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MadPowerBomber vs Vidya GAEMZ 2016

The ol' 16 was an awkward year in Vidya as I found myself far more excited for games of the last generation, games I still own on my PS3, than I was for most of the upcoming new releases that were announced. Thus before I get to the new games, I wanted to do a top five Remasters/Re-releases of 2016, of the ones I played. Which is my ground rule, I had to have played the entire game from beginning to end to include them on any list, which is why some games are absent and I have no opinion of at all. First up, the Honorable Mentions: 2016 saw the re-release of both Marvel Ultimate Alliance games on the current gen consoles and those were a whole lot of fun to revisit. We also saw the Nathan Drake Collection, but I've only played through Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. It was just as fun as I remembered the first time being, but a bit weird seeing it at 60 fps, particularly during the jetski moments of the game. Some time next year I will revisit 2 and 3, along with a lot of other games. MPB'S TOP FIVE REMASTERS/RE-RELEASES OF 2016: 5. BioShock: as part of the BioShock collection that includes all three games, it was quite interesting to revisit BioShock after all this time and most certainly after playing through BioShock Infinite not that long ago. It changed the narrative for me a little bit and made the entire plot of the game far more interesting than the first time around. Visually, nothing much was altered except the resolution from the previous generation. Still a pretty game, but graphically outdated in comparison to the current games available and even some of its contemporaries. [PowerBomb Note: I started BioShock 2, but I didn't make it that far into the game before moving on to something else, again, next year.] 4. Batman: Return to Arkham - Arkham Asylum: easily one of my favorite games from last generation, hands down. The re-release is something truly interesting. It wasn't just a spit and polish job like a lot of the other Re-releases and remasters, as the Return to Arkham title runs on the Unreal 4 Engine, and not the previous Unreal 3 Engine that they originally ran on and even Arkham Knight runs on. So the textures are a bit sharper, some look to have been re-done entirely, like Batman's cape. Revisiting the story of Arkham Asylum was something I had been wanting to do since I finished Arkham Knight to look for particular things and to see if it fits within the traditional fundamentals of a trilogy. Unfortunately, I had forgotten a lot of the elements in Arkham Knight, so I couldn't tell you at this moment whether it did or did not, but I did find an Easter Egg in the game that tells me that it at least might. The game ported to this gen perfectly, looks amazing, and has all the elements that Arkham Asylum was known for. Which, on some occasions, doesn't always hold true and memory has a way of cheating you out of what was actuality. 3. Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3: The most shocking release of the year, if I have to be honest. No one saw this coming, not even with the rumors going on about MvC4/MvCI. It came out the same day that MvCI was announced, and it's pretty much exactly what it was on the previous consoles. I don't know how the Netcode is for online play, but the single player content is still a complete and utter delight and I've found myself spending more time learning the game this time about than I did with MvC3 or UMvC3. 3. Batman: Return to Arkham - Arkham City: While *technically* the same game since they're bundled together, I kept them separate as they are two separate games, on two separate discs with two separate trophy/achievement lists. That's a lot of separate. When Arkham Asylum was released it became the standard bearer for licensed properties, then Arkham City came about and took that standard and placed it firmly on a mountain and challenged the rest of the licensed world to take it from the Mighty Bat, and it still hasn't happened. This revisit to Arkham City put forth a lot of new visual delights that weren't in the original release. Including a better texture for Batman's cape, again!, Catwoman's entire costume, the broken bottle that serves as the Penguin's monocle, and many other things. Even with the release of Arkham Knight - which I thought was magnificent for a great deal of reasons - it's still very hard to top the experience and the pleasure of Arkham City. 1. Skyrim Special Edition: BECAUSE OF COURSE IT IS. The PS4 edition was a fantastical delight in its vanilla form from beginning to end. I adore the world of Skyrim and the Elder Scrolls, at least so far, so it was a great pleasure revisiting this game with its improved visuals and whatnot. Then the mods came and the mods on the PS4, while limited a great deal, gave the game new life in many ways. Not as many as the PC version mind you, but it allows you some new options for the game. The Xbox One version has been just as much a delight, if not more so, as the room for mods is much more expansive because Sony decided to out massive limitations on what could and could not be done with mods on the PS4. The Xbox doesn't allow as much room as the PC does, but it does provide more space and things like the Unofficial Skyrim Patch and things like that. The mods on Xbox, so far, can make it almost an entirely different game. It's quite the experience. Now onto the new stuff! And as before the Honorable Mentions! Let's see, there was BroForce which was probably the most hilarious game I've ever played in my life for a plethora of reasons; Lego Marvel's Avengers which took the Lego games a bit further than even the last one (Lego Jurassic Park) did, but wasn't quite as good or well put together in terms of the movies that they picked; Attack on Titan, which was definitely a Musou/Dynasty Warriors game, but changed the formula a great deal to match it with the anime/manga and was probably one of the most fun times I had this year; Battlefield 1, which got a lot of critical praise for its single player campaign, and I most certainly did enjoy it, but it was far too schizophrenic in design. You don't spend enough time with any of the five different characters you play as to really become attached to them, it's a problem I've had with some of the Call of Duty games in the past. Which brings me to the last honorable mention! Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, a game I technically didn't even want and had no interest in, but turned out to be my favorite CoD single player experience in who knows how long. It was straight forward and to the point, didn't do a lot of jumping around from character to character (once if I remember right) and had a lot of interesting and wonderful game play mechanics added. The zero gravity stuff was a hoot, and the air combat with the jets in space was very slick. That turned out to be my most favorite part of the game. Very surprising, but a little disappointed that Conor McGregor didn't have any lines whatsoever. Spoilers? MPB'S TOP FIVE GAMES OF 2016: 5. Titanfall 2: The amount of time I spent with the original Titanfall was less than an episode of Clone Wars or Rebels, and it being a multiplayer game only added to the fact that I generally suck at multiplayer FPS games, didn't really kick any bells or whistles off in the interest category of my brain. What did trigger it was watching someone else play the game and being enthralled with the campaign enough to pause Skyrim for quite a period of time. This game hits a few cheap pleasure spots right out the gate, one of those being that the voice actor for BT did his best to sound like Peter Cullen, THE voice of Optimus Prime. And it was thoroughly intentional as one of the trophies/achievements is called BT Prime. The game is very much a narrative about companionship and the meaning of that companionship as you develop your relationship with BT throughout, which does make the very end of the game a bit of a disappointment, at least for me. The game play is the slickest of any military based FPS I've ever played and you can definitely see the huge mistake thar Activision made with Infinity Ward here. And graphically it's gorgeous. My only complaints is that I wish when composing a narrative for their games, that Respawn would work harder to create original characters instead of creating homages to their favorite things. Or at least work harder to disguise them as original characters. In this game we have Vazquez from Aliens and an Arnold Schwarzenegger homage, neither of which are at all disguised very well. Respawn also had this issue when they were still called Infinity Ward going back to Modern Warfare's opening sequence when they use a line of dialogue from Aliens in reference to a shotgun. The ending, too, the tail ending where the credits begin is just a Return of the Jedi-like celebration, never minding the loss you feel as a player because of BT's ultimate sacrifice. Still, of the big budget FPS games released this holiday season, Titanfall 2 definitely wipes the floor clean with both Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1. And the Multiplayer isn't that bad, either. 4. DOOM: because it's fucking DOOM. Not really, but kinda. DOOM was a breath of fresh air in the FPS genre because it's still nothing like all the others and there for a while, all the big name FPS games were pretty much identical to one another with the same sort of campaigns, the same sort of multiplayer nonsense, same sort of weapons and repeat ad nauseum. It got old and it got stale and none of the big development studios were really using their imaginations in regards to the games they produce, which could be a byproduct of the publishers ultimately controlling the ebb and flow of development than the other way around. So then comes DOOM and it's just straight up DOOM in all its brutal and gore-filled glory, without all the boggled down weight of some pretentious narrative or another - something that's kind of gone away with the FPS genre this year, huh. My biggest issue with DOOM is that it wasn't long enough, and since there wasn't a lot of story in the game, wasn't a lot of dialogue to push the narrative forward, and most certainly wasn't all that much by way of scripted scenes or cinematics, there should have been a whole lot more GAME out of DOOM than there was. Still, it was a shitton of fun, explosive, hellish and fully of the Red Stuff to satiate a horror fiend and a gore hounds delicate sensibilities. 3. Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens: The true proper follow up to Lego Jurassic World, and a further exploration of the Lego dynamic and game play elements. And holy crap was it a lot of fun. Replaying the Force Awakens movie in Lego form with added scenes and moments with the actual actors reprising their roles was such a delight. The flight combat was far more fluid and intuitive than what was given to us in Battlefront, and there was even some cover shooter components a la Gears of War thrown in from time to time that were actually quite well done and a lot of fun to engage in. One of the reasons I keep coming back to the Lego games is because they're so much fun and while a lot of other people in regards to gaming are concerned with removing fun from them, I think that's a huge mistake. The Lego games, especially ones like the Force Awakens, harken back to the early days of gaming when it was JUST about fun, without depths narratives, characterization, and themes. 2. Street Fighter V: after a rocky start with collapsing servers and whatnot, SFV has taken me back to the arcades like no other fighting game before it. The Netcode is pretty damned good and the constant updating, upgrading and tweaking of what the game has to offer reminds me of the constant on-the-fly development of fighting games in arcades. Tekken still does this, but I believe it's the only one. While it might lack some of the "traditional" modes of game play like arcade mode and all that, it does have a robust and beautiful engine behind the fighting mechanics that continues to pay off the more time you spend with the game. The Survival Mode is still a bit of an arcade mode, just without any kind of ending or whatever one comes to expect with such a mode. Visually, I find the game to be quite pretty save in a few parts here and there, but that's mostly to do with the animation department. Hair is animated very oddly in this game. The General Story Mode that came along with the June update was fantastically weird and wonderfully Street Fighter. They say no one plays fighting games for the stories, those people are liars and part of the Rebel Alliance. I adore fighting game stories because of the oddities, the absurdities, and the wonderfully outlandish aspects of them. They're positively imaginative, and the sense they make are entirely their own to the point where you try to remove them from their own systems of logic or apply others, they no longer work. But in their own little made-up world? It makes perfect sense. The continuous flow of new stages and characters is a huge plus for me as a fan of Street Fighter - the more the merrier - and the possibility of earning them with in-game currency is a pretty cool feature. One I'm unfortunately not good enough to entirely benefit from, at least not yet, so I just bought the Season Pass (the only one I bought this year, and with good reason) and was quite satisfied with the purchase. Juri being the highlight of the season for me, with Guile coming a close second. All in all, this was easily my second favorite game of the year. 1. Far Cry Primal: Where do I begin? I enjoyed what little I played of Far Cry 2 and 3, and I really loved Far Cry 4 - though I haven't finished any of them. Primal, however, was something else entirely. A throwback amidst the general modernized world of these sorts of games, literally. Taking place in 10,000 BC, it's one part fantasy/sword and sorcery, one part in-depth look at the root beginnings of mankind. Gone are the assault rifles and pistols, replaced with clubs, bows, and Spears. The narrative is one of survival of an entire tribe of people in a harsh environment where almost everything is a threat to you, and the tribe looks to you, the player, to rekindle and rebuild their status. Visually the game is striking on many levels, from the foliage to the wildlife, to the vast Vistas and landscapes. All of this allowing for a world that was both beautiful and dangerous to explore. The game play is very similar to that of the last two Far Cry games, yet because of the limited weaponry felt fresh and original. However, one of my favorite aspects of the game was the faux languages created by the developers with the assistance of linguistic professors out of some school that the medication is blocking from my memory. I love languages, from my own English to every other language spoken on this planet that I don't understand at all. Hearing the languages spoke in the game was a real treat as they were hypothetical possible languages of these early humans and how they communicated orally. It gave an authentic feel to a game that is entirely fiction. You build relationships with your animal companions in this game, and you meet some very interesting NPCs along the way, providing a very enriching experience all around. And that's it! The MadPowerBomber's top video games in 2016. And I know, I know, you're probably all, BUT HAY WHERE IS FINAL FANTASY XV?! I haven't played it, yet. So that's why it isn't here at all. BUT HAY WHERE IS UNCHARTED 4?! It didn't make the cut because the game was a complete and total let down, for me. It was an unnecessary story that did nothing for the characters involved, it was another Status Quo narrative just like Uncharted 3 was, with no emotional involvement for me. No risk for the characters, no point. You don't challenge your characters, you're not challenging the story let alone the audience. It looked pretty, played awesome, but the story was bland and unremarkable in every way. Naughty Dog can do better, unfortunately Uncharted is no longer *that* better. And that's that!

#video games #vidya #gaemz #best of 2016