goku gotylist 2016. games of the yearsome of the fgood games
some of the good ones
2016 was One Wild Year. very bad overall; between brexit, trump and, before that, how validating the panama paper leak was even thoguh that didn’t lead to anytihng and never will .
2016 sucked, of course, but luckily, it was a great year for games! i’m not actually convinced it was a great year for games but it seems all these lists are obligated to say that, as though if we as gamers dont perceive a continuous maturing of the industry our fragile egos will burst open and spill tiny emotional nuggets everywhere for us to have to confront
10. Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment®)
what the Hell is there to say about overwatch that hasn’t been said? you ask. apart from the games’ multimillion dollar backstory, ostensibly written originally for a saturday morning cartoon that nobody wanted a part of, which is continuously contradicted by every single second of actual gameplay — where mortal enemies happily fight side by side order to capture a gazebo in a tibetan courtyard in what appears to NOT be a espionage-ridden amalgamation of scifi corporate civil and international conflicts, but instead more of a kind of clean-future-dystopia blood sport
it seems like everybody wants one character or another to fuck but the only characters any normal person would ship are pharah and mercy, a cutesy fan-favourite relationship thats’ rooted in their notable synergy in the actual thing youre interacting with. in the game. Are you Getting anything here Blizzard®? Everyone’s like “Boy, we hope Phamercy is real it’s so cute when they team up” and you’re like NO our lovely pixie Tracer has a gorgeous gay vixen back home but right now shes abroad fighting for the superhero gang against highly sentient robots trying to rebel against slavery, or Something
overwatch’s strengths are how’s it play’s, of course; a fairly deft realization of moba design in the first person that reinvigorates the joy of skilled player movement, projectile-heavy shooting, memorable and strategically masterable play fields and, indeed, everything we left behind in Quake in favour of stop-and-pop shooting of Believable But Highly Abstracted Military Equipment® at brown people
overwatch, which is definitely more gay than Blizzard® wants it to be, has its issues. its developers have time and time again pushed puzzling balance decisions to live servers and , relative to what you might expect of a game of its success, meaningful updates come very slowly in favour of cutsey seasonal events and collectable hats. still, the core game is pretty dang sharp and i hope pharah and mercy’s adorable and very real relationship is personally acknowledged by lead designer Jeff Kaplan®.
9. Tyranny (Black Isle Studios)
look… i havent actually played much of Tyranny at all. i’m including this on faith earned through various successes in Pillars of Eternity — a cool game — and also because i played like 3 hours of it and it was all of the good pillars stuff with critical improvements layered on; namely in nature of player choice and the strength of role playing.
in tyranny you are undoubtedly the bad guy, or at the very least a witting, key player and lawman in the ridiculously fascist regime casting a shadow over The Middle Earth. buit its not all “Wa we wa wa go do the bad things” and I was delighted to find myself making decisions not informed by what granted the advantages in what is a pretty challenging and interesting combat system, or by an systemized ‘player morality’ sliding scale looming over every conversation option, but by what I expected of my character; what they would believe, where they might choose to stick to the letter of the law or sneakily rebel against a unjust actors or where they might kowtow to the powers that be in order to gain favour and power to act more autonomously later. and most importantly, the choices afforded and layered dialogue trees work to support that.
pillars of eternity was a strong revitalization of play and pause crpg combat of the olden dayes but behind its entrancing prose the story was objectively impossible to care about and roleplaying even more shallow than a bioware title. i hope tyranny can stay this path and not railroad the player into a kitschy redemption arc or something when i revisit it soon so i dont have to get all mad at it
8. Inside (Playdead)
inside is a bit of a marvel, to the extent that sitting here thinking about it im wondering why its only 8 on the list. recently i went onto youtube and watched a deeply technical talk about the shaders and other techniques in Real Time Graphics designed and employed by its artists that i really didn’t understand very much purely because i am so, deeply, fascinated by the processes behind such a technically clean and precise visual realization of desolation and haunting dread — and how that comes about in a game from a small independent studio. many of the artistic principles employed in Inside; the subtle tonal differences across flat surfaces from bouncing and wrapping light, and the gorgeous, highly authored atmospheric effects, are seldom employed in games on this level and make for something thats really, ridiculously, good looking and critical to the game’s fairly unique, and wildly successful, narrative atmosphere
inside’s many environmental puzzles are simple and intuitive, with just enough wit in their solutions and the way they play out to elate you in solving them, and controlling the game is a joy down to its many adhoc procedural animation/movement systems created for just one sequence or handful of interactions. its an enthralling ride, for as long as it lasts
7. Firewatch (Idle Thumbs)
its a spoiler that firewatch features a disposable camera loaded with a limited roll that you must use sparingly and it’s a triumph that the game’s environment (which, like new york city, some say, is a character in its own way) supported me bumbling about it for hours mentally and physically composing the best shots i could fill the roll with,; and its the uncomfortable truth that the game’s environment artists composed most of those shots in advance for me anyway. that’s actually damn cool for a fairly natural large open environment.
Firewatch, is very pretty.
the characters (which, by the way, includes the games’ visually breathtaking natural environment) are hugely endearing and, through dialogue alone, act out a bristling romantic attraction that is a v. enjoyable layer of the game’s initially pulpy style grand mystery that blossoms into a fairly emotionally mature little story. writing is rarely this interesting in games. in addition, i would venture that, the national park, is a character all of its own, in this particular story.
6. XCOM 2 (Sid Meier Studios)
im not so sure why this game is here
5. Dishonored 2 (Arkane Studios)
Dishonored 2 is more ‘Dishonored’. That’s been flung around as a knock against the game but it’s fucking amazing if you ask me, a gamer. The surprising thing Dishonored 2 does, as an unapologetic sequel, is BUILD MEASURABLY upon the mechanics of Dishonored. It doesn’t stop to reinvent itself and it certainly doesn’t press reset, it’s very much a game that asks you to have played Dishonored 1 or at least fucking deal with its many depths and complexities in stead. Dishonored, and by wonderous extension Dishonored 2, is a victorious melody of pure stealth (theif), aggressive stealth (batman arkham whatever) and aggro first person kill game (dark messiah of might and magic) that supports loads of independent playthroughs as well as tackling any situation with some combination of styles. The game is woefully unbalanced — almost any situation can be tackled with The Girl One’s “link enemies to the same fate” magic and one sleep dart For Example— but it Is So in service of providing a satisfying dial-an-experience stealthy murder fantasy with a large toolkit and a load of mooks to toy on. Love too game.
oh yeah the story fucking sucks in this game jesus christ
4. Amplitude (Musical Game)
Flow state. It’s some shit that video game designers love to form a circle at GDC and jerk eachother raw about,. I dont play many rhythm games — very many at all — so imagine my surprise when I threw myself into a pretty good one. It has some good tracks, it has some bad ones, A few of them are extremely pumpin’. But most importantly it’s an undeniably competent stab at a tried & true rhythm video game formula and i think its extremely neat. I had an unreasonable amount of fun and satisfaction this year with Amplitude for the Playstation 4 I think it’s becuase of, ugh, “flow state”.
3. Hyper Light Drifter (“Heart Machine”)
2016 gushed about Higher Height Shifter’s pink and teal neon-lit flat illustration aesthetic and its alright lookin’ but not as original as 2016 thinks. Ah fuck it, it’s pretty damn cool lookin’. Whatever you think about, its sure to be 2017–2019’s indie game aesthetic of choice.
No, Neo-Right Thrifter is cool and interesting and on this list because it’s honestly the first engaging top down action g ame i’ve played.
It was fine at 30 fps too. Let me repeat that: It was fine at 30 fps. Hippo Plight Twister was the subject of Gamer Panic when its developers, girls probably, dared to release a game that wasn’t at 60fps or 144hz or whatever the fuck it is they think they want nowadays. The thing is — and this is important — it was fucking good as hell regardless. Regardless of what? Nothing. It was literally perfect and you made “Heart Machine” waste their time converting it to 60fps post-release for probably No Sales.
Happy Night Grifter’s dirty little nuggets of genius are perhaps best represented by the dash move, which was hell of responsive and had the cool feature of not being shit like in most games. a Thing indies are doing is studying old action games, particularly japanese action games, like their lives depend on it and it shows extremely in that they get mechanics like this both Not Shit and also Hell of Fun and rewarding. In Hooper’s Tight Pooper frame-perfect input allows you to chain dashes one after another literally non-stop, which is both game breaking and also not at all because it’s really hard to do and punishing to fuck up and why the fuck not have this avenue for game mastery? I’m literally asking you. That’s a thing that Diaper White Sniffer recognizes, individually simple but interesting, demanding and consequential options (moves) layered over the top of eachother creates for interesting moment to moment choices in combat. They create second-to-second strategy.
Perhaps the reason I feel most strongly about CRIPES! her Flight Left her is because the game is EXTREMELY HARD Y’ALL. A lot of developers create interesting, layered combat systems then make the default game difficulty not require learning any of it. It’s troubling in a way that there’s no way at all to play this otherwise very nice game unless you are brutally good at twitchy slashy action things but it’s also kinda nice that anyone that’s seen the end of it can profess to have really engaged with it. It’s a different kind of difficulty to the likes of Mega Man 9 or Volkgar the Viking or whatever too —I think those are shit — Hypno-toad Meme Generator’s difficulty is as much about strategy, and the aforementioned decision making, as it is about twitch. It’s a meaningful combination of all these good things, and that’s a spot thats generally only scratched by top-of-their-class character action games like Devil May Cry. It’s simpler than Devil May Cry, obviously, by a lot, but here they might already pushing up against the limits of the fixed overhead viewpoint can support while still being readable. and what’s there is enough to match something like DMC’s level of strategic choice.
Heffer Airlifter is available in 30fps and 60fps on Steam and in console pleb 30fps on all other leading digital content marketplaces now.
2. Titanfall 2 (Respawn Entertainment)
i can think of almost nothing useful to write about Titanfall Deux . It’s entirely fucked up that 2016 gave us the best single player and the best multi player shooters in fucking a long ass mother fucking time, and neither of them sold particularly well. this one especially.
whats here is a feature robust call of duty with a pretty fun rewards/loadout customization system except also with HONESTLY AND UNIRONICALLY THE BEST SKILL BASED MOVEMENT SYSTEMS IN A SHOOTER. EVER. IM WILLING TO THROW QUAKE THREE UNDER A BUS FOR THIS. and if you fancy it is you can play with the giant robots. the singleplayer is also really, good. too good to be an afterthought in this entry. fuck.
1. DOOM (id Software)
DOOM, they say, is just like the doom of old. the one we all remember. the classic eponymous game we all love. the famous ‘doom’. its fast right? really fast. its got the gun’s and the demons and the sound effects and the e1m1 melody? yeah.
DOOM is nothing like ‘doom’. serious sam was ‘doom’, more or less. hard reset was ‘doom’, pretty much. DOOM is loudly, and confidently, and bravely its own game. where doom had you dotter about hallways, poking at things until they revealed an armour pickup or a path to progress, and developing specific knowledge of how to deal with specific enemy archetypes before locking you in a room with some combination of them, DOOM has different goals: movement and positioning, resource management, strategy. DOOM’s designers wanted you to play the game in a very specific, exciting way
a team just looking to recreate doom would have never created DOOM. and its hard to point to specific elements that make DOOM work like it does
when you’re not shooting, DOOM wants you to be moving. often, you should be moving instead of shooting. instead of shooting. first of all, DOOM doesnt allow you to accrue enough resources — ammo, health, armour — to pick your way through a large fight. so when the gates slam shut on an encounter arena you’re immediately taking stock of what you can do with what you have, and what resources you can extract from the room you’re in. DOOM’s combat arenas are very vertical, featuring interweaving walkways and platforms and pillars that form a deliberately designed jungle gym to shuffle up and disappear through and generally employ to plan a path out of enemies cornering you and towards the next resource pick-up. you gots to be on the move. enemies are spawning in and your resources are dwindling, and all of this is subtly modelled after the multiplayer arena shooter that began, i think, with doom 2 deathmatch, evolved through quake 1 and quake 2 deathmatch and was probably most consciously realized in quake 3.
DOOM, baby, is first successful single player take on the arena shooter. DOOMs emphasis on movement and the mental map it requires you to keep of your surroundings (and your enemies) creates gameplay that vividly evokes the multiplayer deathmatch experience. enemies essentially surround you, but you have a rough stock of their location, so it’s a matter of carving a path, choosing the biggest threats, adjusting positional goals, working strategically. Like players in a deathmatch, enemies can act somewhat unpredictably, so you adjust on the fly, and you’re surprised by new threats and enemies appearing from odd angles. it feels artificial, even unfair, when a modern shooter puts an enemy behind you for you to swing around and blast in the face, but the nature of the way you play DOOM, like so many multiplayer shooters, creates those scenarios constantly. there are moments of panic and moments you’re in control and it all happens so fast and organically and, at higher difficulties, on a knife’s edge, that it’s downright thrilling. You will take joy in DOOM’s movement, but DOOM isn’t about movement exactly, it’s about the strategic choices and moment to moment excitement that a crafted emphasis on movement affords.
DOOM enforces this in, so, many, ways. from the beginning, with the basic imp, you’re forced to be moving constantly and blocking sight lines with your environment so you can pick them off before they can charge up. there are actually 3 or 4 classes of imp that act in very different ways that mix up every encounter with them, and of course every enemy from the humble imp to the baron is designed with differnet classes of movement, different attacks and different behaviour. where doom was largely the joy of outclassing its handful enemy archetypes due to their predictability and weaknesses, DOOM’s enemies are a series of layered challenges that ramp up the importance and complexity of picking your path through an arena.
DOOM has a huge emphasis on shotgun-style whip and fire weapons, rather than ‘tracking’ weapons like machine guns— even the plasma rifle and assault rifle have upgrades that let you spend their ammo in this way — and that, too, is in service of the arena style gameplay and an emphasis on applying damage in limited windows. even the much discussed glory kill system is a deftly designed factor of the arena gameplay; staggered enemies, with their bounties of health and ammo just waiting for you to pop, are just another resource to manage and movement goal for you to adjust to in your decision making loop.
soundtrack, sound design, visual design, atmosphere, gameplay feel. even an upgrade and skill tree system behind a resource rewarded in through environment exploration and an achievement-like challenge system. doom nails the fuck of those too. but this design, informed from id software’s parallel legacy of the Multiplayer Arena Shooter, is DOOM’s triumph. and i can’t believe it hasn’t happened before now.
DOOM is, true beauty.
