End of year lists are usually a pretty cut and dry thing for me.
A nice way to round out what has, inevitably, been an amazing year for games, one that will
go down in the history books, right?
Well, as 2018 comes to a close, I find it hard to muster that kind of excitement this
time around.
The thought of making a year-end video, for a good chunk of 2018, has filled me with worry
about what I would actually include.
My video game critic galaxy brain would like to philosophise about how 2017 so rejigged
our conceptions of established genre norms and redefined how games could tell their stories
through mechanics – within the AAA space, I might add – that the decidedly cinematic
experiences people were holding up as these generation-defining games felt more like they
defined the last generation than this one.
And while I think there's some truth in that, it's probably more likely that, honestly,
I was feeling a little burned out on games in general this year.
I've been doing YouTube for over three years now at the expense of pretty much everything
else, so it was probably inevitable that something was going to give at some point.
I won't bore you but things got pretty bad—the idea of approaching a word processor terrified
me at times.
Moreso than in other years, then, 2018 has been defined by the focus I placed on myself.
I spent much less time online and more time focused on the world around me, the people
I care about.
I read more and watched more movies again.
I went to places I'd never been.
I tried to place restrictions on the hours I was working so I wasn't simply writing
and editing until I collapsed as was the case previously.
It probably hurt channel growth, but I realised how little that mattered to me, as long as
I'm healthy and doing what I love.
It resulted in a marked improvement in my efficiency, a renewed inspiration from expanding
my horizons and a lot of, if not my most viewed work, definitely the work I value the most.
What's more, this realisation happened to coincide with a latter half of the year featuring
an onslaught of new releases which, regardless of their individual quality, reminded me that
there's still a lot I want to say about games (as well as cementing that, in the year
to come, I'll probably be focusing less on outright terrible releases than I did this
year, instead celebrating what I enjoy).
In summary, this list is weird.
It's not filled to the brim with my favourite games of all time or the most transcendent
experiences, but it is a comprehensive look at the games that stuck with me, for whatever
reason, in a year where I needed them to stick with me the most.
So without further ado, here is the Writing on Games Top Five Games of 2018 (that I played,
obviously, and there are many games I didn't get around to), with some honourable mentions
for good measure!
And in at number five we have…
5.
Yakuza 6
This game features a scene in which a muscled ex-Yakuza in a dad shirt stares down a bunch
of balaclava-clad men and an ostentatious Korean mob boss, all while the stars of Battle
Royale play rugby with a baby.
If I was to tell you that said game of baby rugby, besides featuring some of the funniest
shots I've seen all year, had me clenching my teeth it was so tense, you probably wouldn't
believe me.
But this is the state of things in Yakuza 6; its brash, loud, colourful demeanour belying
a humanity and heart that most games can only dream of achieving—with every part that
you'd think would ring dissonantly in fact only helping to sell me on its utterly singular
vision.
Its new engine simplifies combat in favour of hammering home the bone-crunching weight
of every punch and putting you more directly in control of situations previously relegated
to its over-the-top heat actions, but they also show more closely the wrinkles in Kiryu's
now-grizzled face; highlighting the fact that this is a man who has seen some stuff.
Playing perfectly into the game's story of this man, who just wants to help everyone
at the end of the day, being forced to come to terms with the fact that the world around
him, the gangster life and Japan he knew, is moving on and leaving him and his values
behind.
The fact that Kiryu's send-off relegates so much of the supporting cast we've come
to know and love to near-absence, combined with the yearning I had for a more satisfying
conclusion to a game whose conspiracies were so dense and ever-changing that they were
as confusing to me as they likely were to Kiryu, means that it doesn't quite reach
the dazzlingly cohesive highs of last year's localisation of 0.
But at a time where game after game felt so dull and grey, Yakuza 6 showed me that there
was still room in games for glorious flamboyance.
Don't ever change, Kiryu.
And in at number 4 we have…
4.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Red Dead 2, on the surface, plays it safe.
Mechanically, it's GTAV except the travels between its run-of-the-mill shootouts are
longer and more automatic.
It flat out rejects even the slightest deviations from its ridiculously rigid mission structures;
its gameplay coming firmly second to its filmic ambitions which it only partially realises.
In terms of that larger story, however, and the ways in which this world is sold to you,
Rockstar's approach is risky as hell.
You're taking one of the most anticipated games of all time, from perhaps the canonical
developer of the sandbox game as we know it, and you're forcing players to endure the
absolute minutiae of your world because Rockstar has a story to tell and by god you're going
to experience it.
And while it's barely conveyed through gameplay during missions, what a story it is; a remarkable
tale of characters coming to terms with the onward march of civilisation and the destruction
it will wreak on their way of life, each splintering off from the group for their own reasons as
its leader Dutch begins to unfurl into the egotistical maniac he probably always was.
The game's immense length allows for moments where amongst the tension and the fun of being
an outlaw, one little thing will change, the tiniest detail will slip; enough to sow the
seeds of doubt in Arthur but not enough to remove Dutch of his charm, leading to beautiful
powder keg moments where you suddenly realise how different things are now, and wonder how
you got roped along in the first place.
That said, the cracks begin to show more widely in its detail-oriented worldbuilding when
you're ducked behind cover getting shot at and, thanks to the game's poorly-realised
survival mechanics, you're chewing on a lamb shank thinking "this would do a much
better job of healing my bullet holes if it had some oregano on it."
In short, Red Dead 2 has problems.
But in a game this vast, with so many interconnected systems and environments and a rich, winding
story… some inconsistencies are bound to occur.
It's one of those situations where the amount of bold swings they took, for me, excuse the
many times they missed.
I stand by my assertion that it's more TV show than game, but goddamn that TV show is
good.
And at number 3 we have…
3.
Forza Horizon 4
There's something gloriously dystopian to the supposed utopia Horizon presents to you.
It's a world in which the few humans you do come across exist solely to give you cars
and houses and tell you how good you are in as patronising a way as possible; congratulating
you for spinning around on various landmarks across the country in your dumb hat before
you go on a consequence-free rampage through middle England as invaded by EDM car fetishists;
hellbent on destroying the country one National Trust-protected wall at a time—all while
providing constant offering to The All-Encompassing Social Network That Shall Not Be Named.
In all seriousness it probably seems a little quaint that a game like Forza gets so high
on my list; I'm not even a big car guy so I'm not in it for the money shots or the
culture.
That said there's something that's always relaxed me about the purity of a good racing
game.
There's a comforting lack of equivocation in "start, go fast and finish first" and
in a year where I found real value in media that allowed me to get out of my own head,
the popping visual aesthetic of the game's world, soundtracked by the chilliest of liquid
drum'n'bass served as a much-needed emotional salve.
It also helps that the game feels so good to play on the most basic mechanical level;
its delicate balance of sim-like weight and arcade-type speed combined with the winding
roads of the British countryside lead to races that are as breathtaking as they are nail-biting,
and every stretch of road, with its multiple challenges, encourages you to go as fast as
possible.
Each car the game generously doles out to you features wildly varying handling models,
bolstered by changing seasons; actively requiring you to mess around to find which car is best
suited to which time of the year.
All of this to say that Horizon was a far richer experience for me than I ever could
have imagined going in.
Its sheer speed at times made it feel like the closest we're going to get to a new
Burnout game minus the wreckages.
Its overly-exuberant tone (combined with its oddly dystopic allusions I mentioned earl
ier) should have annoyed the hell out of me but went so far as to come back around to
genuine charm.
It might seem odd for some, but Forza Horizon 4 was simply some of the most fun I had with
any game this year.
And my runner-up for game of the year is…
2.
Spider-Man
By all accounts, I was fully ready to dismiss Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man as a glossier
version of all the other failed attempts to recreate that seemingly unknowable magic of
2.
For all of Insomniac's bluster, I couldn't shake the feeling that every trailer made
its swinging look too automatic for the novelty to sustain itself, and that its combat looked
like any other title aping the punch-punch-counter style made famous by the Arkham games.
Hell, I got my hands on it prior to launch at Gamescom and my worry only grew that this
would be yet another disappointment in a year replete with them.
Boy, how wrong I was.
Once I got my hands on it for a decent chunk of time, I came to realise the lengths the
game goes to in order to make your most minute interactions feel as engaging as possible—turning
it into one of the most joyous experiences I had this year.
The mere act of traversal – often overlooked by games in favour of getting to the meat
as quickly as possible - felt good; less concerned with how cool it would look to hold a button
and arc from the top of a swing to the bottom and more concerned with how good it would
feel to maintain your speed in as straight a line as possible, trying to correctly time
point-launches wherever possible for that oh-so-satisfying boom.
In combat, it wasn't enough to simply watch for your Spidey-sense then hit a button to
warp across the room to counter the incoming attack.
No, you had to intuit your surroundings more than that and get out of the way, leading
to an altogether more frantic and frenetic series of events that placed you in direct
control of its comic book-style action.
What's more, its surprisingly gripping story is given enough time to flesh out its villains,
allowing Insomniac to provide their own flavour to backstories established decades prior,
leading to some emotionally torturous yet gloriously cathartic moments for our protagonist,
with enough levity thrown in around the mundanities of Peter Parker's personal life to maintain
the childlike joy found in its mechanics; leading to the kind of game that had me as
enthralled by the trajectory of these villains as it had me gawking at how cool their costumes
look.
Spider-Man reminded me that games didn't need to wallow in self-seriousness to have
a profound impact on players; it just made me happy and in 2018 in particular, that feels
particularly worthy of commendation.
And before we get to our winner, here are some unordered HONOURABLE MENTIONS:
Next Car Game finally emerged from early access this year as Wreckfest and, following immediately
after the wasteland of aggressively awful handling and content that was The Crew 2,
it felt good to wield a car as if it were a goddamn weapon.
Its wealth and sheer variety of activities sees it land the transition from physics demo
to full-fledged game, while Its damage models appear to have been fine-tuned since I last
played it years ago; allowing you the opportunity to fully utilise a car's weight as you use
other cars as turning aids, without writing off your vehicle in the process.
In short, Wreckfest makes you feel powerful.
There's an incredible ten to fifteen hours in Assassin's Creed Odyssey's sixty hours,
but you can pay to make it thirty if you want.
That's the dilemma I face with the latest entry in Ubisoft's long-running franchise,
where for every forward step this sequel took, it was stretched so thin for the sake of sheer
content and some of the most egregious single-player microtransactions I've ever come across.
The only reason it was so frustrating, however, was due to the fact that when everything comes
together, Odyssey hits surprisingly hard; with a story that allows its characters to
get lost in the excess of ancient Greece without worrying too much about the larger plot, and
gameplay that lets up on the series' rigidity to make for instances of true chaos.
I know I've harped on about it a lot but look at all these chickens!
On the perhaps less well-known side of the spectrum, Paratopic immediately grabbed my
attention by basically looking like a PS1 title and held it by the fact that it's
a forty minute game in a sea of these vast time sinks.
What I wasn't expecting when I booted it up, however, was that these descriptors would
end up doing a disservice to the wonderful horror experience within.
I've played through those densely-packed forty minutes multiple times, each go-around
uncovering something new about its cryptic mystery.
Its aesthetic ends up playing very directly into its horror, being toyed with in such
a way as to draw on your nostalgia while also heightening the unsettling loneliness of its
eerily beautiful world.
If the idea of Silent Hill directed by David Lynch interests you and you've got half
an hour to spare, Paratopic should be your next port of call.
And in the sea of impressive remasters giving me an excuse to go back and find that spark
recent titles weren't giving me, you can now buy Killer7 on PC.
In full HD at 60fps.
In a port that only serves to compound the game's inherent weirdness.
It's one of my top three games of all time.
I'll have a video on the port in the new year but for now, just play it.
Play.
It.
Now.
All of which brings us to my number one game of 2018 which is…
1.
Hitman 2
I cannot tell you how happy I am to have more Hitman in my life.
After the overlords at Square Enix decided the first season – one of my favourite games
of all time - was apparently a failure (before, I might add, going on to release The goddamn
Quiet Man), I was stunned and unbearably disappointed that we wouldn't see the full potential
shown by its first season wholly explored.
And while IO's reclamation of the license and production of yet another season might
prove to be a legitimate financial failure, that fact is made all the more gut-wrenching
by just how absolutely the opposite is true of its magnificent gameplay and the treasure
trove of content provided to players for their buck.
It's more Hitman, for sure, but it's better Hitman.
They take the strengths of the map design in the first game – namely that, as opposed
to being large for the sake of it, what matters is how the different sections of those maps
connect with each other – and somehow apply that principle to some of the most gargantuan
levels across the entire reboot.
Maps have a verticality that was perhaps lacking in some of 2016's environments—encouraging
you to affect things on one end of the map from the complete opposite point and, with
all the challenges and extra modes the game provides, you're incentivised to experiment
and try new approaches; with new features adding breadth that opens up the possibility
of things like sniping, and encourages you to get a bit more bold with the game's stealth
mechanics; taking the first game's "hiding in plain sight" approach and morphing it
into just straight up "hiding".
But it's not just the maps that are interconnected; the mechanics speak to the game's more nuanced
and cohesive approach to storytelling this time around.
And by that I don't mean the overall story that, for as inconsequential as it ends up
being, is a pleasingly shlocky romp that sees you taking on the most comically evil villains
one could imagine while simultaneously making you question just how old 47 actually is.
No, the real meat of the game's narrative comes in its little moments where you realise,
for example, that 47 is not only a renaissance man, not simply a musician but specifically
a drummer, at least primarily.
It draws and expands upon this weird lore they set up in the first game, and fits eerily
well with the cold, calculated rhythm required to steady your breathing while aiming down
a scope and getting a beat on your target.
Helping an assassin do your job for you is one of the most wonderful sequences I've
experienced in a game all year; seeing you explore and affect almost every area on Mumbai's
incredible map, with the moment being made all the better by the fact that, as evidenced
by his inability to do something as basic as focus a rifle, this guy you're helping
is… kind of incompetent; that despite your disguises being laughably transparent to anyone
other than a cluster of clockwork AI patterns, somehow you are still the best assassin in
the world.
Hitman, with its overtly video game-y look and feel and campy story doesn't seem like
the kind of game you'd need top quality writers for.
But I feel their presence; they know.
They're clearly aware that one of the biggest draws of the first game was the unassuming
nature of its player-driven screwball comedy; the ways in which the player, in a game about
a ruthless, cold assassin, could place a wrench in these apparently normal scenarios, seeing
the entire thing devolve into an inhuman mess in a matter of seconds.
The developers wrote it in this time; they crafted scenarios that not only played to
the strengths of its level design but worked with this weird fiction they ended up creating
around 47.
And their dedication to it – in knowing when to put their hands up and say "this
game is better for this weird thing even if other developers might strive to fix it"
– is a restraint, a commitment that I can only admire.
Hitman 2 has made me laugh as much as it's had me biting my nails; it encourages me to
think creatively about approaches to missions I wouldn't have considered in 2016's game.
And in a year that at one point had me craving a game, any game that wouldn't just leave
me completely cold, for Hitman 2 to annihilate that exceedingly low bar was such a breath
of fresh air, making it a game that I'll be playing long into 2019.
And so concludes my list of games of the year.
But in reflecting on this year, the games themselves feel like such a small part of
the bigger picture when so much of what inspired me to keep going was found outside of games;
mainly, it was the love and support of the people around me and in order to give something
back, I thought it would be nice to do what I did earlier in the year and shout out some
smaller channels run by people who offered support, whose work inspired me in some way
and crucially are well worth your time.
Given the rather shadowy workings of the video game industry, real actual journalism in the
field is pretty rare.
Game Brain's dedication to find the people behind the games and bring their stories to
light, then, is really commendable.
Not only is he a great writer, he's managed to discuss game design with Chris Rausch (one
of the designers of the original Pro Skater), he's talked with one of the developers of
the original GTA about the time he spilled blood on Miyamoto, among many other things.
Game Brain is going above and beyond most other channels to explore the weird and wacky
side of this industry we might otherwise never see, and for that I think you should check
him out.
MML Commentaries is able to use his personal family experiences playing a board game to
explore the socio-economic origins of Monopoly.
He's able to deftly explore journalistic ethics as theoretically defined one minute,
before opening himself up to explore the existential horror of online life the next.
In other words, his videos are some of the most effective and impactful attempts to bridge
that gap between the deeply academic and wildly personal reasons we're attracted to media
I've seen in my entire time on this site.
If you're looking for something unrelated to games, my good friend In/Frame/Out made
his foray onto the YouTube scene a few months ago and the level of quality already on show
is quite something.
His exceptionally articulate and conversational writing style combined with slick presentation
and a subtle sense of humour easily puts him up there with the likes of Channel Criswell
in my eyes.
And if I've said it once I've said it a million times – go subscribe to Lambhoot.
His ability to mix super technical analysis of games from a software development perspective
and an utterly impeccable sense of comedic timing make him the most criminally undersubscribed
channel on this website.
If you do one thing today, go and watch his videos and let him know dad sent you.
He will appreciate it.
Which brings me onto my patrons—I say this at the end of every video but I really cannot
state this enough, your support (not just monetarily – although that definitely does
help - but the words of encouragement and the messages letting me know how much my work
meant to you) was absolutely what kept me going this year and what will see the channel
grow for a long time to come.
You are directly responsible for the amount of videos that I was able to make this year,
as well as ensuring that I was able to keep improving in terms of quality.
You inspired me to keep going through the tough times and get better and I will never
be able to thank you enough for that.
In particular I'd like to thank Mark B Writing, Rob, Nico Bleackley, Michael Wolf, Artjom
Vitsjuk, Ali Almuhanna, Timothy Jones, Spike Jones, Laserpferd, TheNamlessGuy, Chris Wright,
Ham Migas, Travis Bennett, Zach Casserly, Samuel Pickens, Tom Nash, Shardfire, Ana Pimentel,
Jessie Rine, Brandon Robinson, Justins Holderness, Christian Konemann, Mathieu Nachury, Nicolas
Ross and Charlie Yang.
And with that, this has been another episode of Writing on Games.
Stay safe this New Year and I'll see you in 2019.
For more infomation >> Welcome To The Official Online Coaches YouTube Channel - Duration: 0:22. 
For more infomation >> Elle répare sa chasse d'eau toute seule ! - Duration: 14:28. 
For more infomation >> 80+ Creative Ideas for Wood Art Decorations | John Ideas - Duration: 10:08. 
For more infomation >> DSPS 2019 新年忘年會 - Duration: 8:57. 
For more infomation >> Loremakers guide to the galaxy : Le système Bacchus- VOSTFR - Duration: 14:48. 
For more infomation >> Géminis - Sin ti (Prod. Alonso) | #Resquicios - Duration: 3:14. 
For more infomation >> The Mystery of Manifest: The Creators Discuss Looming Dangers - Duration: 5:38. 
For more infomation >> Wie leuchtet ein Feuerwerk? |AUTsideshorts - Duration: 2:25. 
For more infomation >> DaMo - Beat making od kuchni - Idę do Ciebie (ZAJAWKA!) - Duration: 3:15. 
For more infomation >> افضل vpn لتغيير ال ip و فتح المواقع المحجوبة فى بلدك و الحصول على إنترنت سريع 2019 - Duration: 5:54. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét