Congratulations! If you are reading this, then you have (just about) survived 2016, which was a monumentally shitty year in almost every respect except for videogames. I remarked at the end of last year that I thought 2015 contained some games of exceptional quality, and yet 2016 makes it look like it wasn’t even trying; I’ve played so many good games this year that it’s actually difficult to think of any actual bad ones, and while that’s partially a result of the industry saturating the market with new titles (to the point where I suspect we may be headed for a mini-crash sometime in the near future as there’s only so much money to go around and the sheer volume of commercial failures could become unsustainable) it’s also a pleasing indicator that many previously-moribund development houses have rediscovered the internal spark that made their games fun in the first place. And there’s no better way to examine this phenomenon than through the usual medium of the Scientific Gamer Completely Made-Up Awards Ceremony 2016!

The Hentzau Self-Injury Award: Devil Daggers

It’s been a while since there was a decent contender in this category; the most recent I can remember was SpaceChem, which caused me to think so hard I gave myself a migraine. Devil Daggers at least causes a more traditionally known injury — where tennis players get Tennis Elbow, FPS players get FPS Left Index Finger RSI — but it does it over a hugely accelerated timeframe, since your panicked flight from a horde of demonic skulls and other beasties chasing you around the arena is so tense and unnerving that your hand will inevitably be clutching the mouse in a rictus claw grip the whole time you’re playing it. A typical game of Devil Daggers lasts maybe 2-3 minutes, but it’s an incredibly intense 2-3 minutes and you’ll find yourself playing game after game as you chase after your friends’ times on the high score table. In a way, Devil Daggers is the perfect indie game. It only has the one idea, but it’s a really good one and it doesn’t get sidetracked with any extraneous bullshit; 100% of the development effort has gone on exploring its one good idea, resulting in a more polished and focused experience than every single one of the AAA titles I’ve played this year.

Best Game That Caused Me To Do A 180 On The Franchise: Dishonored 2

Runner up: The Banner Saga 2

The Banner Saga 2 is possibly the best RPG I played this year and a huge improvement over the original in almost every single area, and yet it still finds itself outdone by a game which only really improved in one — level design — but which poured so much creativity and intelligence into it that I went through much of Dishonored 2 with my mouth gaping slightly open at what Arkane had managed to accomplish.  Each of its levels is a densely-packed warren of secrets, and unlike the first game an awful lot of care and attention has gone into contextualising them as actual conceivable places in a world rather than levels in a game. Thanks to this, and to its choice of two playable characters, Dishonored 2 passes the replayability test unusually well; I’ve been through some of its levels three or four times and I was still finding new things on each subsequent run, and one of them absolutely blew me away with how reactive it was to certain things that only a tiny fraction of players will ever do. With Titanfall 2, Dishonored 2 and DOOM, 2016 was unusually well-served in terms of excellent first-person games; all of them were different, all of them excelled in their respective niches, and all of them are well worth your time. If you had to pick just one, though, I would highly recommend making it Dishonored 2.

The Section 8: Prejudice Multiplayer Award: Titanfall 2

Another near-perfect sequel, Titanfall 2 took everything the original game did, cut in places, streamlined in others and added a single-player campaign that really had no right to be as good as it did. I don’t like waxing lyrical about it too much as I think it was merely Very Good rather than having the all-time classic quality that certain parts of the internet seem to think it does, but that’s still far better than I was expecting; the contrast between Titanfall 2’s campaign and the creatively-monotonous campaign in Infinite Warfare was proof that the talented parts of Infinity Ward really did all jump ship to Respawn, and that they’ve still got what it takes to make a really good shooter.

It’s the multiplayer I’m here to talk about, though, and Titanfall 2 is the most fun I have had in a multiplayer game in years. Maybe even the last half decade. Everything about it is so well thought-out, so finely-tuned, that you can’t help but have fun whether you’re sliding round a corner firing your SMG one-handed into the back of an enemy or goosing ejecting Pilots with your Titan’s laser weapon. It’s even fun when you’re losing, for crying out loud; this is multiplayer so a certain amount of toxicity is expected, but I’ve found myself resenting surprisingly few losses in Titanfall. Partly this is because individual matches are not long enough for you to get overly invested in winning or losing; mostly, though, it’s because it’s extremely difficult to have a truly negative experience when you’re thundering along in a Titan wasting enemy players and AI mooks alike. That’s why I’ve sunk thirty hours into the multiplayer so far, and it’s where something like Overwatch really fell down: I’m practically guaranteed to have fun when I play a round of Titanfall 2, and there’s not very many multiplayer games I can say that about these days.

Most Incomplete Game: Stellaris

Runners up: Civilization VI, No Man’s Sky

It’s a little sad that I can make up an award for this, but that’s the unfortunate state of videogaming these days: it’s viewed as entirely acceptable to skip the polishing phase these days and push out a product that’s only 80-90% complete, and while the missing 10% might not sound like all that much it’s usually the effort that would have been spent on the most important player-facing bits of the game like the UI. No Man’s Sky was obviously released way too early, but it has far deeper problems than a lack of polish or balancing and even if Hello Games had had theoretically infinite time and resources to finish it I believe No Man’s Sky would still be a bad game thanks to its almost intentional ignorance of the collected history of PCG in games up until this point. Civilization VI similarly was missing a good 3-6 months of additional development with pivotal aspects of the game such as the UI and the AI being barely functional on release, but it was still possible to have fun with Civ VI in spite of this; it at least delivered the core of a working game.

Stellaris, though, is a game that was over-ambitious, over-hyped, released about six months earlier than I thought it would given typical development cycles, and which failed to include something rather more fundamental to a 4X: a mid- and endgame that was actually worth a damn. Once you had explored the galaxy there was almost nothing to do besides make war with your neighbours, and since the warfighting system was absolutely atrocious that was an absolutely huge problem for Stellaris. In the event it appears that my six month estimate may have been generous, as they’ve had seven months of additional development  and I’ve not heard any encouraging  evidence that Stellaris is worth playing yet. I plan to revisit it sometime in the new year to see if Paradox have succeeded in bolting a viable endgame onto it, but I’m not holding my breath.

Best Worst Game: No Man’s Sky

Runners up: Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare

Ah, now this where No Man’s Sky excels. It’s not like there isn’t a huge amount of talent that’s gone into it, but quite aside from its significant issues on release I believe that No Man’s Sky is the most misguided game I’ve played this year. The developers simply didn’t grasp the strengths and weaknesses of what they were trying to make, and consequently fell into almost every single one of the blindingly obvious traps awaiting PCG-driven games. It’s built around a PCG algorithm that produces planets that are seemingly identical, with their similarities disguised only by their surface textures; there is no point exploring in this game that’s supposedly about exploration, because once you’ve landed on one planet you’ve effectively landed on them all. It has crafting, because open world games are supposed to have crafting, but it’s a painfully shallow affair; ditto for the combat. But this would all make it merely bad; the reason No Man’s Sky attains “Worst Game” status this year is because it does have a hint of promise lurking within it if you play it as an interstellar version of Pokemon Snap, jetting about the universe to get pretty screenshots of places and lifeforms. Unfortunately Hello Games were so hell-bent on aping other open world games that they spent almost no time exploring the potential of exploring. I don’t think it warrants the shocking amount of vitriol that’s been directed towards the developers in the months since, but the disproportionate backlash from Angry Internet Men doesn’t change the fact that No Man’s Sky is a game that didn’t understand how to be a game, and is consequently the most abject failure of 2016 by some considerable way.

Best Film Of The Year: None

I’ve maintained my cinema-going habits this year, but the results were substantially more disappointing than 2015. There was no Mad Max or The Martian released in 2016 just a series of increasingly identikit blockbusters that, while I couldn’t call them bad (except for the new Independence Day), weren’t exactly good either and which were almost instantly forgotten the moment I walked out of the cinema. Rogue One was good, but I almost feel it wins by default rather than because it is a particularly good film in and of itself, and I’m not sure it’ll stand up to repeat viewing in the way that Mad Max and The Martian did — and which The Force Awakens did not. So no dice this year, Hollywood. You’ll have to step up your game in 2017.

(And no, I haven’t gotten around to seeing The Arrival yet, which is a shame because it sounds like the one film that could legitimately go here.)

Best Soundtrack: Nuclear Throne

Runner up: Brigador

Considering the unusually high quality of many of the games that were released this year it’s curious that nearly all of them were paired with rather unmemorable soundtracks. Some of them had great individual tracks, as with XCOM 2’s Squad Loadout theme, but when considered as a complete body of work there were only two games that serenaded me with great music the whole way through. One was Brigador, whose retro synth stylings were a perfect accompaniment to its neon-drenched arcade shoot ‘em up gameplay. However I’d not heard anything quite like the strummy guitar/harmonica soundtrack to Nuclear Throne before; it lays its cards out on the table the moment you hear that incredible main menu music and continues exploring the idea from there. I’ve been fond of acoustic guitar tracks in  videogames ever since the Tristram theme from Diablo, and Nuclear Throne is basically an entire game of that, so it takes the prize this year.

Best Game Of The Year: Total War: Warhammer

Runners up: Dishonored 2, Titanfall 2, DOOM, The Banner Saga 2

(In any other year XCOM 2 would have been on that list, and the only reason Hitman isn’t on it is because I haven’t yet gotten around to playing episodes 3 through 6 and so can’t comment on it as a complete game.

I must admit I’m a little bit shocked to be writing this. I love bashing the Creative Assembly on here; up until this point they’ve always looked to me like a talented developer that nevertheless keeps falling down in terms of their general approach to development, resulting in games of unpredictable quality. For every Shogun 2 there is a Rome 2; for every Empire a Napoleon; and even their successes bear the unfortunate hallmarks of a development process that seems to value wide, sweeping, and unrealistic scopes over the tight focus required to make a really good game. It’s no coincidence that their best Total War games have been the ones whose scope has been limited by either the time period or by geography, and it’s also not a coincidence that their worst ones have been brought down by too much bloat diluting their development efforts.

Total War: Warhammer changes all of that. Total War: Warhammer appears to be the end result of the Creative Assembly finally putting somebody in charge who knew how to correctly scope out a development plan that was achievable with the resources on hand, and then successfully executing on that plan. That, or they’ve been reading this blog, since Warhammer does what I’ve been saying they should do for years: trade breadth for depth. What’s the point in having thirteen different playable factions if three of them are just the the same barbarian horsemen in differently-coloured trousers, after all? Warhammer cut the number of playable factions down to just four (that were available on launch), but it compensated the player for this apparent reduction in scope by making each faction genuinely different to play. Obviously it was helped in this regard by Warhammer being the first non-historical Total War game and the Creative Assembly’s collective imagination suddenly being let off the leash; it must be so refreshing to work on something like this after a decade of doing the line infantry of Napoleon or the legionaries of Rome, and that enthusiasm really shows through in the design, the art and the animation. So the cavalry in Warhammer aren’t the umpteenth identical set of medieval knights or barbarian horsemen; no, the cavalry in Warhammer are giant green orcs riding boars, or undead knights riding skeleton steeds, or… well, okay, there are some medieval knights in here, but they’re fantasy medieval knights and the two factions that field them are still very different. This cavalry rubs shoulders with hordes of trolls, chaos spawn, giants, dragons and other monstrous creatures, and even the basic foot troops are just as likely to be a shamble of zombies or a disciplined, unbreakable line of dwarves as they are a group of Empire swordsmen.

Add to this the rich lore of the Warhammer world and a map that has landmarks from that world prominently displayed on its surface — resulting in somewhere like Karaz-a-Karak properly feeling like the dwarf capital city when you can see the giant dwarf statues that are carved into the face of the mountain above it — and you’ve got a game bursting at the seams with character and factions that are so different the replayability of Warhammer is dramatically enhanced. I’ve spent a significant chunk of time as each of the four original factions now, totalling over seventy hours. I actually went back to play Total Warhammer twice this year instead of playing other, newer games, simply because it was that much fun to try new races and new strategies. Also because the Creative Assembly are supporting it with a meaty program of DLC that’s adding in whole new playable races to the game — Beastmen and Wood Elves have been added so far, with the Bretonnians scheduled to be released in February — as well as new sub-factions with more interesting goals and starting locations than their parent races. That’s one of the most interesting things about this Total War: instead of trying to do all of the races of the Warhammer world at once and spreading themselves too thing, they’ve instead focused on just doing the original four properly while leaving themselves enough hooks to add in other races later via DLC or even full-on expandalones¹. The extra time they’ve spent on the core factions has ensured they’re good enough to provide a suitably full-fat experience, which in turn means I don’t feel short-changed that additional factions are going to be added via DLC: if each of them has the same effort put into their individuality as the Dwarves or the Orcs then I know that DLC will be well worth the money, and it lets the Creative Assembly slowly build their game up in a way that does it justice.

With so many other excellent games having been released this year I genuinely was very surprised to find a Total War game topping the list when putting together this post, as I hadn’t quite been immediately blown away by it in the same way that I was with DOOM or Dishonored 2. Total Warhammer is much more of a thoughtful, slow burning game whose true potential has only become clear after many months of playing it. It’s earned its place, and not just because it’s the result of the CA finally pulling their act together: in terms of playtime, replayability, character, imagination and sheer fun, Total War: Warhammer is my Game Of The Year.

The post End Of Year Retrospective 2016 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Time for the Scientific Gamer Totally Made Up Awards Ceremony 2013! If this were a real awards ceremony it’d be an entirely self-serving affair where a captive games journalism machine showers pointless awards on whichever publisher had the largest marketing budget to pay for them this year, but happily I’m entirely free of corporate sponsorship (seriously, I’m disappointed in you guys) and so I can do whatever the hell I like. As a result these awards may be a little unusual and totally biased in favour of my opinion, and if you don’t like them you can go start your own blog. Or argue in the comments. Either’s good.

Best Expansion Pack: Brave New World.

That I like the concept of the expansion pack is a matter of public record, and 2013 saw a brief resurgence of the format with the release of Heart of the Swarm, Brave New World and Enemy Within. That being said this is possibly an odd choice considering that I didn’t actually like Brave New World all that much, but I can’t deny that it was very well-designed and added much that was worthwhile to Civilization V. Anyway, the other two fell some way short of what I hoped they would accomplish, with Enemy Within being just kind of good and Heart of the Swarm actually being… not bad, as such, but so boring that it made the previously-dull background extra Matt Horner seem like an interesting and well-written character. With that in mind Brave New World wins by default, but I’m not going to fault the other two for trying.

Best Soundtrack: Sang-Froid.

I let Sunday Soundtracks slide since getting the job, but this doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention to the audio side of things and this year had a lot of games with outstanding soundtracks. Payday 2 backed up the excellent acoustics of its gun battles with a thumping techno soundtrack, while Desktop Dungeons supplied a surprisingly meaty aural accompaniment to its fiendish puzzling. For my money, though, nothing quite approached the thematic period music that came with Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves. This was somewhat unexpected considering the dirt-cheap production values of the rest of the game, but I can’t deny that it’s absolutely bloody brilliant: unusual, catchy, and appropriately boisterous for slaying creatures of the night. I’d like more games to do slightly off-kilter soundtracks like this one, please.

Best Implementation Of Aircraft In An RTS: AirLand Battle.

Aeroplanes are something that the RTS genre has traditionally had a bit of trouble with: how do you balance a unit that can go anywhere and attack anything? Most RTSes dodge the problem by ignoring air units completely, and when they’re included their implementation has varied from sensible (Red Alert) to baffling (Dawn of War: Soulstorm), but I haven’t seen a game that’s nailed air warfare anywhere near as well as the jet fighters in AirLand Battle.  They move well, look good and sound stunning, especially if you zoom down to ground level where an incoming airstrike is like being hit by the fist of God.  Given that this is historically something that’s been very difficult to get right – and continues to be; something that caused me actual physical pain earlier this year was the flight animation of the aircraft in this Shipbreakers trailer – I thought it was worth mentioning, especially since AirLand Battle itself is rather excellent despite being the niche-iest of niche games.

Best Kickstarter Game That I Backed That Was Actually Released: Shadowrun Returns.

Otherwise known as the only Kickstarter game I backed in 2012 that was actually released this year. (Broken Sword 5 doesn’t count because they’ve split it into two parts.) Fair play to Harebrained Studios: they made their pitch, brought in far more money than they thought they would, issued a revised release date, and then proceeded to miss this release date by only a couple of months. They at least know how to do the process of game development right, and the resulting game – while not without some significant flaws – was for the most part a very respectable RPG that scratched a certain cyberpunk itch, and should be the poster child for Kickstarter success stories.  Unfortunately it’s the exception to the rule, with several of the other projects appearing to languish in development hell after achieving their short-term goal of a Steam Early Access release. Maybe I’ll have a bit more to include in this category next year, but I’m not holding my breath.

Best Swamp Level: Metro Last Light.

Swamp levels are one of my pet hates in videogames. I’ve never understood them: these are virtual worlds and developers can build practically any sort of level they can imagine, and yet they persist in making me endure dreary, dank, and depressing swamp levels, which invariably bear all the hallmarks of being filler content that the player has to slog through before they can get to the good stuff. They are visually uninteresting and mechanically dull — or at least they were, until Last Light surprised me by actually doing some fairly imaginative things with the setting, obscuring the player’s view and surrounding them with murky, treacherous water and the unsettling sound of something out there stalking them. It’s all the more damning for the rest, I suppose, since Last Light proved it is possible to have a good swamp level. It’s just that the vast majority of games just can’t be bothered, and I still stand by my opinion that if your game has a swamp level in it then you automatically lose any respect I might have had for it because it proves you just ran out of ideas.

Best Attempt By Blizzard To Take All Of My Money, Again: Hearthstone.

Ah, but we should talk more about this one in the new year when it will (hopefully) be in open beta and everyone can try it. Suffice to say that I’ve already spent money on it despite being not all that sure that I actually like it – and I’m usually quite resistant to the siren call of the microtransaction. As a method for extracting cash from people with a big pair of pliers Blizzard have hit upon another surefire winner here. As a game, though, I’m not quite so sure.

Most Broken Game: Rome 2.

I really wish things hadn’t turned out like this, but as it stands this is the award with the fiercest competition. Three high-profile games came out this year that, on release, turned out to be so completely and utterly broken and buggy that they were all but unplayable.

SimCity suffered server overload after the baffling decision to make it online-only; it was only several months later that things had calmed down enough for basic game features like Cheetah speed to be turned back on. Meanwhile players had to contend with awful agent pathfinding that always took the shortest possible route to a destination, resulting in absurdities like 21 buses jammed in gridlock as they all tried to pick up a single sim from the same bus stop. However, even if SimCity had been released in perfect working condition I’m not convinced that it would have been any good as a game; the bugs and server issues merely compounded the core problem of it being terrible. This is why SimCity, broken as it is, misses out on this particular award.

Over a month post-release and Battlefield 4 still isn’t working properly. The stress of releasing for five different platforms simultaneously seems to be getting to DICE, as they recently proclaimed that they’d stopped all other work to focus on Battlefield’s constant connection errors and crashes. If this is what they’ve actually done then it’ll probably make things worse, as there’s a point in game development where you hit Too Many Cooks and you can’t fix software issues like this by throwing more people at them. I think that at this point, however, it really doesn’t matter; the damage has been done and – anecdotally – very few people I know are even playing it any more. It’s just not worth the hassle. Perhaps next time EA and DICE have the gall to charge a yearly subscription for a Premium service they’ll actually make sure that service works out of the box. I’ll believe that when somebody lowers a thermometer into the underworld and tells me that hell has in fact frozen over, though.

Despite the stiff competition, however, no game I played this year was quite as disappointingly broken as Rome 2. There were two particularly infuriating things about it. First, a large proportion of the bugs and design issues to be found in the game were mistakes that had been repeated from previous Total War games, with the imbecilic battlefield AI in particular being rather reminiscent of my experience with Empire. Game development is usually an iterative process, but you can’t iterate when you apparently have the institutional memory span of a goldfish. Second, though – and far more annoying– is that underneath all the AI bugs and UI issues and incomplete features, somewhere underneath all of that is a good game. Rome 2 is hardly bereft of good ideas. There was a lot of stuff in it that I quite liked in principle, such as the tech trees and the new province system. It had potential, far more so than either SimCity or Battlefield 4; those games were bad (or mediocre) games that happened to be broken, whereas Rome 2 could have been an excellent Total War title had it been executed properly. That it was not was almost entirely down to the rushed release date and subsequent crippling bugs and design issues; with another six months of development it probably would have been a solid entry in the series, but as it is it is merely frustratingly awful and if we’re judging this in terms of nixed potential then Rome 2 easily takes the prize.

Most Perfect Game: Spelunky.

I want to emphasise something here: “Perfect” doesn’t necessarily mean “Best”. Whether you like Spelunky or not is going to be very much down to personal preference; however, several months of attempting to complete the Daily Challenge has led me to appreciate just how well-made Spelunky is. It is a game that knows what it wants to be, accepts its limitations, and excels at literally every single thing it attempts within those narrow boundaries. The art is gorgeous, the mechanics are so polished they’re practically mirror-like and even the music grew on me after the hundredth dungeon crawling session. I usually don’t like to sing the praises of indie games that already get plenty of attention from mainstream gaming sites, but sod it: Spelunky is superb and it deserves every accolade that gets thrown its way.

Best Game That Was So Utterly Horrifying I Still Haven’t Finished It: Papers Please.

I can’t even write about that damn game. I’m pleased it exists, and I’m pleased that I played it, but oh my god is it an uncomfortable experience.

Best Worst Game Of 2013: SimCity.

You know, I’m actually kind of glad I played SimCity, since without it there would be nothing I’ve played this year that really merited this award.  Last year there were plenty of games that made me so angry I couldn’t even talk about them in polite company without turning the air blue, from the ineptly-made Carrier Command to the disgustingly not-a-game Swords and Sworcery, but this year… well, maybe old age is mellowing me a bit. So it’s a good thing I played SimCity; it’s utter badness kept the rage smouldering for a good couple of months and even now thinking about it makes my palms itch. Almost every aspect of its design and execution was a car crash from start to finish, from the computing limitations of the agent AI that meant it couldn’t simulate a city larger than a postage stamp to the AI itself being so incredibly stupid that the most efficient city layout was a single incredibly long road. The resulting simulation was utterly unlike a real city, or even a simplified approximation of one, and so SimCity rather failed at both of the core features implied in its title. I’m actually a little amazed that Maxis have the gall to be releasing an expansion pack for it next year, since I still think the core idea of the GlassBox engine is so fundamentally flawed that anything else built on top of it is going to collapse in utter ruin. But then I guess if you’re Maxis and/or EA that’s the last thing you’re going to admit. I suppose it’ll just have to wait for the inevitable hand-wringing in a post-mortem article a couple of years down the line. Right now, though, SimCity is bad, will always be bad and is all the more bad for being a rather undistinguished coda to what had been one of the PC-est of PC gaming series.

The post 2013 End Of Year Retrospective. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I don’t see myself playing many more new games this year and I have all these words lying around, so I may as well do this now. Presented in the manner of gaming websites the world over via a serious of made-up imaginary “awards”, I figure if you’re going to pompously present some meaningless, preposterous and arbitrary awards you may as well make them actually meaningless, preposterous and arbitrary awards, so these may end up being a little bit… unorthodox.

Best Method Of Convincing Me To Buy Your Game: Defender’s Quest.

Defender’s Quest is an outstanding tower defence game, but the main thing I’m going to remember it for over the years hence is the way it sold itself: it offered a flash demo you could play in your browser that you could import your saves from if you chose to pony up the cash for the full game. This is genius because it’s basically resurrecting the shareware model for a new generation with new technology – you try part of the game, and then if you like it you send the developers some money in exchange for them sending you the rest of it. Like, I’m sure it’ll be totally ignored and that Defender’s Quest probably got ten times the sales from their recent Steam release than they ever did from people playing their demo, but I still thought it was a really smart thing to do and I hope more indie developers follow Defender’s lead.

Best Lazarus-Like Resurrection Of A Game I Thought Was Beyond Help: Civilization V: Gods and Kings.

I’ve been dipping into Gods and Kings again recently and it’s crazy just how much the expansion improves the base game, and it’s even more surprising considering it does it via some under-the-bonnet changes that went mostly unremarked-upon in the prerelease marketing blitz. Siege weapons and naval units have been extensively reworked to make them respectively less spammy and actually useful, while a new tier of industrial-era land units fill in the yawning chasm separating Riflemen/Cannon and Infantry/Artillery. The new religion mechanic is underwhelming but it did give Firaxis an excuse to shunt around buildings, wonders and social policies to improve the flow of the game, and there was even a patch a month or two back which made the AI substantially less psychotic; if you catch it in a good light it even resembles a rational actor from time to time. Still probably not my favourite Civilization game, but the halcyon days of 1996 are long gone and Gods and Kings is now an acceptable substitute.

Best Game I Didn’t Review On The Blog For Fear Of Being Laughed At: Cook, Serve, Delicious.

“We’re trying to get five together for Dota, do you want in?”

“In a minute, I’m making soup.”

“You’re… what?”

“I’m making soup. It’s rush hour, I have like five simultaneous orders to do.”

“What are you playing?”

“Oh, it’s great. You’re the owner of a restaurant, and people come in and you have to make what they order by pushing buttons on the keyboard in very specific sequences and under a strict time limit.”

“You’re playing a game about cooking.”

“Yes, but-“

“You’re putting off Dota to play a game about cooking.”

“I just want t-“

“Shut it down and get in the Dota channel right now.”

Best/Worst Multiplayer Experience Of The Year. (Or Is It The Worst/Best?): Dota 2.

We had a couple of new people start playing Dota with us recently. Watching their inept fumbling about the map and their agape reactions to really basic game concepts like not autoattacking the creeps it can be kind of hard to remember a time when I was ever that green. But then Dota is a game with a learning curve that seems to stretch onwards and ever upwards until it gets obscured by cloud cover; I must seem like a god to these people, but it was only twenty or thirty games ago that I finally caved and rebound my 123 keys to item slots. Until that point I’d fairly sure my brain would have imploded under the strain of having to deal with both skills and active item abilities at the same time¹ Because there’s so many degrees of skill in Dota and so many nuances to the gameplay it becomes simultaneously the most satisfying and most maddening of multiplayer games. When you’re winning it’s because you’re flat out better than the other team, and you feel good about yourself. When you’re losing it’s because you’re a noob scrublord – or worse, because your team is full of noob scrublords – and you feel helpless, powerless and generally shit. Dota isn’t something I’d play to relax, but if you actually want to be challenged by a game that mercilessly boots you in the nuts until you either improve or you quit there’s nothing quite like it.

Best Game I Dissed Slightly Unfairly Because I Didn’t Like The Way They’d Done It: Dishonoured.

Dishonoured isn’t a bad game by any means. I’d hesitate before calling it good, but despite being a rather disjointed experience (for me, anyway) many of the individual elements – the art style, the stealth, the general Thiefiness of it – were very well-made. My putting the boot in was more because I saw what they’d done with the narrative and metagame as a massive missed opportunity that didn’t make any sense rather than because the actual game itself was bad.  So I’m sorry, Dishonoured: you really didn’t deserve what I did to you, although quite frankly everyone had bought you by that point anyway so I doubt I changed any minds one way or the other.

Best Unexpectedly Fantastic Game I’d Never Heard Of Till It Was Released: Chivalry.

I think I did Chivalry a bit of a disservice in my review by pronouncing it a rather short-lived fad, as I now have 27 hours played with no sign of it getting old any time soon. Chivalry’s approach is refreshingly old-school with few unlocks and no persistent stats to keep people hooked into the game, instead preferring to let its gameplay speak for itself. The emphasis on every life being an opportunity to die doing something ludicrous while shouting at the top of your lungs rather than yet another attempt to maximise your K/D ratio means that I have never felt stressed or annoyed when playing it. Chivalry is the antithesis of Dota: it is a game that I load up occasionally for some simple straightforward fun, and it delivers every single time.

Best Indie Game I was Looking Forward To That Actually Lived Up To Its Promise: Legend of Grimrock.

A return to the classic dungeon crawling genre, Legend of Grimrock achieved something special by occasionally convincing me I was actually in the dungeon. The viewpoint is perpetually nailed to first-person meaning there’s nothing to break immersion, and you interact with the surrounding environment not by hammering the use button in front of every wall where you think there might be a secret door, but instead by clicking the mouse on the tiny yet out-of-place piece of masonry you think might double as a button. Then you hear a clunk and a grinding noise from somewhere behind you and off to the left, and so you head in that direction to solve the next piece of the puzzle. Grimrock had some very, very clever puzzles indeed  –which is all the more impressive when you consider they’re made up of basically three elements: teleporters, pressure plates and pitfall traps —  and solving them makes you feel clever, which is the hallmark of a good adventure game. A shame about the one-dimensional combat, but the developers were breathing new life into a genre that had been dead for nearly twenty years. You can’t expect them to get everything right the first time around.

Best Endless Space: Endless Space.

Appearing on Steam with little fanfare, Endless Space was more than a little bit surprising. At first it was surprising that the developers had made an alpha that was so polished, so functional. The game had several missing features and many balance issues, but what was there made me very hopeful – very excited – for the final product. Which is why it was surprising, and disappointing, that there ended up being little difference between the alpha and the full release a couple of months later. This meant Endless Space wasted its promising foundation of a sprawling tech tree and extremely well-designed UI by falling right into several of the common pit traps awaiting prospective space-based 4Xes, the deepest of which was that while the various alien races in the game played somewhat differently they didn’t feel different. They had no personality, and wars against the amorphous Ameoba and the ravenous Cravers played out identically as the AI spammed wave after wave of ships it couldn’t possibly produce at me. It’s still a good game, but it’s also a tragic missed opportunity.

Best Games That Were Really Well-Made And If You Want To Know Why You Can Go Back And Read The Review: Fall Of The Samurai, Wargame: European Escalation, Dustforce, Diablo 3

Best Game Of 2012: Oh, don’t be so tiresome.

Best Worst Game Of 2012: Swords and Sworcery.

So many contenders for this one. Was it Hack, Slash, Loot for having the most awful mechanics of any roguelike I’ve played? Was it Spore, for providing the meaty splat that terminated Maxis’s fall from grace? Perhaps it was Shank, for being so completely creatively bankrupt that I had difficulty taking it seriously. Or perhaps Carrier Command, for not actually functioning properly as a game in any way, shape or form. I think that on a personal and fundamental level, though, nothing quite matched the hatred I instinctively felt for Swords and Sworcery deep down in my gut. It’s like somebody made a game (and I use the term very loosely there) specifically designed to piss me off. Every single second of my brief experience with it enraged me to a degree no other game managed this year, and so despite a crowded field Swords and Sworcery easily takes the prize.

————————————————————

The post 2012 End Of Year Retrospective. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.