Game of the Year for all Years: Shadow of List Hoarders

[disestablished]

2009 was a year of derivatives. Plenty of solid stuff. But not a lot of big standouts. Which is fine because that leaves plenty of for…

GOTY 2009 is Demon’s Souls I imported the asian version in like March or something. To this day, its the only version I have ever owned. What can I say about this game, which has not already been said? Fresh, deliberately paced combat system. Incredibly designed levels which take a lot of care in how enemies are positioned and which types are placed. Amazing art direction and an overall feel and aesthetic which feels sinister and dark, but never gross or nasty for the sake of it. Multi-tiered environments which wrap around on eachother. Many times in un-obvious ways. Ways where the player often feels as though they are risking their neck or taking a chance at something. No pausing and consant auto saving ensure’s you’re always thinking about your actions. That pacing, direction, and maze-like nature gives the player a sense of exploration, despite often being deliberately funneled. Punishing, rewarding, enchanting. Memorable boss fights. etc etc. Very little wrong, here. Save for some quality of life issues and also allowing the player to easily lose access to the core equipment upgrade system, for virtually the entire game cough cough . You just thought you were consuming an item for some extra souls, oops! And then there’s the amazing online aspects. Player invasions for PVP. Ghosts of other players showing how they died. Bloodstains showing where lots of players are recently dying. A message system where players can leave messages as hints, encouragement, try to trick you, etc. Soooo gooooood awwwwww yyyeaaaaahhhhhh.

runner up
Trials HD
I lamented this was XBOX 360 exclusive, for years. Its like crack. Really fun concept, lots of great courses, and effectively subtle, physics based controls. And they have some really wacky course types which really add to the charm of the whole thing.

other noteables for me

Colin McRae: Dirt 2 is just shy of being a GOTY racing game. Its got great presentation. Driving physics which feel realistic, but are also very fun. Great courses. Great graphics. Gate Crasher mode is the best thing ever.

What holds it back a bit is lack of modes (Rally Cross, hello it has Rally Cross.) And more courses would have been nice. The bulk of the game is segmenting courses into small chunks. Just gimme more, complete courses! Where’s Pike’s Peak???. I also felt like the raid truck mode was kind of unnecessary. Like it was fine, if not good. But…I just wanna to be doing more Rally Car time.

Bayonetta I actually did not care at all for the characters and most of the script. Buuuuuut, can’t argue with that solid character action gameplay. and the build up towards the end is pretty cool. I also really like the designs for the angels and stuff.

Killzone 2 is a solid feeling FPS with a solid campaign, amazing graphics, and solid multiplayer which gets extra points for the map which has volumetric fog made from actual particles which interact with player movement. So it swirls and makes trails around where the players have been.

[disestablished]

2010

I didn’t play many of 2010’s games because I was playing Bad Company 2 everyday

GOTY Battlefield: Bad Company 2 One of the very best online multiplayer FPS of all time. It takes all of the good from BC1 and improves it a lot. The classes are well balanced (all though this changed from time to time, as they went back and forth with some pretty dramatic changes via patches). There are good incentives for actually supporting your teammates. The maps are amazing. The destruction engine is improved. The Vietnam expansion was great. All of the elements come together, for some of the most fun-per-mile i’ve ever had in a multiplayer game. An absolute modern classic. I would gobble up new maps for it in a second. Its still totally relevant, as many people think its the best BF.

Only negatives are that the maps were balanced for 12 Vs. 12 on consoles. PC allows more players and its too much (99.5 percent of my BC2 time is on PS3. I’ve played a bit on PC, mainly to appease a friend. But I always disliked the larger player counts). The singleplayer still has the fun character to it. But they ditched the large maps, more open qualities. And instead made a game which is much more linear and contrived, like Call of Duty. Its still a decent time waster. but not nearly as good as the singleplayer from BC1. Also, this was the start of too many guns for the sake of collecting and too many stat boosters which erase some of the differences between character classes. And other things like that, which actually work against the balance and quality of the game. BC2 had a 2 month beta which I played a ton of. The beta had very limited gear for each class. It was very balanced and its arguably the best the game ever played, heh!

King of Fighters 13 Best 2D graphics ever

[iguferon]

As someone who put way too much time into Dirt 2 I feel compelled to mention that it does in fact have rally cross and that game is very good

[disestablished]

Huh, for some reason I totally forgot about the Rally Cross in Dirt 2!

[disestablished]

2011

2010 was really the beginning of a gradual decline in my gaming habits. From here on out, I play way less amount of different games each year. Instead, identifying a couple, which I play a whole lot of.

And then eventually…I will reach a point at which I hardly play anything at all…

GOTY is Dark Souls DUH Even though Demon’s Souls is better, its a new year baby. and that first playthrough should be without the master key.

runner up
Little Big Planet 2 Just as fantastic as the first, plus more fantastic things added.

noteable games I played (and in this case, nearly all of the other games I played)

Shift 2: Unleashed I forgot to mention Need For Speed: Shift, for whatever year that was. Its a fun game which strikes a great balance between sim and arcade racer. Shift 2 (no Need For Speed title, this time 'round) pushes further toward sim. Its by the same core team who make project cars, which plays very similarly.

Shift 2 has a few things going for it.

1. A really exhilarating and effective crashing/rubbing system, which makes the racing feel way more physical than Gran Turismo could ever dream of. And the A.I. opponents are generally more challenging.

2. Night racing with solid real time lighting effects where you have to rely on your headlights and the overall effect of the night time is-----effective. You lose all of your day time reference points and it makes every track feel new. Really cool feature. Gran Turismo’s night time tracks were simply an aesthetic. As they are so well lit as to not really need headlights.

3. The way the steering feels on a pad has a little bit more of a gradual feel to it. Which made rolling through turns feels better than Gran Turismo. GT basically just has you snapping the front wheels from lock to lock.

4. you can tune a car and then instantly test it on track and then instantly go back to tuning and then…awesome. Every racing game should do this forever.

5. A very good sense for grade and elevation changes on the track surface.

6. The dubai track

7. It has a decent at best custom livery system which I flexed to the max and it was so fun to make my own paint and decal schemes.

A real big problem this game has is that the suspension physics can flip out sometimes and throw your car weird. Its not quite as bad as the first game, which literally had your car sometimes bouncing like a rapper’s hyrdraulic pimped car. But it also had an issue where if you tweaked too many tuning options on your car----it seemed like the physics system just got confused and it would usually ruin the feel of the car. Such problems kept it from being a truly great racer. And the first Project Cars seemed to have the same problems, despite claims ofcompletely different driving physics. If Shift 2 had ever fixed these problems, I would probably be calling it the king of driving games.

Portal 2 is good. It just didn’t flex me near enough.

Gatling Gears is a twin stick shooter which probably won’t win any awards with genre enthusiasts but…dang do I love it. Its got cool graphics. Big sound and effects. And its just fun.

a couple of other things

Crisis 2 has multiplayer where you can use all of the power suit’s abilities against eachother. It was really fun, way more fun than I’ve ever had with singleplayer Crysis anything. And it should have blown up in popularity. But instead…it died very quickly.

This is the year Beyond Good and Evil HD release on PS3 and is therefore the third time I have bought that game, for my only ever triple dip.

**I got Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 because I wanted to get back into a fighting game and this had a lot of buzz. I liked it well enough and then…like two months after release, capcom announced that a whole separate to purchase, new version of the game was to release in the same year. rather than patching the existing game. So I immediately stopped playing it and didn’t look back.

[disestablished]

2012

In 2012 I was still playing Dark Souls and double dipped on the PC version.

Dragon’s Dogma came out, but I didn’t actually play that until the Dark Arisen re-release.

GOTY 2012 is Tiny and Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers I love this game to BITS. The gameplay felt so fresh and inventive to me. And it just begged for me to experiment and explore around and just leave no stone unturned or uncut. its probably only like a 3 hour game. But I played for 8, according to my steam profile. I wish they would do a sequel. It will probably run on a potato. Unique songs for the carefully chosen soundtrack. Here is an old video I made, where I create my own alternate route.

So I guess GOTY 2012 is Skullgirls is a good fighter with incredibly inventive characters and what a success story.

I didn’t enjoy Fez nearly as much as I thought that I would.

The Darkness II is every bit as good and flawed, as the first game.

*I never really got along with Battlefield 3. I was playing it, but not nearly as much as I usually would with a BF game.

[disestablished]

Dang I forgot to mention Zeno Clash for 2009

Its not an all time great. But its incredible weirdness and unique qualities definitely held me for a time.

[disestablished]

2013

Ok 2013 had some high quality stuff

GOTY 2013 is The Swapper I usually compare this to Portal, to give people a general idea, without spoiling anything about the game. It does not have Portals. It has…something else which I will not spoil. Play the game. Its got wonderfully inventive gameplay which will twist your brain in a difficulty curve which feels just right. Its got a sort of metroid exploration aspect to it. Its dark and spacey. It stops to bask in that spaceyness. The graphics are all hand made materials and clay. I love this game. its got a cool story.

runner up

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed The brightest and bluest of skies. Its like an absolutely glorious arcade game for your home entertainment system. Transforming vehicles and tracks is the best. It has a large and varied roster. Its one of the best Kart racers ever.

noteable games for me

Antichamber super trippy visuals intertwined with the puzzle gameplay make for a wonderfully disorienting, but never frustrating experience. A very unique game.

Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen I was able to make my character look just like Old Snake. The town in the beginning of the game is fantastically packed with nooks and crannies. I was climbing and jumping all around. Many times feel like I was just having fun trying to do something not necessarily intended-----and then I’d find an item. Gave me Morrowind vibes, in terms of how much stuff there was to see and climb around. Worth the price just for the starting town, alone. Not a huge fan of the combat. But it is a solid game. The grapple system is cool. And some of the bosses have unique, inventive gimmicks to how you can defeat them.

Battlefield 4 This game is pretty fantastic, actually. It has excellent maps. All of them are good. All of the starting maps are great. The expansions add maps which range from good to great. Not a stinker in the bunch. Its all about conquest mode and its iterations, here. By this point, Rush mode (made amazing by Bad Company 2) has taken a huge back seat for a long nap.
The Levelution feature is really cool for the maps which have it. And it meaningfully changes the maps, when the events trigger.
Everything plays great (It did take a handful of patches to get there, however. Including at least one revoked patch lol). Gunplay feels great. Vehicles feel great. Moving around feels great. The graphics are excellent. Put a lot of time into this one.

The only real issue is that there are way too many lock-on rockets and whatnot. And a couple of vehicles have armor upgrades which can make them near invincible.

Also, the destruction system from Bad Company 2 is all but gone. As great as BF4 truly is…it would be so much better with proper destruction.

[disestablished]

Ok big change for 2012 because I just remembered something

[disestablished]

2014

I think I only played 3 new games that year:

MGS: Ground Zeroes
Dark Souls 2
MIND: Path to Thalamus

Ground Zeroes has a surprising amount of stuff to do in its small footprint. But, I wasn’t very compelled to dig deep with it.

Dark Souls 2 had controversy around it which I did not appreciate. The game itself is good. But I also think that the Scholar of The First Sin edition is a appreciably better. And that came later.

So I will default to MIND: Path to Thalamus as my pseudo GOTY. I think its got some similarities to Talos Principle (which I havent played). Its a puzzle game with some pretty trippy visuals and atmosphere. The puzzling isn’t ground breaking or anything. but its decent and the visuals really keep everything feeling strange and dreamy. Its probably not a truly great game. But I enjoyed it.

2015

GOTY 2015 is Dark Souls II: Scholar of The First Sin Its Dark Souls 2 with better visuals, lots of little tweaks to enemy and item placement etc. And a couple of new additions. Such as the invisible hollows. Which I thought were a pretty awesome addition to the game. They also added several NPC black phantom invaders. It also includes the DLC into the game. Aside from the DLC, It really feels like the game we should have gotten in the first place. The PS4/Xbone versions are also the first time a Dark Souls game could be played in 60fps on a console.

[daphaknee]

wheres everyone getting their lists from? i dont trust any of these games from the 90s release lists

[disestablished]

I just looked at the 1998 in video gaming wiki list and also memory. If not knowing the actual year, then at least remembering good games I played which weren’t on the wiki list. That wiki list isn’t a complete list of every single game released.

[Alyx]

Wiki does full lists too!

Category:1988 video games

Just replace the year in the url to get lists of other years.
Their lists use date of initial release which is what I used for my list, so for example Super Mario Bros 3. is 1988.
If you want to go by release date for your region it’ll be harder to figure out.

[daphaknee]

i want something with all the games wikipedia forgot

[Victor]

MobyGames: Game Browser

[Tulpa]

yeah I use mobygames to research releases

its still not comprehensive but its good enough for my purposes

[idiot]

i just used wikpedia and memory
all japanese releases where appropriate because ‘america, lol’

[MintyJuffowup]

I’m going to take a break from editing the top* in order to talk about 1980. This is one of the best years in play for three reasons: Japan is breaking out of its Space Invaders mold, Atari is pushing serious innovations in the arcade and Williams is coming up close behind, and the Apple II is nourishing a DIY scene of termites chewing away at the boundaries.

Out of this momentous year, I want to bring particular attention to The Prisoner.

It’s one of the first games designed by David Mullich, who Wikipedia is telling me also developed the Heroes of Might and Magic series. Well, before he did that, he made a trio of games that drip with cynicism and paranoia. In Network, you control a TV studio trying to maximize ratings; in Windfall, you are Chief Executive of an oil company trying to win big off the Oil Crisis; and in The Prisoner, you are a Number abandoned in purgatory.

Playing The Prisoner means being under constant coercion to compromise yourself, to give up. You exist in a complete world, unable to tell if it is too different or too similar to our own. There is a church that cannot offer salvation, a movie theater that cannot entertain, and a court that cannot carry out justice.

The Prisoner flourishes in its obscurity. You feel lost, lonely, and confused, just as you should.

Before I sat down to write this post, I thought I would put a game from this year on blast. That game was going to be Mystery House but when I remember the refrigerator art drawings in the game, I just don’t have it in me to say anything mean. You’re okay Mystery House

*please do not get the impression that I’ve been working on this uninterrupted

[MintyJuffowup]

I have been moving the list onto Airtable in order to fit I want into a navigable space. My goal is to have it looking something like (I mean almost exactly like) Sight & Sound’s interface they made in 2018.

Something their system does that I hope to incorporate is it conveniently communicates which films are directed by women. This can and should be replicated and expanded to include other genders.

P.S. Would people be cool with this moving out of Axe and into KOP?

[RT-55J]

please do