#I feel like half of the GOTY line is just like

[smol-blue-bird]

Sorry to be back on my American Girl doll bullshit, but words cannot describe the absolute seething hatred I have for Chrissa Maxwell, McKenna Brooks, and Isabelle Palmer

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Ok this is mostly going to be rambling about Tears of the Kingdom, but I'll at least briefly mention a couple other things I keep meaning to say something about and not getting around to.

Pixel Puzzle Makeout League was surprisingly good and deserves its own post because it does some unexpected things.

Theatrhythm Final Bar Line is still mixed but overall more good than bad and generally has similar positives and negatives to the previous Theatrhythm games and Melody of Memory (which is better as a game than any of the Theatrhythm games even if it still has some issues too).

The Outer Worlds is...a game. I totally forgot I started it at some point, and it hasn’t made a huge impression on me in the first five hours or however long.

Cadence of Hyrule is great for a while and does a lot of things right, but there’s a kind of frustrating spike in difficulty near the end, and I’m not sure if I’ll bother finishing it.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed is already GOTY 2023 for me, even if 99% of other people will say it’s TotK. Some day I’ll get around to that XC3 post...

Anyway, as someone who liked a bunch of things about Breath of the Wild but found enough frustrating about it that it took four attempts at playing the game to make it past a single Divine Beast and then give up forever, Tears of the Kingdom brings almost all the same problems along with it but mitigates them enough that I’ve finished a temple without giving up on the game and stopping playing for several months a single time so far.

The really short version is that I think everything in Steph Sterling’s soon-to-be infamous review is true and accurate, and the main thing I disagree with is that at least based on my enjoyment of actually playing the two games I’d have to give BotW an even lower score. Come at me, haters please don’t actually and go do something more fun like playing the game you like so much because I’m glad you’re enjoying it

Yes I’m 100% one of those people who thinks weapon durability has never been a positive thing in any game I’ve played (with the possible exception of certain Fire Emblem games) and Skyward Sword introducing a stamina meter to Zelda was a mistake. I’m happy for people who think they add something to the game for them, but for me they're actively anti-fun and constantly interrupt me when I’m trying to engage with all the neat systems the game has. Please just incentivize me to try new things by rewarding me positively for doing it (see: XC3 and in particular Future Redeemed) instead of punishing me for not playing the game the way you want me to.

Thankfully new additions like weapon fusion and ascend go a decent way to mitigate the frustration I have from stuff like that. I can skip a lot of the tedious climbing, and between avoiding most combat and gooping items together I’ve never had a shortage of actually decent weapons since like halfway through the tutorial.

Another positive is the ability set this time around. It’s a bit weirder on the surface, but they complement each other well and feel a lot less janky to me. Half the time with stuff like stasis I felt like I was fighting against the game trying to get the correct angle and momentum, but the new set of abilities pretty much always does what I want it to and lets me do all sorts of silly things in ways that don’t even seem like they should work at first. The game is at its best when I’m just messing around with that stuff to invent and solve problems in unusual ways.

And then the game is at its worst when I have to do combat of any kind. I can tolerate it better than in the previous game, but I’m still not a fan. I’m still reluctant to use my best weapons or any items I don’t have a reliable supply of, and the controls are still wack. You cannot convince me that run on B and jump on X isn’t crazy or that not being able to remap them is a good idea. I’m also still not a fan of the half dozen popup menus for changing weapons or selecting items or whatever because while they do technically work they’re so awkward to use and would really benefit from a third hand. Finally the N64 controller’s true purpose is revealed.

And speaking of menus, the menus still kinda suck too. Why is every food ingredient and every rock and every bug and every plant and 7000 other things dumped into a single tab instead of having sub-categories? Why is every single one of them available in the popup menu for attaching them to arrows or throwing them or whatever with apparently no way to at least favorite things? Why are there no options in the options menu like changing the volume (ideally with music/voice/sound effects separately adjustable)?

And why is the map? Why can’t I reveal stuff on the map just by going there? Why after the map is revealed is there no way to tell which parts of it I’ve been to already and which ones I haven’t (especially annoying so far for tiny random sky islands)? Why do I have to mark every stupid little thing on it by hand? I am playing the game on a computer, and my map exists on an in-game computer. Computers are supposed to deal with this crap for me so I can do something fun instead. And this is coming from someone who drew their own maps for the NES/SNES games on graph paper and actually enjoyed it.

A lot of these things aren’t huge deals on their own, but I’ve been spoiled by the vast number of quality of life features in XC3 and its DLC recently, and the little things add up. And I know there are people at Nintendo who know how to address these things because literally people from Monolith worked on both BotW and TotK, just not on those specific parts of them as far as I understand (mainly with building the open worlds because they already had previous experience doing that).

On the plus side, even if I’m a little underwhelmed by the story and storytelling (thanks again for ruining everything for me, Monolith), it was immediately much more engaging to me than BotW’s was. Wow, there are actual characters with motivations and stuff right off the bat. Neat! No offense to anyone who liked Calamity Ganon and the Calamity in general, but that was the least compelling antagonist in a Zelda game since probably the NES for me, and I’m glad they’ve taken a bit of a different approach this time. We’ll see what I think if/when I get further through it, but so far it’s at least better even if I don’t entirely love it.

I dunno, it’s something I guess. There’s just enough there for me that I’m still going, but it sure is good at discouraging me from doing stuff that would be lots of fun for me with minor tweaks. But hey, at least locking on to enemies actually follows them with the camera again now, so that’s nice. You know, that feature they literally invented for Ocarina of Time and nearly every 3D game anyone’s made has used since then but then they decided not to in BotW because...reasons?

In conclusion, it seems to be a great game for many other people and a decent but frequently frustrating one for me, but shifted a bit more toward decent and a bit less toward frustrating than the previous game. I’m still not convinced either one of them is a Zelda game though. They feel like something totally different to me with a vague Zelda theme overlaid on them. Oh also the puzzles are much better this time around so far. So that’s nice and more Zelda-y. And maybe we’ll get a Musou game out of it again in a couple years like we did last time, which would be nice because Age of Calamity was the best Zelda game since A Link Between Worlds (not counting remakes and stuff).

[in-the-dollpalace]

time periods AG has not covered yet

It has been stated here alot  that they could cover the same decade twice with a differant POV, since alot of interesting things have happened every year depending on where, and who you are, as demonstrated by Nanea, Molly, and Emily; or Samantha and Nellie, etc. But here are some decades that they have not covered at all.

-any time before 1760s. Beleive it or not, there is american histry pre-revolution. My american history class started with Columbus and Jamestown. And lets be honest, if AG ever does do this time period, they will probably go the settler/pilgrim route. BUT if they wern’t cowards, they could do any time period with native americans, even all the way back to pre historic times. There are many different and unique native tribes with beautiful cultures and history. They can, and should, explore that more.

-the rest of the 1700s. There is nothing for 1780s, 1790s, or 1800s. I think exploring the actual revolutionary war and the post-war years of the new country trying to put itself together would be interesting

-1830s and 1840s. there is a gap between the 1820s and 1850s that they have never filled, and i think there could be some interesting topics there

-the second half of the 1800s. Its crazy how they jumped straight from mid-century with addy, all the way to the next with samantha. Theres just such a huge gap, and this is where the most want has been here on AG tumblr. I see lots of people complaining about the lack of late 1800s dolls, and seen many cool OCs too. I just feel like there is an untapped potential here.

-1920s. AG has payed the most attention to the 1900s, it seems. This is fine, considering how much the world rapidly changed in the century, I suppose. But there is one decade that is notebly missing. It is unknown why they have avoided this decade so far, especially considering that it is right up their ally with the others they have rolled out these last few years. But there are rumors of a 1920s dolls coming soon, so who knows

-1990s. This is one that is a controversial topic from what i’ve seen. Lots of people seem to think it is too recent, but everyone also thought the same about Julie and Courtney when they came out. The reality is, after about 40 years, AG considers it history. Molly came out in the 80s, Julie in the 2000s, courney in the early 2020s, etc. And the rest of the 1900s girls were filled in along the way. So I do truely think that by the late 2020s or early 2030s, they will make a 90s girl.

-any 21st century. At the moment im writing this, I do not think that they ever will extend the historical line into the 2000s and beyond, because the GOTY already covers every single year of this century as a “modern” story (which some have already become period pieces as we get further and further away from that year) but who knows. I would not be suprised if there was a 2000s girl by the 2040s. Or maybe the historical line will be defunct by then based on the pattern of AG pushing it further and further out of focus. I truely do not know

[pocketbelt]

Pokémon Violet impressions

Finally got to finishing it after putting it on hold a bit to handle other stuff. Bit of a different format because it isn't so cleanly divided. The short form is that it is, in spite of it all, the best the main series has ever pulled. But, due to some stylistic and design choices, I do think Legends Arceus pips it for the full series' best title, and I do like that one more, much as I loved this.

Paldea as a region is one of high highs and low lows; I think most of the southern half of the island is just kind of whatever. The towns there feel kind of bleh and uninteresting, and the spread of available Pokémon in the south is kind of lacking. There's only a few mons of interest in the southwest and south, and things are a bit spicier in the southeast (Axew! Charcadet!) but it isn't until you start going towards the "middle" of the island, the pure west and east ends, that things really start to open up, to get interesting and towns and cities start looking good. Eventually Violet starts firing on all cylinders, and when it does, it's slamming it out of the park.

Following on from that, while the opening areas feel a bit bleh and dry for Pokémon picks (unless you get lucky with what gets spawned in raids), once things start opening up, Gen IX's Pokédex is easily one of the best around. Lots of my favourites made it in, which helps, but the brand new Pokémon just keep getting better the further you go. Some are direct twists on old designs (Wiglett is an obvious example) that aren't "forms" of old mons, they just look similar but are different creatures, and that little bit of wiggle room in distinction lets them delightfully weird with reinventions. You need a lot less justification for how something can be an alt form of another creature when it turns out they aren't the same creature at all, they just "so happen" to look like it. I was fond enough of Sword & Shield's lineup and all, but Scarlet & Violet's is way beyond it.

In particular, I really can't understate how important going in fairly blind is. I bang on about it a lot elsewhere, but of all the design aspects that must be considered for an open world, the most critical of all is that there must be surprise. There needs to be secrets, there needs to be things for you to find that you did not expect and could not have anticipated. This is what makes Elden Ring my GOTY pick this year, because it is wall-to-wall secrets and surprises and things I couldn't have fathomed. Likewise, the lack of this is what ultimately damns Zelda: Breath of the Wild, because after a point there's just nothing to find. It's always a shrine, or a breakable weapon of which there aren't very many types. This is the crux of making a good open world: these things are ultimately based around exploration no matter how you slice it, and for exploration to be interesting in a game, there has to be something new to see, find, experience and do. Pokémon's core conceit of finding ever newer creatures to fight, catch, tinker with and use is a natural fit for the format, and in this respect Pokémon Violet slams it out of the park. I was just continuously delighted and routinely surprised by new Pokémon all the way to the end, after I got past the first two gyms' zones. That they could do this across two open world Pokémon games in the same year, as Legends Arceus did the same back at the start of 2022, is fucking wild.

A lot is made about the performance issues and bugs Scarlet & Violet have, and to an extent it's true; this game could've used more time, because it is genuinely ambitious, perhaps too much for how little time (relatively) Game Freak had for it. You might scoff at that, and cite games like BOTW or Xenoblade 3 as proof otherwise, but having played both (Xeno 3 is my second-in-line for GOTY, even!), the claim that ScVi aren't ambitious and their open world isn't as complex just doesn't hold up: - ScVi are constantly, constantly generating and placing Pokémon all around you, in much more aggressive fashion than either BOTW or Xeno 3. There's so many of these bastards around you at all times, way more than what BOTW has loading in and out and regularly matching and passing Xeno 3's enemy numbers. It's actually a nuisance, at times: the hitboxes for proccing fights are a bit bigger than the model of the Pokémon, and with so many tiny ones around it's so easy to stumble into fights that it practically feels like you're back in the old random-battle days sometimes. - On top of spawn lists changing for time-of-day and weather conditions, lots of Pokémon have specialised animations and scripting and variations to react to different environments and spawn conditions, making the dirty great numbers of them more impressive than what Xeno 3 can do. Magikarp are distinct from all other fish Pokémon because they can go up on land and have special flopping animations for doing so; windy weather starts slinging light Pokémon, like the Hoppip and Jigglypuff family lines, through the air at high speeds, practically ragdolling as they go; ghosts fade in and out, Pokémon with shells will hide when approached too quickly and stay there, some mons dig underground to travel and all Pokémon have different aggressive/passive behaviours based on species, regardless of player party level or the like. By contrast, enemies in Xeno 3 are a lot more static, not reacting to the environment or its variables and only deciding aggression based on player level, enemy tier or direct contact; BOTW only has a handful or two of enemies to balance out giving them more numerous behavioural routines and reactions to actions taken around and against them. It's not either of these are worse or less enticing than ScVi, just as ScVi isn't worse or less enticing than these; each game's approach is based on the experience it wants to deliver, and Pokémon's central goal is to make its world feel teeming with life and also pay respect to the long-established behaviours and traits of a good ~400 or so distinct creatures. - Moreover, ScVi's only loading zones are when you go into Mesagoza or inside the few kinds of buildings that have distinct interiors, and outside of that the game only loads when fast-travelling or when you're starting the game. It matches BOTW in this respect, and Xeno 3 segments all of its sizeable zones apart, loading in between them. To say it isn't impressive is to either not understand the potato the game's running on, or to simply be wrong. - Further, ScVi is multiplayer and Xeno 3 and BOTW aren't. It's actually kind of insane how well ScVI's multiplayer works: it tracks four players across the entire open world and adjusts spawns, even accounting for version exclusives, to the areas immediately around them while fairly accurately tracking positioning for all players and all Pokémon around them. Again, considering the potato this is running on, it is genuinely impressive.

All that said, it's true; the game's state is far from ideal. To some extent it's unavoidable; even Xeno 3 is having to pull resolution and rendering tricks and aggressively culls models at a noticeable distance to keep the Switch from lighting on fire. But there's a level of bugs and technical issues that betray that this one needed a bit more time, even just half a year could've made such a difference. Most bugs are simply silly things, visual oddities or momentarily getting stuck in a falling animation, nothing new to open world games, but sometimes things can go hilariously wrong. For what it's worth, playing alone for basically my entire run time outside of a few hours with a friend after beating the story, the worst I had was the odd visual glitch and one lone crash, where the game soft-locked on a fight trigger. A lot of the more recurring issues are things like entry and script triggers that have visuals for debugging (in this case, a non-glowing Pokéball, as glowing ones denote items you can pick up) being visible when they shouldn't be, or the game's memory management and camera disagreeing, leading to it unloading terrain that's still in view and having to rapidly re-load it as the camera was sliding around to set up a fight. A lot of this, while far from game-ruining and even, for me, not actually affecting immersion or the experience that much, is still worth a slap or two simply because Pokémon: Legends Arceus released 10 months prior and simply didn't have any of these same issues. There's some nuance to that - PLA's world is actually a set of smaller open world regions akin to Xenoblade than one singular giant world, for example - but it speaks to how ScVi both needed more time and how there wasn't as much communication between teams as there perhaps should've been. For that, I mean, PLA's menus and various tradition-breaking quality-of-life enhancements (ScVi share a lot of the key ones, but not all) surpass Violet's by a fair bit, when that should've been tech and design shared completely.

While the first two gym leaders are a bit plain, Gen IX sports some of the best gym leaders in terms of design and character (VIII had a fair few contenders as well, so they're just generally getting better as they go) and gives a lot more character to its cast than Pokémon has for a while. In truth I never found Gen V's attempts at a bigger plot and more character all that enthralling, but this feels like a renewed attempt at that, at actually being more of an RPG than the series usually is. Gym leaders starting from the Water & Electric Gyms onward are full of character and use their fleeting time very well; characters recur across scenes and have lots of great lines and fun moments, the storylines for the Team Star questline and Arven's whole story in the Herba Mystica questline are series bests, and the entire final sequence after you beat all three main questlines (Pokémon League, Team Star and Herba Mystica) is far and away the best ending sequence the series has in ways I simply don't want to spoil. This is one key area where ScVi beats Legends Arceus hands-down; despite the flavour of its isekai setup and the harshness of the older time period, PLA doesn't do too much with it or the characters it has. I mean, shit, there's an entire cast of teachers with fun personalities and scenes you can just completely skip by not hanging around the school at all, like I did, because I assumed all the classes were just framework for tutorials I didn't need!

The trade-off to that is that the enemy trainer roster has been savaged heavily; there's very few trainer types, with the majority falling under the broad scope of "student" because the academy at the core of the setting accepts students of all ages (akin to a university, if a university also accepted people as young as 5). There's a broader scope of body types on display, which is nice, but they try and beat the fact that every Student has the same uniform by mixing and matching eye and hair colours and styles/designs, which doesn't really work. Yeah, Pokémon trainers of any given type look the same as each other, but the designs have nearly always been pretty fucking strong in spite of it; the generics are all too generic, this time around. The pressure on Game Freak's dev time mostly shows through this sort of detail; as alive as the world is, its people outside the Gym Leaders, Team Star leaders and plot-centric characters are much duller and more boring than before. In particular, there's a shift in the art design for how most people are drawn from Gen VIII, and it actually hurts IX quite a bit. In particular, you have to try a good bit to make the player character not look terrible.

This isn't helped by one of the killer cutbacks: fashion items are mostly out the door, you can only pick headgear, bags, socks, shoes and gloves, more or less. Your body pieces are locked to one of four kinds of school uniform, which feels like an explicit cut to save time and resources. This is a crying shame, as recent games' fashion elements were a delightful part of giving character to, well, my character, and letting players express themselves.

I can keep going on, but the short of it is that Violet is fucking excellent, in spite of it all. There's just too much going on in terms of mechanics and technical aspects to say it isn't ambitious, and it can't even be called half-baked in its other aspects either; the characters and storyline writing is some of the series' best and it has some moments and lines that are just fantastic in their own right, and there's an eye for detail all over the place. There's foreshadowing for plot elements right from the get, there's well-executed character arcs, there's an internal attention to detail for long-established items and aspects of the series (there's a very distinctive pick for a certain character's Pokéball of choice that struck me, for instance). It isn't lazy, it isn't half-baked, far, far from it: Game Freak are showing a level of care and ambition they haven't been able to manage fully since the jump to 3D! But, they continue to be constrained by either time or resources, and either a significant expansion in staff (especially art asset staff) or a significant increase in dev-time is required.

We saw this a bit already - Sword & Shield having DLC expansions one year and outsourcing a remake of Gen IV the next gave them the time to put together two open world Pokémon games of very different stripes, at the same time. Imagine what they could pull if they had another year, or hell, focused all their staff on one game and handed the IP out for more spinoffs to fill time instead?

Who knows. Pokémon has been trying to build foundations to scale off of for several iterations now, and they finally managed to rip off the bandage of the series' built-in scope creep in Sword & Shield; god willing, the next one now has foundations to use.

[kerlonthenew]

Android shadow of mordor

ANDROID SHADOW OF MORDOR HOW TO

ANDROID SHADOW OF MORDOR UPGRADE

ANDROID SHADOW OF MORDOR WINDOWS 10

Don't buy it at the $30 price, but definitely think about it the next time it's on sale. Looking online, the GOTY edition has been down below $10 before. You can expect to see hundreds of pages of content created by fans just like you. The Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor Game Guide features hundreds of pages of content created by gamers just like you. The story has a main focus on the character Tailon. Fandom's app for Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor - created by fans, for fans. Talion Middle Earth Shadow Of War 8k Game 7680x4320 Wallpaper L Ombre Du Mordor La Terre Du Milieu. Although the story of the game resembles to the Lord of the Rings.

ANDROID SHADOW OF MORDOR WINDOWS 10

The best thing about this game is that the visual made in the game are more than realistic. Shadow is a Cloud Based Remote Gaming PC that is basically a Windows 10 PC you connect to via the internet Although Shadow Man clearly spawns from the console realm, the original designers have made it Shadow Man is an attractive package of weird, but the combat and maze-like levels bring it down. rkr army auction for sale in pakistan Rkr 1986 army auction. Middle-earth: Shadow of War cho Xbox One Bom tn hnh ng cho Xbox One Middle-earth: Shadow of War for Xbox One l ta game nhp vai hnh ng cc hay cho h my Xbox One, c pht hnh bi hng Warner Bros vo ngy. Middle earth: Shadow of Mordor is the game based on the perfect story line of war and wrath. AugPost a Comment Older Posts Popular Posts. I still think the game is really good though I got about 30 hours out of it, and only the last few felt like a slog. Read more android shadow of mordor wallpapers. By the time I started hunting named bosses I hardly ever died, so it was more common to have a completely empty grid of enemies than to have several Nemeses who had beaten me and leveled up. The Nemesis system is neat too, but I liked it better in theory than in practice. I stuck it out for the last fifth, and while it wasn't bad, it wasn't amazing either. I got about 80% of the way through the game and felt my desire to play flagging. BlueStacks app player is the best platform (emulator) to play this Android game on your PC or Mac for an immersive gaming experience. The game nails the Lord of the Rings environment, but the story itself feels pretty flimsy (especially the second half). Shadow of War is the second game in the Middle-Earth video-game franchise and the sequel to the positively acclaimed Shadow of Mordor. By the end of the game I was walking into fortresses openly just so I could take on a dozen orcs and laugh at the pile of bodies I left in my wake.īut there's only so long that can be entertaining. Continue Talions journey through Mordor and wage real-time battles to. WM-211896 is the search number for these. information about Middle-Earth: Shadow of War The Mobile Game on Android.

ANDROID SHADOW OF MORDOR UPGRADE

And when you upgrade abilities as you progress, you eventually become a swirling vortex of death. Talion Wallpaper Middle Earth Shadow Of Mordor Middle Earth Shadow.

ANDROID SHADOW OF MORDOR HOW TO

But once you get the tempo and learn how to counter, you start to really enjoy it. It starts out fairly difficult as you learn the ropes it's not a game you can just spam your attack button to win. It has some of the most fluid combat in any game I've played.

[doll-collecting-aerialist]

If I Was In Charge of AG:

Historical Line:

I wouldn’t necessarily bring back all the Historical characters. I feel like some characters haven’t stood the test of time, and rightfully reside in the vault. Felicity’s stories are incredibly dismissive to the presence of slavery, Maryellen’s gloss over disability and 1950s racism, Courtney is Courtney, and Julie is Julie. I would pull back all the characters in a world where that wouldn’t loose AG thousands, and keep the few that do stand the test of time (Kaya, Josefina, Caroline, Marie Grace, Cecile, Addy, Samantha, Nellie, Rebecca, Nanea, Melody, Ivy, etc..). The other characters (who aren’t bad, don’t get me wrong), would be reworked so the line was more diverse. Each character would at least have meet accessories, a bed, a second outfit, and pajamas, as well as any “staple” accessories from their books, that would always be available.

GOTY Line:

I feel like the GOTY line had its hay day in the 2010s, but I wouldn’t get rid of it completely. I’d bring back the exclusivity, however, well selling dolls like Luciana would get moved to a contemporary line at the end of the year, where they would receive a new meet outfit and accessories. This would get rid of dead weight (cough cough Blaire and Kira cough cough) that AG seems to be struggling with with their new three year retirement system, while keeping in the dolls that are giving them money.

Truly Me:

The Truly Me line is both genius and stupid. The idea of a blank slate doll is alluring, but the practice of it is chaotic, especially when these dolls are marketed as supposedly being in resemblance to the owner (even if AG is trying to abandon this, it’s still heavily implied). I feel like it’s also difficult to represent most groups of children with only fifteen-twenty available dolls. I’m not quite sure how one would go about fixing this issue, in an ideal world, I’d suggest replacing Truly Mes with the CYO line, but that’s not very practical.

I do like the theming AG has taken on in recent years, although using child influencers rubs me the wrong way. I think it could be cool to instead use older teen and adult role models, and every “season” could introduce a new profession with a new set of role models, with a new collection designed by them. Perhaps there could be a new book series introduced in addition to the smart girls guide series, where it talks about different professions, and how to get there!!

In terms of representing children with disability, I don’t think it’s completely fair that most of the disability related accessories are an additional price. I feel like any medical related set could be 25%-50% off when purchased with a doll, just so it’s a bit more fair for those who want to see themselves represented, but don’t have a lot of money in addition to the $120+ they’re already spending on a doll.

CYO Line:

Alright, AG needs more face molds. Like, desperately. And not just used for one doll and then thrown away. We need more than one Asian mold (let’s face it, the sonali mold has been co-opted as another mold for black characters, and I don’t see AG bringing back the number #4 mold as it’s a bit controversial). We need a molds with more pronounced noses that is not the josefina mold. We need molds that explicitly represent mixed ethnicities (Jess and Addy mold crossbetween??), etc etc you get the point.

We need more eye color options, I could see the old style green eyes doing really well, as well as a couple extra shades of brown. I feel like freckle patterns would also be an easy thing to expand on, at least the very least offering different colors of freckles to choose from (red?? darker brown??). AG could also probably find a market in adding more common skin conditions (vitiligo, scars).

I feel like AG could very easily add limb difference options to the CYO GUI. Options for no limb or half a limb, a prosthetic or no?? Idk, I just find it a bit stupid that they’re relying on third party charities to provide representation, when brands like OG have figured themselves out.

Finally, more hair options. Why is there only one textured wig option?? Would it be that difficult to add a medium length textured wig, or a textured wig with bangs? Can we get a curly style about the same length as the straight pixie cut they offer? Also, I’d add a star rating system for parents based on how much of a pain each wig is to take care of, aha.

[dancedance-resolution]

andi mack friendom, are you interested in some more thoughts about my andi mack / american girl crossover (which is actually just a thinly veiled info dump about american girl history and drama)? if so, you're in the right place!

the andi / buffy / cyrus doll set i designed would be a contemporary line.

CONTEXT (forewarning, this is basically just an ag info dump about the 2017 contemporary line) (also, tagging @kirstensleepey because i think this write up might be useful for the ag project you're working on <3):

so in 2017, american girl did a brand new thing. they released 3 dolls who were contemporary characters but not girls of the year. (prior to these dolls' release, which are called "the contemporary line" by the ag fandom, the only categories of ag dolls were historicals, girls of the year, and just like yous.)

the contemporary line was controversial for many reasons.

first, we have our main character, tenney grant. (tenney is basically taylor swift as a doll, if taylor were uncool and a r*publican lol.)

one of the reasons why tenney is so controversial is that she overshadowed the girl of the year (henceforth abbreviated as goty) 2017, gabriella mcbride.

tenney was released only one month after gabriella's release. ag's social media gave much more focus to tenney than gabriella. upon tenney's release, gabriella's store displays were downsized (which is unheard of for a goty). tenney even had a larger collection than gabriella!

why are we mad about tenney overshadowing gabriella? well, gabriella was ag's first (and as of 2021, ONLY) black goty. also, gabriella was ag's first doll to have an explicity confirmed disability - her stutter.

BRIEF INTERMESSION - SOME STATISTICS ABOUT DIVERSITY IN CHARACTER DOLLS:

only 7 out of the 22 total historical characters have been dolls of color. only 3 out of 22 historicals have been black (one of which is now retired). only 2 out of 22 have been aapi (one of these dolls, ivy, was just a best friend doll and is now retired; and the other doll, nanea, has a problematic face mold. i wrote an essay about why her facemold is problematic here!). only 1 historical doll, josefina, is hispanic, and ag has actually misspelled her name as "josephina" on their social media before.

only 1 doll EVER has been native american, kaya'aton'my, who is a historical character from 1764. (not even any of the just like you dolls have had kaya's face mold! kaya is truly the only indigenous doll!) in fact, ag has had more colonizer characters than indigenous characters. felicity and elizabeth are white character dolls from 1776, and their books fail to address the issues surrounding colonization and treatment of native americans. and kirsten is a swedeish immigrant to wisconsin in 1854. her book does acknowledge the existence of native americans, and kirsten has an indigenous friend named singing bird. (i haven't read kirsten's books and i'm not indigenous, so i can't comment on this storyline.) ag actually had a controversy about kirsten just this year - in 2021, the t-shirt design for kirsten said "settlers gonna settle", and ag actually ended up changing the design to "cabin sweet cabin" after backlash.

moving on to the girl of the year line - out of 21 goty dolls, gabriella is the ONLY black goty. only 6 out of 21 gotys have been dolls of color. there have been 2 hispanic characters (luciana, who is generally regarded as an excellent doll; and marisol, who is controversial because her book talks about how her family moved from pilsen chicago - a real area of chicago that is home to many hispanic immigrants - to a white suburb due to crime. this storyline involves racist stereotypes.) also, goty 2016 lea clark (slightly tan skin, blonde hair, light green eyes) is 1/8th brazilian, and some brazilian ag fans consider the emphasis on lea being 1/8th brazilian racial feticization. next, there have been 3 aapi gotys. one of these dolls, sonali, was one of two best friend dolls for chrissa (goty 2009) - yep, you heard that right, yet another doll of color that is a side character! sonali is the bully in chrissa's books, but she gets a redemption arc. to this day, sonali is ag's only south asian character doll. [additionally, there has been some criticism that all of the aapi gotys are mixed race - jess mcconell (goty 2006) has a japanese mother and an irish/scottish father, kanani akina (goty 2011) has a french/german mother and a japanese/hawaiian father, and sonali matthews has an indian mother and a father of unknown race/ethincity. perhaps notably, the only aapi historical doll who is not currently retired (nanea) is also mixed race (hawaiian mother and scottish father).]

as for the disability thing i mentioned - ag also has a disappointing track record regarding disability representation, lol. it was very lightly implied that mckenna (goty 2012) had a learning disability, but that was never confirmed. mckenna's tutor, who used a wheelchair, was ag's first big disability rep, but she was just a side character in mckenna's story. then, many ag fans were disappointed when mary ellen, a historical character released in 2015, was able-bodied (in canon, she had polio as a child, so it would make sense for mary ellen to be disabled and use mobility aids). finally, in 2020, goty joss gave us some disability rep - she has a hearing aid.

ag's lack of disability rep is very frustrating, especially considering that doll companies, like our generation, have made some really cool disabled dolls. and ag has been doing this ad campaign with the paralympics that feels performative to me - like, they want to seem inclusive by featuring dolls with prostetic legs, but they don't even sell dolls like that!!!

lastly, religious diversity - iirc, there are three jewish dolls (rebecca, goty 2001/2002 lindsey, and goty 2009 chrissa). the rest of the dolls are either christian or of unspecified religion. there has never been an explicitly muslim, hindu, or buddhist doll, or a doll who is a member of any religion other than judaism/christianity/unspecified. (there is some hope that we might get a muslim doll, though, since an outfit with a hijab was leaked, and ag trademarked a persian name that i can't recall off the top of the head at my moment. but take these with a grain of salt - ag trademarks a ton of stuff that they don't use, and the leak could be false or just a truly me outfit.)

END OF INTERMISSION - BACK TO THE TENNEY/GABRIELLA CONTROVERSY:

so, we get our first black goty, and she's being totally overshadowed by tenney.

here's where a conspiracy comes in:

we can track when ag trademarks their character names. goty names are usually trademarked early in the year prior to their release (by may). but gabriella mcbride wasn't trademarked until october, iirc.

and gabriella is a very underdeveloped character in comparison to most gotys. one of her main hobbies - dancing - was the same main hobby as both marisol (goty 2005) and isabelle (goty 2014). her store displays were underemphasized in comparison to tenney's, as i mentioned before. she was the first goty who didn't get a movie in six years (since kanani, goty 2011). and gabriella didn't even have a big ticket accessory item available until summer!

so, we get our first black goty, and she's underdeveloped, underemphasized, seems to have been rushed (due to her trademark date), and overshadowed by tenney just one month after her release. why is that?

well, some people think that tenney was actually supposed to be goty 2017! (i agree)

tenney was trademarked earlier, had more development, had a bigger collection, etc. we think that tenney was supposed to be goty 2017, but ag decided to do a doll of color (gabriella) at the last minute. (keep in mind the climate of 2015/2016 - ag probably wanted some clout for doing a black goty, and they also probably heard the ag fandom's demands for more dolls of color.)

so that's tenney.

next we have logan everett. logan was ag's first boy character doll. i'm glad that ag had a boy character doll, but logan kinda missed the mark for me. the main source of controversy surrounding logan is his face mold: he, a white boy, uses the kaya face mold. !! it kinda felt like a slap in the face to many indigenous ag fans - kaya is literally The Only Doll with the kaya face mold, and when we finally get another doll with her face mold, he's not even indigenous.

lastly, we have z yang my beloved <3. z yang was done dirty - she is yet another doll of color who is a mere side character, and also, she was available for only a total of 20 months before being retired!

so, that's everything i have to say about the 2017 contemporary line.

now i'm going to talk about the 2021 contemporary line :3

so, it's summer 2020. the black lives matter is becoming more mainstream. brands are now getting clout for appearing "woke."

so, admist this climate, ag is (as always) facing demands from its fandom/collectors to diversify its doll line. so they announce that they're going to be doing a new contemporary line, to be released in "the second half of 2021"!!!! and they promise that the contemporary line will have a black lead character

fast forward to modern day. thanks to ag's trademarks, we can safely assume that the new contemporary line will be called "world by us." we can safely assume that the line will have 3 characters. the 3 characters all live in washington dc and are best friends :) we can safely assume that the characters will be maritza ochoa, evette peeters, and makena williams. i talked about makena and maritza on that ask regrettable-username sent me about my andi mack/ag headcanons! personally, i'm excited for world by us, and i think it has a lot of potential!

alright sawyer, that's the end of the ag info dump fhjhdhfskf.

now for my andi mack friends:

i think the andi/buffy/cyrus line would be structured similar to world by us: andi is the main character, and buffy and cyrus are her best friend dolls :) all 3 dolls would be released at the same time. andi would have 3 books that have buffy and cyrus as side characters, and buffy and cyrus would have one book each.

the big ticket item for this collection would be andi's andi shack. i'm imagining its design sort of like kira's tent mixed with lanie's camper mixed with blaire's farm. andi the walls of andi shack would open up so that when it's fully opened, the four walls are on an even plane with the back wall and extended out like wings. you remove the roof before opening up the walls. the shack is tall enough that the doll can comfortably stand up even with the roof still attached, and wide enough that all three dolls (andi, buffy, and cyrus) can comfortably stand next to each other inside of andi shack.

andi shack would come with a ton of craft supplies inside of it. it would also come with a little flower box that has cece's african violets, like blaire's flower box. (thanks to regrettable-username for coming up with the african violets idea fdjfsj.)

alright i have to go now, so these are all my andi mack/ag thoughts for now, but i might be back later with more thoughts fhdfjs (hopefully not though, since typing this out took me over three hours [sweating emoji]).

sorry for any typos and sorry for how scatterbrained this is! also this may have some forgotten things/mildly incorrect things bc my only source is my brain (and a photo of all the dolls so i can count how many dolls for the statistics portion) and my brain is not the most reliable thing on earth lol.

[the-shy-shade]

I feel like 2020 has been awful for gaming and it’s only May. In no particular order:

First RE3R was a massive letdown. Capcom feels like they’ve been chatting up EA because it seems like zero consideration for the target audience went into the making of this “remake.” This “remake” takes everything that made the original unique and iconic and tosses it in the trash. 

I’m not sure what makes me more mad: everything that was cut- like the beloved clock tower- or everything that wasn’t, but was used as a throwaway. Jill’s iconic “You want S.T.A.R.S?” line at the end of the game? Here it’s a throwaway line in the middle of the game. A very missable one too since it cuts off when Jill takes damage and there’s an 80% chance of Nemesis decking you before she can get the full line out. 

It feels hollow and soulless and I can tell no one poured their heart into it. It reeks of cut corners and I suspect pushing out Resistance- a game literally no one asked for- in time for its initial release date had something to do with that. No, Capcom, a sucky online Dead By Daylight-esque spin off game is not an adequate replacement for mercenaries mode, especially when it counts for half of the purchase price.

The whole reason REmake is so beloved and considered a masterpiece far superior to the original, even 18 years later, is because it took everything the original gave, rolled with it, made alterations ONLY where needed, and added and expanded everywhere else. It didn’t cut anything completely out. If something was cut they made sure to replace it with something else. RE3R doesn’t do this. For every one new thing added, four to five other things from the OG were cut out entirely. 

If I knew RE3R was going to be like this I never would’ve asked for it in the first place.  

Secondly, Bethesda continues to be proof that as you grow older you’ll eventually live to see all of your heroes die. Incorporating an anti-cheat tool in your game is fine, especially if you’re having a legitimate problem with people cheating to gain unfair advantages. It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s not the end of the world. However, when that anti-cheat tool is used in such a way to lock people who disagree and don’t want it out of the game entirely, then that’s a massive problem. 

I don’t play Doom Eternal or Doom in general. It’s never been my kind of game. However, I do feel for everyone who does. No one saw the implementation Denuvo coming and I think it’s really shitty that Bethesda pushed it on everyone all of a sudden. Most people probably wouldn’t have bought it if they knew about it beforehand. 

That makes the fact that they waited 2 months super scummy too. That means that most people who bought it and have been playing since launch can’t get a refund on Steam due to having too much overall playtime and Steam’s refund policy only allowing up to 2 hours of total playtime. Now that I’m typing this out and thinking about it Bethesda are some evil motherfuckers. They totally did that on purpose to avoid having to give people refunds! So now players are stuck either installing spyware so they can play or just not playing the game. 

It’s also, a double fuck you to people who only play the single-player campaign, and a triple fuck you to Linux users who can’t even run Denuvo if they wanted to anyway. I feel really bad for everyone Bethesda has screwed over with this move, especially the devs who gave their all to make a great game. 

Thirdly, The Last of Us 2. The leaks. I really want the leaks to be fake. Or to be early scenes that got scrapped from the actual game. I love Joel and Ellie. You know who I don’t love? New characters. Why? Because I don’t have a reason to give a shit about them or their plight. 

I really hope the leak with Abby and Ellie is just a scrapped scene / dream scene / bad ending that the leaker uploaded without proper context because if it’s really how things go down hands are going to be thrown. Is there an opposite of GOTY? Because that would be it for me. 

Again, if I knew they would do this I wouldn’t have asked for it. 

I want to be optimistic, but with all the bullshit that’s already happened, both regarding life events and gaming, I’m not holding my breath for anything all that great. If June wants to surprise me with a treat I’d be all for it, but I just can’t bring myself to feel the hype anymore.

[americangirlstar]

Just hire me, American Girl, because I have so many great character ideas

Modern

An adopted Asian girl (hell, an adopted girl in general)

A girl with two dads or two moms

If not an actual trans girl like Jazz Jennings, a girl whose sibling is transitioning

A daughter of Indian immigrants

A MUSLIM GIRL (and please name her Amina because I love that name, and let her mother be a hijab-wearing BAMF who speaks, like, five languages and has seven Ph.D.s)

An immigrant/refugee girl

A girl dealing with the loss of a parent

A girl whose sibling comes home from the army and is struggling to adjust to civilian life

A girl getting adopted from foster care (the story doesn’t have to be SUPER dark but can just be about feeling rootless for a while and then finding family but adjusting to her new life)

(Freals, we need more stories that are less puffy. They don’t have to be super morbid, because children, but not all kids have perfect happy lives, so more stories that represent the girls who do have bumps in the road and show a new point of view to the girls that don’t experience stuff like that.)

A Native girl

Biracial girls who aren’t half-white, like a black/Vietnamese girl or a Pakistani/Dominican girl

(I feel like, in these crazy times, American Girl could really revamp its GOTY line and send a message about empathy and seeing perspectives other than your own.)

Also a black girl from Charleston of the Gullah culture would be cool

An Armenian American girl (I just really want to see that and I don’t know why)

Historical

Jamestown (preferably a Native girl, because if someone’s going to dethrone Kaya as the First American Girl it should probably be another Native girl)

A Chinese or Japanese girl during the 1880s Wild West Era (both because Asian representation and I used to have a Billy the Kid obsession so bringing up the Wild West would be superb)

Famine Irish

A girl who comes through Ellis Island (maybe Italian American)

A Native Alaskan girl

A Native Hawaiian girl

Maybe a girl who has one Native parent and one black parent who’s an escaped slave

At the turn of the century in California there was a lot of intermarriage between Mexican women and Punjabi immigrant men, so a daughter of one of those pairings, and touch on the blending of cultures and the anti-immigrant idiocy that surrounded them

Side note: I literally just pulled these out of a hat within a half hour, so imagine what people could come up with if they actually put time and effort into it.

Holy crap, thanks to @i-cannot-live-without-coffee for this!

[kaorei-endgame]

Game of the Year 2017 #2: Divinity Original Sin 2

The first Original Sin had one of those video game “issues” that’s only really an issue if you let it be. About six hours in, you’d figured out there were about a thousand ways to crowd controlling your enemies: stuns, knockdowns, charms, fears. With the availability, and reliability, of these attacks, battles often broke down to your mages/archers CCing everything on the battlefield while your warrior dismantled them one by one. This felt exceptionally mean--sadism in video game form--and somewhat abusive of the game mechanics, but combat was so often weighed so directly against you that “cheating” by charming half an enemy squad and letting them rough each other up, or depleting half a gigantic orc boss’s health before combat even starts by teleporting a poison barrel directly onto his face, was really more about evening the odds. Original Sin is one of those games, like Final Fantasy Tactics, maybe, where there’s a billion ways to break it. Unlike Final Fantasy Tactics, you don’t feel bad about it because, from behind a still-growing pile of saves and reloads, you know the game is happy to return your cheesy, scummy tactics in kind.

This is a co-op RPG I’ve been playing with Graz for 120+ hours, according to steam, and we still haven’t finished. It is, among Dark Souls, and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (Fast Karate GOTY, 2015), and Resident Evil 5, one of the best co-op experiences of my life.

You can play a skeleton, who has to walk around in disguise to stop everyone from murdering them, and has no need for lock picks because they can simply use, and I quote, their “bony fingers.” The elves are not only cannibals, but they’re cannibals that absorb the memories of their meals, which is sometimes used to learn new skills and sometimes used to solve murder mysteries. Maybe forty hours into the game, I realized this “being forced to experience a living creature’s final moments every time you eat meat” was probably created as an explanation of generic fantasy elves’ earth-mother veganism.

Near the beginning of the game a black cat starts following you around. If you have the Pet Pal talent you can talk to him and he just seems like... drunk? He doesn’t really have anything to say, but he doesn’t go away. If you walk through poison he’ll follow you and get poisoned too and he only has like 50 health so you’re always frantically trying to heal him because the friendly cat who does nothing except meow at me can never die. If you keep him alive throughout the whole opening zone, which also involves keeping him away from fires and superstitious guards who will shoot him on sight, his head clears and he joins your party as a summon.

Also the whole time he’s following you around, there’s this dog who won’t talk to you since he hates cats. But the cat follows you in real time, so if you go to a distant part of the zone and then teleport back to the central hub, the cat is briefly separated from you while it paths around the map to your location, and you can get the dog’s quest to find his missing girlfriend.

There is borderline erotica at one point where, if it’s not explicitly described, the game at least puts the mind worm of “lizard man cunnilingus” in your head. And like... well...............

Also there’s another dog later who’s like an evil pet of an eviler grave robber and he refers to himself as Artax: Death Incarnate or something and after you kill him you can use your recently acquired Spirit Vision power to talk to/throw shade at his ghost, being like “...death incarnate, eh...? :) :) :) :) :)” But it’s kind of wasted because even as a ghost (dog (way of the samurai)) he still thinks he’s pretty hot shit.

There are premade characters who have different dialogue tags, most of which seem to amount to jack shit, like almost any RPG with dialogue trees, but the one I picked, Lohse, is some sort of psychic medium who spirits would just hang out in, which was fun until a really bad demon got into her. Sometimes the really bad demon makes her do things that are completely out of her control, like try to murder an elf who’s trying to help you exorcise him, and isn’t it your favorite thing when games present you with a bunch of false dialogue options?

You start Divinity 2 a political prisoner. Unlike Skyrim, where you’re bound for the chopping block and then five minutes later someone’s telling you you’re a god, Divinity sits you on its prison island for something to the tune of 30 hours (then it tells you, more or less, that you’re a god). Because you have a collar on that restricts your scary magic powers, your overconfident jailers basically let you have the run of the place. You are hemmed in just enough to feel your yoke, and much of the early doings is learning where you may and may not go, and which places, just outside of your captor’s line of sight, are okay to seek out dirty business (i.e.: steal a few valuable paintings from). 

So you poke at all the nooks and crannies of this just-right sized zone, retrieving gloves of teleportation from the stomachs of hungry lizards, helping that dog find his girlfriend, and making painstaking progress on your escape. This is a tight, interesting area, far better than any of those in the first Original Sin, where there’s not even all that much combat. You bum around with a bunch of prisoners, some of whom certain party members have vendettas against/want to murder, but most of whom are like... chill old ladies that sell you water spells and will give you a free scroll if you give them a shoulder to cry on. Eventually, you kill the mob boss (but don’t let me see you laying a finger on Butter). If you’re a really good person, you kill all the magisters--who are basically the cops of the magic world--on the way out the door.

Boy oh boy, the jump in writing/world texture/everything from the last game. The move from “aggressively generic fairy tale stuff” to “moderately generic CRPG world” doesn’t put the writing in Witcher territory or nothing, but it’s much easier to appreciate the quirks of the setting, which holds strange sidequests where you help a bunch of thousand-year-old wizards who have been cursed to for all eternity to be both 1) pigs 2) pigs who are on fire, when you aren’t dealing voice acting that seems to be literally on purpose trying to kill you.

I’m of two minds about the changes to combat. Now characters have magical/physical “armor” that acts as a Halo-style rechargeable shield, protecting character’s vitality and also making them immune to status effects. Since most enemies have as much armor as they do health, that means they’re half dead by the time they’re vulnerable to being sleeped/charmed/whatever, and so crowd control has substantially depleted in value. Which mutes some of the “controlled chaos” feel of the first game--kind of a let down--but does tacitly nudge you into trying out the rest of the game’s broad spreadsheet of abilities, such as a teleport jump for fighters that sprays fire all over the landing zone, or a summoner’s ability to conjure an Inner Demon which both terrifies her opponents AND punches enemies that come into melee range with gigantic purple mind fists (essentially, we have been given Star Platinums of our very own).

And the uncontrolled chaos, where you laugh at the idiot NPC wasting its turn casting Rain until the next NPC sprays the area with lightning bolts and stuns half your crew, where you forget that the whole room is one big oil surface before you do your flaming teleport jump and now everyone in the room is on fire, or a giant Dune worm erupts out of the ground right in the middle of your boss fight and your enemies start attacking it instead and you’re like “.....so are we friends now?” and it’s like haha, nope, they still fuckin’ hate your guts and this battle just got even stupider and twice as long, so I hope you brought healing potions.

If anything, these changes have the unique effect of making me seriously consider playing this 100+ hour monster game that requires 100% of your attention and thought processes at all time (okay so sometimes I checked in on Fire Emblem on my phone during Graz’s turns, but that’s a given) sometime before the next decade. I suspect higher difficulties return a lot of weight to crowd control abilities.

Even though I know Baldur’s Gate has co-op, I didn’t think they could make a game like this. A gigantic, fully featured co-op CRPG where the other player doesn’t have to tolerate being a henchman at best. Where you can both run around talking to whomever you want and progressing quests however you feel like, and then come back together twenty minutes later to compare notes. Where you spend 3+ hours over two days on a single battle, reviewing plays and planning out turns like a pair of football coaches, micro-managing which of you is going to “waste” their turns conscientiously teleporting a friendly, but foolhardy, NPC out of harm’s way (or turning him into a chicken) so he’ll stop trying to impale himself on the NECRO-TENTACLE FIRE that you discovered, in this very battle, spurts out of every oily blob from the void beyond space after their death. And what’s that, four turns in the fire blobs start spawning?

Moreover, though every part of Divinity seems stupid, ramshackle, and tied together with twine, it’s often one step ahead of you. Regular attacks are governed only by cooldowns, but the most powerful spells are restricted by an MP-stand-in called “source” (still, charmingly, pronounced close enough to “sauce”). A difficult resource to replenish, we rarely used source abilities early in the game. But a couple hours after it came to a head, and I started saying “you know, I’m getting a little sick of teleporting back to the giant Source juice box in the hidden basement of this lady’s house every time I want to use Black Shroud,” and was decrying how if they replenished your Source after every fight, making it a per-battle resource, the game would be much more interesting they... give you an ability that functionally does that, and combat becomes much more interesting, on the exact right timeline for me to understand what I’ve gained with this power, having been frustrated for so long by its absence.

I gave up on trying to describe this game concisely. I’m not sure there’s a way to do so, when its whole ethos is jury-rigging systems onto systems and throwing weird events at you constantly and the whole thing chugs along like it was meant to be--damn, it never even crashed until I tried to install a mod. At the strange intersection between narrative and mechanics this game presents, if you think about it, you can almost always do it. You can skip an entire hedge maze by teleporting through its portcullises. If it’d take too long to loot a chest in plain sight of its owner, you can use your Polymorph abilities to turn invisible, pick it up, and send it to the inventory of your lockpicker, waiting outside. You can go upstairs at a bordello. When you wake up, predictably, you’re naked and being robbed. Only, oops, the robbers didn’t reckon your friends would have a magical teleportation pyramid locked onto your signal. 

In the same town, this maid crying about losing her owner’s purse robs you, and if you’re sympathetic about it and give her a hug when she asks, she picks your pocket, and the only way you’d know about it is if you check your gold total after the conversation because, let’s be real, she was acting super sketch. I mean damn, the game somehow makes scrolls, the categorical worst item class in all western RPGs, worthwhile. Who wants a one-use item when you can just learn the spell forever? Until the first time you come to truly understand that a short 3-turn cooldown in “Divinity Time” could be the better part of an hour, and therefore a hundred and twenty seven gold for an Armor of Frost scroll is a small price to pay for peace of mind when The Red Prince needs an extra dose of magical armor like right now. 

And for all the ways you can bring ruin upon your enemies, all the stupid tricks and techniques that really shouldn’t work but somehow always do, the thing that actually breaks the game? The item that made us look at each other and go “we should probably never use this item again if we want to keep having fun.”

Green Tea.

Conservatively, 200+ hours of my life has gone to these games, and when this one is over, I’ll still feel like it wasn’t enough.

[sirbadgerduke]

Retrospective Thought: Top Ten Games of 2017

Another year goes by, and another list of games that I thought were stellar, great and splendid to play. 2016 was a pretty alright year for games, but this year, with a myriad of stellar as fuck releases? personally blew the previous year out of the water with some stellar as hell titles, new IPs or new entries in existing franchises. As good as games this year might be, 2017 was NOT without its controversy, specifically the rise of Loot Boxes(thank you EA, Activision-Blizzard). Nonetheless, without further waiting, here’s my top ten games of 2017. 

10) Yakuza 0(PS4) -

I’m a huge fan of the Yakuza series, seeing it as the last bastion of good Sega Games made by Sega themselves, despite their continuation of fuckin up Sonic. Yakuza 0 is basically a prequel, set before the events of the original game and putting you in the shoes of a young Kazuma and a young Majima Goro. The action is ridiculously fun and over the top as previous entries, including a new Fighting Style that allows you to switch between styles for varying strategies against waves of foes. The story is still as crazy, funny, emotionally gripping and tense as one can get from a Crime Drama centered around the Yakuza. The characters are all larger than life, greatly developed and just a pleasure to see, whether its new guys just for this entry or returning characters at a younger period of their lives. Pick this game up if you haven’t played the Yakuza games, it’s a great starting point. Pick it up if you’re a fan of the series too.

9) Nioh (PS4/WIN) -

Tecmo Koei’s “Dark Souls” only it’s set in Feudal Japan, post Nobunaga. Originally, this title was expected to be out in 2004, but was kicked into development Hell until it’s re-announcement in 2015/16. Following the adventures of William Blake as he searches for Guardian Spirit who has been taken by the evil Edward Kelley. William meets many allies, some who may sacrifice themselves to help him help Japan’s Amrita problem. the gameplay is great and greatly fun, solid and responsive as it needs to be. It blends both the flashy badassery of Dynasty Warriors and the tense, pulse pounding grit of Dark Souls. While playing second fiddle to the gameplay and loot system, the story is delightfully cheesy and over the top, it’s hilarious in most parts and well worth getting engaged in. Buy it for your DW/DS/both DS and DW fix.

8) Resident Evil 7(PS4/WIN/XO) -

Resident Evil needed a dire rehaul, reinvention and a total reimagining from the ground up. RE6 was a dumpster filled with half ideas and lazy gameplay. Resi Evil 7 was teased, showing a rather stylistic change, possibly to jump on the hype left by Silent Hills, but nonetheless it ended up working for the better. The scares were there, more cerebral than ever whilst taking that traditional Resi Evil feel and introverting it into quite possibly the best RE game since 4. Get it if you’ve been wanting that AAA Survival horror atmosphere, definitely worth the price.

7) Pyre(WIN/PS4) -

from the developers of Bastion and Transistor, two incredibly stellar indie titles, Supergiant Games brings out Pyre this year. You are the Reader, you’re travelling with a group of exiles taking part in these “rites” to seek your freedom and return to the commonwealth. mixing parts of an adventure, an RPG and a fucking sports game of all things, these systems and mechanics are all solidly blended together in superb fashion. The story is also one to follow as well, dealing with redemption, rebellion and even death, this is a tale in which character’s mature over time, developing into whichever way you choose throughout the game. A fabulous indie game developed by a stellar indie developer, pick this up as soon as possible.

6) South Park: The Fractured But Whole (PS4/XO/WIN) -

Admittedly, I was not expecting much from this sequel, considering how great Stick of Truth was. But Whole is a fantastic follow up and quite possibly the best licensed game that I can really think of. You follow the story of the kids, Eric and co, as they decide to play Superheroes, hoping to find a lost kitty. In classic South Park style, everyone is not safe, everything WILL be mocked and made fun of, even the “Difficulty” slider is not spared from the same bout of vicious shit flinging. If you’re familiar with South Park, or at least the previous game and it’s brand of humour, then you’ll have a great time with this one, though if you don’t particularly enjoy South Park? You may want to avoid this title. Recommended for those who love offensive humour and South Park. 5) Assassin’s Creed: Origins(PS4/WIN/XO) -

Well it seems taking a year off, retooling and rebuilding the franchise has helped GREATLY with AC:O. Ubisoft are not the greatest of developers/publishers, but I commend them for actually crafting an AC experience that is on par, if not BETTER than AC2. You follow the story of Bayek, a Medjai who’s seeking out individuals of an Order after they had killed his son. While gameplay still has those “creed-isms” Such as stealth and assassinating, the combat, ranged and melee have both been redefined from the ground up for mostly better.While it has a rocky beginning, the story for the most part is damn great, with some really impactful moments here and there, the dynamic between Bayek and his wife ground themselves in a relatable way, giving the series another “good” protagonist in a sea of “bad” ones. If you’re a fan of the series, be wary of the changes to combat, but for the most part you will love it. Buy it to see how an open world is done right. 4) Pokemon Ultra Sun/Moon(3DS) - 

Sun and Moon are great pokemon titles and even good games in their own right, but their “updated” iterations make a good game fantastic. Sure, it’s really a remake, but the added stuff is enough to give a second journey through Alola. More pokes to capture, wider selection of wild pokes in the earlier game, new forms and even new pokes add a much meatier experience on the gameplay side of it whilst the story is vastly improved on with added scenes and characters, giving the UBs more importance helps to make their inclusion not so last minute. While it may be harder to recommend to a passing fan, it’s definitely worth picking up if you’re a pokefan through and through. 3) Injustice 2(PS4/WIN/XO) - 

I loved the original Injustice, even its mishaps, heck Mortal Kombat X was one of my GoTYs for 2015, and I still adore that game/series now. Injustice 2 takes a hard long look at it’s predecessor, looks at its shortcomings and decides to get rid of them, for better or for worse. IJ2 is a vast improvement by definition, more varied selection of fighters to choose from, a better written story plus a Villain that will make you go “Holy shit that’s dope” trust me on that. The game picks up from the last title; Batman is now running things after Dictator Chairman Supes is now put in a cell of kryptonite, whilst Supergirl wants to go rescue her cousin, Earth is in peril by the invading Brainiac, a Krypton Super-Computer who wants to collect all knowledge. The gameplay takes some elements from MKX and even improves upon them, especially the added loot system, giving you that chance to customise how your favourite DC Fighter(or Hellboy/MK/TMNT Fighters, yes even Hellboy and the Ninja Turtles are in this, take that MVC:I!). Varied roster, solid gameplay and a story that doesn’t have any right being as good as it is, a must buy for Fighting Game and DC Comics enthusiasts. 2) Persona 5(PS4) - 

The Persona franchise is one of those JRPG franchises that you either love or hate, I love it if you haven’t read my review on Persona 5. The fifth(Main line, that is) in the super popular gem that is Persona is a fantastic, well written piece of JRPG goodness with music that will blow your socks off, and a story that’s goofy, hilarious yet serious, dramatic and engrossing all packed together neatly. The gameplay while standard Turn Based affair is so solid and fun and with a surprising amount of choice, since you can potentially recruit enemy personas to your team. Each character grows and develops throughout the story, with tragedy and hope mixed in to give you a sorta mix of Persona 3 dark and Persona 4 lightheartedness, and that’s a good thing. Quite possibly my favourite JRPG of this by a huge, wide and long road between the other stuff. Recommend whether you’re new or a veteran to this series, god damn play this game now! Honourable Mentions: In no particular order, here’s a few honourable titles that I loved but haven’t included in my main top ten. Tekken 7, Yakuza Kiwami, Battlechasers: Nightwar, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, Evil Within 2, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, Gravity Rush 2, Horizon Zero Dawn. 1) NieR: Automata - 

This game...this game is why I love games, stories and music, all in one. A fantastic experience from start to finish, a rollercoaster of emotions whilst using gameplay in conjunction with narration and to break the fourth wall on multiple occasions. You play as 2B and 9S, androids that are fighting the Machine menace to save the earth for humanity, by destroying them to pieces and dodging and moving through bullet hell like segments and even Shmup segments too. Seems standard affair right? Well the story really _really_ slowly reveals itself, giving even development to the bosses and enemies you face, no major character here is one note, at all. Platinum Games managed to get one thing they could never quite master right; an engaging, dramatic and heartfelt story/narration. Execution is far from perfect, but this game is so near perfect it deserves to be played by everyone. The music? There’s a few refrains and already established tracks from the previous game, but why fix something if it ain’t broken right? The music is heartfelt and really emotionally heavy. Yoko Taro is truly the Madman of Video Games. But his mad genius is executed for the most part, really great. Pick this game up if you desire something memorable, meaningful and fantastic. So there’s my list, obviously this is my opinion, you may think differently, or think the same way, it’s fine, everyone’s got an opinion, but this is MY list, so don’t hate because a game I like that you don’t like is here, it’s kinda pathetic. Hopefully 2018 brings even more diamonds.

[sporadicbeepboops]

20 Games I Loved in 2016

The Switch delay. Several big AAA duds. Another year without an official Mother 3 U.S. release. 2016 could have been a disappointing year. (Outside of video games, it certainly took its toll.) But at least from my perspective, the good far outweighed the bad. Virtual reality finally made it out of the gates, and despite some hiccups, it shows real promise. Long-delayed games like Final Fantasy XV and The Last Guardian somehow made it to store shelves AND surpassed expectations. And love it or hate it, Pokémon Go inspired a genuine pop culture craze the likes of which we’ve never seen before, at least as far as games go. I think all of that is worth celebrating.

Before we get to the list, some quick shout-outs and no-brainer caveats…

2016 was not kind to the Wii U, but the 3DS quietly had one of its best years ever. That’s partly reflected here, but I couldn’t make room for Dragon Quest VII, Fire Emblem Fates, BoxBoxBoy!, Metroid Prime: Federation Force and Gotta Protectors, to name a few. Sometimes it felt like Nintendo was just cleaning out its closet — how long ago was DQVII released in Japan? — but we benefited either way.

Overall, I played fewer games this year, but the ones I did play held my interest longer. Thanks to various microtransactions and DLC, 2016 probably hit my wallet just as hard.

What didn’t I play? Stardew Valley, SUPERHOT, Final Fantasy XV (at least past chapter 2), Frog Fractions 2, Hitman — oh, and I didn’t get to stuff from last year like Yakuza 5 or The Witcher 3, either. Yakuza 4 was pretty solid though.

I left off any new ports of games that came out last year or prior, unless there were substantial additions that changed the experience in a meaningful way. That meant The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD and Mini Metro weren’t in the running, while Rez Infinite technically was.

Love making lists, hate ranking items in said lists, just because I’m incredibly fickle. There’s a good chance that I’ll want to shuffle everything around the moment I publish this. But my podcasting buddies are counting on me here, so it’s time to be decisive.

Keeping all that in mind, here are the games I really loved in 2016…

20. The Witness - I’m already cheating because if I’m being honest, I didn’t actually love this game. The Witness takes a couple dozen hours to finish, and I spent at least half of them staring at a notebook, drawing grids, connecting dots, and having no idea how to pave forward. But even if I didn’t love the game, I respect it immensely. I admire Jonathan Blow’s commitment to this singular idea, of taking the kind of puzzle you might see on a restaurant placemat and coming up with every possible permutation of it. And there is of course a “meta” layer on top of that, where solutions to each component change the environment around you — tree top bridges that unfold based on the paths your lines take, or colored glass panels that create new puzzles on top of old ones. It might be cold and off-putting at times, but The Witness is still commendable as the ultimate puzzle box.

19. SuperHyperCube - I bought into PlayStation VR for games like Rez Infinite and RIGs — big, flashy, “immersive” experiences. And they delivered! I’m a very happy PS VR owner, and I hope Sony builds on its momentum this year. (I’m skeptical, but then being a virtual reality early adopter was always a leap of faith.) However, while I got exactly what I expected from most of the launch titles, it's the simple puzzle game seemingly modeled off of “Brain Wall” that I keep coming back to. I turn on the headset to play Job Simulator or Battlezone, but I always play a couple rounds of SuperHyperCube before I’m done. A solid case for virtual reality not as a thrilling roller coaster, but a hypnotic, relaxing voyage.

18. Headlander - The best game Double Fine has put out since Iron Brigade. Free-roaming Metroid-style exploration, a perfect 70s-synth sci-fi score and a fun body swapping gimmick at the heart of it all. I wish there were more vessels for your noggin to control, but there’s a strong foundation here. 

17. Kirby: Planet Robobot - It’s easy to take Kirby games for granted, and that’s especially true of Robobot, which uses the same engine and many of the same powers as the recent Triple Deluxe. What does the former bring to the table then? Smart level designs that take advantage of the new mechs without letting them dominate the action. A novel mechanical world that feels distinct from the typical pastel meadows. New amiibo support. OK, so maybe it doesn’t add that much to the series, but it’s right up there with Super Star anyway. 

16. Pokkén Tournament - This game is a fresher, more enjoyable fighting game than Street Fighter V. It doesn’t even matter (too much) that the single player is pretty thin or that the roster is small. When’s the last time you played a one-on-one fighting game that felt truly new? Pokkén is a great 3D fighter and a great 2D fighter at the same time, which is no small feat. And it’s also a gorgeously animated recreation of those battles we all imagined happening in our Game Boys 20 years ago.

15. Uncharted 4: A Thief's End - The popular sentiment seems to be that Madagascar is when this final Uncharted entry really takes off. Slow drama and frequent cut scenes give way to island exploration and memorable shootouts. My take? The back half is fun and the epilogue is lovely, but I could spend an entire game in Nathan and Elena’s living room, or hopping around the globe for the next story sequence. Wherever you stand, this is a fine way to close out a reliable series.

14. Picross 3D: Round 2 - Seven Picross games — eight if you count the Twilight Princess freebie — on the eShop. That’s a lot of a perfectly fine thing. But none of them are Picross 3D. Thankfully, the real deal finally arrived this year, with hundreds of puzzles and a few extra gameplay wrinkles. Worth the premium price tag.

13. Titanfall 2 - The campaign didn’t need to be good. Multiplayer FPS games live and die by their multiplayer, and many developers seemingly write off the single player experience as an afterthought. That’s why Titanfall 2 is such an unexpected treat. The factory, the time hopping, the airborne carrier — all cleverly designed, with platforming gimmicks that would feel just as suited for a Metroid Prime game. I think the reason the new Mirror’s Edge fell flat for me was that this game featured the same parkour moves in a much more exciting package.

12. Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE - This crossover game is Persona-lite, yes, but I think that sells the characters and world a bit short. While its inspiration focuses on the pressures of being a Japanese high schooler, #FE is all about the Tokyo show biz scene. Pop music, soap operas, microwave cooking shows — it’s all very goofy, but the game still takes its protagonists’ dreams and ambitions seriously. #FE also makes clever use of the Wii U GamePad, turning it into a tablet/social app that helps keeps the conversations going. Even if you’re not into this particular “scene,” #FE may still win you over.

11. Rhythm Heaven Megamix - I can’t get enough Rhythm Heaven. They could put 20 new musical minigames on a cart annually and it’d make my list every year. Sumo wrestlers, lumberjack bears, monkey slumber parties — all magic.

10. Severed - A Vita game! It’s great to see DrinkBox Studios stretch beyond sidescrollers with this first person dungeon crawler full of grotesque monsters and creepy, colorful mazes. Swiping and poking on the Vita’s touchscreen feels great. The controls are key to Severed’s success; if battles were menu-driven, the entire game would fall apart. 

9. Pocket Card Jockey - I hope Nintendo keeps letting Game Freak be this weird. It’s not just that it’s horse racing plus solitaire. It’s your jockey biting the dust and being brought back from the dead to repay his debt to the angels. It’s the brassy, big band score that accompanies every race. It’s horses with luchador masks and cats hanging from their backsides. Pocket Card Jockey is a miracle of localization.

8. Pokémon Sun - Yes, another Pokémon game. The Alola region is the best thing to ever happen to this series. Previous games had regions based on cities like New York and Paris, but the results always felt half-hearted. In Sun (and Moon), the tropical island setting influences everything from the creatures you catch to the trials you complete. I’ve never demanded a believable world from this series, but that’s kind of what we get here, and it’s terrific.

7. Inside - This is the type of game where the less you know going in, the better. It’s Limbo — a previous Justin GotY — filtered through a twisted dream logic that I still can’t get out of my head months later. 

6. Paper Mario: Color Splash - I know you don’t like Sticker Star. Rest assured: that 3DS oddity feels like a rough draft for Color Splash, which improves upon its predecessor in every way. A textured, vibrant world that rivals Tearaway in its papercraft. Thrilling scenarios like a train heist, an underwater game show and the throwback above. Hilarious dialogue that mostly makes up for the many, many identical toads. I miss the liberties Intelligent Systems used to take with the Mushroom Kingdom, but everything else about Color Splash restores this spin-off series to its former glory.

5. Overcooked - This year’s couch co-op champ. Cooking with a partner is all about communication, and that’s doubly true when the kitchen is split across two flatbed trucks or on an iceberg rocking back and forth. My friends and I love head-to-head games like Smash Bros. and Towerfall, but it’s nice to play a game that’s all about puzzle solving and careful planning together. And I love the wistful stage select music.

4. Dragon Quest Builders - Minecraft has always fascinated me, but I don’t do well without direction. That’s why I’m so grateful for Dragon Quest Builders, which breaks down the open world construction into small, manageable tasks. I started off just sticking to blueprints and keeping decorations to a minimum; now, I’m spending hours building up towns the way I want them to look, for no other reason than my own personal satisfaction. Even taking the crafting element out of the equation, Builders does a great job of capturing the adventuring spirit of its parent series.

3. Pokémon Go - I didn’t set out to put THREE Pokémon games on here, and in a vacuum, this is much less satisfying than Pokkén or Sun. But we don’t play video games in a vacuum, and certainly not this one. I played Pokémon Go in Central Park, talking to strangers to find out where the Ivysaur was hiding. Or I played on my lunch breaks, exploring parts of South Street Seaport with coworkers that I had ignored for years. Go’s peak came and went, but it remains one of my fondest experiences of the year.

2. The Last Guardian - Another game that’s more than the sum of its parts. The Last Guardian is finicky and sometimes frustrating. Trico is hard to climb. The camera doesn’t know what to do when you’re up against the wall. So what? How many games feature a creature this lifelike? He may be an illusion made up of A.I. routines, scripted animations and fur shaders, but all of those elements come together in a uniquely convincing way. His evolution from reluctant ally to friend has a subtlety I’ve never seen before. I’m glad Ueda spends as much time focusing on the inner struggles as he does the external ones. Hope it doesn’t take another decade for his next game.

1. Overwatch - I didn’t even know what Overwatch was until two weeks before its release, and even then, I didn’t expect much from it. I had played Team Fortress 2 and thought it was just fine. I knew what to expect. Medics, tanks, builders — that sounded familiar to me. But I was so wrong. Overwatch isn’t just a team-based shooter; it’s the superhero team-up game I’ve been longing for since “The Avengers” was in theaters.

All 23 (and counting!) heroes have their superpowers, and all of them have their jobs to do. What really sets Overwatch apart is when these heroes are bouncing off of each other. Any combination of six is going to have its own dynamics. Mei dropping ice walls to give Reinhardt time to recharge his shield. Junkrat dropping traps to help Bastion watch his back. Mercy gliding up to Pharah to give her rockets a little extra punch. Every battle brings new possibilities and strategies to the table. I’ve played over 100(!) hours and feel like there’s still so much to learn.

But it’s not all serious business either. The colorful personalities, animations, costume designs and more do so much to shape the world, even when I know next to nothing about the overall “lore.” Last year, Splatoon felt like the only shooter I’d ever need, but Overwatch has actually managed to supplant it in my heart. That’s something this Nintendo fanboy never thought he’d say. Can’t wait to see how Blizzard builds on their masterpiece in year two.

[audiogrizzly]

GOTY 2020 - Runners Up

I feel I should start off with saying a bit about what this year was like for my gaming hobby,  it was the first in many years that the PS4 was not the system where I took away the most games, for me it was the PC for a change which has slowly been becoming my number 1 place to play.  Though this year also brought a new console generation and I have picked up a PS5, as well as an Oculus Quest 2 (so technically I can now play PC VR, which for a couple of years was always a platform that gates off a few key releases for me despite having a headset for my PS4.  And yeah, working from home has allowed me to use the time that would have been taking up with commuting to play games, so I have had more time to play than usual.

Just a note, I’m only one person and despite what I said in the previous paragraph, I cannot play every single game that comes out in a year, I try to prioritise the games I want to play and I do pay attention to games that get good write ups from critics.  At the time of writing, I have yet to give a good amount of time to the following titles which are likely to come up on many other GOTY lists: Half Life Alyx, The Pathless, Hades, Cyberpunk 2077.  I’m sure these are great games, I have enjoyed many other titles that the developers of them have released before, but however much I enjoy them further down the line, they have missed their chance at being included in this particular list.

So in addition to my GOTY, Ghost of Tsushima, here are the other games I have enjoyed most of all in 2020, ordered by release date:

Journey to the Savage Planet

This was the traditional January game for me.  I know a lot of people see the first month of the year being a bit slow for games but I feel there’s always at least one gem.  It was great to see a Metroid style game that took a lot more from the Prime series rather than the 2D roots of that genre.  The humour didn't quite connect with me but this was a fun distraction that I wasn’t expecting at the start of the year

DOOM Eternal

One of the earliest games I had added to my 2020 watchlist, the sequel to one of my top games of 2016 was always going to be something to be all over.  I felt it was a little more arcadey and leaned on typical game mechanics (e.g. extra lives, traversal puzzle, arena based encounters) rather than the exploration aspects of the 1993 original that the 2016 reboot left intact.  But you don’t get action as satisfying and as brutal as DOOM

Final Fantasy VII Remake

The earliest game I picked up that I put forward for this list and wasn’t on my original watch list.  I didn't play the original FF7 all the way through, but I had played to the point where this remade 1st episode stops at, it essentially covers the first disc on the 1997 original.  I’m more into action RPGs than the turn based menu cooldown mechanic that’s more typical of Japanese RPGs, so with that out of the way I was able to enjoy the world and the story.  I got really engaged by this one and I can’t wait to carry on the story.

Gears Tactics

I always loved the idea of the turn based tactical strategy game when XCOM Enemy Unknown came along.  But I was always more a fan of the combat side than the whole running of the base part of the game.  XCOM was also one of those top games that I always sort of pretended to be into, to make myself seem more like a thinker than a button masher, y’know?  I can name a large number of people who fall into that category too.

I reckon Gears is perfect for this genre and I’m glad to see that Tactics doesn’t make me collect resources and develop new technology while making sure my underground bunker has enough power.  It’s pure action and I love it.

Streets of Rage 4

This game was on my watch list but even I was surprised at how good it turned out.  SOR4 will appeal more to those who played the original games, and the second in the series is my favourite SEGA game ever as well as being quite high up my all time list in general.  This 21st century continuation does not diminish the originals in any way and even makes you come around to the third in the series in a way by including references and it’s best elements.  A hyper stylish tribute and great brawler in its own right.

The Last of Us Part 2

I assigned Ghost of Tsushima as my game of the year, but TLOUP2 would have come a close second.  I just enjoyed being in the world of Tsushima more than I did in the zombie infested post-apocalyptic Seattle.  I see this game as being the equivalent of a great box set, typical more of the second season of an excellent American TV series where they do add a few interesting ideas, a few “wow” moments, but more than its share of devisive moments too.  I can get why people didn’t like the twist as we are used to playing heroes in our games, it can throw us when a bit of perspective is added.  Personally, I felt it was an act too long, but still an intense action adventure.

Rocket Arena

I still played a lot of Destiny at the start of the year and both last year and this year's Call of Duty's were on my most played list.  But Rocket Arena held my attention for most of the summer.  Ultimately, I fell off the game because I was sick of teammates leaving matches, it’s the sort of game where leavers get penalised but are not replaced.  But I found the game to be enormous fun and soon I hope to jump back into the game as I see a few changes have been made.  The game has also taken all sorts of steps to be made available to as many people as possible thought giveaways on Twitch and PlayStation plus as well as being added to EA Play Pro, everything that stops short of just being made free to play which is something I actually hope it shouldn’t have to come to as I like the idea of the Overwatch model where new maps and characters are added for free every now and then.

Carrion

Carrion was a game I added to my watch list after it was shown in Devolver Digital’s over-the-top and sometimes sort of ‘trying too hard to be subversive’ E3 presentations (2019 and 2020).  It looked like a take on the Metroidvania game that took, if you ask me, one of the most appealing aspects of the Metroid games, it’s atmosphere.  Plus it sometimes feels great to be the menace, especially when you go out to total massacre your captors (see also Ape Out)

Fall Guys

I’m sure a lot of people have just totally fallen off of this game since about a month after it’s launch in August, I know I have.  But when it was new and in the conversation, there was no doubt that this was a fun game.  It also came out around the time where you could have guests round and it made for a great “pass the controller” type of game, despite having no split screen modes.  It may be my lack of desire to play a new multiplayer game which stopped me from playing it, though it’s appeal to me is that it’s one of those first of games you can just leap into matchmaking by yourself with.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2

I don’t normally put ports or remakes into my year lists, but I will make an exception here (and one later on) as it has been so long since the games included in this collection first appeared and to compare old with new, it’s almost a whole new world.  Yet it is still familiar, and there’s no bloat, even the item shop (where you can buy decks, wheels, profile pictures etc) doesn’t get in your face.  It also, thankfully, takes influence from the right places of the follow up to both of these games, Pro Skater 3, in making the most finely tuned Hawk’s experience.  I only wish they had included the 3rd game, at least as DLC, but there’s still time.

Star Wars Squadrons

Air or space combat has never appealed to me all that much over my many years of gaming.  I’m not even all that big a Star Wars fan, but I got on board with Squadrons in a big way.  Playing in VR and with a HOTAS really immerses you too, there’s nothing like playing past someone and turning your own head to see where they heck they have got to.  And although I am not all that big into Star Wars, I can tell they have taken great care with the universe and turned out something that doesn’t interfere with cannon all too much.  Put this alongside Gears Tactics in the “I like the idea of this sort of game but I never get on too well with it, but I really liked this one” bucket

Watch Dogs Legion

I know Legion got a hard time in reviews, and I did experience a less than optimal performance in the game, but it was great to run around modern London on foot for a change.  I enjoyed Watch Dogs 2 before this and yes, I get why people think the game is just silly, but Legion finally shows that the game knows when to not take itself seriously and it's all the better for it.  A great touch is when you recruit people for your organisation, they can all get into any car and drive it around, but every now and then you will find a recruit for whom one of their perks is “has their own car”, that is London in a nutshell!

Dirt 5

Dirt 5 wasn’t on my list, and I have had a sort of on-off relationship with the series.  Dirt 5 represents a sort of middle point in the scale between the off-road racer and the serious rally simulation.  I would actually say it's closer to the former actually, it’s definitely the most arcade like the franchise has been in years.  It forgoes point to point rallys in favour of an “all racers” starting grid in most disciplines.  The inclusion of a story is a bit weird, especially as you never actually see any of the characters, it made me wonder what the point was, but I loved the racing as well as all the weather and mud effects.

Assassins Creed Valhalla

I’ve literally just finished this game at the time of writing and what a monster this was at over 55 hours in my playthrough.  I had my doubts that a game set in Viking/Saxon era England could rival the BC Egypt in AC Origins, and that game is still my fave, but there was a lot of beautiful scenery in Valhalla as well as crazy plot points when you got near the end.  It was great to finally play one of these “new” AC games with a steady frame rate (I always had technical problems before) as I have enjoyed the new combat system since Origins and it was fun to visit settlements whose names I recognise from modern era England.  Apart from one really annoying game breaking bug (saved by a previous save file) a number of freezes and it being maybe a bit too long, I’d recommend this heartily.

Replay corner:

Master Chief Collection (throughout the year)

As I said earlier when I talked about Pro Skater 1+2, I don’t normally put ports and remakes, but I wanted to give a shout out to the Halo Master Chief Collection, which I played on PC throughout the year.  It’s in it’s own section here as part of it was released last year, but each couple of months in 2020, it was great to replay each of the games in this series, especially as I said goodbye to Xbox in 2013, Halo was one of the franchises that I knew I would miss and it’s great that I can finally get reacquainted with all the ones I have played before.  It's a shame that Infinite did not come out this year, though I can tell why they wanted to put it back in the oven, plus I still haven’t really played Halo 5 yet as it’s one of the few games that are actually Xbox One only, I have my fingers crossed for a PC port of that though.

[entergamingxp]

DualShockers’ Favorite Games of 2019 — Tomas’ Top 10

December 26, 2019 10:00 AM EST

Astral Chain, Death Stranding, Super Mario Maker 2, and Erica were some of my favorite games from 2019, with plenty of others in the running.

As 2019 comes to a close, DualShockers and our staff are reflecting on this year’s batch of games and what were their personal highlights within the last year. Unlike the official Game of the Year 2019 awards for DualShockers, there are little-to-no-rules on our individual Top 10 posts. For instance, any game — not just 2019 releases — can be considered.

2019 has been a very odd year for games. While we didn’t have any heavy hitters like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, God of War, or Red Dead Redemption 2, everyone had their niche catered to, so I think DualShockers‘ personal GOTY lists will be quite varied this year. I have rounded up the 10 games that stood out to me the most in 2019, and they are all quite different from each other.

Of course, I did not have the time nor the patience to get through every single game that came out this year. That means some notable releases like Resident Evil 2, Gears 5, and DualShockers‘ Game of the Year Judgment did not make my list. Some great games were also just barely beat out, but I’d still recommend Ape Out, Baba is You, Samurai Shodown and Mortal Kombat 11 if you are looking for a good time. Without further ado, here are my 10 favorite games of 2019:

10. Erica

While this live-action interactive game is very short and definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, it is an experience that has certainly stuck with me this year. Unlike most FMV heavy games, Erica doesn’t try to justify its use of live-action through its premise, it’s just how Flavourworks wanted to tell this story. That was an incredibly risky move, but the experience is held up by good writing and a great performance by Holly Earl.

I always love trying games that are innovative, weird, and unorthodox and Erica was able to check all of those boxes. For that reason, it’s still on my mind at the end of 2019 despite a couple of problems. If you’re done with Telling Lies and are looking for another intriguing FMV game, Erica should be on your radar. The game, not the person. That’d be quite creepy.

Check out DualShockers‘ review of Erica.

9. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

After Star Wars Battlefront 2 got struck down, EA’s Star Wars games have become even more powerful than you could possibly imagine. While the discourse surrounding Star Wars is hitting an apex of toxicity following the release of The Rise of Skywalker, fans should still remember that the franchise received two great additions this year: The Mandalorian and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

Capping off a great year for Respawn Entertainment, this game finally provided the engaging single-player focused Star Wars experience that players have been yearning for ever since EA and Disney struck their Star Wars game deal all those years ago. In fact, the only reason this game isn’t higher on this list is that I haven’t beaten it yet, and I’m sure my love for it will only grow as I play it more.

Check out DualShockers‘ review of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

8. Lonely Mountains: Downhill

I initially slept on this game upon its October release, even though I enjoyed my time trying it at E3. When I recently got an Xbox One and Game Pass, I decided to download this game and have been hooked on it ever since. Lonely Mountains: Downhill is a great podcast game, and I have now played it while listening to everything from stand up comedy to podcasts to the last democratic debate. Still, even if I wasn’t listening to anything, the game remained enjoyable.

Just like the Trials series, half of the fun is in mastering the course, and a few unique objectives across the game’s sixteen tracks and four mountains add to its replayability. Lonely Mountains: Downhill can still be quite difficult and somewhat irritating at points when you just can’t get a part of the course down, but overall Lonely Mountains: Downhill is a soothing and relaxing game to play if you aren’t doing anything else or want to do something more than just listen to John Mulaney, Ben Hanson, or Andrew Yang.

7. Super Mario Maker 2

I’m not much of a creator, but I’ve had a ton of fun seeing what everyone’s made in Super Mario Maker 2. Whether I’m rating levels for StephenPlays’ Morning Mario, getting random grab bags of levels in multiplayer or endless mode, or just browsing for myself, I am always surprised by the masterpieces and monstrosities that people can come up with if you give them the right tools.

On top of all of that, the story mode provides a meaty and varied single-player 2D Mario experience, which is something that the series has needed for years. It is my favorite platformer of 2019, and the first of many indicators on this list that 2019 has been an amazing year for Nintendo Switch. Also, Super Mario Maker 2’s multiplayer is terrible, but I love it.

Check out DualShockers‘ review of Super Mario Maker 2.

6. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate also made my top 10 list last year. In that article, I said it could make the list this year if the game added Geno. While they weren’t added to the game, we still got exciting characters like Joker, Hero, Terry Bogard, and most surprisingly Banjo.

Thanks to its hefty post-launch support and just being a damn good game in general, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is one of my most played Nintendo Switch games of the year and has managed to make my top 10 once again. Even though it didn’t work last time, I will say it again: now just add Geno, Sakurai, and we’ll talk about Super Smash Bros. Ultimate making it onto my 2020 GOTY list as well.

Check out DualShockers‘ review of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

5. Tetris 99

I was simply addicted to Tetris 99 earlier this year. I played it every day non-stop and had to actively draw myself away from playing it when I had other things to take care of. While battle royale and puzzle games don’t seem like they would mix, boy howdy they certainly do. While Fortnite remains the king and Apex Legends brought a lot of innovation to the genre, Tetris 99 proved that the mechanics of battle royale aren’t limited to just shooters.

Tetris was already great on its own–just look at last year’s Tetris Effect–and splicing battle royale mechanics in there only embellished the whole multiplayer experience. As the game has received some single-player and local multiplayer modes since launch, Arika and Nintendo’s game has cemented itself as one of the best Tetris titles of all time. It’s becoming a mobile game too. That’s always a good sign, right?

Check out DualShockers‘ review of Tetris 99.

4. Death Stranding

I really like Death Stranding, but for the opposite reasons of most people. Many despise the traversal mechanics and adore Kojima’s writing. I can barely stand many of Kojima’s cringey scenes, but love the melancholic but tense and engaging delivery mechanics. Death Stranding tends to struggle anytime other than when it does do that. While the writing can be bad and the shooting sucks, I was still totally engrossed by Death Stranding and couldn’t put it down until I finished it. Its “Strand Genre” mechanics are also very innovative, showing how multiplayer elements can be combined with a single-player experience for maximum impact.

We’ll be seeing this game’s influence on the industry over the next couple of years, whether that be via making traversal interesting alongside the online mechanics. We need more games like Death Stranding. Still, I don’t think I can ever hear another line as terrible as “Like Mario and Princess Beach.”

Check out DualShockers‘ review of Death Stranding.

3. Dicey Dungeons

PLAY THIS GAME!!! Dicey Dungeons is dice-based in both a mechanical and literal sense, and is by far the most underrated title on this list. It turns standard roguelike and deck-building mechanics on their heads with its dice-based actions and differing playstyles between its six characters. I tend to be very lukewarm on deck-building or card games, and while games like Slay the Spire are fun, that still served as a roadblock for me.

Dicey Dungeons made deck-building interesting by turning genre conventions on their head in its various playstyles. It is a game that everyone should give a whirl, even if they don’t typically like roguelikes or deck-based games. Dicey Dungeons never stops being fun and is far and away the best indie game I played this year. I don’t have a joke for this one, but I think the jokes have been on a good roll thus far.

2. The Outer Worlds

The Outer Worlds was everything people wanted it to be and more. While studios like BioWare and Bethesda have seemed to abandon their roots in recent years, The Outer Worlds revels in its old-school RPG design. It isn’t the largest or most grandiose game out there, but it is certainly one of the most well-written and replayable RPGs in a long time.

I’d rather play a 30-hour RPG 4 times than a 120 hour RPG one time. The Outer Worlds seems to understand that mentality and delivered an experience that can be quite diverse depending on one’s character build and choices. It was just barely edged out of being my game of the year and is certainly a must-play for those who have ever remotely enjoyed an RPG at some point in their lives. On that positive note, Parvati is my daughter and if any of you hurt her, you’ll be hearing from my lawyers.

Check out DualShockers‘ review of The Outer Worlds.

1. Astral Chain

I don’t really have any problems with Astral Chain and it’s super innovative, which is why I gave it a 10 earlier this year. Astral Chain features the tight and rewarding action PlatinumGames is known for but is quite accessible at the same time. Its detective case-solving portions feel like better versions of similar segments in the Batman: Arkham games. Astral Chain is one of the best-looking games on Nintendo Switch. And finally, the Legion is the most innovative thing to happen to action games since Bayonetta’s Witch Time. Creating a unique weapon-user relationship I’ve never seen in a game before, Astral Chain remains fun and manageable while still tasking players with controlling two things at once.

Just like many of the other games on this list, Astral Chain is a trailblazer within its genre and will push the industry forward. While 2019 didn’t have one or two truly groundbreaking games like previous years, games like Astral Chain show that the game industry is at an all-time high when it comes to creativity and quality. I don’t have a joke this time either, seriously.

Check out DualShockers‘ review of Astral Chain.

Check out the rest of the DualShockers staff Top 10 lists and our official Game of the Year Awards:

December 23: DualShockers Game of the Year Awards 2019 December 25: Lou Contaldi, Editor-in-Chief // Logan Moore, Managing Editor December 26: Tomas Franzese, News Editor // Ryan Meitzler, Features Editor  December 27: Mike Long, Community Manager // Scott White, Staff Writer December 28: Chris Compendio, Contributor // Mario Rivera, Video Manager December 29: Scott Meaney, Community Director // Allisa James, Senior Staff Writer // Ben Bayliss, Senior Staff Writer December 30: Cameron Hawkins, Staff Writer // David Gill, Senior Staff Writer // Portia Lightfoot, Contributor December 31: Iyane Agossah, Senior Staff Writer // Michael Ruiz, Senior Staff Writer // Rachael Fiddis, Contributor January 1: Ricky Frech, Senior Staff Writer // Tanner Pierce, Staff Writer

December 26, 2019 10:00 AM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2019/12/dualshockers-favorite-games-of-2019-tomas-top-10/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dualshockers-favorite-games-of-2019-tomas-top-10

[terryblount]

DSOGaming – Here are our Games of the Year 2019

There have been a lot of great games for the PC this year. As such, and contrary to all previous years, we’ve decided to share with you today our Games of the Year 2019. In this list, you’ll find the games that DSOGaming’s writers enjoyed the most. Do note that this isn’t our “Top 10 Most Optimized” and “Top 10 Worst Optimized” lists; these lists will be published next week. So without further ado, here are our best PC games of 2019.

Chris Kountouras – Red Dead Redemption 2

My game of the year is Red Dead Redemption 2, simply because the game wipes its ass with every other open-world game out there. This Western ‘simulator’ provided me with a grand array of feelings throughout its very long single player story, and what a glorious story it was. Arthur Morgan might be the best developed character I ever played.

I laughed, I raged, I robbed, I saved, I killed and I died, time and time again. I lost my way an infinite number of times in this game. Going from A to B had never been so hard in a game before. There are so many things to do, that sometimes you even forget what you were suppose to do in the first place.

And now having the game on PC is a bless. Playing the game on sixty frames feels almost like a completely different game. The perfect gift for Christmas!

Happy holidays and merry Christmas DSOG readers.

Pieter Naude – Mortal Kombat 11

When thinking about the games I played this year, I noticed that most were either sequels or remakes for pre-existing franchises. Honestly, I wanted to choose my GOTY from new IP’s since our industry desperately needs some freshness with this sink or swim climate. As such, I decided that this had better be a sequel or remake that took its franchise to new levels. It had to sustain its longstanding identity, and yet improve on every single aspect from visuals to gameplay. There was only one such candidate for me in 2019: Mortal Kombat 11. Ed Boon and his team had made, in my opinion, their best fighting game ever. The fatalities had never felt more visceral, the story provided the perfect excuse to reintroduce some old-school MK, and the mechanics introduced a playing style that focused more on strategic fighting than lighting-fast reflexes. Truly an excellent accomplishment for Netherealm, and without any doubt the best I played in this year.

Spencer – Halo: Reach

I’m selecting Reach as my Game of the Year, it’s new on PC and the fact is this is absolutely how this game was meant to be played. A couple years ago Sega’s Rez came out on VR and I said it felt like Tetsuya Mizuguchi had designed this Dreamcast game as a VR title long before VR was an actual mass consumer product — but VR added so much to the experience that it made that title feel reborn.

It’s the same story for Halo, this is a franchise that has belonged on PC since its inception but was limited by the console hardware that hosted it so that Microsoft could use the strength it lends as an IP to move hardware. Understandable! But not so great for us PC gamers! Well thankfully Microsoft has decided the IP would be better off coming to PC as well as its Xbox line of consoles. Reach is the first arrival from the Master Chief Collection, which will include Halo CE, 2, 3, ODST, 4 and Reach.

The addition of mouse controls adds a fluidity that was never there on a dual analog gamepad and it feels like the premiere modern FPS franchise has come to occupy its rightful position on the premiere FPS platform.

The PC release, much like the MCC isn’t perfect. The compilation suffered from issues on Xbox One and I imagine it will on PC but it cannot be argued that these are some of the strongest games on offer in this industry and that this compilation is one of the best gaming values out there, ever. Some of the issues I’ve noticed on PC for Reach: muffled audio, crouch doesn’t seem to work correctly and occasional front end menu crashes.

In time I’m confident these issues will be ironed out but in the meantime this is a playable and definitive version of one of the best FPS games released in the last 10 years. Mouse aiming is a revelation, the multiplayer is excellent and the campaign is depressing and somber making you feel vulnerable and doomed even as a Spartan war machine. At the end though, Reach is reborn in our world as well as 117’s.

Here’s to Halo on PC, keep it coming.

Nick McCaskey – Anno 1800

Given the limited time I had to play games in 2019, my game of the year choice is less about a definitive selection and more about my personal slice of gaming. Therefore, the 2019 release I loved the most was Anno 1800, and my 100+ hours of playtime proves it!

I’m a long-time Anno fan, and 1800 was a homecoming for the franchise. It delivered the hallmark mix of soothing city-building, vast empire management, and complex economic simulation while also being the most graphically astounding and technically impressive entry in the series.

Moreover, now is the best time ever to play Anno 1800. The developers deserve kudos for steadily releasing significant patches to improve the game and add free features like a day/night cycle and much better empire statistics screens.

Another reason to jump in now is the Season Pass content is now completely released. I’m morally opposed to paying early for promises, but just last week I’ve purchased the Season Pass at half-price and look forward to enjoying the three excellent content additions to the game.

In conclusion, there’s a time and place for high-energy, scripted story games, but Anno 1800 is my fallback game when I need to sit down for a couple hours and do nothing more than leisurely expand my empire-wide bread production chains. Ah, it’s good to taste life’s simple production pleasures!

PS: As far as other “could have been GOTY if I’d played them” titles, I will mention Control, Disco Elysium, and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. All three seem outstanding and worthy of consideration!

John Papadopoulos – The Outer Worlds

2019 was a great year for PC gaming as we got a lot of amazing games. And, to be honest, it was pretty difficult deciding my GOTY 2019. I really loved Resident Evil 2 Remake, Gears 5 and Devil May Cry 5. A Plague of Tale: Innocence was also a stunning title, and Metro: Exodus was awesome. Still, there was “something” missing in these games.

Ultimately, I was left with three games that were the closest I could think of as a GOTY 2019. These three games were: Red Dead Redemption 2, Control and The Outer Worlds. RDR 2 is Chris’ GOTY 2019 so I believe I should choose another game.

So, The Outer Worlds or Control? To be honest, I enjoyed both of them. The Outer Worlds is a great RPG that even lets you kill anyone and avoid combat via the dialogue tree. Contrary to Fallout 4, its combat mechanics are amazing and it was a truly amazing experience. Yes, there are some shortcomings here and there, but I really, really enjoyed it.

And then there is Control. I’ve always been a huge fan of Remedy’s games and despite a lot of players, I really enjoyed Quantum Break (I love “time travel” so give me more of these ideas/scenarios please). Control is easily one of Remedy’s best games to date. Not only that, but it’s pretty fascinating witnessing its older IPs, like Quantum Break and Alan Wake, being present in the very same universe. It’s a game you should definitely play as it has a lot of special moments, like the Ashtray Maze or what happens to Jesse towards the end of the game. However, its ending did not satisfy me as it’s undoubtedly building towards a sequel. And perhaps this is something in which The Outer Worlds excelled.

When I finished The Outer Worlds, I felt a weird satisfaction. I didn’t get any “The game ended? That’s it? It was really short. But what about this?” feeling. The game felt complete. Moreover, and while writing everything you just read, I was constantly recalling my experiences in The Outer Worlds rather than in Control. Therefore, my GOTY 2019 is The Outer Worlds.

Merry Christmas everyone and happy holidays!

The post DSOGaming – Here are our Games of the Year 2019 appeared first on DSOGaming.

DSOGaming – Here are our Games of the Year 2019 published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[hopperehxpxamqkz-blog]

Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Christmas? (Special Edition)

As regular readers will know, each Saturday we all get together to discuss our weekend gaming plans and see what our fellow community members are up to. This week is a little different, however, with many of us taking a little time away to celebrate the holidays and enjoy time with friends or family, or even taking some much-needed alone time for a bit of peace and quiet. As such, this week's 'What Are You Playing?' feature is dedicated to the holidays, all wrapped up in a super-special bumper edition. Feel free to read through the Nintendo Life team's entries, and then tell us about your own plans via the poll and comments below. Enjoy! Alex Olney, video producer Christmas eh? What's all that about? Well, for me it'll be mostly tucking into some lovely Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but since it's that time of year when my family gets together, you can be sure I'll be making an exception for something. That something is the N64. It's not the first console I or my brother (Simon) owned, that honour goes to the SEGA Master System, but the N64 was what we primarily grew up with after Si won it in a competition in the Beano. I mean, I was the one told him that there were actually 30 Party Rings and not 29 like he thought, but it's not like I'm going to bang on about it on a public article or anything. So we'll be hooking up the old beast and no doubt playing the snot out of things like Mario Kart 64, and perhaps even something like Wetrix, all in gloriously bad 50Hz on a modern flatscreen with significant input lag on composite devices. What else says 'Christmas' more than that? Speaking of which, here's hoping you all have the most splendid times imaginable this season! Whatever you celebrate, whenever you celebrate it, make it a cracking one for me all right? Darren Calvert, operations director As Christmas is a time for spending with the family, Im sure Ill be having lots of games of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with my munchkins aged 7 and 10. Theyve been practising tirelessly since it came out on the Switch earlier this month, so Im sure I will get beaten mercilessly as I resort to button-mashing to survive. When the wider family come over, Im sure well be having a few games of Super Mario Party to pass the time with the kids. Its a lot more fun than Monopoly anyway. Im hoping we can find time for lots of races together in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe also, Im quietly confident of holding my own in Mario Kart still. After a few laps of Sherbet Land well all be in the festive mood. Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas! Dom Reseigh-Lincoln, reviewer This Christmas I'll be taking a well-earned break, but that doesn't mean I won't be catching up or completing some of the games I've missed on Nintendo Switch. So I'll be finishing up Manticore: Galaxy on Fire, Attack on Titan 2 and Armello. I'll likely be returning to my two portable loves - Paladins and Warframe - while continuing to shoot hoops and grind for VC in NBA 2K19. I'm nothing if not productive. Merry Christmas, all! [embedded content]Gavin Lane, contributing writer Christmas used to be a time to sit down with something shiny and new, but now its my chance to flush the backlog and catch up with things I missed throughout the year Switch has made that list quite substantial in 2018! So, while Ill be dipping into Overcooked 2s free DLC with the family, Ill hopefully get to chill the beans with Firewatch and ABZU once everyone is snoozing after overindulging on mince pies. Im also determined to start Wolfenstein II so I can polish off those spoiler-filled GOTY podcasts that have been languishing unplayed on my phone since 2017 before tucking into this years editions! Have a great one everybody! Glen Fox, guides editor So I haven't had much chance to play my Switch the past few months, as I've been an absolute heathen and have been mildly addicted to Black Ops 4, Elder Scrolls Online, and Guild Wars 2. I'm going away for Christmas though, so will have my trusty Switch to keep me company. I've missed a couple of gems that I'd like to dig into, like Pokmon: Let's Go, Warframe, and Hollow Knight. No, I simply don't like Smash Bros. so I won't be playing that it's just the way it is. No doubt I'll double-dip into Splatoon 2 and stuff like that too. This is also my last one of these as I'm leaving Nintendo Life in January to pursue a different line of work. I'd like to say a huge thank you to the supportive and lovely staff, and to the readers who make this site and community as awesome as it is. It's been a pleasure writing for you all and I'm sure you'll see my name crop up occasionally as freelance. Merry Christmas and a happy new year! [embedded content]Gonalo Lopes, contributing writer As 2018 comes to an end, you will find me doing the most clich possible Nintendo thing one would expect: plugging in my SNES Classic and enjoying some sweet retro-gaming sessions for the holidays. The Super Nintendo reminds me of simpler times, exquisite memories, family and friends who are no longer among us. I honour all of those with a big smile from ear to ear you will rarely find among adults nowadays, caused by such simple pleasures as completing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, finishing F-Zero on Master difficulty, enjoying the soundtrack in Secret of Mana, turning Dracula do dust in Super Castlevania IV or just replaying the ice levels of Donkey Kong Country over and over again. Oh yes, I will also re-watch Die Hard between SNES gaming sessions! Maybe this time Hans gets away with it... This was yet another incredible year as part of the Nintendo Life crew, one I could never have imagined in my wildest optimistic expectations. I do not know what the future holds in 2019 (hopefully a new F-Zero to go along with Metroid Prime 4), so allow me to take this opportunity to wish YOU, fellow gamer reading these humble words: Happy Holidays, tons of awesome video games, and all the joys this life has to offer. Liam Doolan, news reporter This Christmas I intend to play a lot of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Pokmon: Lets Go, Pikachu!. When I'm not in either of these games, Ill be attempting to wrap up multiple other titles before 2018 comes to an end. This includes Diablo III: Eternal Collection, Katamari Damacy Reroll and my most recent eShop purchase, Shantae: Half-Genie Hero. As none of these games are actually Christmas-themed, Ill have to go elsewhere for my appropriately-themed fix. Maybe Rocket Leagues Frosty Fest will be able to help me out. Else Ill build a snowman in Minecraft. [embedded content]Ryan Craddock, staff writer As horrifying as the concept sounds, I'll likely be spending the majority of my Christmas break away from games for once - even working here at the Nintendo Life Factory of Dreams and Magic can take its toll after a while. Having said that, I have been working towards unlocking as many Super Smash Bros. Ultimate characters as possible for any potential games with family when I go to visit, so I doubt my gaming break will last for long. Similarly, I've already planned to pack Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Super Mario Party, and maybe even Pokmon, Let's Go, Eevee! for the odd multiplayer session (or in Pokmon's case, just to show off my collection). Now that I think about it, it doesn't sound like I'm having a break from gaming at all, does it? Ah well... Happy holidays, everyone! Steve Bowling, US editor The holiday means we have a long break ahead and things will be a little quieter than usual. For me, that means it's time to sink my teeth into some of the Switch's more time-consuming games. Over the holiday I'll be playing Octopath Traveler and Valkyria Chronicles 4. I've been curious about Octopath since its reveal and have somehow managed to remain spoiler free so far, but I have a feeling I'll be working on both of these games well into the new year. Which games are you playing over Christmas? (883 votes)Super Smash Bros. Ultimate24% Super Mario Party5% Mario Kart 8 Deluxe9% Manticore: Galaxy on Fire 0% Attack on Titan 2 0% Armello 0% Paladins 0% Warframe2% NBA 2K19 0% Overcooked 22% Firewatch1% ABZU 0% Wolfenstein II1% Pokmon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee!8% Hollow Knight3% Splatoon 25% The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past2% Secret of Mana1% Super Castlevania IV1% Donkey Kong Country2% Diablo III: Eternal Collection6% Katamari Damacy Reroll2% Shantae: Half-Genie Hero1% Rocket League2% Minecraft1% Octopath Traveler5% Valkyria Chronicles 42% Something else (comment below)14% Please login to vote in this poll. As always, thanks for reading! Make sure to leave a vote in the poll above and a comment below with your gaming choices over the holidays. Whatever you plan to do this year, we hope you have a wonderful time!