Let's pick-apart people's GOTYs :)

[iridescence]

Here's my dose of bile:

Crusader Kings 2: Probably the best game I played this year but still has bad AI and some ridiculously gamey elements which are very easy for the player to exploit making it fairly easy to conquer half of Europe starting with a small county if you know the mechanics.

And while they have improved it with patches, I hate how easy assassinations were in the beginning, making it seem like some cheesy medieval version of the Sopranos or something..

Guild Wars 2: We were promised "dynamic events" and a revolution in MMO design. We got escort quest "events" that reset every 5 minutes so you have even less feeling of having accomplished something than in a WoW quest. Also why did they make it so you are inundated with skills for the 1st 10 levels and then it takes you 10-20 levels to gain another skill which makes leveling up boring and pointless for the most part? GW2 still is a decent game but was over-hyped as hell.

X-Com. I liked this for the first couple of hours but then realized that all the missions are basically the same thing over and over. Also, why do all of your "international" soldiers speak with cheesy American accents? I mean I wouldn't expect them to hire a voice actor from every country but you could have at least got a German, Brit, Arab, Chinese guy and African for example to give a little variety.

Dishonoured: I didn't get very far in this one so maybe shouldn't judge it at all but it bored me. Beautiful set pieces but just the same old "go in and kill a bunch of dudes" game play or if you want you can sneak past the duded because we're super innovative. I don't get the praise this got at all.

Out of the Park Baseball 13: Have been playing this series for 12 years now and always sink a good few hours into the latest installment, but to be honest, the innovations every year are quite small. I will still buy number 14 next year though. :)

Overall, a pretty meh year for new games I'd say :(

[Jesus_Phish]

Because I didn't get to play a lot of peoples games of the years I'll copy some others in picking apart my own candidates

Sleeping Dogs - Some of the characters are so pointless. There's moments where you'll suddenly talk to a character you've never met or been introduced to before and you talk to them as if you know them well. All the girlfriends/dates are pointless outside of filling your map up with tonnes of collectibles. The radio bug annoyed the hell out of me and I really disliked that unless you were getting a car out of a parking lot you didn't known what it was called. But if those are my biggest gripes about the game I think it speaks for how much I liked it.

Spec Ops The Line - The gameplay is mediocre at best and it's just so obvious when you're going to get into firefights. Not since Gears of War has there ever been so many chest high walls. Some of the characters dialogue was jarring, such as when you replay the intro about 5 hours into the game Walker says "no, this isn't right, we've done this before", really took me out of the game to think how does he possibly know this? Also for all the talk of ammo being a scarce commodity the randomly scattered boxes of ammo don't make much sense bar the ones next to gunners nests. Still loved it.

FTL - a bullshit final boss, AI that does stupid things like standing in the fire just because it happens to be in the upper left corner of the room. And I really wish it would just let me play some kind of endless mode or pirate mode where I can take my own time and do my own thing. If that game let me do that I'd remove it from this list.

[Heliocentric]

On ftl, the fire hurts the whole room its in. The AI isn't so much standing in the fire so much as you sent them into a room with fire.

[Jesus_Phish]

I can't say I noticed that, but it might be an oversight on my part. I thought it only hurt the square they were in, which made combating it if it was in the square they had to stand in much more difficult

[Drake Sigar]

FTL's 'you can make all the right moves and still lose' philosophy is a little harsh for my tastes.



And that was on Easy.

[Noyemi K]

Sleepy Puppies has some really odd immersion-breaking decisions that were made (such as the ability to ram sideways, of all things).

[Mohorovicic]

And that was on Easy.

You are not very good at videogames

[Kadayi]

You are not very good at videogames

Well at least he plays them, which is more than can be said for you. All you do is bitch them out.

[Voon]

You are not very good at videogames

[LTK]

You are not very good at videogames

Doesn't matter. I played 50 games before my first victory as well. Currently at 4:112 victories:games played. FTL is not a game you are supposed to win.

[Gorzan]

Doesn't matter. I played 50 games before my first victory as well. Currently at 4:112 victories:games played. FTL is not a game you are supposed to win.

This. People are too frustrated with the boss to see that, on this game, what matters is the jurney, and how spectacular your eventual death is.

[Heliocentric]

You are not very good at videogames

This. People are too frustrated with the boss to see that, on this game, what matters is the jurney, and how spectacular your eventual death is.

I quite like dying with a whimper, where your teleporter fails and your crewmen are suffocating with the last of the enemy crew. But 2 separate fires erupted on your ship earlier and you fixed it by opening doors so your pilot needs to run to the broken oxygen through vacume and then to the teleport room before your 2 other remaining crewmen suffocate in the corridor of an entirely oxygenless and/or burning ship bereft of life.

You done failed boy!

[Jesus_Phish]

This. People are too frustrated with the boss to see that, on this game, what matters is the jurney, and how spectacular your eventual death is.

I love the spectacular deaths, but my issue was that at the end of the first fight with the boss, which I sent three crew over to destroy his ship, after two of my crew died already on my ship repairing and putting out fires, leaving me with just two crew members on a floating husk of a ship with no missles left, just barely able to jump out after destroying the capital ship with a massive feeling of "I did it" only to be greeted by the same jump select screen with the capital ship still flying around was too much for me.

I went from having sacrificed my crew and most of my ship only to have sand kicked into my eyes by the devs deciding that you have to fight a boss three times. Particularly when you see it blow into four pieces the first time around. If it just jumped its ftl drive up super fast and got away, that'd have been fine, but the game essentially lied to the player by blowing the ship up only to turn around and say LOL JK JK.

[Drake Sigar]

This. People are too frustrated with the boss to see that, on this game, what matters is the jurney, and how spectacular your eventual death is.

Indeed. While I do sympathise with Jesus about the difficulty of FTL's final boss, overall the game is about desperately fighting against your own inevitable destruction. If you're a fan of that, FTL and X-Com classic ironman more than filled that void this year.

[Nalano]

Speaking of XCom, I find that I'm playing it like I play Civ or SMAC: All in one sitting.

Sure, if I have to do other stuff, I save the game, but I have yet to load any save. Every time I consider doing so I think of wasted potential in that game where I could have organized the base a bit more efficiently, or quick-teched to lasers, or stockpiled engineers so I could get a bunch more satellites in the air by the second month, or whatever, and then I'm questioning my original decision to start in Europe or Asia and resent the fact that I was given six Icelandic musclemen to work with and suddenly I'm starting up a new game.

[DaftPunk]

Dark Souls - Farming,farming and farming.

[arathain]

*chortles*

I have to bite here: is that "chortles, I pirate all my games so my vitriol comes free", "chortles, I actually like games after all but enjoy the Grumpiest Chap persona" or "chortles, I don't actually play all these games, but I like BSing that I've played a lot of games that I haven't actually played" or am I way off track?

[Gorzan]

Personally, the only bad thing I've got to say about FTL is that it needs more content. I want some good DLC for it.

I went from having sacrificed my crew and most of my ship only to have sand kicked into my eyes by the devs deciding that you have to fight a boss three times. Particularly when you see it blow into four pieces the first time around. If it just jumped its ftl drive up super fast and got away, that'd have been fine, but the game essentially lied to the player by blowing the ship up only to turn around and say LOL JK JK.

Might've been patched. But when you kill the flagship for the first time it only loses what it's missing on later stages and proceeds to do the FTL jump animation.

[Oshada]

I have to bite here: is that "chortles, I pirate all my games so my vitriol comes free", "chortles, I actually like games after all but enjoy the Grumpiest Chap persona" or "chortles, I don't actually play all these games, but I like BSing that I've played a lot of games that I haven't actually played" or am I way off track?

That's rather well put, I'm interested in the response...

[Outright Villainy]

Spec Ops: The Line.

It had a fairly good story, but it didn't feel in any way mindblowing to me, and certainly not enough to make up for the dull gameplay. The acting, visuals, audio and overall presentation was very good, but the overall message of the game just felt very heavy handed, they were very much beating us over the head with it. I can't say the Fight Club-esque twist did too much for me either. I'm not against story focused games, I thought To The Moon was brilliant, despite having little to no gameplay, but that's because its story would have been fantastic in any medium, whereas for Spec Ops, compared to other great books or tv I've seen this year it was just pretty alright.