My Favorite Game From Every Year I've Been Alive Part 6: 2013 to 2016
I'm going to quit videogames and take up knitting.
Unlucky Number 13
The games keep getting worse and the list of things I didn’t play gets even bigger. What a wonderful time to be alive. We start this set of years with...
2013
It’s 2013, Let it Go is constantly playing everywhere as background noise and the Boston Bombing happened. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One released as well, marking another console generation. This one would feature one or two notable exclusives, which would be one or two more than the next console generation.
As for games, we got a slew of terrible sequels and some new stuff, as always, but a lot of it is pretty bad.
Like Shadow Warrior 2013. It’s a reboot of the franchise, taking it from a great boomer shooter to a mediocre 2013-style shooter. It doesn’t have cover-based shooting, and it’s not brown and gray, but it falls into many of the pitfalls of the time, with its hallway/arena level design that completely ignores the well made levels of the original. It swaps your fun guns for the usual pitsol/uzi/shotgun trio and gives you a katana, which is what you’ll be using most of the time since the guns are terrible. It runs poorly, even on good hardware, and it has that annoying Reddit humor where everyone is constantly making quips and pointing things out. They never shut up, either. It’s a painful experience.
Speaking of painful shooters, we got Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. A game everyone insists is an arcadey fun time, but it’s yet another early 2010s brown slop shooter. I spent an entire review complaining about it. You can check it out here.
If you want the most 2013 of all 2013 shooters, look no further than Bioshock: Infinite. An incredibly over-hyped sequel to the equally over-hyped Bioshock games. After Bioshock 2, fans were left a bit disappointed that the story didn’t progress, so Ken Levine came back to pen another chapter in the saga. One that is so mind-numbingly stupid that it could only impress game critics, and impress them it did, being hailed as a work of art. I didn’t like it at all. I wrote a lengthy review explaining why. Read it here.
Call of Duty: Ghosts released this year, to hammer home the fact that shooters were well and truly dead. I didn’t play this. The only thing I know about this game is that it features advanced fish AI.
I can’t believe so many legendary franchises got crappy entries. What’s next? You’re gonna tell me Devil May Cry got a shitty reboot?
DmC: Devil May Cry was a reboot of the Devil May Cry franchise for western audiences. I guess that means one: the DMC franchise wasn’t for western audiences, despite its massive popularity in the west and two: the best way to appeal to American tastes is to make things worse. Judging by the reviews on IGN, I’d say that yeah, they’re right about that. DMC took the already excellent gameplay of Devil May Cry and convoluted it with color-matching elements. You had to use specific weapons to damage specific enemies, because the part we hated the most about Devil May Cry was the freedom it gave us to play with whatever weapons we wanted. It was overwhelming. I want to match colors and mash buttons. It had a revamped story that changed Dante into a foul-mouthed millennial douchebag and made references to Fox News. This is a message to Japanese developers: NEVER let western studios touch your franchises. I sure hope that never happens again, especially not with something like Ninja Gaiden.
Western gamers don’t want fun, they want misery, and The Last of Us delivered it in buckets. Set in the post-apocalypse, this ultra-violent dad simulator made you demolish zombies, curb stomp humans and shoot other living things, then it made you feel bad for doing so. Same thing with the rebooted Tomb Raider games mentioned before. There’s something weird with these western guilt games. They spend years developing an engine that can render the individual bits of brain matter falling out of an enemy’s skull after a headshot, but then they tell you that violence is bad. I know violence is bad. You don’t have to make a 20 hour game where you spend most of the time killing to tell me violence is bad. It’s like telling me Gurren Lagann is about how we should never build giant robots because they’re not awesome.
Saints Row 4 didn’t make you feel bad for being violent, but it made me feel bad for playing it regardless. The fourth installment in the Saints Row franchise (you can tell by the 4 after the name), this entry brought you back to the city of Steelport to take part in more haha funny chaos. The gloves were off and the series went from over-the-top to complete and utter self-parody. I’ve always said this game is having more fun with itself than you are. It’s like going to a party where nothing’s happening, but one guy keeps going “WOOOOO! HELL YEAH!! WOOOOO!” every now and then. The game wants to come off as being a raucous good time, but it’s just busy work. I don’t care if I get turned into a toilet, I’m still shooting bullet sponge enemies, traversing an empty city and doing tedious mini-games.
There has to be something good here. How about Ride to Hell: Retribution- oh Lord. This was a broken, sloppy mess of a game that became infamous for how bad it was. A lazy, try-hard edgy attitude that completely falls flat thanks to its terrible animations, horrible dialogue, atrocious voice acting and low overall quality. The gameplay was also a mess of the worst cliches of the era. Save yourself the trouble and watch someone else play it. That’s the only way anyone can get any enjoyment from this.
How about Injustice? Oh no. This was a fighting game from the developers of Mortal Kombat. It had a roster full of DC heroes: Batman, Superman, The Flash, Wonder Woman, etc. and it featured their signature clunky fighting and janky animations. It was a clownfest game, featuring a wildly unbalanced cast, unblockable stage interactables, infinite combos and a ton of flow-breaking in-game cutscenes. This game stinks.
Maybe those previous games were too action-packed for you. You might want to relax by playing something slower, like Sim City, which also got an entry this year. Just fire up your PC and boot up the game and get ready to build massive skyscrapers for your little townsfolk. Wait, what’s this? You have to be online to play a singleplayer game? And the servers don’t work? Amazing! This game was only notable thanks to its absolutely disastrous launch that had everyone staring at a login screen. The game was fixed eventually, but the stain of being a broken mess at launch never washed away.
If you wanted an always online game that actually worked (mostly), you were in luck, as this year gave us quite a few online grind-fests you could waste dozens of hours on. Firs off is Payday 2, a bank heist simulator where you rob banks and shoot cops. You can technically do a stealth run, but good luck getting that to work without a well-coordinated team. Most of the time, things devolved into minutes-long shootouts.
If you preferred your co-op shooting in space, you could try Warframe. The premiere space ninja grinding simulator. It had a unique art style and a fun action combat system with a focus on movement. Spend hours and hours grinding to make your gun do 30% more damage. I spent a couple hundred hours on this, and sometimes get the urge to go back.
Final Fantasy 14 re-launched this year. It originally released in 2010, and keeping with the times, its launch was a complete and utter disaster. No one liked the original, and it was so bad, they had to take it down and re-make it. This iteration was a huge success and it’s still being played and actively developed over a decade later. If only other developers had the presence of mind to completely teardown their game and try again, instead of throwing it in the garbage like so many of these short-lived live-service games. Or maybe not. Crunch is already terrible as is, imagine having to slave away six months of your life in unpaid overtime only to be told “nah, this is shit, mate, do it again”.
The last of our grind-fest mini section is Path of Exile, a Diablo-clone where you fight hordes of monsters to get epic loot. The game features a sprawling skill tree promising dozens of different builds, if you can grind for weeks to unlock them. It was a lot of fun, until a random server desync made you lag into a mob of demons and die. Then it wasn’t so much fun.
Killer is Dead was another weird, wacky Suda 51 game. It was a hack and slash game where you play as Mondo, a hitman for hire, who has a giant cybernetic arm that shoots blood bullets. Slay hundreds of monsters to foil the King of the Moon’s secret plot to use moon energy to turn people into monsters. The game makes zero sense, and looking into the story makes it make even less sense. There’s something about boiled eggs, too.
We also got DayZ. Based on an ARMA mod, this game popularized the survival genre and was a huge hit.
The biggest game this year was Grand Theft Auto 5. After this game released, Rockstar realized they didn’t have to make anything else, and could just keep re-releasing it and charging people for in-game money. This was a massive hit, it’s the best-selling game of all time and it has made over four quintillion dollars in revenue. That’s not even a real number, but it’s probably close to what GTA5 has earned in revenue. Over a decade after its release, we’re getting Grand Theft Auto 6, a massive bloated game that will surely live up to the hype.
For a much smaller game, we got Dragon’s Crown. Smaller in scope. If you look at the Sorceress, you’d know there’s nothing small about it. It’s a 2D beat-em-up by Vanillaware. It looks like a ton of fun, but it’s locked in PlayStation jail, so I haven’t been able to play it. Jason Schreier of Kotaku made some comments complaining about the game’s sexy female characters, and the game’s artist saw the critique and, since Jason didn’t seem to like any of the female characters, he replied with an image of shirtless dwarves. It’s still funny to this day.
A much, much smaller but somehow bigger game was Flappy Bird. It released in 2013, but it didn’t get popular until 2014. This was a simple phone game where you tapped the screen to keep a little bird flying without hitting any of the green Mario pipes. It was incredibly simple, but for some reason it became a massive success. It generated tens of thousands of dollars PER DAY in revenue, and everyone was playing it. The game’s creator eventually took it down because he felt it was “too addictive”. The game was taken off app stores, and phones with the game installed then shot up in price, being sold for thousands just because they had the bird game pre-installed.
Gunpoint also came out this year. It’s a cool stealth puzzle game where you hack into complicated security systems and then sneak into the building.
Let’s check in on Nintendo, to see what they were up to. They were still struggling with the Wii U’s disappointing numbers, and they were celebrating the year of Luigi. This just meant they were releasing their games as normal, but slapping Luigi on them. New Super Mario Bros for the tenth time, but this time with Luigi! Amazing.
They also got a Platinum exclusive with The Wonderful 101. A neat little game that was like Pikmin mashed with Viewtiful Joe, but with way more touchscreen gimmicks. It’s a really unique game that has way too many quick time events. Seriously, they’re excessive. Platinum really needs to dial it back.
We also got Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death. It’s a God of War inspired budget game where you play as Marlow Briggs, and fight soldiers. It’s fun, campy and often goes on sale for under $5. You can’t go wrong with it.
Out of all this underwhelming slop, which did I pick as my favorite of the year?
My pick for 2013: Dota 2
That’s right! The best thing to come out this year was the misery simulator DOTA2, AKA: The Stanford Prison Experiment disguised as a MOBA. This game, along with sleep and government bureocracy, have taken hundreds of hours of my life. It’s one of the best games ever. It’s ridiculously complicated, but every part of it makes sense in the greater context of the game. Every stupid mechanic has a point, every play has a counter-play, and every counter-play has a counter-counter play. Chess is easy to learn, impossible to master. Dota 2 is impossible to learn, impossible to master. I could go on for thousands of words explaining why I like its obtuse design, but I won’t do that here. Maybe at some point, I’ll write a review on it. For now, I’ll just say that it’s my favorite game of 2013.
I hate everyone that plays it, though. Myself included.
Runners up
You’d think that a stinker year like this one wouldn’t have any runners up, but hey here we are.
La Mulana (2013 remake). It’s a bunch of nonsense; a metroidvania with a ton of cryptic, moon-logic puzzles, tough as nails platforming and evil bosses. It’s a magical experience that will make you feel the same magic you felt playing videogames for the first time, but I don’t recommend it for everyone since it’s a massive game that actively hates you. It’s Silksong’s criminal cousin who doesn’t get invited to Thanksgiving.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. AND IT WILL COME, LIKE A FLOOD OF PAIN. POURING DOWN ON ME. AND IT WILL NOT LET UP UNTIL THE END IS HERE
AND IT WILL COME THROUGH THE DARKEST DAY
IN MY FINAL HOUR
AND IT WILL NEVER REST UNTIL THE CLOUDS ARE CLEAR
UNTIL IT FINDS MY DREAMS HAVE
DIS-
A-
PEEEEE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EARED
MY DREAMS DISAPPEAAAAAR
*GUITAR SOLO
2014
Ebola was ravaging Africa, and Ubisoft released Assassin’s Creed Unity. Much like other games of this era and beyond, it was plagued by tons of bugs and issues on launch. My favorite was the one where peoples’ face would disappear, leaving behind a spooky set of floating eyes and teeth.
Watch Dogs also disappointed many. After years of marketing itself as an ultra-advanced next-generation game with incredible graphics and complex, hacking gameplay, it released as just another Ubislop third person game with none of the bells and whistles. The graphics looked worse, the gameplay was nonexistent and it kinda stunk. This led to the game flopping, and Ubisoft realized they had to improve their games’ quality if they wanted to sell more. Just kidding. It got eights and nines on review sites and it sold millions of copies. Ubisoft made bank and proceeded to make two more underwhelming, buggy sequels and no lessons were learned.
Speaking of underwhelming but high-grossing: Destiny. This sleeping pill of a game combined the thrill-a-minute gameplay of Halo with the slow dopamine drip of an MMO, to create something that was a videogame, and could be played on a screen.
If you preferred your boring shooter MMOs free-to-play, you could try Firefall. It was a third person sci-fi MMO shooter, where you would do boring MMO quests… but in space! I played it for a few hours and had a crushing realization that I was completely and utterly bored. I deleted the game and went back to Warframe.
If you missed that old Bungie, that making Halo Bungie, made Master Chief Bungie, you could get Halo: Master Chief collection. A compilation of the classic Halo games, all in one package for your enjoyment. This definitive edition of the games was feature-complete and extremely polished. Juuuust kidding. Again. This was a buggy mess with no working multiplayer and constant, disastrous problems. The game would reach a “playable” status years later, with the multiplayer actually working almost a decade later. This game didn’t sell, and it was a sobering reminder to Microsoft that they couldn’t sell a half-assed product and- who am I kidding. It sold like crack and no lessons were learned.
Xbox also released Titanfall. From the former Call of Duty development team, it was a first-person shooter where you’d run around and shoot people to call down a giant mech.
Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze was also a good time. I didn’t review that one. Not yet, at least. Donkey Kong is back, on the Wii U, but no one played it until it was re-released on Switch (myself included). This was another fine platformer where you would jump around in creative stages and monkey around. Get it? Because Donkey Kong is a monkey. Wait, he’s an ape. Ape around.
Donkey Kong was also in Super Smash Brother 4. More like, Super Smash Brothers Snore. I didn’t like this one at all. It was better than Brawl, in its core gameplay, but that’s not saying much. It’s like saying two is a lot more than zero.
On the subject of Nintendo, we got Mario Kart 8. This game, much like Grand Theft Auto 5, would be played for an entire decade before we got something new. At least it was fun, looked great and had an amazing soundtrack.
Some other decade-spanning games were released this year. Hearthstone popped up and showed everyone you could make millions by selling digital cards. Smite released this year, a free-to-play third person MOBA about mythical gods fighting. It was a good time, and it had a decent business model: free to play, or you could pay $30 and unlock every character forever. It was a fun time. Granblue Fantasy released this year, too, and much like Hearthstone, it found out you could make millions by selling digital pictures. It was one of the first big gacha games, and you could pay big bucks to get PNGs of anime girls. I have to admit, they had some good PNGs. I played it for some time, but didn’t spend any money. I stopped playing because progress was exceedingly slow. At the pace I was getting material drops, I could have forged a legendary sword in real life before I got one in-game.
If instead of a gacha full of anime girls, you wanted your mobile game to desecrate a beloved series, you could check out Dungeon Keeper mobile. Another horrid decision by EA, this game was Dungeon Keeper, but on mobile. So Dungeon Keeper, but bad.
If you liked hanging around in dungeons, but wanted a better experience, you were in luck. You could try Stranger of Sword City. This was a dungeon crawler RPG where you form a party and explore dangerous dungeons. Dangerous isn’t an exaggeration. This game is brutally difficult, making any mistakes cost you dearly, by wiping out characters. Death comes quickly, and if you’re unprepared, you can get hit by a one-shot spell that kills your entire party. It’s tough, but it’s still a lot of fun.
Thief had a new entry. It was a reboot or something. I’m not sure. All I know is that it wasn’t well received, and it was teased as Thi4f, which is incredibly dumb.
Another 4 from this year was The Sims 4. Much like other games mentioned, this one also went on for over a decade. There is no sign of Sims 5 in 2025, and it isn’t even being considered at the time of writing.
Now for a quick edition of “games I played but no one else cares about”: LoadOut was a cartoony third person shooter, where the gimmick was making your own guns. You could pick a firing type, such as sniper, shotgun or rocket, add elemental effects and other things, including healing. The guns were horribly unbalanced, but the game was fun in a party game sense. It was free to play and multiplayer only, so it was shut down and can’t be played anymore.
Town of Salem was a social deduction game. Think something like Among Us. You had to figure out who’s who using deduction tactics, and you would vote during the day to see who would be executed. A friend of mine and I would play this and try to get the other players to execute us under false pretenses.
Fistful of Frags was a first person cowboy shooter where you’d yee-haw and shoot each other with coach guns and six-shooters. Pass the whiskey.
The year prior we had Flappy Bird, a mobile game that was delisted and any device with it installed went up in price. Same thing happened to consoles with PT installed. PT (Playable Teaser) was a demo/proof of concept for a possible upcoming Silent Hill game. You would run around a house, looping through it, seeing different creepy things each time. There was a talking baby fetus thing that looked like the thing from Eraserhead. Despite it being a demo, it captivated millions before being delisted and highly sought-after.
Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is another parallel to previous years. Remember back when DmC: Devil May Cry came out, and I said Japanese studios should never outsource to western devs? Well, they didn’t listen, and we got Yaiba. A truly horrendous game, Yaiba took the beloved Ninja Gaiden series, gave it a comic book coat of paint, added some cringe-inducing comedy and put zombies in it. The result was a mess of a game. It played nothing like Ninja Gaiden, it was more like a cheap knock-off of God of War, with tons of spongy enemies that took forever to kill. You had multiple attacks, but none of them did anything, so you would end up mashing like an idiot hoping something would die. It was full of flow-breaking puzzles and platforming sections, in-game cutscenes and a ton of nonsense. It’s a lot like Ninja Gaiden 4. Both games are awful, but I think Yaiba is way worse. This game sucks.
We also had Five Nights at Freddy’s, the game that introduced millions of kids to horror, the Internet and launched Matt Pat’s entire career. To think that the Pope would have never gotten a copy of Undertale if it hadn’t been for this game.
The biggest releases this year were Dark Souls 2 and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.
Dark Souls 2 is the second game in the Dark Souls franchise (you can tell by the 2 next to the name). It takes the high difficulty of the first game, and elevates it to kaizo levels, filling each stage with a ton of annoying enemies. This game is often seen as “not a great Dark Souls game, but a good game in general”, and I disagree wholeheartedly. I think this game is terrible. I got through it with gritted teeth after having enjoyed the first one. The locations are bland, boring and uninteresting. Each section is a glorified hallway with one or two things to do and see. There are sections like The Gutter and Shrine of Amana which made me want to rip out my hair, then my clothes, then my skin. They were designed by a mad man with hatred in his heart. Most bosses were complete pushovers, going down in one attempt. There were some bosses that were just a room full of regular enemies, but a health bar appeared underneath. The movement was a lot faster and floatier, everything felt like it had less weight, nothing interesting happened, and then there was the section at the end where you had to go into giants’ dreams or something to find the next thing to do. It was a terrible time, and I dropped the game at one point, only to find out I had dropped it at the final boss, so I went back and finished it. It was a disappointing time, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, fan of the series or not.
Shadow of Mordor, or what I like to call it, Shadow of Boredom, was an Assassin’s Creed style game set in the Lord of the Rings universe. You play as the Gravewalker, an undead who-
PRETENDER! My name is known at grave sites throughout Mordor. The dead rise when they hear my incantations. I EARNED the title of Gravewalker, and now you sully the name by using it for yourself. This ends now!
What was that all about? Anyways, you play as the guy, and he’s dead, but an elf spirit brings him back to undeath and you have to kill orcs. It uses the Batman Arkham Assylum style of combat where you fly from one enemy to the next with the push of a button. It’s very repetitive, with missions that have you walking from one-
GRAVEWALKER! I’m gonna stick a spear so far up your arse you’ll cut your tongue every time you speak!
-That’s rude. Like I said, the missions had you going from one spot to the next, following a highlighted path to interact with highlighted objects with no real interactivity. Follow the preplanned path, and press the button when the game tells you to. It’s incredibly boring-
GRAVEWALKER! Cut me all you like! You’re the one who’ll be dead at the end!
-SHUT UP! This was another reason why I hated this game. While you’re trying to engage with the boring, shallow combat, you keep getting interrupted by orcs coming at you and shouting. Anytime a named orc appears, it triggers an unskippable in-game cutscene that shifts the camera to the orc for a few seconds while they spout their taunts. It breaks what little flow the gameplay has going all to show you some green guy screaming nonsense at you. If there are multiple orcs showing up one after another, things get ridiculous-
GRAVEWALKER! I HAD A BOWL OF NAILS FOR BREAKFAST… WITHOUT ANY MILK!
Oh for God’s sake, let’s wrap this up.
What piece of junk did I pick as my favorite from this mess of a year?
My pick for 2014: Sunset Overdrive
Originally a launch title for the Xbox One, this underrated shooter flopped hard, but it’s a blast to play. I ignored it for years because it was an X-Bone exclusive, and I didn’t want that console, and the marketing made it look incredibly cringey. Don’t get me wrong, the game is a cringe-fest, but it plays well, at least. I always recommend it to anyone who would listen.
I wrote a review for it, which you can read here.
With 2014 being one of the worst years in gaming, that means things can only get better in 2015. Right?
2015
Things did not get better in 2015.
Starting off with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5. I love the Pro Skater series, but this one is a complete travesty. It’s a bland, buggy mess. A lot of others have covered it in more detail, and I don’t care much for it. It’s a soul-less cash grab, and I like to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Rise of the Tomb Raider. It was a third person action adventure game with crafting. It was like Uncharted, it had elements of Assassin’s Creed, it was every game at the same time, and nothing all at once. I wrote an excessively long review on it. Click here to read it.
Black Desert Online is a Korean MMO grindfest. It takes place in a massive open world with no fast travel. Fight monsters, farm, cook, fish and do all sorts of activities to make number go up. It was a very complex game, with an overwhelming amount of things to do and a massive world to explore. I had fun with it while I played it, but then a few years back they changed owners and I lost my account in the process.
Another long-running multiplayer game that released this year was Rainbow Six Siege. The premiere four-dimensional tactical shooter. Get shot through an angle you didn’t check, through a wall or through a small bullet hole. It’s fun and stressful in equal measure. Like other games mentioned in these years, it was also overhyped and sold as a different product before release.
On the Wii U we have what is now Tomonobu Itagaki’s final game, sadly, Devil’s Third. This was like a prototype of Wanted Dead, blending melee combat and third person shooter. Neither half worked particularly well, and it was a bit of a mess. The game had some interesting ideas, but the execution was wonky. The constant in-game cutscenes didn’t help. No one would have known about this game if Itagaki’s name wasn’t attached to it.
Time for a quick round of “games I played no one cares about”. First off is Rise of Incarnates. It was a very short-lived free to play Gundam Versus style game. You picked a hero that was linked to some mythological deity and you’d fight in 2v2 battles. It was interesting, but it didn’t secure an audience in the five months it was online. Yes, it only lasted five months. It launched in July, got pulled from Steam in October, then it was completely shut down in December. Apparently the game couldn’t become a hit in three months. The other game was Dirty Bomb. It was another free to play multiplayer game, but this one was a first person shooter. It was fun, but it was removed. You can still technically play it, from what I’ve read online, but I haven’t confirmed it.
Another online multiplayer game that was shut down was Evolve. It launched as a paid game, and it had some critical success, but there weren’t enough players to sustain it. It went free to play, but that wasn’t enough, and it was shut down in 2018. It was an interesting asymmetrical shooter where one team played as the hunters and another player was a giant monster, and they had to fight each other. The idea hasn’t been picked up by another game.
For shooters this year, we had Fallout 4 and Halo 5. Fallout 4 took the already anemic RPG elements from the first-person Fallout games, and stripped them down even further, leaving only the terrible shooting. It was a success, somehow, proving people will really lap up anything if it has a recognizable IP attached to it. Halo 5 was another game. I didn’t play it, because it looked extremely boring, and if Halo 4 was anything to go by, it was.
We also got the first Helldivers, a fun isometric shooter best known today as “that one game that came before Helldivers 2”. It’s a great game once you understand a few of its quirks.
Heroes of the Storm released this year, to a confused chorus of “what?”. Blizzard was throwing its hat into the MOBA ring long after the fad had passed. They missed out on acquiring DotA2, so now they went and made their own dota. It had some interesting ideas, and it was decently entertaining, but it didn’t make the usual trillions of dollars Blizzard is used to seeing, so it was put to rest.
There’s Rocket League, which I haven’t played, and it segues into the “games I haven’t played” corner. Witcher 3 is the most popular game ever, and I haven’t played it, because I wanted to play the fist two before it, and I played part of the first one and stopped for some reason. Splatoon also released, but I never had a Wii U nor any intention of playing this. Undertale also released this year, much to my not-playing it. If Matt Pat gave me a copy of this game, much like he did to the Pope, I wouldn’t play it either. Bloodborne, I haven’t played it. It’s stuck in PlayStation jail, and I don’t own one, nor do I plan on owning one at any point. If it ever comes to PC (loud, mocking laughter), I’ll play it.
Hatred released this year, and it vanished. It caused a ton of controversy before release, being banned of Steam at one point, and causing everyone to clutch their pearls. It was an isometric shooter where you play a guy in a trench coat who shoots guns. He basically goes postal. That sounds very familiar. The game was mediocre, and it was forgotten a week after launch, showing that sometimes, the best thing you can do is ignore something if you don’t want it to get publicity.
This year also saw the release of Mordheim: City of the Damned, which was one of my first reviews.
What sort of nonsense did I pick as my favorite from this underwhelming year?
My pick for 2015: Yakuza 0
A dramatic soap opera JRPG disguised as a manly brawler. This and Like A Dragon have been the only Yakuza games I’ve played, and they’ve both been fantastic. There’s a lot of stuff to do, to the point where it’s a bit overwhelming. The combat is fun, the soundtrack is bopping and it has a financial mini-game which really speaks to me for some reason. It gets bonus points for featuring Ai Uehara as a character (don’t google her in public).
No runners up because, come on. Do you see what I’m working with here?
Maybe 2016 will be better. Or it won’t. It won’t.
2016
Battleborn came out and it was smashed to the ground. No one cared about it. I saw preview footage of it and it looked atrocious. There’s a fan effort to make a private server for the game and that seems like a huge waste of time. This game looks like crap. If you want a shooter MOBA, go play Deadlock.
Battleborn was destroyed because it released alongside Overwatch, Blizzard’s shiny new franchise. This was like Team Fortress 2, but with pretty girls and less content. The game was alright at first, then patch culture and competitive gaming shaped it into a sterile mess of shields and stalemates. It helped popularize the concept of hero shooters. God have mercy on us all.
Call of Duty Infinite released, and I don’t care for the game. All I remember is that the reveal trailer for this game was disliked into oblivion on YouTube. Millions of people still bought this game and ate it up like good little consumer piggies.
Battlefield 1 also released this year. It was infamous for being a mess at launch, which was the style at the time. Crowbcat’s glitch compilation has over 7 million views. People learned their lesson and stopped buying crappy games. Juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust kidding. It sold like crazy. Then when Battlefield 2042 came out years later, it was a broken mess, too, but people went back to Battlefield 1 because they saw it as the more polished product. To me, this is irrefutable proof that games are declining in quality, and people never learn their lessons.
Mighty Number 9 released this year, and it was crappy, but no one bought it, so there’s an upside to that, at least.
Persona 5 released, spawning a huge wave of Persona fans who have never played the games. I am not a fan of the series, and I haven’t played the games.
In indie games this year, we got Stardew Valley. A worthy successor to Harvest Moon with its own flavor. It’s nice, cozy and it has a lot to do and some interesting characters to socialize with. I liked it a lot.
There’s also Mother Russia Bleeds, a horror beat-em-up that takes cues from Hotline Miami. Punch your way through Russia’s criminal underground and overcome an addiction to drugs. It’s pretty okay.
There’s Rabi-Ribi, a game that’s not about being a Jewish Rabbi. You play as a bunny girl, which is the exact opposite of a Rabbi, and you explore an interconnected metroidvania world, fighting bullet hell bosses. It’s a lot of fun.
There was also Let it Die, another Suda 51 mind trip. This time, it’s a free to play Souls-like with pay to win elements and an eternal grind. Wait, that sounds terrible. It was pretty frustrating, but speaking of sounding terrible, its soundtrack does not. It’s an eclectic mix of weird styles and unique artists. It even has Wakusei Abnormal on it. The soundtrack alone is worth checking out.
Devil Daggers was another indie game that released this year. It’s an experimental first person shooter that looks like a nightmare. Play its sequel HYPER DEMON if you want to transcend and experience Hell.
Furi was another indie game. It’s a boss rush where you go up against different colorful enemies. The bosses are very hit-or-miss in terms of quality, with some being fun, some being complete pushovers and others being The Burst.
Enter The Gungeon is yet another indie game. This top-down shooter has you going around the titular dungeon to defeat a dragon, go back in time and kill your own past. It’s a blast, full of a ton of secrets and some great arcadey action.
This year saw the release of the premiere stress simulator Darkest Dungeon. A game where you make a party and descend into horrid dungeons. I played it for a few hours, but it’s too much. Getting your entire party wiped by a random crit that starts a chain reaction where your tank kills your healer makes Stranger of Sword City look fair by comparison.
Speaking of dungeon crawlers, we got Labyrinth of Refrain. This weeb dungeon RPG from the makers of Disgaea has you exploring the titular Labyrinth of Refrain. It’s one of those niche weeb games on the Vita. I have been playing it on and off for a few months for a review, and I had a lot of fun with it at first, but it just keeps going and going and going. It’s nowhere near as long as I’m making it out to be, Stranger of Sword City is longer, but it really starts to drag after a point. The Three Towers of Umbra are no fun.
There’s also Titanfall 2, the sequel to Titanfall (you can tell by the two in the name). It’s a fast-paced good time.
Another shooter we got this year was DOOM 2016. It’s not the two-thousandth and sixteenth entry in the series, it’s just a reboot. It tries to keep the same energy of the original games, but with a lot more in-game cutscenes, a much lower enemy density and an emphasis on glory kills. It’s competent.
Combining shooters and indies we got Superhot, the most innovative shooter. It’s a first person shooter where time only moves when you move. At least that’s what it says on the box. In reality, time never really stops, it just moves very very slowly. You can tell because if there’s a bullet coming at you, you can stand still all you want, it’s still going to inch its way towards your soft little skull. It’s a ton of fun, taking an almost turn-based approach to gunfights. The game then shows you your run in real-time, making you look like an action star.
Another indie shooter we got this year was Toxikk. This was a throwback to arena shooters, heavily inspired by Unreal Tournament. It looked great, felt great and played great, with good netcode. Sadly, it never caught on, and only had a few dozen players. Arena shooters are a lot like Classical music. Everyone wants to say they like it, but no one actually wants to play them/listen to it. I bought it on release to tell the developers that yes, we want arena shooters, but it wasn’t enough.
Girl’s Frontline released, too. It’s a mobile gacha where you collect anthropomorphized gun waifus. It’s surprisingly difficult. It was released on Steam recently, even though the sequel (in name only) is already out.
Street Fighter V came out. Like most games of the era, its launch was a complete and unmitigated disaster. Its netcode was never up to par, and it was an overall disappointment, but it was Street Fighter, so everyone in the FGC had to put up with it. I got it much later after release for $5, and thought it was worth it at that price point. Lucia was great, even if she was just Ken but worse.
Can’t talk about gaming in 2016 without mentioning Pokemon Go. This mobile game swept the world and had droves of people going outside for the first time. It was a fad that faded quickly, but it was massive as it was happening. It was crazy to see. The game was even referenced by name in Hilary Clinton’s best campaign speech.
Which slop did I tolerate the most out of all this-
GRAVEWALKER! YOU HEAR ME YOU BASTARD? I’ll cut off your nutsack and nail it to my door!
-Sheesh I thought we left this bit back in 2014.
My pick for 2016: Enter The Gungeon
A neat little roguelite shooter with a ton of secrets to explore. I don’t have much of an emotional attachment to it, like with a lot of games of this era, which is why I mentioned it previously in the article, unlike the others where I hold it off until the end. I still recommend it.
Conclusion
That’s the list up to 2016. A dark, dark time indeed. I hope it gets better, but I know it won’t.
Join us next time for more doomer-posting about videogames. Up next we’ve got indie darlings like Hollow Knight and Cuphead. Bet you can’t wait to read what kooky opinions I got on those two. I see… wow… 2018 is looking grim. 2019 at least has Sekiro, which I like… OR DO I? Find out in the next installment of “Roger rants for way too long about games”.