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GOTY 2019 (Halfway Point)

Started by The Boston Crab, May 25, 2019, 05:33:40 PM

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As today is the exact halfway point of the year, what about a quick round up of your GOTY so far this year?


It's been a terrible year overall with almost no good new releases but it's been my best year since the Switch first launched because of pirating a load of Japanese 360 shmups and buying a load more that I should have just pirated. I'll try to come up with stuff that's actually been released this year.


For me, then:


Sekiro

Took a while for the combat to properly click but even before that glorious NG+ run, this was an amazingly atmospheric and rewarding game. Story and lore stuff doesn't seem to have much depth, though, and after two runs, I'm unlikely to ever go back to this. That's fine, that was their intention to make a one and done thing. I think a number of the systems don't make enough sense and I'd say that they could have gone further from their established tropes to commit more wholeheartedly to the one-time nature of the game. It's better than I expected, the peaks are extraordinary, but the flaws are as I expected.


Rolling Gunner

Exceptionally well polished indie bullet hell from an ex-Cave bloke. The graphics are a bit Dreamcast, the music is pretty generic but evocative of the late 90s but the gameplay is sensational. Very accessible, exciting, tough to play for score but not at all unmanageable to play for survival. Excellent visibility and some interesting little patterns. Only on the Japanese eShop at the moment but it's coming to the West pretty soon.






Twed

My nomination is "Halfway Point" from GOTY.

Zetetic

XCOM 2 WOTC (2017)
Lovely to return to something after the modders have had a go at it for a bit.

biggytitbo

Hitman 2 is brilliant and more cunts should play it.

Zetetic

#4
Even if you're not a cunt, it's about £10 on Steam at the moment. (And there's a demo with a stupid name.)

Edit: Hang on, that's just the 'Starter Pack'. Fucking hell.

peanutbutter

Haven't played any but Hypnospace Outlaw looks neat so I'll pick it

The one by the paper please people looksneattoo

Consignia

Tetris 99. GOTY? Yes! GOTD? Most Likely! GOTC? All signs point to yes. GTTO? Came out in Feb, May gone now, Just saying.

Kryton

A few years too late but No Man's Sky is winning it for me... Then Hitman (again a few years too late), then Alien Isolation (a few years too late), then Rocket League.
Assuming this thread is about what MY GOTY is rather than a 2019 release?

It's specifically the exact opposite.

That said, there's no point in having that restriction, not least because it's been pure HIV so far.

Consignia

To be fair, HIV is manageable these days. So whilst bad, it's not damning assessment of the year as it looks.

We're not there yet but if E3 doesn't deliver, we're talking malignant AIDS gas billowing through air vents up and down the country.

Honestly, might be one of the shittest ever years in the medium. All the Nintendo stuff in the pipeline looks like absolute crap to me. Astral Plain might be good. DxM is shit based on the demo but I'm glad they're making something as niche and shit as that. Pokemon is a bad game, simple as that. Animal Crossing is a bad... No, it's not even a game. TOWN looks awful. Luigi's Mansion has always been total bifida. Pikmin 4 can fuck off before it's even announced. Finished it years ago and then someone finally just said, have these games ever been anything but total shit? Moment of lucidity for everyone, even Miyamoto was like damn, Recycle Bin that mother fucker.

Kelvin

Disagree about Nintendo. The first half of the year has been slow for them, but the back half is back to back hits. Obviously not all AAA hits, but good, solid games based on past entries. Mario Maker, Link's Awakening, Fire Emblem (which looks like shit graphically, I admit), Luigi's Mansion, DxM, maybe this platinum game if it's made by their good team, and not their shit one.

As for my game of the year contenders; I must admit there currently no obvious winner from the current batch. Smash Ultimate is the game I've played and enjoyed most, followed by the superb Overcooked... but neither game are from 2019.

Ape Out was excellent, and is probably my current answer, even though I think the game's last third is slightly lacking in the constant bombardment of ideas that made the rest of the game so strong.

That said, I probably enjoyed the nostalgia of Turok HD (For Switch) even more if I'm honest. In fact, I was surprised at how well that game held up, and was actually improved by the makeover. With the fogging massively pushed back, you can finally appreciate the impressive level architecture, and smart, looping level design. Greatly improved my opinion of that game, actually. I think it might be a game in need of wider reappraisal.

Timothy

Half way winners:
Sekiro
Phoenix Wright Remake
Kingdom Hearts 3
Devil May Cry

Half way loser:
Nintendo. Agree with Boston. I sold my Switch last month. There are no games I want in the upcoming release list. Pokemon had so much potential but is going to be the same game again, probably the same with Animal Crossing and I already have Mario Maker for my WiiU. If there will be any other games released that I want I just buy the Switch 2.0/Lite but at the moment I didn't see any need to keep it.

Couldn't even be bothered going to CeX to sell my Switch. Just slid it.

Timothy

Somebody on the Dutch marketplace bought Switch plus two games for around 340 euros. Happy Timothy indeed.

Just remembered Cuphead on Switch. I really loved that but it's probably two years old. It just wasn't good until it was released on my favourite console.

I'm never selling my Switch because I have about ninety A/A+/S/S+ tier games on it but the first party stuff is of no interest to me besides MM2 and I don't really like 2D Mario that much any more, I must be honest.

I was never really into Nintendo first party stuff besides the proper big lads. Mario Galaxy, Twilight Princess, Mario 64, Ocarina. Metroid Prime. I don't even like Super Metroid, so the likes of Kirby and Yoshi and Fire Emblem and Pikmin and Boxboy or Pokemon or whatever are straight up immuno-deficient.

Kelvin

Quote from: The Boston Crab on May 27, 2019, 11:52:25 AM
Just remembered Cuphead on Switch. I really loved that but it's probably two years old. It just wasn't good until it was released on my favourite console.

Yeah, I remembered that after writing my post above. Cuphead's definitely my game of the year so far.   

QuoteI was never really into Nintendo first party stuff besides the proper big lads. Mario Galaxy, Twilight Princess, Mario 64, Ocarina. Metroid Prime. I don't even like Super Metroid, so the likes of Kirby and Yoshi and Fire Emblem and Pikmin and Boxboy or Pokemon or whatever are straight up immuno-deficient.

Have you actually played Pikmin? I'd think you might like the later ones. They play really well, have a great loop, fun battles, and there's just a really nice vibe/atmosphere to them. They're much deeper, more satisfying games than the Yoshi, Kirby style that virtually plays itself. Of the ongoing Nintendo series, Pikmin might be the most underappreciated "quality" title*.

* For context, I consider games like Mario Party, Mario Tennis, Kirby, Yoshi, etc, to be mid tier filler titles, rather than Nintendo firing on all cylinders. Pikmin 2 and 3 are much better than "filler".       

Kelvin

I'll tell you what's not my game of the year; The Flame in the Flood. An indie survival game I bought because I thought it looked impressive in trailers, but played for 15 minutes and DEAD TO ME.

I honestly don't know if I've ever given up on a game I paid money for so quickly. It wasn't even bad, just the exact type of game I hate; confusing, fussy menus, terrible tutorials, tiny, tiny text, and I just didn't have a clue what I was meant to be doing. Me dumb but happy now gone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADdm3h0-Qjg

St_Eddie

The Resident Evil 2 remake.  It's only a 7/10 for me but it's the only new game which I've played this year, so it wins by default.

If we're allowed to nominate recent games which weren't released this year, then it's easily The Room trilogy.  9/10.

If I can nominate really old games that I've played this year, then Dark Forces.  The thinking man's shooter.  9/10.

Blue Jam


castro diaz

Full disclose: The Boston Crab has transferred me ten bitcoins and a 5% stake in his next fictitious venture in an impotent bid to keep this absolute war famine of a thread afloat.  It was accompanied with a brief personal message that simply said 'I have bitten off more than I can chew, not just this thread but also in life.  If you don't intervene now I'll be forced to retell that anecdote about how I slept with the daughter of a Triad boss in order to bump up traffic.'  Because I am concerned about the legal and not to mention reputational ramifications of the incident I decided to begrudgingly accept his coin and thus tacitly condone what happened to that poor girl.

As such it is incumbent upon me to write about my favourite game from 2019.  Unfortunately I live four years behind the cultural curve and therefore have hardly played one game from this year, which I have forced myself to write about today.  One of the benefits of this is that I get to soak in the briney past and am currently up to the dizzying year of 2015.  Really excited to find out what 2016 has in store for us all!

I first played Everybody's Golf a few years ago during a bout of especially sticky existential disquiet where it felt like the walls of my lungs were closing in on me.  I was first attracted by the game's bright primary colours and the simplicity and honesty of hitting things with a metal pole but the main selling point for me that brittle Sunday morning where I clicked buy was because I judge innate Japanese deference as a direct and personal comment about my precedence.  Instead I flew in to Golf Island in a state of hesitant fragility, which is in my experience when Mormons get you.  Upon arrival became immediately aware that golf here was a religion.  Specifically golf as envisaged by Suzuki, the deranged emperor in charge of everything here (including, I suspect, the way in which the wind blows), whose name is whispered in a dazed, reverent hush and whose eyes dominate every horizon.  His biggest strength is his absence.  He is rarely, if ever, seen, but he is always felt.  He built impeccable glistening statues in his image that would make Stalin blush, and they are dotted around the course like Easter Island heads but somehow more expressionless and unknowable.  Statues don't age and gold doesn't wilt.  They are unmalleable and, unlike manifestoes or speeches, they don't leave any evidence of betrayal.   

Congolese hat-wearer and political despot President Mobutu changed the name of his new country to Zaire upon seizing power.  This angered his new, collected people as it was in fact a colonial exonym gifted by the Belgians, despite his intent being to distance the country from its shackled past.  They rioted in the streets so in retaliation he changed a day of the week to Zaire-day.  The rose again so he changed the currency to the Zaire.  Protest soon waned.  The first rule of dictatorship is to reinforce your mistakes.  He also enforced his coup d'etat with the tagline 'Neither left nor right' which is also great advice on the golf course.  He ended up building one of Africas most extravagant kleptocracies but compared to the stockpiled grandeur of Suzuki's Golf Island lair it's left to look rather like a widow's unused drawing room.

Not so much a religion then but a cult.  That is to say not enough people either live or holiday on Golf Island to be granted religious status.  A cult furthermore with similarities to those featured in the superlative documentary Wild Wild Country both built an airport, invented a currency and circumnavigated planning permission laws within their compound but, unlike the devoted followers of Rajneesh, these Golf moths never had the decency to wear orange.  Between holes you are forced to walk around the entirety of the island where you coincidentally happen to bump into Islanders who insist on talking to you despite the game knowing, it must know, that you've come here specifically to golf.  Conversation quickly and inevitably turns to how great Mr Sasuki-san is and I wouldn't have even minded if I had seen any evidence of this whatsoever.  As it is it's just taken as read that he's fucking brilliant.  At least Kim Jong Il hit the odd hole-in-one.  Aside from that the game hid so much of itself coquettishly away with microtransactions and grind that I couldn't even bring myself to switch the PlayStation on less I betrayed myself and accidentally started playing it, which only furthered the mortal dread I had hoped the game would soothe.  Suffice to say, and I hope I'm doing this right, the game is complete Lou Gerhig's.

Which brings us fussily to Everybody's Golf VR.  Where you are offered not spiritual salvation but solid advice on what wedge to use for a short chip out of the bunker.  It is a stripped down version of the game on the PSVR which puts you right in the hideous shoes of a golf pro and lets you drive, chip and putt your way to self-actualisation across the three main golfing terrains, namely Forest, Beach and, of course, Dinosaur.  The latter is described, in that wrought and cautionary way the Japanese can not escape from (not even in another language), as 'A formidable course designed to express the brutality of nature'.  Quite appealing for someone who wants to be eaten by a mountain.  This was all particularly exciting for me as it gave me a chance to play as the fictional golfer who lives in my head (and briefly summered as my caddy way back on Golf Island) Jenny Yamaha, a private detective nicknamed Five-Iron who I would gladly walk out on my kids for.


Four!

Mark Twain once said of Wagner that 'his music is better than it sounds'.  A biting piece of false criticism that you could also apply to Virtual Reality.  It is far better than it looks.  It feels far better than you think it would, despite my desperate protestations elsewhere.  Popping your ball down on the tee, letting some cut grass fly from your palm so you can see the wind, looking down the fairway and to the flag, then head up and suck in the panoramic sunset all around you, the sound of distant water and happy birds, before taking a deep breath, if you've still got one, looking at that flag one last time before driving what used to be your ball but now belongs to god, then watching it sail all the way down to infinity.  It feels indescribably great.  There is also putting.

It is a sublime sensation to be out of the fairway without the danger of running into the type of people who play golf.  Just me, a three wood and the splendour of a hypothetical Mother Nature in all her digitised glory.  It is an odd desire that when I've purposely decided to partake in an activity I'm more than happy to do not much of it at all.  In the latest internet addiction thread some brave souls admitted to how difficult it is to do almost any activity these days without that silent itch at the back of your brain telling you to augment it with something else.  Washing up and a podcast.  Film and your phone.  Queue at the bank read the Milonga Dildo thread for the hundredth time.  PSVR wisely doesn't yet have the capacity to multitask.  You are forced to confront the game and yourself.  Perhaps an amber leaf will float gently onto the green in a minute and liven things up.  Oh look, Mr Gopher is trundling over to the water hazard for a quick drink.  See the wind's picked up, dear.  Most of the time it is set to a soundtrack of blissful near silence.  Sweet floral breeze in a surround sound perhaps occasionally gilded by unimportant noises just dropping by.  Hear distant water cascade down a cliff face, the chirp of a happy bird, the bumble of an overhead plane.  Listen, is that the sound of a Velociraptor ripping a fellow golfer to shreds on the 9th?   It is a beautiful way to pass an hour of anyone's time, especially yours.




It is just a lovely place to be.  It has that content, inconsequential profundity Test Match cricket commentary has.  You are safe here.  We are not at war.  Food and shelter for all and all you have to do is let your eyes close for a moment.  I haven't read the holy texts myself because I am my own religion but I'm pretty sure this is what Buddhism feels like. 

There is a disgraceful (and hopefully temporary) lack of multiplayer but perhaps it is a deliberate and apt choice.  Over my middle age, if this is what it is, I have slowly divorced myself from football (she kept the house) and become more and more drawn to individual sports.  It feels like a more naked, less compromised way of ranking human capability.  In golf you are your opponent.  Just like in life.  And I've found that slow, measured micro-improvements I've made to my swing or my ability to read a green immensely satisfying, far more so than beating a faceless stranger who means nothing to me.


If you fall I'll probably try and catch you

As previously touched upon this game is Japanese and the experience would therefore be incomplete if there wasn't some abstract, candied bullshit or morally skewed sexualisation of children to contend with.  Everybody's Golf VR's version on the theme is to oblige you to spend your time never more than four foot away from your ever-present caddy.  Now in general I'd quite like to spend the rest of my life having women carry my bags and critique me.  However Riko, the pixel Lolita in my current employ, will choose the exact moment my swing is at its vital, parabolic crescendo before thoughtfully advising me to 'not get flustered', or help my short game by telling me to 'really try this time!' just before putting for a rare eagle attempt.  In Everybody's Space HAL 9000 spends his days saying monotonously counselling his crew, 'are you sure you want to use that booster, Dave.  Jupiter's a long way away, could I suggest a nine-iron?'.

Every now and again she will punctuate the round with an unskippable event where you are invited/coerced into sitting on a bench with your caddy as she waxes lyrical about a fucking lake or some bollocks and I try to resist the temptation to put my head through her skirt.  But I don't do it because despite what the gypsy children daub on the front of my house I am not a paedo, so I try to leave as soon as decorum allows.  As the tawdry little vignette draws to an end you can see the dawning realisation in her eyes that I am leaving her again.  To go and play more golf, predictably.  A twitch of unspeakable loss darts across her giant eyes in what I can only read as a plea for salvation.  It is a look only a human could give.  She has found sentience.  She knows what she is and that she's designed to be trapped here, bound forever to be a robot club whore in a hidden cutscene.  The real game, it is revealed, the real point of Everybody's Golf and perhaps my whole life, is to break your way out of this benign dystopia, off of Golf Island and take the sexy android hopefully 18-year-old with me too.  Away from enforced fairway club-selection and instead into the liberated drudgery of living with me, like Lars and the Real Girl but more real this time.  As such I spend the rest of the day's round purposely thwacking the ball into a clump of trees at the edge of the map knowing that's where the game would've stashed a cache of guns and keys to the sea-plane.  I am yet to find them.

This is all nonsense and tosh compared to the real malevolent heart of the game, worst still than Maleven, the world's evilist man although to his credit he is disarmingly honest about it all.  Featured here in Louis Theroux's uncommonly depressing study on crime  modern South Africa he is a captivatingly brutal bastard.  Some dead cunt once posited that 'cellar door' is the most beautiful sounding combination of words in the English language but I contend that Maleven saying in his crippled English that not only does he 'like crime' but that he would 'take your child.  Put it in oven.  Make oven on' solely to further his career because he 'wants money' has a simplicity and grace to it that Tolkien could only dream of and is overall a far superior example of what this great language can do when it puts its mind to it.  But again, mad Maleven is nothing compared to the pure, undiluted evil of the game's pre-order bonus, the caddy Steve.

Steven is an ingratiating pencil cunt who looks like one of the less successful side-characters from CITV's Zzzap!.  He was the only reward for placing my first ever pre-order and, as I didn't have a chance to play it for a week by which time it was a fiver cheaper, I essentially paid five quid for him to massively detract from the enjoyment of the game.  He really is the cunt's cunt.  The usual intrusive, badly timed advice is given but he doesn't even have the decency to be a sexually provocative teenager.  These events also happen with Steve but instead of sharing a box of chocolate bon-bons with the girls I have to indulge this utter twat's entry-level magic tricks.  I try to skip the scene so I can report him to management as soon as possible but he has the fucking nerve to protest about this and breaks into some Marcel Marceau mime shtick in a vain attempt to change my mind.  I know there's no glass box, Steve.  And I know it's not that windy because there is a giant blew arrow rotating before my very eyes that says 'Wind 2km'.  You're about as funny as a parody thread.  Now fuck off out of my way and hand me a driver.  But sir, we resume play on the green, just three yards from the cup.  Hand me my fucking driver and start system shutdown.

Is it the best game of 2019?  No.  Is it the best game I've played in 2019?  Also no.

Returning to the clubhouse I am greeted not with the evangelical fevour found on the Island but instead it feels like I'm the first person to walk in on Jonestown.  It is a complete atmosphere void, empty of people and air, and the only person to attend to my needs is a subservient receptionist whose voice tells you she'd do anything your imagination conceived but whose bare-bones programming tells you she'll let you choose 9 holes or 18.  The place has all the joie de vivre of a Swiss suicide clinic and in the staid, conference-centre pall she is a rare burst of colour.  She also bows a hello, a goodbye and every time I spend over two minutes staring at her as she does some filing.  Upon approaching the desk she tells me that 'I've unlocked something new'.  I assume she means I've awakened some dormant feelings within her rather than the newly available Tornado Cup mode.  I've always wantonly craved the respect of receptionists.  There is something aloof and unshakable about them.  There's nothing they couldn't have seen a thousand times.  Similarly, whenever I see a big, beautiful lake I just want to hoy a massive log in it.

Hopefully the above criticisms, admittedly about 70% of the text thus far, only highlight how great the game feels to play, because despite the awkward benched silences, deep psychosexual issues and the constant bowing, it is still one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I've ever had and serves as yet another testimony to how unique and migratory Virtual Reality can feel.

madhair60


The Culture Bunker

Quote from: Blue Jam on May 27, 2019, 01:32:53 PM
Snooker 19
Put off buying this by the lack of a "Create a Player" function, so ended up buying the cheap (£5) Snooker Nation Championship 2019 instead. The snooker itself is fine, but there's not a lot going on in it.

I think the RE2 remake might be the only other 2019 game I've played, and that gets about 5/6 out 10. I have really enjoyed Bomber Crew, though, which came out last year.

St_Eddie

Quote from: The Culture Bunker on June 05, 2019, 02:12:50 PM
I think the RE2 remake might be the only other 2019 game I've played, and that gets about 5/6 out 10. I have really enjoyed Bomber Crew, though, which came out last year.

Now that the dust has settled, it has to be said that the Resident Evil 2 remake was overrated.  It's by no means a bad game, in fact it's a good game but the way that the critics responded, you'd think that it was a masterpiece.  It's a decent but flawed game.  Upon completion, I rated it an 8/10.  Upon reflection, I rate it a 7/10.  I can't quite get my head around the sheer number of people who rated it a 9/10 or even a 10/10.  Come on, folks.  It's not that good.

The Culture Bunker

Quote from: St_Eddie on June 05, 2019, 04:00:39 PM
Now that the dust has settled, it has to be said that the Resident Evil 2 remake was overrated.  It's by no means a bad game, in fact it's a good game but the way that the critics responded, you'd think that it was a masterpiece.  It's a decent but flawed game.  Upon completion, I rated it an 8/10.  Upon reflection, I rate it a 7/10.  I can't quite get my head around the sheer number of people who rated it a 9/10 or even a 10/10.  Come on, folks.  It's not that good.
Well, my thoughts were made clear in the relevant thread, but the abortion of a second scenario is a huge part of my rating it "middling". I enjoyed a lot of my first run through, but then playing as Claire felt an absolute grind through repeating exactly what I'd already done.

Blue Jam

Everybody's Golf VR? Not got VR capabilities but The Golf Club feat the PGA Tour was free with Games With Gold last month and I'm loving  it, the best bit is swearing at John the commentator for sneering at me in Canadian.

I'm not sure is it's worth starting a thread about NHL 19 (especially as it's also a 2018 title) but it's an immense amount of fun, and that's coming from someone who knows fuck all aboot hockey . That one's free on Games With Gold this month.

biggytitbo

I'm playing RE2 now and it gets progressively worse as you go along after a good start, which might be why it reviewed so well. It's alright but its 90s roots and wonky gameplay keep showing through the improved aesthetics. Never have a sewer level in a game in 2019 either, please.

madhair60

Quote from: St_Eddie on June 05, 2019, 04:00:39 PM
Upon completion, I rated it an 8/10.  Upon reflection, I rate it a 7/10.  I can't quite get my head around the sheer number of people who rated it a 9/10 or even a 10/10.  Come on, folks.  It's not that good.

Evergreen gamerpost. I was astonished that the RE2 remake turned out as poor as it did.

The Culture Bunker

Quote from: madhair60 on June 06, 2019, 08:30:03 AM
Evergreen gamerpost. I was astonished that the RE2 remake turned out as poor as it did.
The feeling I got - doubtless wrong - is that they ran out of time to complete it properly.

Swoz_MK

Sekiro so far. I liked it even more than Bloodborne.
I'm hoping Bloodstained and Blasphemous join it.