Another year, another silly list to make. 2015 was a great game for gamers, with tonnes of quality and interesting products coming out.
Unfortunately, I played next to none of them, instead playing a tonne of old games that I then proceeded to not write about, or not to publish my reviews of. I also finally got a 3DS, opening myself to a whole new avenue of games to also not publish my reviews of. As such, there's going to be a tonne of games here that I haven't actually published anything on the blog about. That said, being included on this list does mean I liked them. This is also the year that I've played most games in for a while, so I think I'm going to go ahead and make this list a top 10 for once. Keep in mind that, despite the title, I'm ordering these by how much I liked them not by which I think are the best games. I've also got a one game per franchise rule, and count TellTale games as one franchise, because otherwise a third of the list would be TellTale simply because I played stupid amounts of TellTale this year. Games that made the list in previous years are also excluded.
But because of rules like this, and the fact that 10 is not 20, or 30, or 40, there are some games that I wish had made the list that I simply had to cut. This is where they get their fair dues, their
Honourable Mentions:
Heh, that was clever, wasn't it? I'm a clever boy. Good, clever Rariow. Note to self: have a biscuit.
Hearthstone: League of Explorers & That One Patch That Nerfed Warsong Commander
Yes, I'm still playing the deceptively simply card battler by Blizzard, and I'm still as in love with it as I was before its release. Unfortunately, the meta fell onto some hard times, with the extremely uninteractive Patron Warrior dominating for ages, and making the people among us who didn't want to get killed from over max health from an empty board somewhat annoyed. The The Grand Tournament expansion barely helped, weakly trying to introduce tools against the deck that proved not powerful enough, and which makes TGT the least important expansion to date. Fortunately, Blizzard got their ass in gear and nerfed the shit out of Patron Warrior. Despite cries that they were killing the deck, they didn't, and it remains competitively viable, whilst no longer being as infuriating to play against. This was soon followed up by the release of the League of Explorers adventure (a mini expansion with some single player content), which did everything I hoped The Grand Tournament would achieve, and created some of the most interesting deck archetypes in the history of Hearthstone. Everyone get outta here, because we're gonna be rich!
Game of Thrones (and pretty much every other post-Walking Dead TellTale game)
I bought and played pretty every single post-Walking Dead TellTale game, and played through them in the course of the past year, and I loved them. Almost all of them. Walking Dead Season 2 was alright I guess.
Ahem.
Still, the great majority of the TellTale library is extremely enjoyable, cool story-based content. The choices you have to make are consistently interesting, and difficult. The first season of Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us are both as good as I remembered them.There's just a lot of good stuff that TellTale puts out, and I recommend all of it.
Even Walking Dead Season 2.
Ironcast
This is one that I genuinely wish there'd been space for on the list, and very nearly edged out the game that ended up on number 10. The weird little turn-based combat match-three rogue-like thing is tonnes of fun to play, and difficult as all heck. The steampunk aesthetic works fantastically, the sound assets are terrific, and the gameplay systems work surprisingly well for something so strange. Plus you get to control a steampunk mech, so that's pretty fucking cool.
Dice Masters
The first physical game that I've put on one of these lists, woo!
I won't lie, I don't think Wizkids' Dice Masters is a great game. It comes up with a concept that sounds cool on paper: it creates a deckbuilding game where, instead of putting cards in your deck you put dice in your bag from said cards. From that point it plays out fairly similarly to Magic the Gathering. Unfortunately, this concept doesn't work all that well, since the dice add another unnecessary layer of randomness on top of the randomness I already see as the biggest issue of card games.
The smaller amount of variables you put in your deck (or "team" as the game insists you call it), a pitiful 8 where even the really simple Hearthstone allows you 30, means deckbuilding has a lot less depth than I'd like it to. Combine that with some blatantly unbalanced cards and stupid amounts of power creep, where certain cards come out that are just simply better than pre-existing cards (Lord of D is blank, has the same stats, and costs the same as Green Goblin, but Green Goblin has an insanely powerful upside, for instance), as well as some pretty atrocious quality control (card wordings are often inconsistent, make little sense, or are counter-intuitive), and you've got yourself a deeply flawed game.
Yet Dice Masters has been a lot of fun for the past half year. I've been playing the shit out of it with my flatmates at uni, and been having a veritable whale of a time. I love the Marvel, DC, Yu-gi-oh! and DnD flavor of the different sets, and Dice Masters has proven both a good passtime and a cool thing to chat about with people I like who don't really care about games otherwise.
Unfortunately, I played next to none of them, instead playing a tonne of old games that I then proceeded to not write about, or not to publish my reviews of. I also finally got a 3DS, opening myself to a whole new avenue of games to also not publish my reviews of. As such, there's going to be a tonne of games here that I haven't actually published anything on the blog about. That said, being included on this list does mean I liked them. This is also the year that I've played most games in for a while, so I think I'm going to go ahead and make this list a top 10 for once. Keep in mind that, despite the title, I'm ordering these by how much I liked them not by which I think are the best games. I've also got a one game per franchise rule, and count TellTale games as one franchise, because otherwise a third of the list would be TellTale simply because I played stupid amounts of TellTale this year. Games that made the list in previous years are also excluded.
But because of rules like this, and the fact that 10 is not 20, or 30, or 40, there are some games that I wish had made the list that I simply had to cut. This is where they get their fair dues, their
Honourable Mentions:
Heh, that was clever, wasn't it? I'm a clever boy. Good, clever Rariow. Note to self: have a biscuit.
Hearthstone: League of Explorers & That One Patch That Nerfed Warsong Commander
Yes, I'm still playing the deceptively simply card battler by Blizzard, and I'm still as in love with it as I was before its release. Unfortunately, the meta fell onto some hard times, with the extremely uninteractive Patron Warrior dominating for ages, and making the people among us who didn't want to get killed from over max health from an empty board somewhat annoyed. The The Grand Tournament expansion barely helped, weakly trying to introduce tools against the deck that proved not powerful enough, and which makes TGT the least important expansion to date. Fortunately, Blizzard got their ass in gear and nerfed the shit out of Patron Warrior. Despite cries that they were killing the deck, they didn't, and it remains competitively viable, whilst no longer being as infuriating to play against. This was soon followed up by the release of the League of Explorers adventure (a mini expansion with some single player content), which did everything I hoped The Grand Tournament would achieve, and created some of the most interesting deck archetypes in the history of Hearthstone. Everyone get outta here, because we're gonna be rich!
Game of Thrones (and pretty much every other post-Walking Dead TellTale game)
I bought and played pretty every single post-Walking Dead TellTale game, and played through them in the course of the past year, and I loved them. Almost all of them. Walking Dead Season 2 was alright I guess.
Ahem.
Still, the great majority of the TellTale library is extremely enjoyable, cool story-based content. The choices you have to make are consistently interesting, and difficult. The first season of Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us are both as good as I remembered them.There's just a lot of good stuff that TellTale puts out, and I recommend all of it.
Even Walking Dead Season 2.
Ironcast
This is one that I genuinely wish there'd been space for on the list, and very nearly edged out the game that ended up on number 10. The weird little turn-based combat match-three rogue-like thing is tonnes of fun to play, and difficult as all heck. The steampunk aesthetic works fantastically, the sound assets are terrific, and the gameplay systems work surprisingly well for something so strange. Plus you get to control a steampunk mech, so that's pretty fucking cool.
Dice Masters
The first physical game that I've put on one of these lists, woo!
I won't lie, I don't think Wizkids' Dice Masters is a great game. It comes up with a concept that sounds cool on paper: it creates a deckbuilding game where, instead of putting cards in your deck you put dice in your bag from said cards. From that point it plays out fairly similarly to Magic the Gathering. Unfortunately, this concept doesn't work all that well, since the dice add another unnecessary layer of randomness on top of the randomness I already see as the biggest issue of card games.
The smaller amount of variables you put in your deck (or "team" as the game insists you call it), a pitiful 8 where even the really simple Hearthstone allows you 30, means deckbuilding has a lot less depth than I'd like it to. Combine that with some blatantly unbalanced cards and stupid amounts of power creep, where certain cards come out that are just simply better than pre-existing cards (Lord of D is blank, has the same stats, and costs the same as Green Goblin, but Green Goblin has an insanely powerful upside, for instance), as well as some pretty atrocious quality control (card wordings are often inconsistent, make little sense, or are counter-intuitive), and you've got yourself a deeply flawed game.
Yet Dice Masters has been a lot of fun for the past half year. I've been playing the shit out of it with my flatmates at uni, and been having a veritable whale of a time. I love the Marvel, DC, Yu-gi-oh! and DnD flavor of the different sets, and Dice Masters has proven both a good passtime and a cool thing to chat about with people I like who don't really care about games otherwise.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario