whataboutvideogames

[whataboutvideogames]

The Best Games I Played in 2023

Games I Played in 2023: (in no particular order)

Tears of the Kingdom (finished)

Baldur’s Gate 3 (so many hours but not finished)

Spider-Man 2 (finished)

Wildfrost

Dredge

Chants of Senaar (finished)

Cocoon

Resident Evil 2: Remake (finished Leon’s story)

Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 + Phantom Liberty (finished like 4 different times)

Super Mario Wonder

A Short Hike

Death Stranding

Horizon: Forbidden West: Burning Shores (finished)

Metroid Prime: Remastered (finished)

Blasphemous

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (finished)

Diablo IV (finished campaign)

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Marvel’s Midnight Suns (finished)

Ghostrunner

Final Fantasy VII Remake

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

Axiom Verge 2

Halo Infinite (multiplayer)

Marvel Snap

Top 10 Games I Played in 2023 (regardless of release date)

Tears of the Kingdom

Baldur’s Gate 3

Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 + Phantom Liberty

Chants of Senaar

Spider-Man 2

Resident Evil 2: Remake

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

Marvel’s Midnight Suns

Ghostrunner 

Marvel Snap

Tears of the Kingdom What more is there to say? The most I’ve cared about characters and story in a Zelda game since Twilight Princess, which had a leg up on account of me being 15. 

Baldur’s Gate 3 It feels like this is the game everyone acted like Skyrim was back in the day. How can there possibly be this much game in one game without any of it being garbage? With most of it, in fact, being excellent?

Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 & Phantom Liberty The Baldur’s Gate 3 of action-RPGs. How are there this many completely branching story endings? How are there this many fun, viable and completely different builds?

Chants of Senaar The kind of game I want everyone, regardless of gaming experience, to play. Simultaneously, a game that feels like it was designed specifically for me.

Spider-Man 2 They done it again. The narrative may not be as strong as the first game’s surprisingly excellent story, but essentially every other aspect has been refined and improved.

Resident Evil 2: Remake Would earn its spot on this list for the implementation of Mr. X alone. Even more so than the unscripted invincible-baddie encounters in RE7 & 8, the fact that he stalks you through the police station you spend most of the game in enhances the experience, as your familiarity with the surroundings becomes a vital tool in escaping him. 

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim Extremely cool example of non-linear storytelling. The balance of letting you freely switch whose stories you’re advancing versus gating certain paths until you’ve advanced to certain points is well handled. Also, unlike seemingly most people, I generally enjoyed the mech-strategy combat portions.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns As someone who would love to love XCOM type games, this is the one that finally did it for me. The card/deck system is neat, but I think what really does it is the freedom of movement and the elimination of a lot of XCOM’s punishing randomness. Plus, a Persona-style slice-of-life dating sim game about Marvel characters feels so obvious in hindsight, I can’t understand why it wasn’t done sooner. Or why it wasn’t successful :(

Ghostrunner Look, I loved Cyberpunk 2077, but this game is waaaay cyberpunkier. I love a game that lets you slow down frenetic action to plan out your next move, and that’s almost the whole game here. The main issue is that the amazing combat is broken up by platforming that is fun at times and maddeningly frustrating at others. Excited to try out the sequel sometime.

Marvel Snap I play this game every ding dong day and I’ve never gotten tired of it. It’s simply the best competitive card game out there. The balance between cool individual card mechanics and the simple central mechanic of winning ⅔ lanes is unbeatable. 

#Jedi Survivor you seem cool but I've only played like 30 minutes of you so far #Dredge you're neat but i kept getting stuck on random stuff #cocoon you're also neat but i need a story or dialogue or characters or SOMETHING #ratchet and clank was fun but completely in one ear and out the other #Axiom Verge 2 you were great #Mario Wonder is great but loses points for making kid-friendly invulnerable characters (good!) #but making it so those characters can't use power-ups (bad! this is all children want to do! is become an elephant!!!) #games #video games #2023

[whataboutvideogames]

Horizon Forbidden West: Why Is the Climbing Like It Is

Horizon: Forbidden West has a lot going on – this is objectively true. But whether its many facets succeed or fail, they're all connected by climbing segments that range from functional to miserable. 

The functional parts come from the slight improvement Forbidden West made to its climbing since Zero Dawn. Clearly some effort was made to make the climbing a little less linear, as pulsing your Focus can now reveal the yellow lines of climbability branching all across some cliff faces. 

The miserable parts are in the less wide-open spaces; inside ruins or buildings, or even sometimes on those same cliff faces. There’s exactly one climbing path to get where you need to go, and you’ll alternate between holding the thumbstick forward and pressing the jump button until you get there. 

We Solved This Problem in 2017 While I’m glad Forbidden West made some improvements to the climbing, it’s still playing catch-up to Breath of the Wild. I don’t understand why any big-budget open-world game developed after Breath of the Wild doesn’t follow its lead and let you just. Climb anything.

Breath of the Wild was the first and so far only open-world game to make climbing interesting. By letting you climb basically any surface and only limiting you with a stamina meter, it gave power to the player in a way GameStop never could. Instead of numbly following the signposted path, the player charts their own course, figuring out how to stretch their stamina meter from one landing to another. 

Stealing Is Good There’s no reason Forbidden West shouldn’t have the exact same mechanic. You can still gate off anything you need to by just making it too tall or making it unclimbable, as long as the majority of cliffs and buildings can still be scaled.

I’m a big proponent of games outright and shamelessly stealing good mechanics from other games. I love that Returnal stole the active reload mechanic from Gears of War. I hope every FPS will steal the grappling hook from Halo Infinite. Somebody needs to steal (rescue) the amazing flying from Anthem.

Every single open-world exploration-heavy game should absolutely steal Breath of the Wild’s climbing. Horizon: Forbidden West would still have some issues, but they would all be much easier to swallow if the climbing that takes up so much of the game was organic and interesting instead of on-rails and tedious.

#horizon: forbidden west #HFW #H:FW #horizon forbidden west

[whataboutvideogames]

Elden Ring: Anybody Home?

I wish Elden Ring had more people. Ordinary people, who aren’t soldiers or cultists or monsters or diseased or living jars stuffed full of the corpses of great warriors. 

I’m always running into presumably human enemies and I can’t fathom what their deal is. What do they eat? Who do they work for? Who raised them and where are they?

There may or may not be some kind of answer to these questions buried deep within Elden Ring’s purposefully inscrutable lore, but for those of us who just play the actual game, 99% of the living things in this world exist only to stand in one spot until it’s their turn to try to kill you. 

What’s There Is Great, But It’s Not Enough Exceptions to this rule are generally memorable moments — arriving at Radahn’s castle to find Alexander and Blaidd waiting there, stumbling into the peaceful Jarburg, or any time you encounter a new non-hostile NPC.

But these encounters are few and far between, and though The Lands Between may be packed with secrets and mysteries, it’s empty of people. It would liven up the pacing of the game to break up the tense combat and exploration with some more peaceful encounters. Roundtable Hold and the Volcano Manor are great examples of this; I would love to have come across even just two or three more similar locales in my journey so far, where I can breathe easy for a minute and meet some interesting people. 

Discovery Demands Diversity Back in 2017 when I was playing a similarly excellent game, Breath of the Wild, I reached a point where I saw something strange in the landscape. Instead of being excited, I sighed and thought “ok, let’s get this Korok seed.”

I knew the game only had two things to offer when you saw Something Weird out in the world: Korok seeds and shrines. Impressive as the game was, it took some of the wind out of the exploration when I knew exactly what was at the end of the rainbow.

I’m worried I’m approaching a similar place with Elden Ring. When I finally beat the Draconic Tree Sentinel and walked into the Capital City, I didn’t know exactly what I would find. But I did know what I wouldn’t find: people. And it’s getting a little difficult to care about becoming Elden Lord of an empty world. 

P.S. Pretty much everything else about this game is perfect. Except for the giant ants. I hate them more than anything.

#elden ring #games commentary #games criticism

[whataboutvideogames]

tl;dr

If Super Metroid is your favorite Metroid game, you'll love Metroid: Dread. If Metroid: Fusion is your favorite Metroid game, you'll really enjoy it but be let down by the ending.

Metroid: Dread Is About 80% of a Brilliant Game

The Journey to Dread I was born in 1992, and growing up I only had access to handheld gaming devices — which means the first Metroid game I ever played was Metroid: Fusion.

Released in 2002 on the Game Boy Advance, it was a departure from the previous three 2D Metroid games. It featured more narrative, inner dialogue for Samus, and a computer that gave you orders about where to go next. Fusion managed to include these elements without losing the spirit of exploration that marks the series – it may have more narrative and dialogue than the previous games, but it’s still minimalist in comparison to the Castlevania games of the same era. It gives you just enough to take you on a satisfying narrative arc without interrupting the exploration and combat.

The next 2D Metroid game was Metroid: Zero Mission, a remake of the original Metroid. Being a remake of the original game, it returned to the “less is more” style of narrative. However, a new section added to the end of the game still manages to — practically wordlessly — make Samus feel more like an actual character, in addition to flipping the gameplay completely upside down in a thrilling way.

Metroid: Dread is in many ways a brilliant game, but despite its technical achievements it fails to meet the bar set by the two games that came before it.

Technically an Achievement Metroid: Dread’s gameplay is designed to perfection, in the way the best Nintendo games are. Running, jumping, space-jumping, and shooting all feel great. Surprisingly, the best mechanical addition might just be the slide, which is intuitive and fun and feels like it must have been a part of the series all along. Between good pacing and a well thought-out control scheme, the game does an impressive job of feeding you a steady drip of new abilities without overwhelming you.

Much has been made of Dread’s difficulty, and it’s true: this game is hard. Mostly, however, the boss fights are hard. On my first playthrough on the Normal difficulty, I don’t think I died to normal enemies or even mini-bosses more than two or three times in all. In contrast, by mid-game I was easily dying a dozen times per boss, and probably died to the final boss about 50 times before finishing the game. The boss fights were fun and satisfying, but the swerves in difficulty made the rest of the combat feel trivial in comparison.

The E.M.M.I. Of course, between the bosses, mini-bosses, and E.M.M.I. zones, maybe the developers thought the player would need a break. The E.M.M.I., heavily featured in Dread’s marketing, are invulnerable killer robots that stalk certain areas of the game. They represent Dread’s biggest departure from the Metroid formula, and they’re a welcome addition. Samus is powerless against the E.M.M.I. for most of the game, turning ventures into their territory into tense stealth sections and fraught escapes. The AI for the E.M.M.I. keeps you on your toes as the robots anticipate your escape routes and appear when you least expect them.

While the E.M.M.I. are effective, they aren’t utilized to their full potential. Their confinement to explicitly defined areas saps away their intimidation, and while the E.M.M.I. do gain new skills as the game goes on, none of them really feel very distinct from each other. Encounters with them get harder, but your tactics for avoiding them never change. The menacing robots also have essentially no effect on the narrative of the game — by the last third, they’re basically a footnote.

Did I Miss Something?

That unrealized potential extends to the structure and narrative of Metroid: Dread as well. The sparse narrative is promising, right up until the final boss fight of the game, but then the game ends without reckoning with anything it’s introduced. Imagine if in The Empire Strikes Back, Vader told Luke that he was his father, but then Luke killed Vader, blew up the second Death Star, and the movie ended. This is supposedly the end of this part of the Metroid saga, so then imagine if there also weren’t any Star Wars movies after that, and you’ve got a good feeling for how Dread treats its story.

Compared to the emotional endings of Fusion and Zero Mission, Dread simply doesn’t stick the landing.

[Spoilers] The stuff about Raven Beak being Samus’ … dad? was wild enough, but then Samus turns into a human-Metroid-Chozo hybrid for all of two minutes before the X parasite possessing Quiet Robe turns her back? Somehow, and for some reason? If they wanted Quiet Robe’s sacrifice to be the emotional lynchpin of the finale, they needed it to make at least a little bit of sense.

They also reveal that Raven Beak was impersonating Adam for about 90% of the game and never mention it again. It should have been a great twist, but it’s tossed at you about 4 minutes before the game ends, robbing it of any impact. [End spoilers]

Don't Leave Them Wanting This Much More The game ends abruptly from a structural standpoint as well. With so much emphasis on the E.M.M.I. in the beginning and middle of the game, it’s unsatisfying that there’s no real final showdown with them. I was waiting for something like the final confrontation with SA-X in Fusion, or the curveball end section of Zero Mission. It’s like if an episode of a medical drama ended with the second diagnosis being right, or if E3 ended without “one more thing”; you know that when it seems like it’s about to end, there’s actually a surprise waiting for you. To use a more relevant example, it's like if a Zelda game ended the first time you collected the Three Magic Whatevers. I was so certain that Dread was saving something for after what appeared to be the Big Final Fight — but then it just actually was the Big Final Fight, roll credits.

Some games make you want DLC in a good way, because you just want to spend more time with them (looking at you, Hades). Metroid: Dread makes me want DLC because it’s about an hour of game away from being the new pinnacle of the series. Instead, it’s Empire Strikes Back without Return of the Jedi: brilliant, but unsatisfying on its own.

P.S. Also, was there music in this game? There are melodies from the Fusion and Zero Mission soundtracks that I still remember after at least a decade since I played them last. Even Metroid Prime: Corruption’s music had some memorable and distinctive bits. I just binged Dread for three days straight and I couldn't hum five seconds of music from it.

#metroid dread #metroid #metroid fusion #super metroid #metroid: dread #samus

[whataboutvideogames]

How to Enjoy Gris (and Life)

Playing video games when you’re 29 and a parent is a fundamentally different experience than playing video games when you’re 13. As a kid, I had way more time to spend on games, but way fewer options. I probably wouldn’t have finished Pokémon Blue if it came out today — I know this, because I’ve started about four other Pokémon games, all entries that came out after I graduated high school, and never finished them.

Having more choices and less time makes me very conscious of how I’m spending my free time. Generally, this means that games where the actual gameplay isn’t fun in and of itself are often begun and frequently abandoned. I would love to play more Pokémon or Dragon Age, but I just can’t justify it when the combat brings me little to no joy.

This has developed into an unconscious worry that I’m not enjoying my free time as much as I could be. It’s hard to pick one of the 50 TV shows I mean to watch, because what if I end up wasting valuable time on a bad show? I want to get the most fun possible, and the most content possible, out of the games I play.

We’re 200 words in, so it’s probably about time for Gris to make its entrance.

Gris is a beautiful 2D platformer from Nomada Studio. It’s so beautiful, in fact, that I really recommend you play it docked, on a TV. You play as a woman walking through a lonely landscape, collecting bits of light, solving puzzles, and gaining new abilities. It’s a game that tells a beautiful, wordless story about loss through symbolism and metaphor, but I’m not going to get into any of that — partly because a lot of it is beyond me, and partly because Polygon already did a great job of it here.

What I want to get into is what the gameplay itself taught me. One of the distinguishing features of Gris is its general lack of explanatory material. The only text I can think of in the entire game, outside of the sparse pause menu, is what shows up when you gain a new ability, and even then it’s extremely minimalistic. There’s no breadcrumb trail to follow, no dialogue, no map to consult, no old man to give you a quest. You simply press forward.

The thing is, while you press forward, you’ll frequently come to forks in the road. Remember how I worry about spending my free time the most “effectively”? Initially, these crossroads were torture. What if one path leads to some sort of non-essential but fun content and the other carries me further down the actual story, with no way to return?

Choices like these in any game give me FOMO, leading to a habit of starting down one path, thinking “this looks like it goes somewhere important,” heading back to try the other path, rinse and repeat. Gris, however, taught me to let go and just enjoy a beautiful and charming experience. When I stopped worrying about wringing as much content as possible out of it and trusted the developers, a good game turned into a great game.

Gris is a lot like life: it’s best when you stop worrying about whether you’re doing it right and just live in the moment. There’s no shortage of great moments in this game, so just play it and have a good time.

#Gris #also apparently it's pronounced like 'grease'?? #i guess that's spanish for you

[whataboutvideogames]

Metroid: Dread Is About 80% of a Brilliant Game

The Journey to Dread I was born in 1992, and growing up I only had access to handheld gaming devices — which means the first Metroid game I ever played was Metroid: Fusion.

Released in 2002 on the Game Boy Advance, it was a departure from the previous three 2D Metroid games. It featured more narrative, inner dialogue for Samus, and a computer that gave you orders about where to go next. Fusion managed to include these elements without losing the spirit of exploration that marks the series – it may have more narrative and dialogue than the previous games, but it’s still minimalist in comparison to the Castlevania games of the same era. It gives you just enough to take you on a satisfying narrative arc without interrupting the exploration and combat.

The next 2D Metroid game was Metroid: Zero Mission, a remake of the original Metroid. Being a remake of the original game, it returned to the “less is more” style of narrative. However, a new section added to the end of the game still manages to — practically wordlessly — make Samus feel more like an actual character, in addition to flipping the gameplay completely upside down in a thrilling way.

Metroid: Dread is in many ways a brilliant game, but despite its technical achievements it fails to meet the bar set by the two games that came before it.

Technically an Achievement Metroid: Dread’s gameplay is designed to perfection, in the way the best Nintendo games are. Running, jumping, space-jumping, and shooting all feel great. Surprisingly, the best mechanical addition might just be the slide, which is intuitive and fun and feels like it must have been a part of the series all along. Between good pacing and a well thought-out control scheme, the game does an impressive job of feeding you a steady drip of new abilities without overwhelming you.

Much has been made of Dread’s difficulty, and it’s true: this game is hard. Mostly, however, the boss fights are hard. On my first playthrough on the Normal difficulty, I don’t think I died to normal enemies or even mini-bosses more than two or three times in all. In contrast, by mid-game I was easily dying a dozen times per boss, and probably died to the final boss about 50 times before finishing the game. The boss fights were fun and satisfying, but the swerves in difficulty made the rest of the combat feel trivial in comparison.

The E.M.M.I. Of course, between the bosses, mini-bosses, and E.M.M.I. zones, maybe the developers thought the player would need a break. The E.M.M.I., heavily featured in Dread’s marketing, are invulnerable killer robots that stalk certain areas of the game. They represent Dread’s biggest departure from the Metroid formula, and they’re a welcome addition. Samus is powerless against the E.M.M.I. for most of the game, turning ventures into their territory into tense stealth sections and fraught escapes. The AI for the E.M.M.I. keeps you on your toes as the robots anticipate your escape routes and appear when you least expect them.

While the E.M.M.I. are effective, they aren’t utilized to their full potential. Their confinement to explicitly defined areas saps away their intimidation, and while the E.M.M.I. do gain new skills as the game goes on, none of them really feel very distinct from each other. Encounters with them get harder, but your tactics for avoiding them never change. The menacing robots also have essentially no effect on the narrative of the game — by the last third, they’re basically a footnote.

Did I Miss Something?

That unrealized potential extends to the structure and narrative of Metroid: Dread as well. The sparse narrative is promising, right up until the final boss fight of the game, but then the game ends without reckoning with anything it’s introduced. Imagine if in The Empire Strikes Back, Vader told Luke that he was his father, but then Luke killed Vader, blew up the second Death Star, and the movie ended. This is supposedly the end of this part of the Metroid saga, so then imagine if there also weren’t any Star Wars movies after that, and you’ve got a good feeling for how Dread treats its story.

Compared to the emotional endings of Fusion and Zero Mission, Dread simply doesn’t stick the landing.

[Spoilers] The stuff about Raven Beak being Samus’ … dad? was wild enough, but then Samus turns into a human-Metroid-Chozo hybrid for all of two minutes before the X parasite possessing Quiet Robe turns her back? Somehow, and for some reason? If they wanted Quiet Robe’s sacrifice to be the emotional lynchpin of the finale, they needed it to make at least a little bit of sense.

They also reveal that Raven Beak was impersonating Adam for about 90% of the game and never mention it again. It should have been a great twist, but it’s tossed at you about 4 minutes before the game ends, robbing it of any impact. [End spoilers]

Don't Leave Them Wanting This Much More The game ends abruptly from a structural standpoint as well. With so much emphasis on the E.M.M.I. in the beginning and middle of the game, it’s unsatisfying that there’s no real final showdown with them. I was waiting for something like the final confrontation with SA-X in Fusion, or the curveball end section of Zero Mission. It’s like if an episode of a medical drama ended with the second diagnosis being right, or if E3 ended without “one more thing”; you know that when it seems like it’s about to end, there’s actually a surprise waiting for you. To use a more relevant example, it's like if a Zelda game ended the first time you collected the Three Magic Whatevers. I was so certain that Dread was saving something for after what appeared to be the Big Final Fight — but then it just actually was the Big Final Fight, roll credits.

Some games make you want DLC in a good way, because you just want to spend more time with them (looking at you, Hades). Metroid: Dread makes me want DLC because it’s about an hour of game away from being the new pinnacle of the series. Instead, it’s Empire Strikes Back without Return of the Jedi: brilliant, but unsatisfying on its own.

P.S. Also, was there music in this game? There are melodies from the Fusion and Zero Mission soundtracks that I still remember after at least a decade since I played them last. Even Metroid Prime: Corruption’s music had some memorable and distinctive bits. I just binged Dread for three days straight and I couldn't hum five seconds of music from it.

#metroid: dread #metroid #metroid fusion #metroid dread