by mento
An annual tradition. If a game's on here, I beat it this year. "This year" being 2013, inattentive future peoples.
As is now customary, some end of year statistics. Everyone likes statistics.
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06/01. XCOM's better than it's ever been, and is another example of what I've tentatively dubbed Neostalgia: When developers recreate a classic game and make it as good as people's rose-tinted memories of the original, despite the amount of necessary modernization the model had to go through. However, a single playthrough is enough to see me set for incognito antagonists for a good while. It's a great game; I just have others to play right now. Less stressful ones.
07/01. Utterly ridiculous. It's a surprisingly competent RPG at its core, though.
08/01. It didn't take long to "beat" Spelunky with shortcuts, but defeating the final boss at the end of the fourth area is merely the tip of the iceberg. I'm not sure I have it in me to do some of the ridiculous tasks these hidden areas ask of the player, let alone these BS achievements.
11/01. Not so much "beaten" as played through the Arcade mode on the medium setting once. But then there's not a whole lot else to this game: Arcade mode is the only single-player mode, and it's just the same eight boring standard matches against bots for every character. I need to stop renting these fighters when I have no intention of playing online or local multiplayer with them.
17/01. An anime melancholic Dark Souls for the Wii. Is what I'd use to reductively describe this game. It's a definite curio, like so much of the Wii's library tends to be. Also, what the hell, VGK? Chickenhead was like the least ominous thing in that game, even after he got all robotic Norman Bates.
19/01. An excellent sense of style and an ingenious re-purposing of the hoary top-down 2D shooter as a series of half-strategic, half-instinctual fugue-state massacres. Less said about the ho-hum plot, the forced stealth level and the numerous bugs the better.
29/01. Had no idea what to expect with Pandora's Tower, besides "it's the worst of the Operation Rainfall trio". Be that as it may, it's actually quite phenomenal. A combination of Majora's Mask, Dark Souls, Castlevania and a Roguelike, there's nothing quite like its particular combination of character action RPG, versatile chain combat and puzzle-solving dungeons and bosses. It's the graphically weakest of the three OP games, possibly the shortest, and absolutely the grossest, but there's a reason that campaign wanted all three to see the (American) light of day.
30/01. The TurboMento game for January. You can go find that blog for more information if you'd rather, but Ninja Spirit's a breezy hour of ludicrous ninja action from a genre/era that's usually several magnitudes more difficult. Didn't even need to save state it.
04/02. Finally checked out this CING classic, starring those scribbly Take On Me people solving crimes in the late 70s. Despite the constant game overs, it's a forgiving point-and-click game with a pretty riveting mystery at the core of it. Well, a whole bunch of mysteries really. Can't wait to get my hands on Last Window.
12/02. Fairly solid 3D platformer in an era of gaming that has unfortunately moved on. I'll miss games like this, with its oodles of imagination and some neat ideas (how often do you craft weapons in a platformer?), when I run out of extant games of this formula. Maybe the Indie nostalgia scene can move onto 3D platformers in a decade?
