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

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#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

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#8 - Super Mario Maker - Nintendo
68 Points
4 Votes
0.5 First-Place Votes

I've never played a Fallout game but always wanted to, though mainly because I know there are nuclear-war themed radio stations. I'm kind of alright with grind/collecting/chores type gameplay but the hate is making me think maybe I should just stick with my own nuclear song playlist.

<3 insult sword fighting. Have used "how appropriate, you fight like a cow" many many times irl.

loooved watching Super Mario Maker videos this year. it's the first thing to make me want a Wii (U or whatever).

Kind of tempted to c&p my post on Beginner's Guide but Karl linked it upthread, it's not hard to find.

"I hope now you've learned to stop picking your nose."

I deeply love Skyrim despite not being overly-enamored of the whole sword & sorcery thing. Fallout 3 should've been a lock for me since it's the same company doing a similar type of game in a setting that interests me much more but it's been such a slog for me to get into it. I don't know why, exactly. I can do inventory management and smithing and enchanting and shit in Skyrim all the livelong day so it isn't about the tedium.

Super Mario Maker is amazing and insane. i like it how it is so much more than simply making Mario levels, that they threw in all the weird characters and easter eggs and bizarre musical cues. as usual production quality is top-notch and gameplay is fun and perfected. i still wish every game was published by Nintendo.

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#7 - Life is Strange - Dontnod Entertainment
68 Points
4 Votes
1 First-Place Vote

not that i am actively encouraging it or anything but it is interesting that nobody is making predictions

Frog Fractions for #1!

i think i had an epic whine last year about predicting the top 5. or maybe it was on a music poll. or both. it's something that i whine about

I kinda assumed Life Is Strange would be top five, although much of the praise I've heard has been tempered.

What, Witcher at number one? I really have no idea. I haven't even heard of 4/5 of the games that have placed thus far.

pretty sure my #1 will be #1

(Frog Fractions should be honorary #1 every year though)

thread: what is your stance on fake top 3s before the real top 3s

asking for a friend

If only I'd remembered to vote MPQ it could've made it into the Top 10! Regrets.
And The Executive would've placed higher too.

love fakeouts

Life is Strange wasn't available for mac, iirc, so even though I think I would love it, I can't play it.

I also love fakeouts.

re: life is strange... one of my favourite things is non-american representations of american coming-of-age stories... granted I am only halfway thru, i kinda lost some steam afte the xmas break, gotta go back and finish it!

Bloodbourne / Witcher 3 / MGS V / Rocket League should be top four but I don't know in what order

Her Story hasn't placed yet, right? But I imagine it'll probably be up next.

If only I'd remembered to vote MPQ it could've made it into the Top 10! Regrets.

nhex is my secondary nemesis

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#6 - Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain - Kojima Productions
83 Points
5 Votes
2.33 First-Place Votes

too

fucking

low

Oh hai is it too late to update my ballot, just remembered that Duke Nukem 3-D was released for consoles in 2015, thx

i keep thinking i should play this but i haven't played a MGS game since the NES. does that matter?

surely undertale is still to come, yeah?

many xps, re: MGSV, no spoilers

this was my #1 FYI. it's unbelievable that it even exists really. the MGS series might be the best game series of all time and it's unbelievable that a team that pretty much defined a style of game that is now virtually outdated (high prod value narrative-driven linear AAA) managed to turn around and not only create an incredible open world experience, but do it without sacrificing ANY of the idiosyncrasies that made the original series so essential. i DID NOT EXPECT mgs5 to have a "psycho mantis reads your memory card" or "use a turbo controller and die" moment. I didn't think there was a way? but they did. the moment where you are madly completing missions trying to solve (INSERT MYSTERY HERE) and once you come to a solution you have to use the game's menu system in such an exhausting, labour-intensive way was fucking brilliant. annoying. but brilliant.

and mission 43 (if you've played the game, look it up, you'll know what i mean) was SO FUCKING INTENSE that i once cried DESCRIBING IT.

i keep thinking i should play this but i haven't played a MGS game since the NES. does that matter?

as you may have surmised from my above paragraph: you should play every one of these games and then also read every article leigh alexander has ever written about them

in the year 2027 when we finally get around to polling the best game of the 8th generation of consoles i will be on ILX screaming about the brilliance of MGSV

i will probably be screaming it into a virtual reality headset which will transcribe my madness to 3D letters which i will grab with my hands and put in a box on ILX which will look exactly the same

xpost Mordy, no it will probably be for the best, since you won't be used to sitting through hours of cutscenes.

this was my #1. gameplay wise it is easily the best controlling 3rd person game outside of a Mario. storywise it is incredibly underrated and ahead of its time. i really like how Kojima took this "ultimate perfect soldier" and made this game about playing as a disabled vet with PTSD.

it has been funny and slightly unnerving to see gamers rationalize all of the horrible things the lead character does in this game. i think Kojima knew this, and had long ago reconciled gamer bloodlust vs. his own anti-war anti-nuke messages that seem lost on that audience. hence why language is such a big theme in the game. this is a Japanese man making a game about US military dominance, about the roles of private forces in conflict zones, about Afghanistan -- a place we are stilled mired in. yet you didn't read anything analyzing this or wondering what this game says about our modern wars, it was all TMZ-style Konami vs. Kojima hype/hate. this dumb industry.

I just scanned through the rollout and... I basically gave up on games last year, apparently.

The only thing on the list that I played was Fallout IV, and I only played about an hour of it.

someday i will get around to playing MGSV, a friend lent it to me. maybe in 2019 when i get tired of playing Dark Souls 3.

The Final Word on ‘The Phantom Pain,’ a Video Game About Video Games <-- the only article worth reading that talks about the Koj vs Konami stuff. Posits that the game is a message in a bottle about that very conflict. Fuck I love this game