Number 2: Super Smash Bros for Wii U

Nintendo had the best looking games this year, like, easily.  Mario Kart 8 (which almost made this list), Super Mario 3D World (which only didn’t get the number two spot because I didn’t beat it) and this all look like some of the best cartoons I’ve seen in years.  Like, they just look amazing in a way that I haven’t seen in years.  Seriously, every time I put Smash Bros into my Wii U, I’m blown away at the animations, backgrounds and character models.  I’m not kidding when I say these are some of the best graphics I’ve seen in years, partly because art direction has been shit for the past couple of years, but also because it’s clear that Nintendo is putting a lot of love into their games.

It’s interesting, for all of the love Nintendo put into this game, Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U really is just an improved version of Smash Bros. Brawl, and strangely, that’s actually a good thing.  It manages to speed up a little bit, remove some of the weird tripping elements, and better balance a lot of the gameplay, and it kind of makes it into the game Brawl should have been six years ago.  That should be a bad thing, maybe?  I’m not sure.  All I know is that I really, really like this game a lot.

So, the game really isn’t any different than any of the previous games in the series, at least in the macro sense.  There’s not new here, which is weird, since the last two games added a whole bunch of shit.  I guess there’s a Mario Party esque game that I haven’t played because I hate Mario Party and a few other modes, but a lot of it is just the same stuff that has already been in the game before.  It does get rid of the Adventure mode, which is a shame, but after the Subspace Emissary being a lot more of a pain in the ass than fun, I don’t really hold that against them.

On the micro level, the game is vastly different from Brawl.  In speed, it feels closer to Melee, or at least, it’s faster than Brawl ever was.  I’m not a professional Smash player, but it does feel more comfortable and speedy to me than Brawl, and the controls feel a lot more fluid.  I’ve never been able to dodge as well as I have in this game, and I’m not sure if it’s me, or if it’s the controls, but they feel like butter.  Characters are also rebalanced, with some of the weaker characters feeling a lot stronger than they had, and some of the stronger ones feel weaker.  Again, I could be wrong, but this post is about my perceptions, and the game feels like the balancing is better than Brawl.

The new characters are pretty great.  There’s a severe lack of clone characters this time around.  Sure, Lucina is a new way to play Marth and Dr. Mario is back, but most of the new characters have their own unique ways to play, nearly all of them approaching the game from a completely different angle.  Little Mac is probably my favorite of the new characters, especially since he has a super bar mechanic and some neat special moves, but I love the ideas behind Rosalina and Luma and she seems like she’s really cool for the people who like her.  Personally, I found her a bit strange to play, but only because she seemed out of my comfort zone.

On the whole, there really is a lot to explore here, but again, it’s the same game Nintendo has put out three times before.  Iterative improvements are great, and since it’s been six years since the last game came out, it’s a lot easier to appreciate how good even small improvements can be.  The game is still a lot of fun, and it’s extremely enjoyable, so it’s completely worth it to sit down and beat the hell out of your friends.

2014 Top Five Games

It’s been a little while since I updated here, and one of these days, probably when my Playstation gets fixed, I’m going to get back to doing those Metal Gear Solid reviews.  I don’t know what it is about Metal Gear Solid 3, but I’ve had a really hard time getting into it.  Part of it also might have been me playing World of Warcraft again, which is a complete time sink.  World of Warcraft probably isn’t going to be an issue anymore (more on that in a bit), so I’ll be getting back to playing Metal Gear soon.

Anyway, this year was one of the worst I can think of for video games.  I had a hard time coming up with a top five list of games, and even then, only two of them feel like they’re worthy of being on a top five list.  It’s not that there weren’t good games that came out this year, because there were, it’s just this was a year rife with missteps, disappointments and rush jobs.  I think any video displaying a glitch from Assassin’s Creed Unity would be, like, a microcosm of this year in gaming.

Right, so anyway, this year is going to be a little bit different.  Normally, in a top 5, we just count down to the best.  I’m not going to do that this year.  Mostly because, outside of my top game, I can’t really come up with a good order for any of these games.  Like I said, a lot of them wouldn’t normally make it onto a top five list, although I think most of them might have wound up on a top five, but all of them do have strengths and weaknesses, so it’s hard for me to say that I liked one game more than the others.  The exception of course, is my number one game, because that game was freaking amazing.

I’m also going to give each game its own post, and give it a sort of mini-review.  Well, it will be less of a critical review of the game and more of just my thoughts, positive and negative, of the game.  I’ll be talking about what worked and what didn’t in the game.  If no one is interested in those posts, I’ll go over my top five in this post so everyone can see them, and then move on to reading about the games they’re interested in.

Also, I know that there were good games that aren’t going to be on this list.  Obviously, I can’t play every game that comes out, that would be silly.  So, this list is sticking to games that I played, beat and enjoyed in 2014.  Games like Alien: Isolation or whatever, I’m sure were great, but I didn’t play them, so I can’t, in good conscience, put them on a list.

Finally, after I list my top five games, I’m going to do my “Honorable Mention” game, just to give an example of what I’m going to be writing later in the week.  That said, it will probably be a lot shorter than the other reviews, or whatever I’m going to wind up calling them.  Anyway, without further ado, my top five games of 2014, in no particular order except for my number one.

5.  Wolfenstein: the New Order

4.  Dragon Age: Inquisition

3.  Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

2. Super Smash Bros for Wii U

1.  Shovel Knight

Shovel Knight is, easily, far and away the best game of the year, and it would probably be number one on any year it came out (except, maybe, like 2007 or 2013 or something) because that game is just one of the best games I’ve ever played.  The other four are fun, but they have their issues and, with the exception of maybe Wolfenstien, would probably have never made a top 5 list of mine in any other year.

As for the honorable mention, this year, it goes to World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor.

I quit World of Warcraft two weeks ago.  I was on a raid team, we weren’t going anywhere and I was having money issues, so I dropped the game.  The truth is, I really wanted to drop it weeks before, probably months before, but I liked being on a raid team.  It was a lot of fun.  It was a shame that the only raid that was out when I was playing (and as of this writing, still out) sucked.  Sucked a lot.  It wasn’t just that my team couldn’t beat more than two bosses after five weeks of raiding, which sucked a whole lot, but because it was just a lame raid.  It’s got all the problems of Firelands: boring layout, sleep inducing mechanics and tons and tons of filler bosses, with none of the cool things from Firelands (a title worth having).

At first, Warlords of Draenor seems pretty cool.  Honestly, the questing is about the best I’ve done since Wrath of the Lich King.  No, scratch that, it’s the best the game has ever had.  Sure, some of the zones aren’t perfect, but the set up, how questing was done, the rewards, the use of rare monsters and events, it was great.  They took the good stuff from Timeless Isle and other MMORPGs like Guild Wars 2, dropped a lot of the shit, and managed to make questing a whole lot of fun.  Tying in some pretty decent Video Game Writing doesn’t hurt, either.

Unfortunately, as soon as I got to level 100, the game begins to grind to halt, because of the fucking grind bullshit Blizzard has saddled with the game.  The Garrison, your own personal castle/fortress, is really neat, but it’s pretty clear it’s there only because making the new models, which are gorgeous, took up way more time than they were expecting.  There are eight dungeons, a zone that you can’t access yet and a single daily quest where PCs murder about 100 bad guys for meager rewards.  I mean, really meager rewards.

I’m not a huge fan of daily quests, but I understand that they’re kind of the nature of the beast, and until Theme Park MMORPGs figure out a better way to do this, daily quests are the best way to keep players engaged in the game.  By the time I quit, half of my 90s from Mists were at 100 and were geared up to raid and had done everything that was available to them, outside of grind out reputations (which can only be raised to Exalted status by killing monsters), after only a couple of months.  Say whatever there is to say about the Mists of Pandaria dailies, which had some serious problems, at least I didn’t get the whole story available to me in a couple of weeks.

So, anyway, I quit.  It was fun, a lot of fun, until I ran out of things to do.  I know that’s weird to say about literally any other game, but like, Blizzard does a good job of making World of Warcraft fun.  It’s seriously enjoyable to play, to get engaged with the game, but if there’s nothing to do, there’s nothing to do.  Since everything is controlled by Blizzard, and emergent gameplay isn’t really a thing, it’s worse than when you run out of quests in Skyrim.  At least in Skyrim, rolling a new character can lead to a different experience just by playing a new class.  That’s not the case in Warcraft.