Havent played all the "blockbusters" of 2013, but here it goes: 1. The Last of Us 2. Bioshock Infinite 3. Beyond 2 souls 4. Rayman Legends LoU and Bioshock stands out.
Heh? Bioshock Infinite Assassins Creed 4 Last of Us Batman Arkham Origins GTA V Dead Space 3 Beyond God of War Ascension Rayman Legends Gears of War: Judgement Tomb Raider Saints Row IV Splinter Cell Blacklist etc... Thats an "awful" year?
I was about to say this year wasn't awful but then I remembered that faux Sim City game was released this year and my opinion on the year went to crap. That game did not deserve to be called Sim City... Ugh. I sold my PS3 too early to get to play Beyond and Last of US (Come on ND, give me a PS4 port!), haven't had a chance to play all the awesome small titles on PC yet, and while Bioshock was a fun story I hated it's combat. So my top games of the year are: 1.Rogue Legacy - I had a ton of fun playing this and put in over 20 hours into the game 2.GTAV- highs and lows in storytelling and missions but all in all I good GTA game. Online is kind of cruddy with the leveling system but I still haven't played all the different game types with my friend 3. Gears of War: Judgement - I am a sucker for a Gears game even one that is a total rip off... Nope gonna strike Gears:Judgement, the campaign was awesome fun but not in the same vein of a regular Gears game and that multiplayer was a joke. Shoulda been a $30-40 expansion of Gears3. so my list is only: 1.Rogue Legacy and 2. GTAV... Wait gonna add Resogun to the list too... Actually, I probably should just take some time and really think it over. For now strike everything other than; SimCity being really crappy, Rogue Legacy awesome, GTAV being solid, Resogun having a fun co-op, and Gears: Judgement being a rip off.
Arkham Origins was TERRIBLE. I know I'm in the minority, but the Last of Us was a massively overrated game with crappy mechanics. Some people have claimed it's the best game of the last console generation. They are ********ing high as a kite. It's not even Naughty Dogs best game, that goes to Uncharted 2. While I loved Gears of War, Judgement was a little disappointing. I wanted more. GTA V is GOTY
Yes, but those were the more or less "high profile" releases, some of them good and some of them not. I havent played them all myself. But overall its been a pretty good year.
Have to agree with Dante here. I know the Last of Us has gotten a few nods for GotY already, but it's just not a game. It's another step "forward" in the awful trend of making players watch mroe and interact less. Having said that, I enjoyed Bioshock Infinite but it's even worse in that sense because the FPS gameplay moments are pretty detached from the story and entirely unnecessary. So go figure. I've spent a lot of my playing time this year catching up with old games, like Spelunky, Borderlands 2 and even Tomb Raider (which I bought over 6 months after release). Also playing Civ 5 as always, which got a great expansion this year, but it already feels like forever ago. I did pick up AC4 and it looks amazing but I haven't really started yet. So I don't really have a GotY 2013... yet? For 2014 I'm looking forward to the South Park game (not as a GotY candidate I'm sure but I will be picking it up right away) and the Diablo 3 expansion at least for the first half of the year.
I read an article a few months after Infinite came out that said the beginning of the game had the look and feel of the greatest adventure game every made by a mile; then you gore someone's face in, and the shooting starts. I thoroughly enjoyed Infinite, but I thought the author has a point. It would have been quite the experience to play Infinite as an adventure, as long as the rest of the game looked and played like that first hour. Infinite and GTA V were the only two games that came out in 2013 that held my interest long enough to beat them, so they're tops of my list I suppose.
These are all the games I remember playing this year, and the way I would rank them in order of enjoyment. Not all of them might be 2013 releases, some might be 2012 releases I only got around to playing this year. Saints Row IV Bioshock Infinite Dead Space 3 Tomb Raider 2013 Assassins Creed: Black Flag Borderlands 2 XCOM: Enemy unknown Total War: Rome II Batman: Arkham Origins The Testamant of Sherlock Holmes Metro Last Light Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition I also played the Leisure Suit Larry remake, though not sure if it would belong on the above list for any other reason than nostalgia.
Its a matter of perspective what constitutes a good year and what does not. Like I said, I havent played them all, but I have played at least 4-5 great games, which is enough to warrant it a good year for gaming (imo). Certainly not awful. Maybe you're just a little spoiled. lol
It was the worst year in living memory. You had the perfect storm of the last console generation winding down and anything decent from the next being delayed.
One thing of note for me in 2013 was not only that Indie games were strong but that many divergent types of gameplay (whether new or nostalgic) or games that don't require the typical "kill X" objectives were strong - Papers Please, The Stanley Parable and Gone Home for example are deservedly on tons of GotY lists. (I played Papers Please, just picked up the Stanley parable but haven't gotten Gone Home yet.)
Favorites played in 2013 1. Bastion (2011) 2. Saints Row the Third (2011) - So much fun. I did play some SRIV, but it was hard to divest it from this one and compare it on its own. 3. Tomb Raider - Gameplay was superb. 4. Sleeping Dogs (2012) 5. Brave New World DLC for Civilization V - Really improved this game immensely. Trade routes are a cool addition to the franchise. Biggest Disappointment Sim City - Beyond just the release debacle, they designed it to be a multi-player game but failed miserably in understanding how to make that functional or fun. Worst played in 2013 Bioshock Infinite - Bioshock seemed great for an hour, then took me on a mostly tedious 12 hour journey just to take a giant dump in my face in the final chapter. Best gaming related in 2013 Steam Trading Cards - What? This shouldn't work on an educated, discerning consumer such as myself. It totally does, though. Most Anticipated 2014 Transistor Steam Machines
i love the trading cards. i have zero interest in crafting badges with them, but i love making bank off the backs of those that do. i bought around 5-6 games during the holiday sale (mostly indie or older titles), and i didn't use a dime of my own money. it boggles my mind, though, to see how much money people "threw away" to level up their snow globe badge. it makes no sense to me.
Not sure if I would call it a bad year. Perhaps you did not have that one title that swept away everything else, but you had several very good games.
It's strangely addictive in a way that makes me never want to become a day trader. I saw one guy with a 2013 level 2013 snow globe badge. That's about $3000 he would have had to spend. It's interesting to watch the marketplace react and move with the crazy sales too. Valve must be having a field day analyzing the data (and collecting their 5%/$.01 per transaction). The announcement of third party Steam Machines ranging from $499-$6000 today does not have me optimistic about that purchase, though.
GOTY - Last of Us It had some little issues with the game play, and it took a few hours to get going, but it was a great game even if I take away the fact that it probably had the most engrossing story of any video game I've played. Runner up - GTA 5 A fantastic achievement for an open world game, lovely graphics, memorable characters, okay story. It raised the bar for GTA games as they said they would...but it also suffered from the same problems all GTA games suffer from imo - it gets a little too repetitive driving from a to b etc. Needs to have more interiors accessible and more variety in missions...I hope thats what they work on for the next step. Also, major letdown on the online. Not just all the issues they had getting it up and running, but even when it was working it didn't give what was promised and got boring pretty quickly (My friends and I played it for about a week and a half....haven't played it since).
I'm not too surprised, that game really divided players in the "hate it or love it" camps. What I admire most about it is the ambition of its narrative and the way the model of time is internally consistent. I can understand though that people who are more indifferent about those aspects of a game would find the mere gameplay mechanics not enough to keep them interested throughout the game.
Yeah I can concede to that. What really made the game shine was the powerful story, and the amazing world the developers crafted. In many instances I found myself just wanting to get over the gunfights, admitteldy at times rather tedious, to progress further in the narrative. It has in some ways completely changed the way I look at other video games and their stories. Anyhoo, BEST GAME EVA!!
I'm not at all indifferent about the narrative. I can forgive irritating gameplay (especially the terrible PC controls), but Bioshock Infinite's story is total crap. I'll talk a bit about it in spoiler tags below... Spoiler (Move your mouse to the spoiler area to reveal the content) Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler Columbia looks terrific and has really interesting initial qualities, but none of them are ever delved into in any way. The citizens are racists, so it is okay to shoot them. That's as deep as it gets. Then when you run out of white people to kill, the game uses "parallel dimensions" to turn the Vox Populi into the villains, so you have more people to kill. To say that the oppressed are just as bad as the oppressor is kind of a despicable worldview. But does anything about Columbia really matter? No. The meta-narrative is the important thing. The game foreshadows the two "twists" early on, in the Hall of Presidents mission I think, but I can't imagine either being terribly surprising if that was missed. I spent most of the game wondering which one would be the twist, thinking that using both of them would be too over the top, but I was wrong. The final chapter is basically a long cutscene, you're forced to participate in by walking through the motions pre-determined for you. The choices you made earlier in the game don't matter. You don't get to make choices now. Then it ends with a final scene which even if you're ignoring the basic time travel paradox doesn't really make sense. Then after 15 minutes of credits, you get 5 seconds that make that previous scene completely incomprehensible. I've seen the "time lines" people have created, but I think there are too many things being ignored for it to work. Sorry for the rant.... I've just been seeing a lot of Bioshock stuff with the end of year reviews, and every time I think about that game, I get angry. Which maybe speaks better of it than a game I would completely forget.
I've played a few on the list I really liked Tomb Raider, GTA V and surprised no one mentioned Injustice... Saints 4 was fun at first but once you got your dude maxed out it was way too easy.... I just picked up Arkham Origins and so far I'm liking it...