And so we stagger to the end of yet another year. Even by my high standards 2015 has been an excellent year for games, and the coverage on here has been spottier than I liked – I ended up reviewing a round thirty games, which is a solid effort but also the first time this blog hasn’t wholly reflected what I’ve been playing over the last 365 (and a bit) days. That makes this an excellent point to look back and consider the best and worst that 2015 had to offer — whether I reviewed it on here or not – and you know what that means: it’s time for the Scientific Gamer Totally Made Up Awards Ceremony 2015!

Best Game That Showed The Decomposing Remains Of Maxis How SimCity Should Be Done: Cities: Skylines

It wouldn’t be entirely fair to say I didn’t get on with Cities: Skylines. I played it for ten hours. I enjoyed it. I also never made it further than a mid-size city, as the game’s relentless focus on traffic planning and transportation tripped me up time and time again and I couldn’t bring myself to tear down what I’d built just to move a roundabout ten metres to the left. It’s not a game you play if you are in any way a perfectionist, and in my opinion it’s also got something of a flaw in that it’s just as reliant on its traffic system to carry the game as SimCity was on its much-vaunted Agent system. The difference here, of course, is that Cities’ traffic system is really really good and a much stronger base to build a game on. The actual running-a-city part doesn’t have a huge amount of depth to it but there’s still hours of fun to be had tweaking contraflow systems, bus routes and subway tunnels. SimCity didn’t exactly set a high bar to clear, but Cities: Skylines vaulted clean over it with considerable aplomb.

Most Stylish Game: Invisible Inc.

I have a funny history with Klei games. Shank is the only one I ever reviewed on here, and I hated that game’s guts; I acknowledged that their subsequent efforts (Mark of the Ninja and Don’t Starve) were considerably more imaginative, but something about them just failed to grab me.

This makes Invisible Inc. the first Klei game I’ve played for more than a couple of hours. It’s an intriguing tactical stealth ‘em up that is heavily crippled by its procedurally generated levels – Invisible Inc is supposed to be a cross between XCOM and a roguelike, but a campaign takes four hours plus and losing your progress because the level RNG decided to present you with an all-but-unwinnable scenario is a bitter pill to swallow. However, while its gameplay is decidedly flawed, Invisible Inc’s art style, animation and music are simply to die for. I don’t know what you’d call the art style exactly – a sort of cartoonish art deco version of cyberpunk that’s animated incredibly well is about the best I can do — but it’s a game worth playing just to see it in motion, not to mention experiencing the excellently-pitched soundtrack slowly ratcheting up the tension while guards close in on your oh-so-vulnerable agents. Invisible Inc. may not have gotten everything right, but as far as art and music are concerned it’s pretty much without peer – this year, anyway.

Most Disappointing Game: Pillars of Eternity

Runners up: Satellite Reign, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris

Disappointment was arguably a trap that Pillars was never going to fully avoid. Nevertheless it’s disappointing in and of itself just how deeply it waded into it; Pillars was a game of which I had some unreasonably high expectations, but even taking those into account it still fell some way short of Obsidian’s previous output. The world and mechanics they created for Pillars had a lot of promise, but the writing and the plot were so average they were almost substandard. Nine months later and I couldn’t tell you who the main baddie is or what his motivation was, which is never a good sign of a well-crafted story. I was hoping that now that they had a solid mechanical base to build on Obsidian could do something really interesting in the DLC, but from what I’ve played the White March expansion is just as staid and stodgy as Pillars’ main campaign. The most infuriating thing about it is that all the time you’re playing Pillars you’re repeatedly told about the backstory of Waidwen and the Godhammer, which all sounds way, way cooler than the complete non-entity that is the actual main plot of the game. It’s one of those weird inexplicable things that I guess you have to see from the inside to really understand, since I don’t understand why Obsidian didn’t just make the Godhammer the story instead.

Best First-Person Game Where You Run Around Solving Fiendish Puzzles While Listening To Audio Logs That Tell A Tragic Yet Affirming Backstory: The Talos Principle

Runner up: Infinifactory

I feel a little bad for Infinifactory. It was a great puzzle game from Zachtronics that managed to recapture something of what made 2010 classic SpaceChem so amazing, and I still recommend it without question if you liked SpaceChem even a little bit. It was just rather unfortunate that the very next week I played The Talos Principle, which married up puzzles of equally brain-teasing quality with a fantastic setting and backstory that told the tale of Earth’s final days thousands of years after they’d actually happened. It was a refreshingly different take on the end of the world that hammered on some of the AI buttons that I have, but which did so very effectively. In most puzzle games (including SpaceChem and Infinifactory) the setting is just window dressing, but in the Talos Principle it’s inextricably bound up with what the game is on a fundamental level. It’s not *the* best game I’ve played this year, but it’s certainly one of the most memorable.

Best Soundtrack: Grey Goo

Runners up: Tales From The Borderlands, Invisible Inc.

Oh, it’s been a really good year for soundtracks. I already mentioned Invisible Inc., while Tales From The Borderlands had impeccable taste when picking music to accompany its elaborately choreographed intro sequences (seriously, go and listen to the playlist). The Witcher 3, MGS V, The Talos Principle and Shovel Knight all had extremely good music to accompany them that I still listen to every now and again. It’s odd, then, that the game with the best soundtrack of 2015 is one that I didn’t actually like all that much: Grey Goo was a very average and forgettable strategy title that demonstrated why the classic style of RTS has faded to nothing more than a footnote in the annals of videogame history.

Grey Goo’s soundtrack is a different beast entirely, however. Ignore the first track – it’s the signature theme for the game, and so it’s oddly fitting that it’s just as wishy-washy as the rest of it. Focus instead on track two, which is a far more rockin’ remix and which sets the tone for what is to come. It’s no surprise that C&C maestro Frank Klepacki is behind this, and he goes on to produce several more outstanding tracks – both Beta themes, Crush Under Foot and Wall Defence in particular evoke the best of Red Alert’s industrialised soundtrack fused with the dubstep that is so popular with the young people these days. It is a far, far better set of music than Grey Goo deserved, not to mention an excellent accompaniment to tricky coding problems at work. I highly recommend giving it a listen even if you haven’t played the game.

Most Unnerving Gas Giant: Alien Isolation

This might be a very personal thing, but the most unsettling part of Alien Isolation wasn’t any of the jump scares from the paper tiger of the Alien or the creepy androids that would sneak up on you silently while you were trying to hack a terminal and throttle you to death. No, the scariest part of Alien Isolation was the part with no enemies or monsters on screen at all. It’s the part where you’re doing an EVA to align a communications dish for some reason or another, which means you’re inside a spacesuit. All you can hear is your own breathing echoing in your ears. All you can see in front of you is a gantry leading to the dish – and above it a huge, pitiless gas giant hanging against a backdrop of dead stars. Gas giants give me the willies since it’s hard to think of a place more inimical to life without getting into exotic stellar object territory; they’re hauntingly beautiful yet lethal at the same time, and Alien Isolation renders it with the same trademark attention to detail that made Sevastopol station such a (creepy) joy to explore.

Worst Game Of The Year: Chroma Squad

AKA this year’s Game I Would Most Like To Purge From My Memory. The premise doesn’t sound bad; a JRPG-like take on a Power Rangers-esque TV show, complete with terrible costumes and improbable baddies. I don’t even think the tactical combat side of Chroma Squad is that bad, either – mechanically it is reasonably solid while at the same time being astoundingly average in every way. However, you have to be really, really talented at writing to make the sort of hackneyed dialogue found in your typical episode of Power Rangers not only bearable, but entertaining. That’s a really tricky needle to thread, and I can’t think of all that many games that have successfully managed to do knowingly bad writing..

You can probably guess what I’m going to say next: whoever was behind the script for Chroma Squad is most definitely not a talented writer. The writing in this game isn’t knowingly bad, it’s just plain terrible, and made all the worse for being littered with precisely the sort of banal, repetitive internet in-jokes that are hilarious to twelve year olds but which drive me up the wall. After hour one I was unconvinced but willing to see if it got any better; after hour two I was getting increasingly angry; and hour three just made me want to jam forks into my eyeballs to make it stop. I settled for turning the game off instead. Even thinking of Chroma Squad now provokes a tiny flash of rage, though; it’s so insufferable it made me damn near apoplectic at the time and I was unable to turn out a coherent review because of this. Please heed my warning now, though: no matter what else you might hear about, do not play this game. You will regret it if you do.

Best Film Of The Year: Three way tie between Mad Max, Star Wars and The Martian

I’ve been visiting the cinema a little more frequently this year and have seen many of 2015’s supposed blockbuster hits. Most of them were exactly the sort of bland entertainment that you enjoy at the time but then instantly forget about five minutes after you leave the cinema, but there were three standouts that have stuck with me long after the popcorn salt had faded from my taste buds. Mad Max had some astonishing visuals and an excellent mix of practical and CGI special effects; The Martian was highly implausible in an entertaining way without outright breaking science at any point; and Star Wars had some duff bits but was for the most part exactly what the franchise needed to convince people that Star Wars was safe again after experiencing the prequels. It certainly convinced me.

Best Six Million Dollar Man Simulator: Metal Gear Solid V

MGS V was many, many things. It was one of the best stealth games in years. It was a competent third person shooter. It was a better Thief game than the recent Thief reboot, letting you steal everything that wasn’t nailed down by attaching balloons to them and watching them zoom into the stratosphere. It let you play Guard Pokemon, with all the gotta-catch-em-all compulsiveness that entails. However, despite all of these high points (and quite a few low ones) my enduring memory of MGS V will forever be sprinting across the African savannah towards a cluster of guards and clotheslining them into the dirt with my bionic arm while the Six Million Dollar Man sound effect plays.

(Calling in the chopper for an airstrike with Rebel Yell blaring out over the speakers is a close second.)

Best Game Of The Year: The Witcher 3

Yeah, despite MGS V being a very strong showing in the open world stakes this was ultimately no contest whatsoever. The Witcher 3 felt like a real landmark, both for open world games and for gaming in general. It was the first open world game that really, truly felt like a fully fleshed-out world, and which had a considerable amount of depth to go along with its sprawling breadth.  Its writing was laced with humour, heartbreak and pathos, and it could be delivered via a shrug of the shoulders or the upturned corner of a mouth just as well as through voice acting. It had believable, flawed characters with believable, flawed relationships, and while it took some pride in being a gritty, “mature” world, for once it actually felt like it earned that description as it effectively dealt with adult themes such as fatherhood and family. The Witcher 3 is so good, in fact, that I struggle to stop myself from going back to replay it before the second expansion DLC is released and I can get the most out of a repeat run. That’s the sort of genuine classic that comes along only once every five years – if that. If you play one game from 2015 (which, let me say again, was a very good year in general) make it this one.

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That’s it for the blog this year. Thanks to everyone reading for sticking with me so far, and I hope you have the very best of Christmases.

The Scientific Gamer will return on Monday 4th January.

The post 2015 End Of Year Roundup 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.

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