My sister came up with the perfect analogy for these types of clickers. She said they’re the game versions of:
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Nioh…
I think it spent almost a decade in development and you can certainly tell. I think there’s a general Souls fatigue on this board, so it’s not getting the attention it deserves. Tim made a video about it recently and called it “Dark Souls: manual transmission edition” or something like that. Yea, that’s basically it. Dark Souls is a Subaru WRX with a CVT and Nioh is a 2006 Mitsubishi Lancer EVO. It’s loud and furious and beautiful and raw and somewhat broken but it rules and I love it.
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Game of the year #2
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playerunknown’s battlegrounds
- The best thing that can be said about this game is that hopping in a car with a bud feels like blood gulch CTF in halo 1.
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It’s a strong game no matter how one slices it. I really need to go back and finish the last leg of Bill’s Gaijin Quest.
I just wish the storyline and characters weren’t so thiiiiiiin as you move stage to stage. All the cool depictions of Buddhist/Shinto/Yokai biz don’t have the same mysterious allure as (relatively) more original Soulsborne lands.
unfortunately this was kind of the only part of the game I liked
I’m excited to see the battle royale modes in other games. If anyone at Konami has a pulse they’ve refocused MG Survive on a BR mode. I would love Respawn’s take on it, or even 343i’s.
Just ranking the 2017 games I have played:
- Sonic Mania
- Persona 5
- Nier Automata: I know this will get me banned from the forum but I fail to see how this is anything more than an ok action game with good character designs and fantastic animation work, but I should also point out that I haven’t finished the second loop yet (I don’t think it is reasonable to expect players should play through a game thrice in order to fully appreciate it). I should probably beat it soon because I’m tired of seeing an August episode of Hinge Problems lying around in my podcast app at 50% completion because I don’t want to get spoiled but it is more for that reason than wanting to play the game itself
- Fire Emblem Echoes
- Gran Turismo Sport
- Destiny 2
(not counting Yakuza 0 or Kiwami in this list because I technically bought imports of both those last summer)
I also got Nioh for Christmas and it probably would be between Sonic and Persona if I had spent more time playing it
Nier Automata is actually unremarkable-other-than-aesthetically if you don’t play through all three loops, sorry!
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spoilers the third “play through” of Nier 2 is not a third playthrough, it’s just the actual second half of the game
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I’m glad you mentioned this, because I was kind of losing motivation on my second time through despite the novelty of the differences. I guess I will have to persevere.
In no particular order:
Minecraft
Horizon: Zero Dawn
Prey
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
Assassin’s Creed: Origins
Getting Over It
Super Mario Run
Super Mario Odyssey
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past
Styx: Shards of Darkness
Snake Pass
Growing Home
Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy
Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age
Hob
Cuphead
The Last Guardian
This was the year that I finally “got it” and fell into Minecraft. I built a castle in survival mode that I’m still expanding and making better, I have a couple megastructure projects on-going in creative mode and I can do either of these with my nephews whenever they’re over. It’s a great game to play while listening to podcasts unwinding after work.
Horizon: Zero Dawn plays it safe by copying what works in other open worlds but the truly impressive part of it aside from the technology is that it’s from a studio that had up to this point made only first person shooters. That they were able to transition and expand their whole development process to do a different genre is already super impressive and that they were able to do it as a huge AAA studio is doubly so. I imagine working exclusively with one publisher on one set of hardware helped keep things relatively simple, but still. Hunting robot dinosaur monsters works well enough and is enjoyable but the biggest surprise is that the lore dumps you find in the readable collectibles scattered throughout the world actually deepen and enhance the story in ways you don’t initially suspect.
Prey is the sequel to System Shock 2 everyone was waiting for and the most fun I’ve had exploring a haunted space station.
Dishonored 2 and Uncharted 4 were both great games and their expansions eclipse them handily by being leaner, more refined versions that are zero fat all-killer-no-filler adventures.
Wolfenstein II is a worthy sequel to New Order and matches that games excellent narrative by continuously upping the ante and setting the stage for what should be a most spectacular conclusion in the hypothetical third game/act.
AssCreed Origins is a beautifully rendered slab of exploration porn built to satisfy the wander lust of the open world junkies who just cannot ever get enough of distant-but-reachable vistas in video games.
Getting Over It is mechanically tight and interesting and probably a metaphor for all our lives and struggles, individual and collective.
Super Mario Run is a Mario game on mobile phones and is more fun than it should be. The Remix 10 mode they added extends the shelf life indefinitely if you’ve already cleared all the stages and are tired of farming toads for your kingdom by racing other players’ ghosts.
Super Mario Odyssey is the Sonic 2006 of the Mario series and it is amazing that both this game and Breath of the Wild came out in the same year.
Breath of the Wild is a wonderful breath of fresh air for a series that had grown stagnant.
Dragon Quest VII is a legendary JRPG and I finally am able to play it on a portable when/wherever I want.
Styx: Shards of Darkness is just as good as the first one, both really fun pure stealth games with really big, really layered levels to play around in.
Snake Pass made me empathetic towards snakes.
Grow Home let me awkwardly clamber my way all the way up to the moon and then allowed me the satisfaction of being able to jump off and orbit the world I’d just climbed out of.
Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is literally the first three games with contemporary graphics and I love them for that. These were games from a time when 3D platformers were still brand new made by a plucky Western team who had the courage to not try and copy Mario 64. They are brutal, often unfair exercises in trial and error which was literally how every video game approached the concept of difficulty and player skill until 2007.
Final Fantasy XII might be the best Final Fantasy after VI/VII and getting a new version with a remastered license board and more of a traditional type of job system was a real treat.
Hob is an awesome game of pure exploration and wordless narrative where your reward for exploring the landscape is physically altering it thus enabling further exploration.
Cuphead is a series of sublimely animated boss challenges so impeccably designed that failure almost never feels unfair or discouraging.
The Last Guardian is in a way the end of an era for me. A decade in development limbo and nearly eight years after it was first announced we finally got to experience the conclusion to the Ueda-verse with a storybook-like heartwarming tale of the bond that blossoms from the unlikely friendship of two characters who couldn’t have been more unalike.
That was my 2017. I should have played Nier or Nioh or probably a number of other games that I didn’t but fortunately there is always next year and the year after and the year after that.
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getting over it with bennett foddy is my goty 2017 because I haven’t finished nier or played norwood suite or oikospiel or nitw or anything I should have played in 2017
because I was playing hots jfc
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i started playing through this the other day and got really sucked into it and got to the point where i achieved world peace but then i left my computer for a bit and closed the tab and now its two days later and i lost all my progress, darn. this thing went on and destroyed the earth with paperclips but without me
i downloaded Getting Over It and the shitty PUBG on Xbone, gonna be the first games of the new year
On tib’s rec I just powered through the entirety of Universal Paperclips last evening and can confirm: it’s really the only clicker
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hearing that it’s playable in an evening was the main thing keeping me from it
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You’re a sick man.
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There is no way for me to phrase this that won’t sound obnoxious, but the play experience is far different from what it was 6+ months ago. Back then, it was more of a chaotic romp. The glitches were more of the amusing variety (physics errors occasionally launching things into the air, things of that sort) vs the glitches today which are largely slow servers causing rubber-banding and other unamusing, highly frustrating problems. When PUBG launched, there was more reliance on the RNG, the weapons weren’t balanced (and people hadn’t ‘solved’ for optimal loadouts yet), and fewer players knew the map. Moment to moment, it felt like everyone was improvising, and winning came down as much (or more) to mindgames as it did map and equipment knowledge. Now when you play a round, maybe 1/3-1/2 of the players will be unfamiliar with the game. Other people know the drop zones and loot paths to get the scopes and the cars and whatever. The sensation early last year was that everyone was on their heels the entire match. Now, as a noob, it feels like you’re on your heels playing keepaway from a pack of pros. This maybe has some worth in its own right, and the game certainly has improved for people who want to get good and dump hours into it, but the experience for casuals is, in my experience, not as fun.
Part of what is going on is that there is no casual/ranked play. If there was a very RNG-heavy casual ruleset to complement the current ‘competitive’ ruleset, maybe casuals would be more fun.
huh it’s almost like the early access game was early access 
I don’t understand your snark. Making casual play worse for the benefit of competitive play is not a necessary outcome of development.
This was meant more in response to the first half of the post than the second. I don’t disagree with your conclusions.