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GOTY.cx 2014

Started by Bored of Canada, November 24, 2014, 11:00:55 PM

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Your Games of the Year. 2014.
With kind respect for Idle Thumbs.



What single game in 2014 has captured your heart, your imagination and your brainthoughts this year?

It's hard to choose for me. There's two that have absolutely slayed me. I should choose one but I'm going to choose two, because rules are made to be lightly bent with strong masculine hands covered in small knicks and burns from a life of poor decisions. 

My games for this year are as follows:








Prison Architect is a game that I have written a lot about here. It is a game that is still not out yet, it's an Alpha and is updated with new systems and features every month, and may even be my game of 2015 and 2016 and so on if they keep working on it. It's an increasingly in depth simulation and management game where you run a private prison and try to turn a profit whilst keeping your prisoners suppressed.

This game is deliberately morally murky and captures great stories and only gets better and better each month. One (of many) prisoners in my huge mainly maximum security prison were addicted to heroin. I got into a good place with sniffer dogs and ended most of the drug smuggling in. But with people throwing shit in over the fence, prisoners smuggling it in when being ingested, things being smuggled in through visitors, and even stuff coming in with the food supplies. No matter how much I stacked the cards in my favour, it generally still got in.

So whenever anyone in my prison overdosed, I'd get the doctors in quick smart, toss their room, and shove them in solitary for a good long while. Forcing them to battle it cold-turkey, puking in their tiny solitary cell. And now, when they're in that much pain, they're more willing to become informants, and if they've been in prison longer, they know where the stuff is. So I released him from his punishment in exchange for snitching for me, and did huge raids all over the prison. Did this a number of times, except one time people got wise that he was snitching. And he was marked for death within my prison.

So I had to actually make a new wing and juggle around all my schedules just for this one guy to keep him alive. It's not like everyone would just instantly aggro on him. The aggressive people might stay away from him with enough guards about. Whilst I was building my wing, he was beaten pretty bad in the showers, but survived, so I got him up in a heavily secured private little prison house at the north end of my prison. He went about his schedule for two days, enjoying the luxuries of all his stuff in needed in one place. Though having to have his meals at like 4 morning and such.

Two days later, I realised he was gone. He had a phone in his cell, and I had built it so far north due to lack of space that he was right by the prison walls, and someone had thrown over a digging tool, and he had just burrowed out through the toilet without me noticing.

I've got loads of stories. It's a fascinating game. Really fun. Pretty damn accessible too in turns of starting it, especially compared to something like Dwarf Fortress, which I've never been able to understand.

It's troubling, addictive, and teaches you a lot by making you reflect on conservative decisions vs humane decisions. It also creates great stories with all these interlocking systems creating exciting things happening.





My other game would 80 Days which is an IOS game based on the Jules Verne novel where you play as newly hired French valet Passepartout. I found out about it through Idle Thumbs not too long ago and played it religiously after that. It's a choose your own adventure type game presented beautifully with a great soundtrack, but with various gameplay systems other than just text.

You have to manage your funds, your luggage, timetables, the health of Phileas Fogg, figuring out which routes are better, gathering gossip to find out if you want to avoid a certain city. Maybe there's a civil war somewhere. Maybe some object or person you've met will really help you in a certain city, or maybe you know that having had that happen, you need to avoid that like the plague, because it'll waste time and you need to get there in 80 days. The tension of the timelimit is really clever. It's a surprisingly great framing device for a game of this type. There's so much to see, and no time to see it. So there is always this tension as the game tries to tease you into chasing it down narrative rabbit holes. Chasing love or getting embroiled in a murder mystery, or huge amounts of other things, but you must keep going. And if you want to chase that, then fine, but you're letting your boss down.

I've not seen anywhere near it all. I've only been to maybe an eighth of all the cities you can travel to.

It's astonishingly written. It's very minimalistic. Very brief passages that let your imagination go wild with what it doesn't necessarily say.

As I've said before on here, it's filled with beautiful moments that have stuck with me, and it makes me smile.

Bhazor

Mine would be Divine Divinity: Original Sin. The problem is I didn't actually like it all that much.

In theory it did everything I love. An off kilter setting which mocks everything and itself. A fascinating combat system with tons of strategy and room for lateral thinking. A world which felt lived in with hundreds of unique characters with internal lives and relationships. A real physicality where almost every object can be used in interesting ways. Unfortunately, the game had several fundamental problems. Difficulty was all over the place, the lack of random battles meant its incredibly easy to end up woefully underleveled, all skills books share the same icon so trying to find a new one in a shop selling hundreds of the fucker ate up more time than the battles, terrible inventory interface, fucking durability on all items and some glaring omissions in terms of tutorial to the point I had to use an online walkthrough to escape the tutorial dungeon.

Now a follow up, or an addon, that fixes these issues and it would really be my game of the year.


In terms of game I enjoyed playing the most that would be DOTA 2. The first game I've played online since Battlefield 2 and it showcases the best and worst of multiplayer. At its core its just a fantastically designed game with so much variety that after some 300 hours I'm still getting a thrill of discovery at learning some new combo or trick. It is making me completely racist towards Russians though. FUck those guys, they are an assholes.

madhair60

The Binding of Isaac Rebirth. It's The Binding of Isaac but it actually functions.  Tenouttaten