I thought 2015 was a great year for games. I think it has enough stand out titles in it that it'll go down as one of those years. But now we're in 2016 and from the middle of 2015 there's been bits of information coming about games that we might be playing this year. Looking forward I think we're on to another winner of a year for video games.

Here's what I'm looking forward to this year. It'll be interesting at the end of the year to look back and see how it all turned out.

We got a great big convoy!

The first title scheduled for release that has my interest is American Truck Simulator. I'm not really into these kind of job simulator games but Euro Truck Simulator 2 is a fantastic game. It had so much more going on that I expected. If you've never played it, let me paint a picture. You start off as Joe McTruckin (at least I did), a man (or woman) with dreams of owning a trucking empire. But a man who owns no truck. So you do some jobs for shipping companies, driving there trucks around Europe bringing oranges from Madrid to Glasgow and then you pick up a job in Glasgow to deliver bags of cement to Berlin. Eventually you save up enough to buy your own truck. Then you start hiring people to drive supplies around. The game becomes part truck driving simulator, part business management. It helps too that the driving feels really nice. There's something relaxing about how the trucks handle, about listening to real world radio stations as you drive around different locations and about that first time you turn your head out of the cockpit of your truck so you can back up into a loading bay.

I expect ATS to have all of that but with BIGGER TRUCKS because that's what you Americans do right? Driving down the interstate of California in my big 18 wheeler listening to classic rock? Yes please.

What. Is. Firewatch?

Three games journalists, personalities, what have you of this very site still have yet to explain to us exactly what is Firewatch. By the looks of it, you play as a character from a Pixar movie in a very picturesque woodland setting and communicate with people via a radio, but there's a mystery going on. I wanna know what that mystery is. Is my character insane? Is it aliens? Is it a set up? Will Canadian Screen Actors Guild version of Jason Voorhees rise from the lake to murder some fun having teens?

Spinning a yarn

I don't know if it started with Sony and the PS4 but in the last two or so years, big publishers have been giving some of their precious E3 stage time to small indie guys. And that's great. That's something I hope to see continue in the future. Of all the games that caught my attention at the last E3, Unravel is one of those games that I'm most looking forward to. I love the style it has going on, I was interested in what the designer of the game had to say about its creation and where it came from and I'm hoping that the game will invoke the same kind of joy that things like Journey have done previously.

Tiger Uppercut!!

I wish either Sagat or Juri (yes, I know) came with the initial launch of characters in Street Fighter V. Those two are my favourite to play. Even without their inclusion, I'm hyped for SFV. I haven't gotten a fighting game for my PS4 yet other than Injustice: Gods Among Us which contained a good story but has MK fighting mechanics which I don't like as much as I like Street Fighter mechanics. I think the way Capcom are going about releasing this and the after support of being able to buy characters just by playing the game is a nice turn around from previous years. I'm not good at SF at all but that won't stop me enjoying it locally or playing through whatever story they throw in there. Here's hoping that Evil Ryu and Good Ryu have to team up to fight Mecha Ken.

There is no more Blood. We used up all the Blood. Blood Blood Blood.

Bloodborne was my number one game from 2015. I loved the movement, the weapons, the story, the settings, the music, just everything about it. I still remember the first time I beat Father (Paul) Gascoigne after a couple of hours of trying. I spent two hours getting whomped, took a break for a day and came back and got him on my second try. By the end of the fight I was standing up almost kicking my tv to try make sure he was down. I loved that feeling.With Dark Souls III I like that it looks like they've kept some of the speed from Bloodborne but slowed it down a little to be like Dark Souls.

While I'll always like the speedy combat more, it suits the Dark Souls titles better to be a little more methodical, a little less frantic. Also did you see that giant dude in the trailer?

The Dark Adventures of Cyber Jesus

Thanks to Gamespots own Danny O'Dwyer I'll never be able to look at Deus Ex: Mankind Divided without thinking about that header. I might get this one on Steam just so I can rename it as The Dark Adventures of Cyber Jesus. I liked the "relaunch" of Deus Ex: Human Revolution all the way up until they decided to present me with 4 buttons. I get why Mass Effect 3 got so much stick over coming down to three options but personally I always found the ending of Deus Ex Human Resources to be even worse than that. It was a sour ending to an otherwise great game.

At least this wont be ruined by the presence of George Clooney.

Adr1ft looks like exactly the sort of terrifying adventure game I can get behind. Floating around the wreckage of a space station with limited oxygen supply, trying not to boost off in the wrong direction into the void of nothingness, wondering how the hell you'll survive, if you'll survive. I'm really looking forward to this one. I'm not big on "walking simulators" and this sort of seems like it might be a "floating simulator" but it's set in such an interesting location that I can't help but be interested. And it'll totally have a better space section than Final Fantasy VIII.

I'd murder a cup of tea right now...

Cuphead is a front runner for best style and it's not even out. I kind of wish it wasn't just a boss rush game but I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt that that is the better way for this game to be. The art style is almost too good to be true. I think this will end up being a short experience but I'll probably end up playing it over and over. If it ever comes to Vita I'm done for.

People in regular clothes don't belong in Final Fantasy games.

Final Fantasy XV will be my first full Final Fantasy game since Final Fantasy XII. Maybe. It depends. I'm cautiously optimistic that it will be ok? The demo looked fine, the combat seems ok and I'm glad to see it looks like you've got some amount of freedom in the game. Hopefully it doesn't take "twenty hours to get good" because that's way too much of a time investment for any game. The only thing that looked weird was NPCs in regular clothes. This is Final Fantasy. Nobody wears normal jeans or shorts and a t-shirt unless your idea of normal jeans are those ones that come with a bunch of pointless straps that come from Hot Topic.

Dreeeaam, Dream Dream Dream...

Dreams. Media Molecule are nuts. I really like that Sony keep giving them money to keep being nuts. I'm not even sure they've sold me on the idea that this will actually be a video game and not just a toy or creation tool but I was sold on it all the way back at the PS4 announcement conference when they showed it off before it even had a name. I'm not a creative person but I'm still looking forward to whatever the hell this is to try create things. If I've to buy two move controllers to get the best out of then so be it. Hell I might buy them now while they're cheap.

What even is this game?

If the guys at America's premier knock off site of Gamebomb.ru can't even explain what Firewatch is then they've no hope of telling us what the hell What Remains of Edith Finch is about. I thought The Unfinished Swan was a neat game that kind of maybe went on a bit too long. But this new game from Giant Sparrow looks right up my alley. It's another "walking simulator" looking type game that I think I'll enjoy. Now is the time that people are expanding on things like Gone Home and Dear Esther. Games that many years ago had the internet in an arms war about "what is games?" that some told us where the blue prints for things to come. It reminds me of Austin talking about that studio that made Sunset and how that wasn't so much a game for gamers but a game for developers to give them an idea and let them run with it. With no more content coming out for Bloodborne it looks like What Remains of Edith Finch will be my 2016 Lovecraft nightmare.

Will every day still be great at your Junes??

Persona 4 Golden was a game that I stupidly put off for about two years of owning a Vita because "that shit is anime stuff, I won't like that". Then I finally caved and bought it. At first I didn't know if I liked it. I was just some school kid, making friends in a new school and walking around a town and studying. This didn't seem like a good game. Then it became a great game. Suddenly even doing things like studying was fun! Persona 5 can't come soon enough and if it doesn't come out in Europe in 2016 I'm buying a copy from the US and shipping it over.

"He's always bloodying hanging off things"

Back around when Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception was being released my girlfriend worked in a game retailer and the store was full of posters and tv screens and display stands and they nearly all depicted Nathan Drake hanging off of something. Every trailer had him dangling by one arm off the back of a plane or something. We watched the trailer for Uncharted 4: A Thief's End and he does it again! The man has great upper body strength I'll give him that. I've still yet to play an Uncharted game. I skipped owning a PS3 last generation. I think this game looks great though. The demos they've shown looked outstanding. The Last of Us is a game that comes close to being near the best game of last generation (Red Dead Redemption) and I liked every Crash Bandicoot game that Naughty Dog, Inc. have worked on. Between now and the release of this game I'm going to spend a couple of weekends in a crash course with the Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection to get up to speed.

"Now she's doing it too!"

Tomb Raider was a very good game that didn't have nearly enough puzzles in it. I know that Rise of the Tomb Raider technically came out in 2015 but not on a platform I own. After hearing how good it's apparently turned out with them turning the combat down a notch and the puzzle platforming and story up a notch it sounds like a hell of a time. I've already heard the ending but I'm looking forward to seeing and playing my way to it.

Blizzard where not prepared to kill one of their best characters...

I got into World of Warcraft back just as World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade was being released. Again, similar to Persona 4 I had put it off as something I wouldn't like. Within a weekend of playing WoW I'd already started to convince other friends to try it out. I got myself into a raiding guild and one of the highlights of playing it was the Black Temple raid. We killed Illidan Stormrage and I even made (but sadly lost) a terrible POV kill video of it. Fast forward to 2016 and now I'm really only interested in jumping back into WoW at the release of an expansion, playing for a bit, giving it a couple of months for all the content to release before buying more time to check it all out and then doing the same thing over and over. World of Warcraft: Legion will probably be no different.

But they're making a dope looking shooter!

What. Is. Overwatch? A dope looking shooter that's what. I already said so in the header. I'll admit it that I like Blizzard's work. I've bought every collectors edition of every game since getting into WoW that they've released. All the Diablo ones, all the WoW ones bar vanilla and tbc and all the StarCraft ones. If there was a Heroes of the Storm one I'd probably have bought that too. Overwatch will probably be the first game I buy from them that I won't splurge out on the CE unless I get to play some sort of extended demo. But unless I start a streaming channel on twitch and amass a large following or I get blessed by the Blizzard Lottery system that's not going to happen. I look forward to spending hours shooting dudes in this great looking shooter. Blizzard have never been good at coming up with original concepts but they're one of the best at taking other ideas and tweaking them into some of the best games in the genres.

<Insert Jamiroquai lyrics about virtual something here>

VR is something I'm really interested in but it's already been a bit of a wave for me. At first it was exciting. I tried out an early Oculus devkit and because the concept was new I didn't mind just playing tech demos. But then two years happened and it all looked a little bit like the Kinect. Roller coaster tech demos only get you so far. But now that we're in 2016 and we know the production models for at least two of the three or four major pieces of hardware are hitting this year it's become exciting again. I probably won't take the initial bait on any of them. I need to see prices, to decide which one is best and also to see if they're going to be another Kinect or another Playstation Move.

And everything else!

There's a tonne of other games set to release this year that I'm looking forward to checking out. World of Final Fantasy looks like a fun distraction to play on my way to and from work. Hyper Light Drifter looks stylish as all hell and with a name like that it has to come with a great soundtrack. The Technomancer will be rubbish but in a good way and has my favourite stupid name for a video game. No Man's Sky might be interesting if there's something to do in it but like VR it seems like that game is impossible to demo or they're just doing a bad job at it. I don't believe for a second that Horizon: Zero Dawn is actually coming out this year so I haven't included it above but that's about the coolest looking open world game I've seen in a long time. Even it if has Guerrilla Games trademark meh story telling it has their trademark awesome design. Mass Effect: Andromeda is also totally not a 2016 game but I'm ready to be a space cowboy in a Mako (which totally handled fine in Mass Effect). Hellblade (awful name) seems promising as Ninja Theory make great action combat games. And I look forward to seeing what else Devolver Digital put out this year besides EITR and Mother Russia Bleeds.

That it! We'll check back in at the end of 2016 and see how it all turned out. Hopefully pretty good. If you made it this far, thanks for reading - unless you just skipped to the end.

So what are you looking forward to this year? Do you think 2016 might be better than 2015?