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My picks for Game of the Year 2011
This post is mainly sparked by this forumthread which had me first think about it and I figured I would write out why I picked the games I picked here. I have to say up front that I find it quite hard to pick one game above another as it at times really doesn’t feel fair.
1. Sequence
Sequence when it came out really seemed to go unnoticed, which for the most part hasn’t changed at all. So this may even be the first time you’re hearing of it, though I wrote a post about it before. Sequence is one of these hidden gems that needs to be shared with people. It’s a completely unique game combining DDR with RPG mechanics, clever writing and very enjoyable humor.
I’m struggling to even think of any downsides to the game, but I can’t think of anything other than me wanting to get all the drops and create all items, which isn’t necessary by far. Even the grinding for that was pretty minor all things considered. I can’t stress enough how much sheer pleasure this game has given me, while serving as a breath of fresh air in the release season.
As it’s such a unique game, it may not be for everyone, but at the cost of only a couple of dollars/euros, I really encourage you to give it a shot!
2. Portal 2
Now this one may not come as a big surprise to a lot of you, but I really enjoyed my time with Portal 2. The singleplayer was a lot of fun to go through, especially the voice acting was great. I’ve heard of a lot of people that they saw the twist coming, but I didn’t have that “problem”. I just played along with the puzzles and occasionally got stuck in between the actual puzzles as you had to move through the deserted facility. All around though, it was very entertaining and a fun experience that didn’t get frustrating.
The singleplayer’s fun and all, but the real fun lies in the multiplayer. I went through it with a friend while using voice communication (you really can’t do it without…) and it is immensely fun to figure out puzzles with 2 people. At times one will have an idea and the other will finish it, or disprove it.. or you might both be stumped for a while, which I remember happening on several occasions. I remember thinking “How’s Portal ever supposed to work with 2 players?” before the game was released and I don’t think Valve could’ve done a better job than they have.
3. Red Orchestra 2
Red Orchestra was one of the games that I had been hearing about for a while and that looked pretty interesting but I never got around to playing. Thus with Red Orchestra 2′s release, I hopped on the bandwagon and boy was I in for a ride. Tossing aside all conventions about teambased multiplayer first person shooters, RO2 is much more based around a realistic setting of the battle for Stalingrad in World War 2. This means that there will not be regenerating health, crazy weapons and over the top action, instead you’ll be lying or crouching around cover with your bolt-action rifle.
Because of this the action flows really differently in RO2 than in most other games. You’ll have incredibly tense moments that you won’t have in other shooters as the action feels completely different and more fast paced. While I’m not normally someone to take it slow in an fps, I have no problem actually doing this in RO2. It just feels right to be careful as it only takes a shot to blow your brains out. It’s a great immersive game that keeps you on your toes at every moment you’re playing.
4. Binding of Isaac
This little indie gem is the second biggest surprise this year. It has gotten a lot of attention as the setting is so unique and because of the way it was made, by a single developer in his free time. Despite that, it’s a a terrific game altogether. Though I have to say that I’m really bad at it, only having “completed” it once or twice. But that doesn’t matter, this is a game where you will die a lot and then just start over again immediately after.
This game also is a lot like Eufloria where it’s windowed and thus incredibly easy to alt-tab. The way the gameplay works it’s also perfect to just play for a couple of minutes and tab out again to return to it a little later. This makes it perfect for when I’m listening to music, talking with some people or maybe reason reading some things. This has caused my steam stats to say that I’ve played 56 hours of it at the time of this writing, but in reality it’s much much less. All in all though, this is a great indie game that is cheap and will entertain you for a good while.
5. Skyrim
I was going to put this at #1, but then I took an arrow to the knee. All kidding aside, Skyrim is a pretty darn good game and I feel that’s something that goes without saying. I hardly heard anyone seriously critique it. It’s a huge game with tons of things to do in it and it’s all around very good and solid. The leveling system in it is much improved over the previous games as skills go up by simply using the skill. This is a really intuitive system and a milestone jump from Oblivion’s system which was needlessly complex and tough to understand and min-max your character.
Furthermore I love the nordic setting and the mythology it’s based on, I even expected to see some actual runecarvings in there, but if they’re there, I haven’t seen them. The game still suffers from some scaling issues where you’ll run into an impossible opponent or will get one-shotted by an arrow, both of which are frustrating. Despite that, it’s a good game with a lot of content in it to keep you entertained. You really ought to pick it up.
Honorable mentions: Bastion, Dead Space 2, The Witcher 2, Battlefield 3, Trine 2
Skyrim characters talking you down
I was doing some side quests and this character just started talking trash to me asking me who the hell I was to get on his property.
The way this was done made my character feel like a random bozo.
However, at this point my character is:
- The dragonborn who saved Tamriel
- The master of the college of Winterhold
- The leader of the companions
- The leader of the Thieves guild
As such it sounds so weird for him to not know who the hell I am. *grumbles*
Thoughts on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Skyrim? Yeah, you might be tired of hearing about that game by now as it really is just about everywhere and everybody and their pets seem to be playing it. Even I was surprised to find everybody on my friendslist to be playing Skyrim instead of some of the other big releases. It was therefore kind of a bother to get my copy late, especially while getting asked many a time what I thought about it. In the spirit of those questions; I’ll give my thoughts on my first 20 hours of the game.
First of all I decided many months ago that I was not going to read up on the game at all as to make sure it’d all be new for when I did get my hands on it. So I went in knowing nothing and was quite impressed with the opening sequence, it looked good, set up the main story and then rapidly just dumped you in the world where you could then do whatever the hell you pleased. So what I did was just start exploring around. Before reaching Riverwood (the first town you’re likely to come across) I first found a castle southwest of Helgen(the starting place).
In this castle, which was a neat dungeoncrawl, I immediately met a bunch of vampires. This was no problem most of the time but I had to really take it slow in one room where whenever I would shoot an arrow at anyone, 6 enemies would aggro and come at me. After a while of taking a couple of shots and hiding, I managed to get them down though. This to me is a core experience on a Elder Scrolls game; you run somewhere, go in it and then meet obstacles that you aren’t supposed to face yet, but you deal with it best you can. I found myself some initial gear and money and proceeded further into the dungeon when I met my first boss; a Master Vampire.
I believe I was level 3 at the time and I could honestly only barely touch the guy, even while using sneak attacks. I tried many times refusing to drop the difficulty from Expert, but in the end I had to give in and drop it to the lowest difficulty just so I could kill him. Moving on from there I followed the quests more as upon going to Riverwood you get a whole bunch of quests leading you all over the place anyway.
As is common in the Elder Scrolls games, there are several guilds and in the 20 hours I’ve currently spent in the game I’ve completed one guild’s quests and only just started a second and have not even come into contact with any of the others. To add to that; I’ve only visited 2 out of the many big cities in Skyrim, which each are bound to have their own series of questchains which so far have all been very good and worth doing. Even normal fetchquests are worth doing as there’s always been something fun to set them apart. Be it the landscape surrounding the area or good dialog, or merely the setting. As such I’m reminded of some bandits who had a mage working for them who complained about their drinking habits, followed by you overhearing drunken bandit talk. It’s something rather small, but it really does add flavor to the area.
The thing that surprised me most is that the actual dungeons have became quite lengthy and some have some unique twists to them; such as traps that will push you off ledges, trapdoors and what feels like a lot more verticality to them. I may be misremembering the dungeons of oblivion slightly, but they were mostly very square and horizontal. The level design really has improved over the years, with hidden goodies in corners, requiring you to make a diagonal jump or turn around and hug the wall to get on a small ledge to reach a chest.
Negatives
So you get the gist; this game is great all around, but it does have some issues and I’m not talking about “open world jank”. First of all, it seems to crash to desktop after an hour or two, you can actually feel it coming as it starts to bog down. But since you save a lot in skyrim, it isn’t a huge deal, neither are any minor bugs (not run into anything major shockingly). The inventory management is a little frustrating sometimes as everything is sorted alphabetically. This would be an issue if you’re looking for a certain level of potion, in a massive list. It would be more useful to be able to divide them into “health potions”, “magicka potions”, “poisons”, “buffs” etc in this example.
Another thing I found to be rather weird is that a quest had me intimidate a guy, I tried to scare him, but my non-melee character didn’t make much of an impression and thus I had to “brawl”. What does this seemingly entail? Punching, as you automatically raise both of your fists. However you’re free to just grab your melee weapon and conjure a monster to help you out. So what is the point of brawling I wonder?
The final point is that I just haven’t found the mouse controls to be where I want them. This is especially so when you’ve got an arrow drawn, your mouse sensitivity is halved on the horizontal axis, yet unchanged vertically and I’m not sure why it does this.