Giant Bomb did their usual 10 hours or so of podcasts for game of the year stuff. It’s a log to listen to, but it’s interesting stuff.
Is Giant Bomb a big thing in the gaming community? I only recently discovered their YouTube videos when I was looking for Stardew Valley reviews. I’ve watched a bunch of their first looks and they are all incredibly funny and intelligent.
Well, not all but yeah, they seem like good people and I’ve been listening to their stuff for years. I’m not too sad about Dan leaving the podcast, he generally rubbed me the wrong way and I never really clicked with him. I wish GB would cover more indie and strategy stuff though, and I really wish they would talk a bit more about games they are playing on their podcast instead of directing people to watch a 45 minutes “Quick Look” - I don’t know how many times I wanted to hear with some interest their take on a game only to have a 30 second, “it’s pretty good, but we put up a quick look for it on the site so check that out” and then they move on.
Finished 20 games in 2016, down on 21 from last year. There was a few fluffy quick fire freebies in there mind you.
Best of the bunch that were released last year:
Firewatch
Banner Saga 2
Oxenfree
Virginia
Of the bigger guns that have come out this year I have mostly avoided them, though I got Dishonored 2 for Christmas and have a couple of hours with it. I am finding it a bit overwhelming so far, maybe I have forgotten how to play this kind of game (despite loving the previous Dishonored). Same with Hitman. I can see both games are really good but I think I tend to enjoy things with a narrower focus (see above list I guess). I have about 6 hours with Stellaris and 4 with Hearts of Iron. I hope to return to Stellaris as that early game is just a joy. Hearts of Iron, yeah I should just stop buying that and Europa Universalis FFS. I suspect that I have no need to play Doom or Dark Souls 3 or Deus Ex (despite loving the previous Deus Ex). Or just games beginning with D. It seems my tastes are changing with age, and I should use this brief review of my year to inform my 2017 purchases and save a bit of money :) Game devs: More games like Firewatch pls! The two games of 2016 that I definitely want to play at some point that I haven’t bought yet are XCom and Inside.
Of the many MANY many top 10 lists I’ve seen posted in feeds and on youtube, both best games and worst games released this year. Battleborn isn’t mentioned anywhere. It is like it never came out.
Eurogamer did a top 50 readers choice.
So apparently I missed it when it was originally posted, but:
While I think the Skylanders slowdown and Disney Infinity death are because of too many releases in a short period of time (particularly with DI, where they’d release multiple waves of like eight figures at once, making the game wallet-unfriendly even at MSRP), I do think part of the lack of amiibo news is because stores finally got enough of the speculator-friendly amiibos in stock to stop all the “can’t find this amiibo in stores and people are selling it online for $100!” stories. I know I just walked into a big-box store yesterday and bought the Toon Link and Toon Zelda amiibo bundle as a late Christmas present for my sister, and a year ago, I couldn’t imagine any possibility of finding something like that anywhere except on eBay as a $150 listing.
With all that said, here’s a major one tied to the above topic:
The Beanie Baby Award: The NES Classic Edition.
Yeah. The Neogaf thread just for the Giant Bomb’s 2016 GOTY discussions is at over 5k posts and counting…
But it’s a very different kind of “big” compared to the major review sites, since their main business model isn’t ads but subscriptions. So to a first approximation they maximize for a devoted fanbase rather than for short term page views.
I’m not sure what you mean by this after praising it in the sentence before. Do you mean their failing is not having more single-player stuff ready in the pipeline as DLC?
I still don’t know what sort of “gamer cred” is needed to get an account at the GAF but I’ve signed up twice without luck.
Are you using a non-free email address, such as you get from work of your ISP? They don’t allow registrations with gmail/hotmail/etc.
Thanks! Easy to miss a thread during the holidays, when I’m not in front of a computer 12+ hours a day.
Game I Most Regret Buying At Release, aka the SimCity (2013) Award: Civilization VI
I didn’t entirely hate Civ V. In fact, by the end, it had graduated to worth playing, in a bland way. But I spent the first 30 hours kind of hating it, and Beyond Earth was certainly a problem, so you’d think I would have waited on Civ VI. Nope! Jumped right in, and disappointed again. I hear some people say that the AI is acceptable at lower difficulty levels, and I don’t even get that: I’ve been a Prince-or-lower player for a solid decade now, and it’s definitely a problem.
But it’s also a lot of the changes beyond that. I got decently back in to Civ IV for the first time in years when it was the Classic Game Club entry over the summer, and… it just freaking kills me to see how wrong things have gone. I can’t really call it a crime against gaming because it seems to work for so many people (Civ V and VI both on that highest revenue list!), but it’s a petty crime against what was one of my all-time favorites at one point, and I’m out for real on the next one. I don’t play a ton of current-year releases (maybe 15 this year), and I tend to avoid obviously bad stuff until it’s super-cheap later on, so I have no problem at all declaring Civ VI the Worst Game of 2016 (that I played).
(Until there’s a GOTY edition and a thread here with people swearing that everything is fixed, then I’m back in for more pain!)
Baseball’s a Kind of Boring Sport, Sure, but it Makes for the Best Spreadsheets: Out of the Park Baseball 17
I buy one of these every second or third entry when the craving hits, and it’s a no-fail hundred-plus hour experience over the course of the baseball season, even when I don’t have the time to do so. And it hits my CPU harder than anything else I play: literally the most pressing argument for upgrading my gaming PC is so that I can run a baseball statistic simulator more quickly. The world we live in. Hard to spend too much time on this since most people already know if they’re in the particular niche, but if you even think you might be interested in this, I hope you got it in that ridiculously good bundle deal that it was in recently.
Game I Liked More Than Overwatch, but Was Clearly Doomed From The Start: Battleborn, for all the reasons (both positive and negative) that others have already mentioned. I’m interested in a buy-the-box, well-designed game of this type, but f2p has clearly passed it by for the market overall, and I have no idea how Gearbox didn’t realize this wasn’t going to work. I’m almost more interested in the business strategy side of it, as the biggest mistakes are often the most fascinating.
Absolute Best Game I Played This Year: Always-A-Year-Late Edition: Renowned Explorers: International Society
I read Tom’s effusive praise of this last year when it came out, wishlisted it, picked it up in a sale at some point with the expansion, and promptly backlogged it. I also saw the damn thing at at least two PAX Easts, and talked with the devs. You’d think I’d have gotten to it in a more timely manner, but no. I vaguely remember not loving the graphics in screenshots, maybe that was it.
Well, in action, they’re beautiful and expressive, both in information and character. A lot of minor flavor differences that don’t matter that much from a gameplay perspective matter a ton in terms of the actual flavor of the game. And then that underlying gameplay is so perfect, from the balance of the classes to the several different ways to win to the insidiously addictive high score chase. The length of a single playthrough is exactly on point, long enough to feel like it’s building to something consequential, to hurt a little when you lose a game on the last mission, but not to hurt so much that I didn’t want to start another. I put something like 80 hours into this and still go back occasionally, which is more of a rarity than ever at this stage of my gaming life. I got almost all of the achievements, which is not something that I do.
RE:IS scratches so many different itches: tactical RPGs, strategy board games, FTL, adventure-story games, probably more I’m not thinking of. If any of that sounds remotely appealing to you, go read Tom’s review, pick this up, and don’t let it sit for more than, you know, a year or so.
TB’s top 10 is up. 90 freaking minutes long.