The NOT Game of the Year Awards 2018

Hello everyone what a wonderful year. I'm suffering in an incredible amount of pain and I'm just as surprised as you that I still haven't killed myself yet. I've got like 3 or 4 days left on my HBO GO free trial and I've just finished season 1 of Westworld so let's get this post out of the way because I've got PLACES TO BE.

This year was a roller coaster for me pretty much immediately. Smashed up my laptop so the screen is completely destroyed. Now I have to use my TV as a monitor which means I can't use my PS4 and computer at the same time, which has cut my multitasking down considerably. One of the reasons for less posts on this website in fact. I really liked writing on my laptop while there was something on in the background, but now that's just not an option, and things just started to seem like a chore and it just kinda got to me. Then there was the crippling pain that developed in my head around May that no one still can explain to me which has hurt every day of my life since May.

Honestly, if you asked me, I'd tell you: I really feel like I'm dying. I am suffering every day of my life though the MRI and CT scan came back perfectly fine, so I don't know. But that's not even the worst thing that happened to me this year. The worst thing that happened to me this year is the VIDEO GAMES. So let's talk about the bad games of the year.

Fallout 69

was basically released in a brown paper bag, and once entered into the homes of anyone ignorant enough to fall for Bethesda's tricks, began heating up the proverbial heroin spoon of microtransactions and other analogies for whatever the fuck bad game this is. Yes, I've literally given up making fun of this game for being so bad because it's just so... well, I'm over it now.

In all honesty, this game was just sad. I expected, at the very least, Fallout 4. In the end, I got kinda-not-really Fallout 4 that had, at best, been kicked in the head several times while no one was looking. The base building was bad, the character models still looked like they were a few lightbulbs short of a kitchen sink, and oh yeah the game is still disgustingly ugly. I think I saw a video review on the game that talked about how gorgeous it was and while they reviewed it on PC and had access to the super high resolution assets, I mean... have you looked at it? Still can't tell if they were joking or not. Anyway, Bethesda are liars and thieves and this game was and will forever be a colossal waste of time.

Car Fry 5

Holy fuck this fucking game sucked. I'm not even going to pretend. I gave it a shot, I really did, but I just can't handle Far Cry anymore. I remember back when Far Cry 3 came out and the character of Vaas showed up and he did these really intimidating monologues about the meaning of insanity and, well, it was more of a "this actor is really fucking good" kind of thing than anything because his monologues never really went anywhere. I mean, spoilers and all, but you never even really fight Vaas. He does his "meaning of insanity" bullshit to you twice, then you get high on drugs, kill him while hallucinating, then fuck his sister. Meanwhile the entire video games industry was creaming their pants about how he was the best villain ever and I'm just sitting there like "uhhhhhh"

Well anyway, that's actually kind of what Far Cry is anymore. The villains portrayed in these games are like a group of old out of touch french men sat down on a warm sunday morning and compiled market research on what edgy hipsters think is intimidating. Or, they threw a dart at a board and hoped for the best.

Monologues. That's it. That's all these fucking villains do. That's all Far Cry knows. These villains will tell you they want to kill you, they will send wave after wave of mooks with veeeery expensive guns and cars to make it seem very convincing, but when they finally get their hands on you they, well, they... "God. The creator of all things. Happy, sad. Love, pain. You see, son, in a sense I'm like god too. I can bring happiness, sadness, love... especially pain. The bible I write is a bible of choice. When you serve god you don't really get a choice, you're forced to serve mindlessly. Free will is the enemy of religion. Ironic, isn't it? Free thinking is the enemy of the very religion that serves the god who gave us the ability to think for ourselves. But my bible gives us all a choice. A choice to think for yourself. A chance to choose your own happiness, or sadness. A choice of love, or pain. Because I am god, a creator of all things. And I give my children a a choice."

Okay now imagine that camera angle with weird trippy colors, strange Sigur Ros-like ethereal music playing from nowhere and dutch angles and bam you've got yourself a Far Cry villain. Oh, and one more thing, imagine listening to that speech 55 more times. Because in Far Cry 5 you get kidnapped throughout the story once you hit certain "milestones" and you're forced to watch these stupid bullshit idiot cutscenes of stupid goddamn motherfucking villains who want you dead so bad they capture you, drug you up so bad you're unconscious for several hours, tie you up, pull out their guns... then tell their minions to do it and LEAVE. Oh yeah and you reach these milestones by leveling up and shit, so you can be in the middle of doing side missions and get kidnapped. I actually stopped playing the game before I beat it because it kept interrupting me from doing the side missions and I just couldn't take the garbage story and its insistence that I shouldn't play the side content anymore. So this game fucking sucks.

Impromptu review this game gets 1 "incoherent speeches written by old men still too intimidated to walk by the American Eagle section of the mall" out of 5.

Ni No More Studio Ghibli II: Revenant Kingdom


Right out of the gate I'm not sure I could call this a bad game, but it's certainly a disappointing one. The first Ni No Kuni was such a beautiful and cute little game that was heartwarming and charming in just about every way. I'm still not exactly sure of the full extent of the Studio Ghibli influence that game had, was it just the fully animated cutscenes that would play on occasion or was it more? I can't say. But it was a great game and I'm fairly certain it was my game of the year the year it came out.

Ni No Kuni II, on the other hand, is a facsimile of the first. The story is so weak and boilerplate anime overbearing "love will conquer all", the characters are weak, and I originally played the game when it came out so that was before they added any difficulty options, so it was incredibly easy. It was so strange. It lost its entire identity in the span of a single sequel. The overland travel map was... realistic and not hyper stylized like the first game, and it looked "graphically unimpressive" if we're going to remain diplomatic about it. The party members were interesting at first. The game literally opens up with you, the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITE STATES OF AMERICA, GETTING NUKED. Then through anime bullshit you get warped to this crazy weird fantasy world and also de-aged 30 years.

This game lacks any decent story telling and is by the numbers as you can expect. The gimmick behind this one is that it has a kingdom builder mechanic but it's not very good. It's all simple "acquire the ship builder and you can build the docks and then build upgrades for your boat" but then you get an airship not too long after you get the boat so it's like what the fuck do you need the boat for anyway. So that's kind of a waste of time. I stuck with the game until the end, I owed it that much but it didn't really give me much in return. The ending is kind of a head scratcher that springs some strange plot development on you that made me ask "what was the point of this?" when they could have just not introduced your weird mind crime mutant son from the future at the very actual end of the game, but whatever.

I will say that it's not all doom and gloom. I'm being kind of hard on the game because the first one actually went somewhere interesting and this game goes NOWHERE interesting, but the world building is kind of interesting, even giving us an equivalent to Silicon Valley and even Facebook (Called Leafbook). Ultimately this game left me very disappointed and the "love will save us all" anime trope makes my skin crawl, especially the way it was employed here, so I will say that it's not a bad game, but it's certainly not my game of the year... and if we're being totally honest I wouldn't have remembered I played this game in 2018 if my trophies didn't timestamp them as this year, because I almost completely forgot about this game.


Reddy Deddle Demption 2


THIS GAME IS A MESS. YOU FUCKING PEOPLE LIED TO ME AND I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY. Everything up to this game coming out was how it was the best game ever made and not one review made mention of the complete ASS controls and how it doesn't even feel like THE PEOPLE WHO MADE MAX PAYNE 3 knew how to design a fucking THIRD PERSON SHOOTER. Everything is sluggish and slow and hard to aim and it relies on auto aim to such a degree that once you turn that off, the game completely breaks down.

You people think you can just play "MAY I.... STAND UNSHAKEN..." and that makes it okay when you take away my weapons, or change my ammo types? This game is fucking wild sometimes. The story is sooooo good and that's IT. The gameplay is rough around so many edges. The game direction is all over the place. I've never been more frustrated when playing a game in my fucking life. You've got to manage your health, stamina, dead eye cores, you've got to ensure you're eating food or else Arthur is going to start losing weight(Which in turn negatively impacts his cores also) and I also have to watch what clothes he wears because that could also affect his cores? Did anyone tell Rockstar that this shit isn't a SIMULATION? I remember when I first realized how the hunting system worked in this game I almost busted a gut. You have to track the animal, you have to study the animal to see what kind of weapon you have to kill it with and to see the quality of its pelt, then you have to kill it all in a single shot.

There are so many systems in this game that I looked at once and was like "yeah, no" and just played the game without paying attention to them. Did I want a better satchel throughout the later portions of the game? Absolutely. Was I willing to suffer through the absolute bullshit hunting system to get them? Not for a second. I just wanted a, I don't know, Red Dead Redemption game again and instead there's all this stuff on there that I absolutely did not need that just gets in the way. What's this about boons and charms that I can craft? You mean there's MORE shit that I have to learn about? Ehhhh whatever I don't need it.

There's a lot of bad in this game. The story is phenomenal. The acting is otherworldly. I truly loved the characters and felt the brotherhood of Arthur and John, and have never hated a character like Micha in quite a long time. But for fucks sake the bullshit I had to go through to just enjoy it, was almost not worth it. It's so apropos that this game starts with an intro video of Rockstar loading a double barreled shotgun, because when it comes to this game's direction they really went with a scattershot approach to it all, and it shows. And that's why this game is absolutely not my game of the year, no matter how good the story may be, and how much I may love the characters.

So what about the good games? Well thankfully there was a good game or two that came out that I can talk about. But this list is getting pretty long as it is, and I'm creatively bankrupt, so let's pad my KD ratio here and I'll save that post for another day. LOOK FORWARD TO WWW.WORDSTHATKILL.COM'S GAME OF THE YEAR 2018 LIST COMING UP SOON CLICKBAIT.

MERRY CHRISTMAS ALL. Oh shit I missed Christmas... uhhhhh, shit, well, there's always next year.

My name is Ryan. I like to play video games and Dungeons and Dragons and all kinds of other cool stuff. I also like to write. This is my website, it's nothing special, but I write about topics from time to time that probably make no sense. But if you think they do make sense, then hang around and check out some other articles. My friends call them "blogs" but goddamnit I've got a URL and everything, so they're "articles".

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