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Honorable Mentions:
ABZU: I thought this was a neat experience, but it didn't leave any impression on me other than Journey Under Water. I suppose the One Big Moment was cool but even that borrowed its format from one of Jouneys several Big Moments.
Day of the Tentacle / Grim Fandango Remastered: Not sure that it counts anyway, and I only played maybe two hours of each because my brain no longer works this way (maybe I'll whip out some guides over the winter and just bask in the old schoolness of it all with none of the mental stress) but the director's commentary was great and it was fun seeing all the work they put into modernizing a pair of games that are very dated for very different reasons.
The Banner Saga: Released on PS4 January of this year, and I was hooked, but it didn't stick with me much after it was done. I was excited for The Banner Saga 2 up until the point I booted it up and almost immediately bounced off it, leaving me to wonder if I ever really loved The Banner Saga in the first place.
Overcooked: I love the idea of this game, but it is VERY hard with just two players, especially when one of those players is your 37-year old girlfriend whose only real video game experience is The Walking Dead Seasons One and Two on an iPad. She loves food, I love playing video games, and the first two levels of this are a lot of fun. Once they put us on trucks and made the playing field start sliding around, though, all hope was lost. Bummer.
Batman: Arkham Knight: This game was a lot of fun while I was playing it; honestly, it should be on my list where The Witness is. But I mostly enjoyed it for all the ways it reminded me of how much I loved Arkham City, and while I didn't hate the Batmobile as much as most I did find it overused and repetitive nonetheless.
Nodima GOTY 2016
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1. DOOM
I did not have any expectations for this game prior to release. I heard the multiplayer beta buzz and didn't care much; haven't cared much for competitive first-person games since the first Modern Warfare. I play a first-person shooter every other year or two, and generally pick something that seems the most original. Who'd have thought a return to its roots would make DOOM the most original shooter in years? It undeniably borrows from modern tropes and from its own standard operating procedures, but subverts almost every expectation over and over again until you're left with a game that's both a satire and send up of the entire idea of video games and their history with violence and gore. Impeccable writing, sound and level design and more add up to a game I imagined would just be a quick, bloody romp but proved to be so, so much more.
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2. MLB The Show 16
I have bought Sony's One True Baseball Sim yearly since 2013, though I could never tell you exactly why. I admire the attention to detail in the simulation of an actual sports broadcast and the way the baseball feels and looks like baseball; if any sport lends itself to video games, it's baseball, especially the modern SABRmetrics version of it. But 2016 was the first year I had a good relationship with this series' servers, and as such I became hopelessly addicted to Diamond Dynasty, a twist on EA's Ultimate Team modes that does away with contracts, injuries, multiple versions of the same player (well, discounting the super cool flashback and rookie cards) and all the other distracting, free-to-play elements that make EA and 2K's versions of the same mode seem exploitative in favor of letting you focus on which players past and present you love to play with and why. It's an endlessly rewarding loop that had a baseball ex-pat like myself randomly checking box scores in the paper for the first time in two decades, and glued to my bar stool throughout the 2016 playoffs.
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3. Uncharted 4: A Thief's End
I was late to the Uncharted party; I originally binged all three over the summer of 2013 thanks to a deep discount on PSN. I had always worried fans and critics of the series were overrating its characters' sense of individualism and relatability, and that spending $60 on a 6 hour game I'd only play once would be a mistake. Enter 2016, wherein I played Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection and Uncharted 4 all in a row, loved every second of it, and came away without a doubt in my mind that this current regime at Naughty Dog is an infallible monster when it comes to narrative structure and using gameplay to invest the player in the tales they want to tell. It's the best playing game in the series, the most beautiful game of its generation and a stellar story in its own right that only marginally leans on its predecessors; a lesson the Star Wars people failed to learn when making Force Awakens. I never touched the multiplayer, but I bought the Digital Deluxe Version and didn't feel like I wasted a penny. I didn't want this ride to end.
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4. Ratchet & Clank
What a lovely surprise! During the original PS2 trilogy, I'd found myself super into Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando but otherwise gravitated a little more towards Jak & Daxter. Yet this pseudo-re-release somehow ginned up wells of nostalgia I didn't even know I had, and was so purely fun that I immediately started a New Game + upon completion. I didn't finish that second run, but boy is this game full of awesome guns, beautiful locales and trinkets to collect. It's just a shame the story didn't quite keep up with the gameplay.
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5. NBA 2K17
This game used to top my GOTY lists year in and year out if for no other reason than it was a fantastic way to vicariously manage a franchise and play a few seasons with my favorite basketball players, meticulously animated and crafted to operate on screen eerily similar to the way they did in real life. I've found the series to slowly mire itself in a variety of issues related to online server unreliability and free-to-play mechanics that have made its MyPlayer mode both a money tree and a hinderance on the rest of the game. There is feature bloat nearly to the point of no return with this game, but for the first time since 2K12 or so the CPU feels excellent to play against, and a new A.I. system simulates the individual styles of each NBA team like never before. It's the first 2K since the PS3 days I've sunk any real time into not one but two franchise saves, and while MyTeam is a horrible mess of incentives to spend real money and the laggy, basically-a-different-game online play are huge disappointments considering my love affair with Diamond Dynasty earlier in the year, the actual on court product is enough of a saving grace I feel comfortable loving NBA 2K again.
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6. The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt
Sneaking in on the technicality of the sheer scope of Blood & Wine, an expansion I'm nowhere near experiencing (I only just beat the base game about three weeks ago), The Witcher 3 has and will be a part of my life for the better part of two years by the time all is said and done with it. I don't enjoy everything about this game - so much of the loot is inconsequential (at least on the default difficulty), despite best intentions there is still a lot of repetition in its game design, and the Skellige Isles are the antithesis of fun to explore and/or traverse. The Witcher 3 works because its world is easily the most fully realized open world this side of a Rockstar tentpole, and the sheer detail invested in that world overcomes all the RPG tropes, Eastern European PC RPG rough edges and bizarre concept of pacing this game throws at you.
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7. Mafia III
I've been meaning to do a long, detailed write-up of all the ways Mafia III doesn't work. Killscreen's review goes a long way towards describing what I felt while playing this game without addressing the totality of that feeling. All the disconnect between narrative and actions, between player and locale, between setting and abilities. Mafia III was nothing if not a frustrating experience and not at all what I'd hoped it'd be, quite small in ambition both game and story wise. Setting all my disappointments aside, though, it was still a game I could play for hours at a time and enjoy. I loved the articles in the issues of Playboy and read each of them with my morning coffee (the photography was great, as well). The weight of the combat was lovely, and there was a certain feeling captured in raiding an enemy base with shotgun-toting brutes in tow while diegetic music hummed out of an AM radio. And, despite totally not nailing its attempts to inject social and political commentary into their narrative, Hanger 13 definitely deserves some recognition for trying something bold and complex, even if it was ultimately little more than window dressing on a lifeless world.
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8. The Witness
I'm going to be honest; this is the point in my Game of the Year list where I'm just mentioning things I played rather than things I finished. Firewatch could have gone here, but where most found the best characterization of the year and a fascinating psychological tale I mostly found yawns and a pretty forest. Life Is Strange could have gone here but I think the running rule is these episodic games are tied to the year their first episode releases, not their last/the compilation's release date. And Until Dawn would place much higher on this list than either game if release dates were entirely irrelevant to Game of the Year discussions. But anyway, The Witness. I felt stupid playing this game almost immediately, and once things got more complicated than a simple maze I solved a series of puzzles involving fruit trees, a single puzzle involving the horizon, a single puzzle involving a courtyard and then wandered aimlessly from puzzle to puzzle, hoping something might stick and never quite getting there. I wound up hating this game for how stupid it made me feel and baffled at how anyone could have beaten it without their hand being held, but I definitely admired its smarts even if it failed to teach me anything during my brief visit.
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9. No Man's Sky
In all honesty I should probably rank this game above The Witness, and maybe even Mafia III. I never came to hate this game, and in fact generally loved my time spent with it. Many hours were lost to exploring planets, scanning things, running from one two-minutes-away marker to the next until suddenly my ship was an hour and twenty minutes from where I stood. But there was a point at which it all felt pointless, and my progression felt as for-the-sake-of-it as progression can get. There is no game I've gone from "playing as much as I can" to "not playing at all" as quickly as I did No Man's Sky; I have very fond memories of punch-gliding across irradiated tropical deserts and iced-over wastelands, but I don't ultimately have any reason to recommend this game to anyone aside from the sheer wonder that comes from your first 12 or so planets, as wonderous a feeling as any game has ever granted me. Whether that feeling is worth the price of admission is ultimately up to the player; for me, it very much was at the time but has felt less and less so the more distance I put between myself, the fantasy of No Man's Sky and the reality of it.
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10. Tricky Towers
I'm not great at this game. I play it maybe once a week. I only enjoy the Race mode, and mostly just on Normal mode. I don't have any Hot Tricky Towers Strats to share with you. But it's joined The Pinball Arcade as That One Game I play for Three Minutes Waiting for Something Else to Happen. I've never much enjoyed the fighter/competitive twists on Tetris in the past, but something about the physics based nature of this one is incredibly charming, and I've felt few more raw emotions of righteous fury or rapturous delight than when my tower collapses atop itself or the same happens to a competitor just moments away from the finish line, suddenly just a fourth of its previous height and all hope seemingly lost. A great reminder that some of the best game designs are also the simplest.
SOME GAMES I WISH I'D PLAYED WITH LITTLE TO NO REASON FOR WHY I DIDN'T PLAY THEM
ALL THE VR GAMES: I don't have that kinda dough, yo.
The Division: Just would like to know what it's like, but I think I'll just go back to Destiny if I want a fix like this.
All the Free PS+ Games I Didn't Play, Which Is Just About All of Them
Let It Die: For some reason I assumed this was a cartoonish side-scroller until I saw the Quick Look and realized I'd never play this.
Bound: Just screams PS+ some day.
Just Cause 3: Just Cause 2 was enjoyable as a PS+ game on PS3 but I didn't come close to finishing it and found it mostly baffling; once the explosions got old, so did the game.
Fallout 4
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Virginia: I'm lying. I played this. I wish I hadn't paid for it, or played it.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare: I thought the hype reels for the campaign looked cool.
Street Fighter V: I love Street Fighter, but I no longer have anyone to play it with.
Hyper Light Drifter, Oxenfree, Downwell: All look cool.
Hitman: Seems like a game I wouldn't enjoy playing nearly as much as I enjoy watching it.
Final Fantasy XV: Someday, but not today, or tomorrow.
Watch Dogs 2: Such a bad taste from the first one.
The Last Guardian: Next on my list, once holiday spending is wrapped up.
XCOM 2: So worried its as buggy on consoles as it was the last time around.
Titanfall 2: Campaign sounds promising, but if I'm completely uninterested in the MP what's the point?
Rise of the Tomb Raider: If Uncharted hadn't came out this year...
Overwatch: Ew, online FPS.
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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz
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