Out of my entire gaming culture collection The Last Of Us Post-Pandemic is still my favorite piece. I love the detail and size of this statue, and of course the background that it originally comes with. Last of Us is still some of the best the industry has to offer. ____________________________________________ #playstation #ps #tlou #goty #goty2013 #thelastofuspostpandemic #thelastofus #classicplaystation #naughtydog #gamingsetup #gamingsetups #collectorsedition #sony #remarkable https://www.instagram.com/p/BuErTtSgYyh/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1bkgp5ovpiact
It can't be easy making a Zelda game of any variety, with the series' rabid fans and their justifiably high expectations. No less so when that game is the first 2D Zelda in many years, and a sequel to one of the most acclaimed Zelda games of all time. Against all odds, A Link Between Worlds delivered with a quirky world to explore, fresh puzzle mechanics, and more freedom than any Zelda game before. The ability to "merge" Link from 3D into 2D and travel along walls fit right in with the conventional Zelda toolset by being simple to understand and incredibly adaptive. After all, the best puzzles make the player feel smart for solving them, and ALBW masterfully combines this new tool with the old to challenge even the most seasoned veterans.
A Link Between Worlds is a game that shines from every angle, a beacon to fans both new and old.
Game of the Year 2013 - Runner Up
Super Mario 3D World
Super Mario 3D World is my favorite Mario game of all time. Let me give you a second to fathom the gravity of that statement. I love it more than Super Mario 64, more than any spin-off, and more than any 2D Mario. Are you skeptical yet?
I have fun while I play most games, and obviously I think playing games is more enjoyable than not, but what makes SM3DW so special is that it radiates joy. The vibrant colors and visual themes of each stage are consistently beautiful (even the caves), and make a whimsical combination with the bright, jazzy instrumentation.
The mood is complemented by inventive game design, which is unexpected for such a long-running series. SM3DW abandons all conventions of 2D and 3D platform games, instead blending the two seamlessly. The balance between these two styles varies greatly from stage to stage, which works to draw out the strengths and weaknesses of each of the five playable characters. I haven't even gotten to the power ups yet - the Cat Suit brings along a playstyle so unique that it could have an entire game solely devoted to it. Nintendo is known for innovation and wild ideas, and SM3DW is filled to the brim with clever mechanics.
Super Mario 3D World is wildly creative, joyful, maybe even magical. It's a must-play, whether that means you go it alone or with the help of some friends.
Game of the Year 2013
Fire Emblem: Awakening
What used to be something of a niche title picked up a lot of steam with Awakening, and for good reason. FE:A is a brilliant adaptation that feels like an evolution of Japanese games. Western games are known and loved for their dedication to player choice, and many have argued that Japanese games are falling out of favor because of their linearity. FE:A takes this argument and bites back, giving the player more agency while maintaining a linear story. Just don't hold your breath for any "moral choice" binaries, because they're not coming.
For those who don't know, Fire Emblem is a turn-based strategy series with multiple units making movements on a grid. Each "piece" on the "board" is a character with strengths and weaknesses depending on their weapon or magic. As the game gets rolling, you'll quickly find yourself commanding an army, and each character in your army has their own motivations, personality quirks, likes, and dislikes. Characters that often fight together will unlock bonus conversations that increase their "Support Level," and characters that max their Support Level have bonus content at the end of the game.
The way that Awakening incorporates player choice is directly tied to the characters you use and who they develop relationships with. Without spoiling anything, romantic relationships between characters will have a direct impact on other members of your army. Even more importantly, your in-game avatar is not only one of the strongest playable units in the game, he or she will play a critical role in the game's story (a first for the Fire Emblem series). The plot itself is generally fixed, but the ways in which you can experience it are impressively broad. For example, if your main character is a healer, they are likely to be fighting near units that take a lot of damage, and are much more likely to develop relationships with different characters than if they were a brawl-wary thief. Furthermore, the characterization is spectacular, which I'm sure is thanks to the game's excellent localization. Awakening is also the first in the series to offer a "casual" mode as an alternative to what is now known as "hardcore mode," where characters that are killed in combat are gone forever. Additionally, players choose a difficulty that impacts the aggression and strategic skills of the opponent's AI. The strategy genre as a whole is traditionally far from newcomer friendly, but these two settings go a long way in making the game approachable to newcomers while providing challenge to those who seek it.
For all of the things it does right in regards to player choice, Fire Emblem Awakening is just as strong in its linear aspects. Key plot points and important battles are given life by an incredible soundtrack. It'd be an enormous spoiler to go into depth about the track above, but the song represents one of my favorite moments in gaming in 2013. Although the story of the game doesn't have much to say thematically, the pacing and twists will easily keep you hooked through the 20-30 hour campaign. As the credits start rolling, you're rewarded with an ending that details the aftermath for each individual in your army - a Fire Emblem tradition that never disappoints.
Fire Emblem Awakening is a masterpiece that challenges conceptions of linear and non-linear games in a genre that many games have "evolved" out of. For its gripping story and gameplay loop, extensive customization, and unique balance of player choice, Fire Emblem Awakening is my favorite game of 2013.
Platinum Games has a reputation for pulling off absurd, badass, and zany set pieces, and this game is no exception. Revengeance takes it to the next level with its dynamic music design. Each boss fight has several different versions of the same song, delicately layered and looped so that as soon as the action gets real, the music does too (check out this boss fight from the first 15 minutes of the game). And as far as "zany set pieces" go, I have no idea how anyone is going to top this game's final boss. Seriously, I cannot handle the end of this game (don't worry about spoilers, you really shouldn't be playing this for the plot anyway).
Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch
We RPG fans knew we were in for a treat after the announcement of Ni No Kuni, a collaboration between the RPG masterminds at Level 5 and the animation legends at Studio Ghibli. The bigger surprise was how hard it delivered on its premise. Gameplay as simple as walking around town was a blissful experience, thanks to the jaw-dropping environments and uplifting soundtrack. Much like an animated movie, the story could be a little predictable, but the scenes were so thoughtfully done that their impact was not at all lessened. It's fitting that they wrote a story about a boy travelling to a magical world, because in my experience with the game, that is exactly what they accomplished.
Phantom Breaker: Battlegrounds
The "beat 'em up" genre has seen a big comeback thanks to today's digital game stores, but beyond the removal of arcadey, quarter munching difficulty, it hasn't changed that much. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I mean, there's a lot of fun to be had in the button mashing of stuff like Castle Crashers. But Phantom Breaker: Battlegrounds stood out to me because it's a different kind of beat 'em, one that requires thought and skill through its fighting game-inspired mechanics. I think it's largely gone unappreciated, but the rewarding combat, awesome hand drawn pixel art, and catchy chiptunes easily made it one of my favorites of 2013.
Pokemon X / Y
Although it's been said that the main story of X and Y was a step down from the achievements of Black and White, I don't think that's really what matters. X and Y, to me, was a celebration of the player, made evident by the character customization, the impressively fresh new Pokemon, the availability of classic Pokemon, and the close interactions with your team in "Pokemon Amie." Whether you're a new player or an old fan, I think it's exceptionally easy to find a home in Pokemon X and Y.
While running through the campaign of Dead Space 3, I struggled to decide if I was enjoying myself or not. I guess I was desperate, waiting for any sign of the series I had grown to love. Surely, that fierce tension would return? It's a feeling the original Dead Space showed the world, and Dead Space 2 mastered: overwhelming uncertainty of your chances of survival, contrasted with an urgent demand for action. I trudged forward, waiting for that feeling, and before I knew it the credits were rolling and I had seen all there was to see. I couldn't have felt more lost.
If you're not a fan of horror, you should know that I'm really not either. Disturbia is the scariest movie I have ever finished, and I've given up minutes in to anything that crosses that threshold. I say this because it's telling of how compelling the gameplay of Dead Space really is, that a wuss like me could bring himself to finish the game and come out loving it.
The defining system of Dead Space gameplay is "dismemberment": your enemies have really long, really deadly, and really gross limbs that protrude from their bodies, and unless you use your weaponry to slice them off piece by piece, you'll find the same being done to you in an elaborate, gruesome "Game Over" cinematic. Carefully placed shots are not only rewarded, they're made necessary by the near-infinite number of bullets it would take to kill a necromorph otherwise. Necromorphs might creep towards you slowly (with an unsettling twitch here and there), but it always felt like a race against time trying to finish one off before it shoved its claws into you. You can imagine my confusion when Dead Space 3 brought me face to face with necromorphs that dashed all over the screen and died long before being sufficiently cut to pieces. More than that, there were entire chapters filled with plain old human enemies waiting to be showered in bullets. I couldn't find so much as a hint of the methodical, "make every shot count and do it right now" combat that brought me here in the first place.
It's clear that the game was designed around being far less scary, and ironically, that's not what I wanted at all. Where we used to have limited resources and strategy on how to use them, instead we were given a crafting system to make all kinds of crazy, powerful guns. Instead of limited ammo and supplies forcing players to go outside of their comfort zone, we were given a universal ammo system that meant you only switched weapons when you got bored with what you were holding. The tension of pacing down dark, labyrinthine hallways was replaced with well-lit, open areas where you were never caught off guard. Isaac Clarke's feelings of isolation and hallucinations of his murdered-by-zombies-girlfriend were taken away, and we were given an angry, cussing, bro-tastic bro dude to shout at you during the action (gamers love those guys, right?). Other than the setting and weapon designs, there wasn't anything about this game that made me feel like it belonged in the Dead Space series. Maybe this is all an issue of expectation management, but am I wrong to feel this way when there's a giant "3" in the game's title?
After the masterpiece that was Dead Space 2, I was convinced that Visceral Games could do no wrong. I wasn't deterred when EA made the egregious statement that Dead Space 3 needed to sell 5 million to succeed (numbers are a well-kept secret, but estimates say that's far and beyond double the sales of any previous entry). Lots of games in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era bent themselves backwards trying to reach a broader audience, and although they often failed to do so, most of the games were still enjoyable. Until Dead Space 3, I had never seen a game so far removed from what was right for the series. I guess the success of annual titles like Madden, Call of Duty, and Assassin's Creed made publishers hungry, hungrier than they ever deserved to be. EA bet the farm that more action would make Dead Space 3 the success they wanted, and they were dead wrong.
The problem is that action games are fun when they're empowering, and horror games are fun when they're not. Perfectly balance the two, and you end up feeling nothing at all. I can only hope that Dead Space 3 will serve as a reminder that a game can only be stretched so far.
2013 has been an amazing year in video games. It was the end of the generation and expectations for those games reached a peak. We expected games that fully harnessed the technical limitations of the consoles as the developers adapted to them over the past 7 years. We expected games that pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be an interactive experience as the landscape of the industry steadily evolved over the generation.
And 2013 delivered. The breadth and variety in the many great games was truly astounding. Large studio development pushed interactive storytelling to the limits. The landscape of independent game development continued to profoundly affect the industry to the point where the term “indie” became obsolete. Criticism in games became ever more pointed, and it's a sign of growth and maturity in the industry.
As such, I had the chance to experience a substantial amount of games this year. This is the first year in which I've had such a comprehensive overview, as I finished around 30 games. I'm glad this is the year when I was able to play so many games, because game experiences are much more concise these days. Playing 30 games a decade ago would probably have been an exponentially greater time investment. I've also been away from Nintendo hardware and games for a long time, and I came back in full force at the end of the year with purchases of both a 3DS XL and a Wii U. The differences in these games were pretty far reaching. I've realized how much I've missed by not playing video games from Nintendo, and it has certainly affected my list this year more than I expected.
Thinking of the year as a whole, it's been hard to pin down the Zeitgeist. And I think that's really what the year boils down to, the variety of different story lines in the industry. There have been so many things in the pipeline that have been building up through the past generation that the result is that video games are heading towards a variety of different directions. Whether it is the further emancipation of developers from publishers, the rise of streaming and e-sports, or digital distribution and all-in-one hardware, 2013 as the summation of the previous generation, shows that the future will be very exciting.
The Lists: Top Ten Games of the Year and Ten Honourable Mentions
The Rest: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, DmC Devil May Cry, Proteus, Ridiculous Fishing, The Room Two, Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale, Sim City
Have Yet to Play: Fire Emblem: Awakening, Rayman Legends, Pikmin 3, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, Guacamelee, Cart Life, Samurai Gunn
Nintendo had the best line-up of games in a long while this year, and it ended it spectacularly with Super Mario 3D World. Having been away from Nintendo systems since the Gamecube, 3D World has reinvigorated in me, the pure joyous feeling that is capable in video games. Not only was it a system seller (I bought a Wii U to play this), but it was a profound reassessment of what I thought video games should be and how they can be designed. This game reminded me how collectibles can be fun with the clever level designs that encourages you to think more laterally (and sometimes vertically). It also doesn't hurt that this game is incredibly fun with friends as well. Who would have thought a cat suit would have been the best addition to a beloved franchise?
