Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2012-12-29 02:53 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2012-12-29 02:53 pm
[ SECRET POST #2188 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2188 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 102 secrets from Secret Submission Post #313.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
GOTY 2012
My top five:
1. The Walking Dead
TWD absolutely destroyed me. The writing, the characters, the plot, all of it building up to a fever pitch that ended in a bravely downer ending with no foreseeable way to get a "good" ending. Good endings don't exist in TWD. It kicks you right in the feels and then does it again. While it's for all intents and purposes an adventure game (albeit one that feels a little like classic Resident Evil with less shooting and more talking) I think it transcends its genre and is proof that Telltale have really outpaced their earlier efforts. Each episode is more gutwrenching than the last; the very last scene before the ending had me wanting to tear my teeth out I was so distraught. No game has ever done that before and I suspect no game will ever do it again.
2. Dishonored
This was GOTY until I played TWD -- and indeed, it comes close. It's like this crazy fucking mashup of Thief, Deus Ex and Bioshock, with shades of Half-Life 2. And hey I like all those things. It's really a mashup of a LOT of stuff, I'm not the only one who noticed -- but somehow it makes it all work. Nothing feels out of place or tacked on; the game coherently whips all these seemingly disparate elements into a single cohesive narrative and environment. I would go so far to say that this is one of the greatest games to come out in over 10 years; while I hate the term "immersive sim" because it's such a nonsense bullshit buzzword that nobody can agree on the meaning of, this is a triumphant entry in the canon of games drawing from a legacy dating back to 1994 with System Shock. That a game like this can be made in 20 fucking 12 just speaks volumes to me, particularly considering the state of the industry these days; that they were able to implement leaning in it, even for the console version, just tells me that if you get enough SMART people in the industry who can think outside the box, amazing things can and will happen. While the story is a bit tried-and-true, it hits all the right notes. And the GAMEPLAY, my god the gameplay -- it was almost perfect. Almost.
3. Journey
It's a Team Ico game made by people who are not Team Ico. It's so beautiful I think I cried. I didn't get a chance to play Ico or Shadow of the Colossus until the HD re-release (which, to date, remains the high water mark of HD re-releases, as NOTHING ELSE EVEN COMES CLOSE IN QUALITY. Silent Hill HD I'm looking in your direction!) So when I sat down to play, I was blown the fuck away. Likewise with Journey -- for various reasons my PS3 has sat unused for most of the year; now that I have a place to put it, and I got a $50 PSN gift card, I went and bought Journey and played through it two nights ago. Jesus Christ, what's wrong with me that I'm only just now getting to it? It's so simple, so pure. I mean... okay. I'll come clean. When I first started it up, the first five, ten minutes I couldn't help but snicker about bongs. But then I kept playing. And someone else joined me -- she must have been new to the game too, 'cuz we didn't go anywhere without each other for the most part. We were always checking to make sure the other person was keeping up. She and I, we saw so much of the trip together; I remember when the war machines were searching for us, and she froze, we both did. And then I dove for cover, pinging away with that little singing you can do, and she followed; somehow, we made it through that part unharmed. And we continued on. She abandoned me in the snowfields, the sharp winds cutting like knives, and I couldn't press on... but someone else came, someone else who'd made the journey, someone else to join me as we walked to our deaths. All of this, two and a half hours without a single fucking word spoken between anyone.
4. Spec Ops: The Line
(This used to be #3.)
This is the game for people who hate tacticool manshoots. This is the game for people who like tacticool manshoots. It's for both, but for very, very different reasons. It starts off so safe, so banal, then 15 minutes the shit hits the fan and all of a sudden you're being told you're a monster because you totally fucking are. The game is a direct assault on the state of the industry and the Joe Fuckface Fratboy demographic who keep publishers swimming in money every November. Don't get me wrong -- I like Call of Duty as a game series just fine myself, but I don't like what it's done to the industry, I don't like it as a symbol. Spec Ops: The Line didn't either, and it let me know exactly how it felt. The sad sick irony of it all is the tacked-on multiplayer, which completely undermines the point of the game and took valuable resources away from fixing the base game's few issues. A frank critique of modern FPS games wrapped up in a harrowing update of Apocalypse Now -- this was a game that needed to be made.
5. Cry of Fear
I waited like, what, 3 fucking years for this fucking thing? Worth the wait. It's apparent now that Afraid of Monsters was every bit just a prototype for Cry of Fear; Cry of Fear is classic, Silent-Hill style psychological horror. While it has its sticky spots (there's a nightmare sequence late in the game that was damn near impossible) it does a lot to bring back the terror, that horrible sense of creeping dread that I had way back in spring 1999 when I got Silent Hill 1 as an Easter gift. Cry of Fear and Afraid of Monsters go into that pantheon of games that have influenced me massively on an aesthetic level, along with games like Manhunt, Deus Ex and Thief. And hey! Before too long, you won't need to own Half-Life 1 on Steam to play!
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Lone Survivor
The closest thing to Silent Hill 2 since Silent Hill 2. That same sense of creeping dread, surreal symbolism and that horrible sense of being alone... I only wish it had been longer. It's very difficult, but then again what's survival horror without being a little tough? My only caveats are that the game doesn't quite do enough to let you know that there's respawning ammo and pills, and that the game sort of crumbles a bit towards the end; that being said, the game is short enough that it doesn't completely wear out its welcome before it's over.
Thirty Flights of Loving
If Brendon Chung were to take a shit and sell that as Blendo Games' newest release for $15 I would buy it and make everyone else buy it too, and it'll probably come with an awesome jazz or guitar soundtrack. That's how much I'm in love with his style. This game (and its free predecessor Gravity Bone, now included with the game) is not a long game, and really it's not much of a game at all. You can get through it in about 15 minutes and it's almost entirely W+mouse. (You can use a gamepad too tho.) But Chung has a certain style, a certain flair, and it's clear that he's been doing a little world-building. Nuevos Aires seems to make an appearance in just about everything Chung makes, and I love peeling back the little details of this weird little flashy retro-60s zaniness. TFoL is lovely amounts of incidental detail and a slightly open narrative told through jump cuts -- yes, jump cuts, all of which are reached by you moving forward. Like all of Chung's games, it's simple but stylish, almost more art installation than game (though games like Atom Zombie Smasher are certifiably game-like, and AWESOME.) And it's also cheap and you should play it, god damn it.
Re: GOTY 2012
(Anonymous) 2012-12-29 10:07 pm (UTC)(link)Re: GOTY 2012
Re: GOTY 2012
(Anonymous) 2012-12-30 12:37 am (UTC)(link)/wistfully wishes for an art book/
/and more games in this new world
Re: GOTY 2012
(Anonymous) 2012-12-30 03:13 am (UTC)(link)Yeah, ME3 is my GotY. Despite the endings I just love so much about it, multiplayer included.
Re: GOTY 2012
Just finished Dishonored, doing a no alerts, no magic, no kills playthrough, and was impressed by the difficulty of doing so (despite the fact that they'd clearly intended you to play the game that way). In the early missions I'd say it's almost easier to go the all-stealth non-lethal route, but for the last three or four, and certainly the last three, it's much harder. Certain sections were Dark Souls hard, and as a result I loved it. Not enough real challenges in gaming these days, and that was a good, fun one. Have to agree with Yahtzee that the characters are a bit bland, though the art, atmosphere, gameplay, and level design more than make up for it.
Haven't downloaded The Walking Dead yet - meant to as soon as the last episode was out (I hate waiting for episodic things) then got sidetracked with Dishonored, Far Cry 3, and Christmas.
Ah, Journey... I got in early enough that the whole co-op aspect hadn't been spoiled for me. I had no idea that the NPC whose behaviour seemed so random was another player until the end of my first playthrough. I think that's the best way to go into it, though it would be very difficult now.
Question for you, if you don't mind, something that occurred to me whilst playing Dishonored: I seem to recall you saying that you couldn't hear? Does that make it more difficult to play stealth games, without the verbal cues - like the guards muttering to themselves, so you know they're there even when you can't see them? Or does that just make you pay more attention to visual cues (e.g. shadows)?
Re: GOTY 2012