TST2i.png
#10 - Beginner's Guide - Everything Unlimited Ltd
48 Points
3 Votes
0.5 First-Place Votes

(i'm gonna start letting these breathe a lil bit more)

haven't played this yet but i loved his first one so i guess i probably should

oh look trash collector simulator jk Fallout 4 was ok but i have never been taken in by the Fallout series.

imagine a world of infinite possibility... Now imagine you have like 3 interesting verbs and constantly need desk fans

3 interesting verbs is otm, and it's one of the main things that makes Witcher 3 a better game (i know they're very different games with different goals, but tbh i only have time for one incredibly massive open world action RPG a year, so i lump them together). it's nearly impossible to have an interesting conversation in Fallout 4, because you have to play as the most boring, emotionally stunted person in the entire world

can we talk about the irish accent thing tho. like wtf. how could it be.

my wife's theory was that she was just cosplaying being irish

theory: anyone that has posted on this thread is capable of writing better conversations in Fallout 4 than what they came up with, and is probably also capable of hiring an amateur voice actor through Craigslist that would have done a better job

feel like the junk collecting mechanic was both the best thing and the worst thing. first time i trashed that opening neighborhood felt amazing and i ran around picking up every single thing i could. that was fun for a few hours.

*entire world explodes in background*
your fallout 4 character walks up to a military officer supervising dozens of people scrambling toward the vault: "Hi, how's it going? Hey there. Hi. Hi, how's it going? Hi. Hey there."

i can see what Fallout is doing but it seems like it requires some effort on the player to complete the immersion and ignore the bugs/jank, and the world/setting is not appealing to me enough to make me want to do that.

the irish accent somehow bothers me less than the one doctor having a... chinese? accent? iirc?

http://i.imgur.com/5WaXhqv.png
#9 - Downwell - Moppin
50 Points
3 Votes
0.5 First-Place Votes

i'm just done with games where conversation is an important game mechanic. it's always...bad. or if it's good, it's usually the primary mechanic, which is not particularly interesting to me.

Oh, cool, I didn't know they made a Baby Jessica game.

what's the best dialogue game ever? galatea maybe?

^ feels like a worthy ILG thread

Yeah, I really don't care about dialogue or story in most games (at least where they aren't central elements, like in the Telltale games). Probably because those elements often suck. That might be why I find myself drawn to games where the characters are ridiculously ott parodies or complete cyphers.

I love the story/"dialogue" in the Portal games.

monkey island 2 comes to mind immediately but that might be nostalgia
witcher 3 is better than most but still regularly garbage

marvel puzzle quest, of course

sure but that doesn't give you (the illusion of) choices. same with the Souls games.

i remember KOTOR being a pretty good talky game, but i never got very far (it was actually too overwhelming with all the people you could talk to and possible paths).

(was talking about Portal)

best dialog game imo The Secret of Monkey Island. insult sword fighting is still maybe the best use of dialog as game mechanic.

fyi, it is a graphic adventure and one of your quests is to fight The Sword Master. while training you learn that the real key to swordfighting is having a clever quip ready at all times. so you must travel around the island bumping into random pirates and learning new insults and their appropriate comebacks. the brilliant thing is once you get to The Sword Master, all of her dialog is different from what you have learned, so you are re-contextualizing the comebacks, often to hilarious and unforeseen results.

i think we all know secret of monkey island :p

I loved Downwell, and that was with the difficult iPhone 4S controls. I'd love to give it another shot with a gamepad and see how much farther I could go