henke on 20/12/2014 at 07:33

---

It's been a pretty good year for games. New console generations, Oculus Rift demos aplenty, a bunch of kickstarters finally getting released, the sequels to some great games, and the ports of some missed classics. So what were your favourites this year?


My Top Ten

1. The Last Of Us Remastered (PS4)

Ok, this one is making the list on a technicality. Sure it’s a 2013 game but the PS4 Remastered version came out this year so it totally counts because it’s finally on a system that I can play it on! I mean ok yeah sure I did play the PS3 version earlier in the year as well but that shouldn’t count. Hey, I didn’t complain when all you PC-gamers put Dark Souls on your lists the year after it came out originally! OK? OK!

It started out as a great game. It was only slightly past the midpoint where I began to realize what I was playing wasn’t merely a great game, but one of the best games I’d ever played. And the ending sealed it. This is one that left me with an emptiness after I finished it, and a feeling that nothing else was going to give me for a long time.

2. Dark Souls II + The Crowns Trilogy DLCs

A worthy sequel to perhaps the best game ever made. I don’t need to write too much about this, do I? It’s Dark Souls 2!

3. SpinTires

Out of all the games I’ve kickstarted, this was the one I’ve been looking forward to most, and the one that satisfied the most on arrival. The only drawback is that it’s rather sparse on content. What is there is… just about perfect. It’s everything you could wish for from a Soviet era lumberhauling offroad truck sim, and then some. The tree and mud and water physics are the kind of things that you wouldn’t expect any developer to put a bunch of time into making and getting right, but oovee did. It’s hard to believe that someone would make something this niche, this perfect.

4. Infamous: Second Son/First Light (PS4) AND Shadow of Mordor (PS4) AND Far Cry 4 (PS4) (tie)

While they didn’t offer the challenges of Dark Souls 2, or the emotional resonance of TLOU, or manage to touch that place in your soul that only the mud-physics of SpinTires can touch, Shadow of Mordor, Far Cry 4, and Infamous: Second Son were the most pure FUN games of the year. They all offer little in the story or character department(tho Infamous comes out ahead of the others here), but from a gameplay perspective they are pure bliss.

7. Valkyria Chronicles

The gameplay is great, but VC’s greatest victory is the amount of personality it manages to infuse into every member of it’s enormous cast.

8. Thief

Thief didn’t bring back the feelings of it's forebears, the way DXHR managed, but I still enjoyed it for most of the same reasons I enjoyed the originals.

9. Golfy Bird/Flappy Golf (Android/iOS)

It might look like simply Super Stickman Golf 2 reskinned to capitalize on the Flappy craze. But this revamping of the gameplay, which replaces swings with flaps, is so much fun it’s almost hard to believe a whole new game was waiting to be revealed by only the slightest tweak to the gameplay. I spent a lot of time during the coffee breaks and backseat car-rides of 2014 flapping around SSG2’s courses, ever trying to attain the elusive “hole in one flap”.

10. Watch_Dogs (PS4)

I’m a sucker for city based open world third person action games. I love stealth, I love action, and I love games that combine the two well. I love slo mo shootouts and car chases and protagonists with badass trenchcoats. There was pretty much no way I wasn’t going to have a great time with Watch_Dogs.


Honorable mentions (aka Top 11-22)
Wolfenstein: The New Order
Wayward Souls (iOS)
Alien Isolation
Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes (PS4)
Betrayer
MXGP
Abyss Odyssey
Monument Valley (iOS)
Door Kickers
The Fall
Tesla Effect
Sir, You Are Being Hunted

Man I played a lot of stuff this year. Too much! I'm not even counting all those PS3 games I caught up with at the start of the year, or all the Oculus Rift stuff. Time for a new years resolution: less playing games, more making games.

Shadowcat on 20/12/2014 at 10:44

---

Huh. I realise that it's reached a point where I <em>don't even know</em> what year the games I bought came out.

I don't think I actually purchased a game on physical media this year. Everything was just an entry on a web site. So much was from sales. Who knows when a given game was made? Obviously I could find out with little difficulty if it occurred to me to do so; it's just that it's no longer <em>obvious</em>. Kinda weird.

Jason Moyer on 20/12/2014 at 18:56

---

Weird, I've been buying most everything online for the past 7 years and it hasn't effected my ability to perceive the passage of time in any way that I'm aware of.

Jason Moyer on 20/12/2014 at 20:24

---

I think the biggest problem I have with remembering when a lot of stuff came out is how much goddamn shit is being constantly released now. That and Early Access. I mean, I played Sir YABH in 2013, but it didn't come out until 2014.

ZylonBane on 21/12/2014 at 01:36

---

Goat Simulator