Your Best/Worst Gaming Experiences of 2013
Dec 18, 2013 6:04:41 GMT -5
Post by TangoBunny on Dec 18, 2013 6:04:41 GMT -5
It's coming to the end of the year, and much like how I made a similar topic last year, I figure it's a good time for us to discuss what stood out to you as being great or disappointing gaming experiences over the last twelve months!
Here's my Top Ten Best Experiences, followed by my Top Ten Disappointments, that I experienced in 2013.
Top Ten Best Experiences
10th Place - Skylanders Giants
A good chunk of my year was taken up by playing Skylanders for the first time. My desk and shelves are now cluttered with figurines, I've spend a ridiculous amount of money collecting toys, and after playing two Skylanders console games, two Skylanders portable games, and half of Swap Force, I'm finally getting a little burnt out in wanting to play more of the game, at least for the moment.
But you know what? I still love it. I've always liked toys, but I've never had any motivation to collect them, and this gave me a great reason to go out and hunt excitedly in toy stores for new awesome things! I'm still amazed at the love and care that go into the figures.
When you turn the lights out in your room, Stealth Elf's eyes and weapons glow in the dark. Undead Skylanders have glowing skull bases. Lightcore Skylanders absorb power emitted from the portal to light up, without any kind of wires or removable batteries. Swap Force Skylanders can be reconfigured into 250+ combinations, and are honestly fun to play with. And, of course, all figurines have your very own personal data and progress saved to them.
Some people see Skylanders as 'expensive physical DLC', but I don't even really consider them to be part of the game. I see them as toys, and all the connectivity to the games, and being able to see them alive and in motion, complete with voices and special effects, is an incredibly cool bonus.
That doesn't mean I don't care much for the game, though. After all, I spent several months playing it pretty much non-stop! It can be described as a more child-friendly Gauntlet sequel, except with a great level of care and attention to the world, rather than it being randomly generated or generic dark monster arenas. It's simple, but it's great fun, and I'm glad to finally be able to play with toys all over again.
9th Place - The Stanley Parable
The narration in this game is truly wonderful, and the small amount of time I got to spend exploring The Stanley Parable had me hooked on wondering what would happen next. It's always a good sign when the main criticism of a game is that there wasn't enough of it, because I definitely ended up wishing there were more secrets and paths.
It's actually pretty hard to write praises about this game, given that its nature is best kept a mystery, but I'll definitely say that the more confusing path in the game was one of my favourite experiences in gaming, to the point where I spent a lot longer watching other peoples reactions to playing the game, than playing the game myself.
8th Place - Shantae
The animation and music in Shantae have such a mesmerising vibe! There's so much clever trickery on the Game Boy Color hardware too... seeing the backgrounds transform color palettes is an incredible effect, even by today's standards.
The game did have its flaws, such as being very vague as to where you're supposed to be heading at any given time, and having sections involving blind jumps due to the tiny screen, but even with those problems, I really enjoyed the overall experience. It's lighthearted, fun, and stylish!
7th Place - Antichamber
I love games where you're left to your own devices to figure things out. Myst, Nancy Drew titles, LucasArts adventure games... they're all great, and the more surreal their settings are, the better! So when it comes to Antichamber, where the game is truly non-linear in the order you discover things, yet still follows an order to reaching the finale, it was wonderful. Learning to associate abstract symbols and colours with directions and solutions gives a great feeling of satisfaction that I haven't really felt since I played Riven many years ago.
6th Place - Kairo
Another surreal puzzle/exploration game, but this one focusing more on scenery than the puzzles themselves. For my tastes, I actually enjoyed this a lot more than Antichamber! It was a lot more interesting seeing what the next area would be like, and gave a much better sense of being in a bizarre physical environment, where everything is made of stone in an abstract location. The optional hidden puzzles were the icing on the cake, and led to a lot of fascinating discoveries in how they were solved!
5th Place - Grand Theft Auto V
Generally speaking, I'm not into third person shooters, and have found all past GTA entries to be somewhat infuriating in terms of the downtime between missions. Finding a decent car, driving to an unmarked ammo store, spending money on weapons, finding hidden body armour powerups, commuting across the map... only to get die right at the end of the mission, lose your car/weapons/armor, and restarting back on the other side of the map where you have to do it all over again.
GTA V fixes all of those problems with player-friendly checkpoints and the ability to retry sequences when you die. Add that to some absolutely incredible voice acting, character stories that I genuinely wanted to see what would happen next, a great sense of humour, and vibrant world... and it was a really, really enjoyable experience from start to end. The amount of detail in the game was crazy too, from varied dialogue on retrying missions, to different perspectives on missions depending on your character, to heist setups where you never quite know how it'll play out. This is easily the best open-world action game I've played, and even Saints Row wasn't quite as fun as a lot of the content in GTA V.
4th Place - Frog Fractions
I'm not quite sure what I expected when I loaded up Frog Fractions. I guess a bizarre take on edutainment games from the early 90s? Which it was, I guess! But nothing could have prepared me for just how crazy it got, and I certainly didn't expect that I'd end up getting the soundtrack for a novelty web game.
3rd Place - Bubsy 3D (2013)
Bubsy 3D felt like the successor to Frog Fractions. I absolutely love low-polygon CG from old computer games, and this brought back everything wonderful from that era. Bubsy 3D is truly a work of art in every sense, and even inspired me to get commissions of a low polygon render of my avatar!
2nd Place - Inazuma Eleven
Hooray for lighthearted sport RPGs! I've not had this much fun with a sports game since the Mario Golf RPGs on the GBC and GBA. It was definitely intimidating at first, considering I know almost nothing about soccer, and getting used to the controls certainly took me a while... but once I had figured out how the matches worked, I absolutely loved it.
Even after beating the game and winning the championship, I'm still really looking forward to engaging in the post-game tournament. Over 1,000 players to recruit, custom teams, custom strips, custom movesets, training facilities, taking players from other teams, and a more difficult post-game league to play... despite having already bought the two sequels, I'm eager to stick with this game for a while longer, which is a rarity for me! It's not very often that I feel like sticking with post-game content, but there's so much to do in this game, and it seems appealing enough, that I can't wait to make my custom dream team.
1st Place - Virtue's Last Reward
Last year, 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors was my favourite game, and this year, Zero Escape has once again topped my list. It's exactly what I was hoping for in a sequel... more confusion of the player, more routes, a more player-friendly interface, extra things to find in the puzzle rooms, and a great sense of discovery.
I love the way the author can bait the players thoughts in directions that are plausible, but may be red herrings. Watching other people play the game after I had finished it caused me to notice a lot of very specific references in the dialogue that are easy to overlook when playing it for the first time, subtley tipping off potential clues, or casually misdirecting the player with comments that they might expect to happen after playing the first game. There's even a section of the game which helped me understand the potential concept of one of the most mysterious and unexplained rooms in Remember11, a previous game by the same author.
It's really wonderful to finally have a VN with an explicit flowchart detailing all of the paths too, so you can easily see which routes and branches you have or haven't taken, rather than trying to map it all out on a notepad.
I really can't wait for a sequel to be announced, and I hope Kotaro Uchikoshi continues to make games and stories like this for a long time to come!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Top Ten Disappointing Experiences
There are two important things to note about this list:
1. This isn't a list of the worst games. It's a list of games that I both played and found disappointing.
2. Only the games that I've played until I considered them beaten are listed. The games that I abandoned shortly into the game aren't listed, as I don't know about the full game.
With that in mind... here's the ten games that I endured to the end, but that I found to be the most disappointing!
10th Place - Just Cause
I started off really enjoying Just Cause, especially in terms of how accessible it was, and I'm always a fan of the 'clear out the maps of collectables and territories' style of gameplay.
Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that every location felt exactly the same as every other location. Go to a location with some crates, go down a dirt road with enemies on either side, expect a vehicle to be shooting at you, kill a guy on a balcony, take the territory, end up with an identical building with a helipad on the roof.
What started off as a game that felt like an open-world game, it soon devolved into feeling more like a minigame of 'run and gun down the dirt path and reach the helipad building' repeated over and over. There was also some irritating moments when enemies started getting weapons like rocket launchers, as you could easily find yourself blown up before you even knew what was happening.
9th Place - Monster High: Ghoul Spirit
I have fond memories of playing Bratz Rock Angelz on the PS2 as a child, exploring the city, buying all the official doll lineups of clothing, accessories and makeup, and listening to the most incredible vocal soundtrack. Bratz always has a bad reputation, but I loved it! It's been quite a while since I had fawned over dolls, but the recent Monster High lineup got me back on track, and the fact it had video games made me hope to relive those Bratz Rock Angelz memories.
As usual for disappointing games, it started out seeming so promising! A vocal song on the title screen, and the ability to explore a giant school, with the goal of furthering your social status amongst the other monsters.
It quickly turned out that this involved nothing more than fetch quests and Wii remote waggle minigames. "Go here, get this. Go there, give this. Go here, get this. Go here, give that. Now shake your Wii remote to complete your cooking class! Great! Now go here, and get this." This was literally the entire game, with absolutely nothing else to it, and once you've done all of the fetch quests in the game, you see a little scene where everyone is dancing at the school ball (all ten characters or so), and then it dumps you back to the main menu.
As a game, there was almost nothing redeeming about it outside of getting to walk around a brightly coloured school. That was kind of neat, but not quite at 'do this for four hours straight' levels of neat.
8th Place - Poker Night 2
I really enjoyed the character dynamics in the first Telltale Poker Night at the Inventory, but Poker Night 2 just felt flat. On a game based purely on its characters, the characters just weren't very interesting, nor did they interact in notable ways with each other.
7th Place - The Alpine Encounter
I'm always fascinated by old computer games, and this one seemed very curious! A graphical text adventure where events occur in realtime. The goal is to find out about a stolen vase that is believed to be hidden at a ski resort. While you explore the alpine hotel, NPCs are all walking around on their own schedules, talking to each other, and moving items around, and you can eavesdrop on them and track what they're doing, hoping to find the culprit.
The problem is that the parser is impossible to comprehend, and I could never make it past 2pm because that's when you die of starvation, and I could find absolutely no possible ways to buy, order, or eat food. It also had a skiing minigame that you could play... which did not work at all, and managed to corrupt the game's own memory. I really wish I could play this more, but after sitting around trying every possible command at the restuarant and snack shop to get food for an hour, and failing, I had to give up and use a walkthrough to beat the game earlier than intended.
6th Place - Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Now this is certainly a polarising game. I did enjoy Animal Crossing New Leaf for around a month, but after a while, I got my house as big as I needed, and had absolutely no motivation to get any more bells. I don't care about bug or fish collections, nor collecting furniture, so... I just never get any kind of lasting appeal. It's really fun for a couple of weeks, and then it just feels like you've done everything notable, and anything more is just pressing A next to bugs, fish, fruit, and things in the ground... and then selling them for bells that you didn't want in the first place.
5th Place - The Typing of the Dead: Overkill
Don't get me wrong, I did really enjoy this game, and I understand it was at the risk of never coming out at all... but it's certainly not as fun as the original TOTD in its design! The same kinds of words come up constantly, the bosses don't have interesting typing-related gimmicks (aside of the final boss), and there's no amazing novelty in-game unlockables, like Dreamcast backpacks, keyboards, big head modes, zombies with piko piko hammers, and so on. It's just Overkill with words, and none of the whimsical graphical nonsense that made the original so amazing and replayable.
4th Place - Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy music is great when it's in an RPG and sets an atmosphere! It's not quite as great having these dramatic orchestral style themes as a focus of a rhythm game though. Maybe I don't have the same level of nostalgia as the target audience for this game, but playing most of the sets of music felt tedious.
Simply put, it's a music game based on tapping along to the rhythm, where the vast majority of the music isn't remotely designed to be 'tapped along to.'
3rd Place - Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia
I'm okay with innuendo and tacky girly romances in games, but this game was made -entirely- out of awful romance/innuendo conversations, with nothing else going on. Sure, there was some reason that you were fighting JRPG battles, but as soon as the dungeons were over, it was back to watching two girls bickering and fawning over you.
Anime style "Which girl would you choose?" settings are usually tolerable, but in this game, you were constantly pressed to choose between a boring childhood friend who you don't care about, or a boring song-magic-girl-robot-thing that you don't care about. The game tried to portray them as both being attractive and cute and desirable, but goodness, there was nothing interesting about them at all! Their entire character designs were based solely around the concept of 'She has a tragic past but she secretly loves you and likes to dress up for you.'
When an entire game is based around choosing between two boring and unrelatable people, there was absolutely zero motivation for me to keep playing. The game had three phases, with the option to stop or continue after the ending in the second phase, and I was so glad to be able to stop and skip the optional third phase. The storyline was an absolute wreck.
I should note that the art and music was pretty good! But... that dialogue and character design. Totally uninteresting in every way.
2nd Place - Test Drive Unlimited 2
I really wished this game would be good! Two huge open islands where you can race to your hearts content, earning money, and spending it on fashion, cars, and luxurious houses that you can walk around. To me, this is the perfect setting for a racing game! How could I ever dislike this?
Well, it turns out that the car physics were absolutely atrocious, to the point where it was almost impossible to complete even one of the late-game driving license tests, because your car would always spin out upon accelerating. Accelerating slowly meant you were less likely to randomly spin out (but still likely to), and you wouldn't be able to complete the test as you started off too slowly. Combine that with random traffic in the tests, and it was an agonising experience to even be allowed to race at all.
Then there was an incredible imbalance with the money system. I think I worked out that to afford the highest priced house in the game, I'd have to complete around 2,000 races, getting 1st place every time, and never spending money on anything else. I didn't have time for that at all.
1st Place - Disney Infinity (3DS)
I went into this game expecting it to be completely disappointing... and still managed to find it even more disappointing than I could have ever believed.
The console versions of Disney Infinity are about three things: Toys, Playsets, and Sandbox building. The 3DS version involved none of these things.
It's a Mario Party clone, except you choose three characters, which have stats that level up. This means that a level 10 jumping character will always be better at minigames based on jumping than, say, a level 1 racing character.
Essentially, this means that if you don't have a certain character in your group, you're guaranteed to lose minigames, making them completely pointless to play. Similarly, if you have the 'right' character, you're going to win, making them pointless to play.
Have an awesome power disc that would give you an amazing vehicle in the console games? Great! In the 3DS version, the only thing it does is change the colour of your dice. Have a new playset expansion pack for the console game? Excellent! You can put it on the 3DS version, where it does nothing at all!
Even with the lowest of low of expectations, I had still heard that you could 'create your own board layouts' in the 3DS game. Turns out this isn't true either. All you can do is change what minigames the board will force you to play, and what random decorations will be placed next to the spaces. For example, you could change the trees on the board to benches! None of these have any effect on gameplay, nor do they change the actual layout of the spaces on the board. The most you could choose to do in the so-called 'sandbox mode' is make every space a driving minigame, then taking a driving character into it, ensuring that you win every single time.
Here's my Top Ten Best Experiences, followed by my Top Ten Disappointments, that I experienced in 2013.
Top Ten Best Experiences
10th Place - Skylanders Giants
A good chunk of my year was taken up by playing Skylanders for the first time. My desk and shelves are now cluttered with figurines, I've spend a ridiculous amount of money collecting toys, and after playing two Skylanders console games, two Skylanders portable games, and half of Swap Force, I'm finally getting a little burnt out in wanting to play more of the game, at least for the moment.
But you know what? I still love it. I've always liked toys, but I've never had any motivation to collect them, and this gave me a great reason to go out and hunt excitedly in toy stores for new awesome things! I'm still amazed at the love and care that go into the figures.
When you turn the lights out in your room, Stealth Elf's eyes and weapons glow in the dark. Undead Skylanders have glowing skull bases. Lightcore Skylanders absorb power emitted from the portal to light up, without any kind of wires or removable batteries. Swap Force Skylanders can be reconfigured into 250+ combinations, and are honestly fun to play with. And, of course, all figurines have your very own personal data and progress saved to them.
Some people see Skylanders as 'expensive physical DLC', but I don't even really consider them to be part of the game. I see them as toys, and all the connectivity to the games, and being able to see them alive and in motion, complete with voices and special effects, is an incredibly cool bonus.
That doesn't mean I don't care much for the game, though. After all, I spent several months playing it pretty much non-stop! It can be described as a more child-friendly Gauntlet sequel, except with a great level of care and attention to the world, rather than it being randomly generated or generic dark monster arenas. It's simple, but it's great fun, and I'm glad to finally be able to play with toys all over again.
9th Place - The Stanley Parable
The narration in this game is truly wonderful, and the small amount of time I got to spend exploring The Stanley Parable had me hooked on wondering what would happen next. It's always a good sign when the main criticism of a game is that there wasn't enough of it, because I definitely ended up wishing there were more secrets and paths.
It's actually pretty hard to write praises about this game, given that its nature is best kept a mystery, but I'll definitely say that the more confusing path in the game was one of my favourite experiences in gaming, to the point where I spent a lot longer watching other peoples reactions to playing the game, than playing the game myself.
8th Place - Shantae
The animation and music in Shantae have such a mesmerising vibe! There's so much clever trickery on the Game Boy Color hardware too... seeing the backgrounds transform color palettes is an incredible effect, even by today's standards.
The game did have its flaws, such as being very vague as to where you're supposed to be heading at any given time, and having sections involving blind jumps due to the tiny screen, but even with those problems, I really enjoyed the overall experience. It's lighthearted, fun, and stylish!
7th Place - Antichamber
I love games where you're left to your own devices to figure things out. Myst, Nancy Drew titles, LucasArts adventure games... they're all great, and the more surreal their settings are, the better! So when it comes to Antichamber, where the game is truly non-linear in the order you discover things, yet still follows an order to reaching the finale, it was wonderful. Learning to associate abstract symbols and colours with directions and solutions gives a great feeling of satisfaction that I haven't really felt since I played Riven many years ago.
6th Place - Kairo
Another surreal puzzle/exploration game, but this one focusing more on scenery than the puzzles themselves. For my tastes, I actually enjoyed this a lot more than Antichamber! It was a lot more interesting seeing what the next area would be like, and gave a much better sense of being in a bizarre physical environment, where everything is made of stone in an abstract location. The optional hidden puzzles were the icing on the cake, and led to a lot of fascinating discoveries in how they were solved!
5th Place - Grand Theft Auto V
Generally speaking, I'm not into third person shooters, and have found all past GTA entries to be somewhat infuriating in terms of the downtime between missions. Finding a decent car, driving to an unmarked ammo store, spending money on weapons, finding hidden body armour powerups, commuting across the map... only to get die right at the end of the mission, lose your car/weapons/armor, and restarting back on the other side of the map where you have to do it all over again.
GTA V fixes all of those problems with player-friendly checkpoints and the ability to retry sequences when you die. Add that to some absolutely incredible voice acting, character stories that I genuinely wanted to see what would happen next, a great sense of humour, and vibrant world... and it was a really, really enjoyable experience from start to end. The amount of detail in the game was crazy too, from varied dialogue on retrying missions, to different perspectives on missions depending on your character, to heist setups where you never quite know how it'll play out. This is easily the best open-world action game I've played, and even Saints Row wasn't quite as fun as a lot of the content in GTA V.
4th Place - Frog Fractions
I'm not quite sure what I expected when I loaded up Frog Fractions. I guess a bizarre take on edutainment games from the early 90s? Which it was, I guess! But nothing could have prepared me for just how crazy it got, and I certainly didn't expect that I'd end up getting the soundtrack for a novelty web game.
3rd Place - Bubsy 3D (2013)
Bubsy 3D felt like the successor to Frog Fractions. I absolutely love low-polygon CG from old computer games, and this brought back everything wonderful from that era. Bubsy 3D is truly a work of art in every sense, and even inspired me to get commissions of a low polygon render of my avatar!
2nd Place - Inazuma Eleven
Hooray for lighthearted sport RPGs! I've not had this much fun with a sports game since the Mario Golf RPGs on the GBC and GBA. It was definitely intimidating at first, considering I know almost nothing about soccer, and getting used to the controls certainly took me a while... but once I had figured out how the matches worked, I absolutely loved it.
Even after beating the game and winning the championship, I'm still really looking forward to engaging in the post-game tournament. Over 1,000 players to recruit, custom teams, custom strips, custom movesets, training facilities, taking players from other teams, and a more difficult post-game league to play... despite having already bought the two sequels, I'm eager to stick with this game for a while longer, which is a rarity for me! It's not very often that I feel like sticking with post-game content, but there's so much to do in this game, and it seems appealing enough, that I can't wait to make my custom dream team.
1st Place - Virtue's Last Reward
Last year, 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors was my favourite game, and this year, Zero Escape has once again topped my list. It's exactly what I was hoping for in a sequel... more confusion of the player, more routes, a more player-friendly interface, extra things to find in the puzzle rooms, and a great sense of discovery.
I love the way the author can bait the players thoughts in directions that are plausible, but may be red herrings. Watching other people play the game after I had finished it caused me to notice a lot of very specific references in the dialogue that are easy to overlook when playing it for the first time, subtley tipping off potential clues, or casually misdirecting the player with comments that they might expect to happen after playing the first game. There's even a section of the game which helped me understand the potential concept of one of the most mysterious and unexplained rooms in Remember11, a previous game by the same author.
It's really wonderful to finally have a VN with an explicit flowchart detailing all of the paths too, so you can easily see which routes and branches you have or haven't taken, rather than trying to map it all out on a notepad.
I really can't wait for a sequel to be announced, and I hope Kotaro Uchikoshi continues to make games and stories like this for a long time to come!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Top Ten Disappointing Experiences
There are two important things to note about this list:
1. This isn't a list of the worst games. It's a list of games that I both played and found disappointing.
2. Only the games that I've played until I considered them beaten are listed. The games that I abandoned shortly into the game aren't listed, as I don't know about the full game.
With that in mind... here's the ten games that I endured to the end, but that I found to be the most disappointing!
10th Place - Just Cause
I started off really enjoying Just Cause, especially in terms of how accessible it was, and I'm always a fan of the 'clear out the maps of collectables and territories' style of gameplay.
Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that every location felt exactly the same as every other location. Go to a location with some crates, go down a dirt road with enemies on either side, expect a vehicle to be shooting at you, kill a guy on a balcony, take the territory, end up with an identical building with a helipad on the roof.
What started off as a game that felt like an open-world game, it soon devolved into feeling more like a minigame of 'run and gun down the dirt path and reach the helipad building' repeated over and over. There was also some irritating moments when enemies started getting weapons like rocket launchers, as you could easily find yourself blown up before you even knew what was happening.
9th Place - Monster High: Ghoul Spirit
I have fond memories of playing Bratz Rock Angelz on the PS2 as a child, exploring the city, buying all the official doll lineups of clothing, accessories and makeup, and listening to the most incredible vocal soundtrack. Bratz always has a bad reputation, but I loved it! It's been quite a while since I had fawned over dolls, but the recent Monster High lineup got me back on track, and the fact it had video games made me hope to relive those Bratz Rock Angelz memories.
As usual for disappointing games, it started out seeming so promising! A vocal song on the title screen, and the ability to explore a giant school, with the goal of furthering your social status amongst the other monsters.
It quickly turned out that this involved nothing more than fetch quests and Wii remote waggle minigames. "Go here, get this. Go there, give this. Go here, get this. Go here, give that. Now shake your Wii remote to complete your cooking class! Great! Now go here, and get this." This was literally the entire game, with absolutely nothing else to it, and once you've done all of the fetch quests in the game, you see a little scene where everyone is dancing at the school ball (all ten characters or so), and then it dumps you back to the main menu.
As a game, there was almost nothing redeeming about it outside of getting to walk around a brightly coloured school. That was kind of neat, but not quite at 'do this for four hours straight' levels of neat.
8th Place - Poker Night 2
I really enjoyed the character dynamics in the first Telltale Poker Night at the Inventory, but Poker Night 2 just felt flat. On a game based purely on its characters, the characters just weren't very interesting, nor did they interact in notable ways with each other.
7th Place - The Alpine Encounter
I'm always fascinated by old computer games, and this one seemed very curious! A graphical text adventure where events occur in realtime. The goal is to find out about a stolen vase that is believed to be hidden at a ski resort. While you explore the alpine hotel, NPCs are all walking around on their own schedules, talking to each other, and moving items around, and you can eavesdrop on them and track what they're doing, hoping to find the culprit.
The problem is that the parser is impossible to comprehend, and I could never make it past 2pm because that's when you die of starvation, and I could find absolutely no possible ways to buy, order, or eat food. It also had a skiing minigame that you could play... which did not work at all, and managed to corrupt the game's own memory. I really wish I could play this more, but after sitting around trying every possible command at the restuarant and snack shop to get food for an hour, and failing, I had to give up and use a walkthrough to beat the game earlier than intended.
6th Place - Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Now this is certainly a polarising game. I did enjoy Animal Crossing New Leaf for around a month, but after a while, I got my house as big as I needed, and had absolutely no motivation to get any more bells. I don't care about bug or fish collections, nor collecting furniture, so... I just never get any kind of lasting appeal. It's really fun for a couple of weeks, and then it just feels like you've done everything notable, and anything more is just pressing A next to bugs, fish, fruit, and things in the ground... and then selling them for bells that you didn't want in the first place.
5th Place - The Typing of the Dead: Overkill
Don't get me wrong, I did really enjoy this game, and I understand it was at the risk of never coming out at all... but it's certainly not as fun as the original TOTD in its design! The same kinds of words come up constantly, the bosses don't have interesting typing-related gimmicks (aside of the final boss), and there's no amazing novelty in-game unlockables, like Dreamcast backpacks, keyboards, big head modes, zombies with piko piko hammers, and so on. It's just Overkill with words, and none of the whimsical graphical nonsense that made the original so amazing and replayable.
4th Place - Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy music is great when it's in an RPG and sets an atmosphere! It's not quite as great having these dramatic orchestral style themes as a focus of a rhythm game though. Maybe I don't have the same level of nostalgia as the target audience for this game, but playing most of the sets of music felt tedious.
Simply put, it's a music game based on tapping along to the rhythm, where the vast majority of the music isn't remotely designed to be 'tapped along to.'
3rd Place - Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia
I'm okay with innuendo and tacky girly romances in games, but this game was made -entirely- out of awful romance/innuendo conversations, with nothing else going on. Sure, there was some reason that you were fighting JRPG battles, but as soon as the dungeons were over, it was back to watching two girls bickering and fawning over you.
Anime style "Which girl would you choose?" settings are usually tolerable, but in this game, you were constantly pressed to choose between a boring childhood friend who you don't care about, or a boring song-magic-girl-robot-thing that you don't care about. The game tried to portray them as both being attractive and cute and desirable, but goodness, there was nothing interesting about them at all! Their entire character designs were based solely around the concept of 'She has a tragic past but she secretly loves you and likes to dress up for you.'
When an entire game is based around choosing between two boring and unrelatable people, there was absolutely zero motivation for me to keep playing. The game had three phases, with the option to stop or continue after the ending in the second phase, and I was so glad to be able to stop and skip the optional third phase. The storyline was an absolute wreck.
I should note that the art and music was pretty good! But... that dialogue and character design. Totally uninteresting in every way.
2nd Place - Test Drive Unlimited 2
I really wished this game would be good! Two huge open islands where you can race to your hearts content, earning money, and spending it on fashion, cars, and luxurious houses that you can walk around. To me, this is the perfect setting for a racing game! How could I ever dislike this?
Well, it turns out that the car physics were absolutely atrocious, to the point where it was almost impossible to complete even one of the late-game driving license tests, because your car would always spin out upon accelerating. Accelerating slowly meant you were less likely to randomly spin out (but still likely to), and you wouldn't be able to complete the test as you started off too slowly. Combine that with random traffic in the tests, and it was an agonising experience to even be allowed to race at all.
Then there was an incredible imbalance with the money system. I think I worked out that to afford the highest priced house in the game, I'd have to complete around 2,000 races, getting 1st place every time, and never spending money on anything else. I didn't have time for that at all.
1st Place - Disney Infinity (3DS)
I went into this game expecting it to be completely disappointing... and still managed to find it even more disappointing than I could have ever believed.
The console versions of Disney Infinity are about three things: Toys, Playsets, and Sandbox building. The 3DS version involved none of these things.
It's a Mario Party clone, except you choose three characters, which have stats that level up. This means that a level 10 jumping character will always be better at minigames based on jumping than, say, a level 1 racing character.
Essentially, this means that if you don't have a certain character in your group, you're guaranteed to lose minigames, making them completely pointless to play. Similarly, if you have the 'right' character, you're going to win, making them pointless to play.
Have an awesome power disc that would give you an amazing vehicle in the console games? Great! In the 3DS version, the only thing it does is change the colour of your dice. Have a new playset expansion pack for the console game? Excellent! You can put it on the 3DS version, where it does nothing at all!
Even with the lowest of low of expectations, I had still heard that you could 'create your own board layouts' in the 3DS game. Turns out this isn't true either. All you can do is change what minigames the board will force you to play, and what random decorations will be placed next to the spaces. For example, you could change the trees on the board to benches! None of these have any effect on gameplay, nor do they change the actual layout of the spaces on the board. The most you could choose to do in the so-called 'sandbox mode' is make every space a driving minigame, then taking a driving character into it, ensuring that you win every single time.
