TheMightyEthan

Sea of Stars This might well be the prettiest game I've ever played. It's made in a 16-bit style, and as I understand it is very much like the Chrono games, though I've never played those so I can't say for sure. Regardless, it's extremely charming, with lovely sprite work and amazing use of color. It's definitely one of those "every frame a painting" games. The world itself is varied and interesting, both in a gameplay sense and in a world-building sense. The story goes places, and I was with it the whole way. The battle system is also a lot of fun, being turn-based but with bonuses to attack or defense you can get by pressing A at the right time, which makes it a little more engaging, and an interrupt system for enemies by doing certain types of damage to them. I'm not a huge JRPG fan in general, but this one really hooked me, and I'd highly recommend it. Grade: A+

Alright, last call for submissions, I'll post the results tomorrow.

You know it!

I've been wanting to play this for a while, but it's never been on sale at the time time I was ready to start a new game, so I finally just said fuck it and bought it to force myself to play it after Sea of Stars.

I played FF7 Remake on PS4 originally, but I want to replay it before Rebirth and I want to be able to do it on Deck, so here we are.

Just a little tease, the top 5 are all currently within 4 points of each other, so it's still anybody's race.

It's really interesting to see everybody's picks. Between 6 of you who have submitted votes so far, there are 22 games that have a vote from at least one person, so we're averaging like 3.5 unique games per list.

I'm extending the deadline because I'm playing a certain game right now that I doubt I'm going to finish in 3 days that seems like it might make it on my list, so instead of the 15th it's now next Friday the 22nd.

Solar Ash This game is from the makers of Hyper Light Drifter, which I couldn't get into, but I definitely did with this one. You're a high tech space lady skating through psychedelic environments fighting giant monsters to save your homeworld from a black hole. It's like Jet Set Radio x Shadow of the Colossus, and it's so good. The environments are varied and interesting, the bosses are challenging without being frustrating (mostly), the worldbuilding is cool, it's gorgeous, everything about it just comes together into a perfect whole. Grade: A+

Thirsty Suitors This is another indie game about a girl coming back to her hometown after leaving 3 years earlier, making peace with her family, her exes, etc. By fighting them. Think Scott Pilgrim, if Ramona was the main character and she had to fight the exes herself. Lots of emotional growth and working through past conflicts, etc. It's really lovely and heartfelt. Grade: A+

Sea of Solitude This is a cool (and very pretty) little indie puzzle game about dealing with your own and others' demons, via the metaphor of traversing a magical ocean on a tiny motor boat. It's fun, and doesn't overstay its welcome. The emotional metaphor isn't the deepest thing in the world, but it at least doesn't feel the need to explicitly explain it to you via voiceover like so many other indie puzzle games do, so I'll take it. Grade: A

I liked FF7.

I had heard on a podcast you can grab bullets out of the air and throw them at enemies, but if that's true I was never able to get it to work.

Superhot VR This game more than any other has made me feel like a movie action hero. Time moves when you do, you dodge bullets and shoot mans. It's perfect. My only complaint is I wish there was more of it. Grade: S

Final Fantasy VII Yes, I finally beat the game from 26 years ago! I'd tried it a couple of times before throughout my life, and never even made it out of Midgar, but wanting to finish it before FF7 Rebirth comes out motivated me to stick with it, and I'm glad it did. It's obviously got some old game jankiness, and some very much "guide dangit" moments, even ignoring secret bosses and weapons and stuff, but overall I'm surprised how well it held up, and how hard the story hits. I would definitely recommend giving it a shot to anyone who's interested. Grade: B+ (I know this is probably unfairly low, but I never got into a JRPG until Persona 4 Golden, so I don't really have a way to judge how good it was "for the time," so this is just my current enjoyment of it)

Master Cheeks!

Yeah, the submission to me is just so I can score them and generate an overall list, I figure there will be discussion once the list is posted. And yes, only restriction is release this year.

Assassin's Creed Mirage This game was billed as a return to form of the pre-Origins AC games, and they nailed it. Easily the best one since before they switched to the Action RPG formula. It captures the feel of the old style of games while keeping some quality of life improvements so it doesn't feel outdated. This is exactly what I wanted. It's only about 20 hours long too. Grade: A Too bad it looks like they're going back to the Origins/Odyssey/Valhalla style for Red.

I do (did), and it's probably not, but my biggest gripe with the Steam Deck is the low-quality LCD, so this high quality 1000 nit HDR OLED is very appealing. Originally I was going to wait for a true successor, but there were a series of things that pushed me closer to caving. First was just the fact that it was OLED, second was finding out it was HDR, then finding out it had better battery life, then Digital Foundry's testing indicating that it's about 8% faster than the original Steam Deck, and finally the thing that pushed me over the edge was finding out on Monday that the Limited Edition of the OLED Deck was still in stock. I was able to sell my old Deck on FB Marketplace at least, so that's enough to cover about 60% of the cost of the new one.

I did a thing.

Alright, let's do 5 instead of 10 then.

So I know it's a little early still, but I wanted to try something different this year, so I wanted to get the word out early. What I'd like to do is have everybody DM me their personal top 10 list, and I'll compile an overall list for the forum. The way I would do it is assign points, so if you rank a game #1 it gets 10 points, #2 gets 9, and so on, and total up all the points from everyone to get an overall list. The only rules I would suggest is that all the games have to have released this year, and ask everyone to DM me by December 20. Is anybody interested in doing this? We could obviously all post our own GOTY's too like we have before. Also, is 10 games from this year too many? Would 5 be better? Let me know what you think!

Dead Space Remake I got a month of EA Play Pro for Jedi Survivor, so I decided to try Immortals of Aveum (not good) and this (pretty great). If I didn't already know that they had changed the layouts of the ship a little to make things flow better, I would think this was a 1:1 recreation of the original's levels, and that's pretty emblematic of the whole thing. Basically, it perfectly modernizes everything about the game in such a way that it seems like it's a perfectly faithful recreation, when in fact everything is improved. It's pretty amazing. Also this game is still great.

Immortals of Aveum Goddamn I hated the characters in this game so much. They were trying to be fun and sassy, but I just wanted to punch them in the face. The gameplay was kinda fun, but not enough to put up with these characters. Grade: C

Well, I was able to get it working eventually, so I avoided starting over, and now Star Wars Jedi Survivor properly belongs in this thread instead. This game is pretty good. In some ways, particularly the combat, it's better than the original. However, I think they expanded it too much, the areas are too big, it's just overall too bloated. I started having more fun with it once I stopped exploring every single nook and cranny and just kind of explored stuff as felt natural as I moved through. So I didn't just follow the complete main path, I would go look at little side areas when I saw them on the map, that kind of thing, I just didn't make a point of exploring every single inch. When I made that change it picked up and started feeling better. The combat is also improved over the original, which was pretty good to start with, though it still does the dumb "oh, I suddenly remember how to do something I should have known how to do this whole time" thing, but thankfully not nearly as often. It just feels smoother, you're less restricted at the beginning, and overall just feels better to play. That said, I did think several of the boss fights were badly designed, and ended up bumping it down to story mode for two of them, not because they were "hard", but because they felt unfair. The story would have been better if I hadn't seen the big twist coming literally from the first mission. I actually had almost convinced myself I couldn't be right, because even a Star Wars story couldn't be that obvious. Well, I was right, which completely robbed the big narrative moment of any impact. Also, the PC version is still a mess. I got multiple crashes per play session, which given the way it handles saves is terrible. I had to redo the final boss fight because it crashed in the middle of the end cutscene. It's just bad. Overall, this game is still worth playing if you liked the original, but it's not anything amazing. Grade: B-