Dan's End of 2014 Awards - Part Five

So here we are, at the dénouement of my End of 2014 Awards. Today’s fifth and final part sees me hand out my last two awards to games that defined this past year for me. If you’ve missed any of the preceding eight awards, you can find them by following these helpful, handy-dandy links to Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.

Before I give out these last two gongs, I’d like to take a moment to honourably mention some Honourable Mentions that didn’t quite make the cut for various reasons.

Forza Motorsport 4 – There’s no denying that Forza 4 is a fantastic racing game. It’s got a ton of cars to collect and a ton of events to race through, to the point where completing the game’s ten-season World Tour mode left me with only 6% overall completion of the game’s event list. Unfortunately I put the game down at that point and haven’t been back to it since, due to its pitifully small roster of tracks. Note to Turn 10 – if you’re going to populate your game with hundreds of cars and over a thousand races, it might be worth including more than two-dozen locations to race in. Y’know, for diversity’s sake.

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations – Oh man, this game. On paper, it should be my favourite game in the whole damn series. Mechanically it’s got the most fluid and responsive exploration and combat I’ve seen in the franchise to date. It also tells a much more introspective story about Ezio (one of my favourite protagonists of the 360/PS3/Wii generation), revisiting the characters and world of the original Assassin’s Creed while also giving you a whole new city to explore in Constantinople. Yet in spite of all this, Revelations fell pretty flat for me. I think it’s a combination of really disliking the present-day portion of the game, and just being burned out on the franchise as a whole. I’ll definitely be taking a reasonably lengthy break before I come back to check out Assassin’s Creed III.

Heavy Rain – Now this is a weird one. I remember really liking the majority of Heavy Rain, in spite of its obvious flaws. By all accounts, it probably should have been honoured in these awards for its entertaining story and the way the whole experience is driven by player choice. Yet, when the time came to sit down and actually think about these awards, I found myself brushing it to one side almost immediately. What kept me from presenting it with a proper award, you ask? Honestly, it’s probably the way Jayden (far and away my favourite character throughout my playthrough) died abruptly and without any kind of fanfare or acknowledgement in the game’s closing moments. That left such a sour taste in my mouth that, although I remember the game fondly as a whole, I came away from it having enjoyed it significantly less than I might have done otherwise.

Nothing as It Seems Award for Subverting Player Expectations

Papers, Please (PC – Lucas Pope – 2013)

I went into Papers, Please knowing that it was an 8-bit border control simulator and not much else. That lack of preparatory knowledge meant I went into the game without any real expectations. Now, I know what you’re thinking – how can a game I started playing with no expectations win an award for subverting my expectations? The answer is simple – almost the entire time I was playing Papers, Please, it kept throwing expectations at me, only to knock them down a couple of in-game days later.

In my first Papers, Please ‘session’ (for lack of a better word to describe the bevy of prematurely-ended playthroughs I experienced), I became acquainted with the order of EZIC, an anti-establishment organisation trying to bring down Arstotzka from within. “Aha!” I thought, “This must be what the game wants me to do – to get involved with these rebels and bring down the corrupt, evil Arstotzkan government.” So I let their agents through the border and received a big bundle of cash in return. I fed and clothed my cold, malnourished family, and bought a bigger apartment in another sector. What I hadn’t counted on was the omniscient vigilance of the government I was helping to bring down. They clocked I was spending a lot more than I was earning, and arrested me. Game over.

The next time I played the game, I figured that it would be best not to get involved with EZIC. I dismissed their agents and ignored their kick-backs for fear of being implicated in some terrorist action in the future. About ten days into my new job, an inspector arrived enquiring about EZIC, and whether anyone had tried to pass through the checkpoint. Being the good Arstotzkan citizen that I was, I obediently handed over all the EZIC paraphernalia that their informant had given to me a few days previously. For my loyal actions, I was arrested and implicated in EZIC’s activities due to possessing those items. Game over.

It was only after a few of these sessions of the game setting up my expectations only to knock them back down that I realised what it was the game actually wanted me to do. In my next (and most recent) session with Papers, Please, I opted to simply do my job. No getting involved with organisations, no deals with corrupt guards or overbearing superiors, I just focused on reading those immigration documents. I let through those who met the criteria, and turned away those who didn’t. I sacrificed my personal stake in the events that were unfolding and became the soulless archetype of the model border control officer. And do you know what? As soon as I started doing that, I managed to see through my thirty days of service and beat the game with comparative ease.

And the craziest thing is, Papers, Please probably still hasn’t finished subverting my expectations. The game has twenty endings, of which I’ve only seen four. Should I ever return to it (and I suspect I might, at some point in the future), there’s still a wealth of content left unexplored. Content that I’m once again going to have to go against what I think the game expects of me in order to find and experience. Not bad for a game I didn’t expect anything from, eh?

Sweet Morphine Award for Most Addictive Game

Pokémon. All of them. (Various – Game Freak – Various)

Let’s be honest here. You all knew that Pokémon was going to feature on this list somewhere in some form. The only element of doubt in anybody’s mind was probably regarding which game I’d choose to honour above the others. Would I recognise Pokémon Y’s incredible longevity now that my in-game clock has passed the 800-hour mark? Would I praise Pokémon Colosseum for delivering a 3D Pokémon adventure that deviates from the series’ standards in some really interesting ways? Would I acknowledge Pokémon White 2 for finally delivering on the promise shown by its underwhelming predecessor? Ultimately it was impossible for me to choose between them. That’s why I’m jointly presenting this award to all of the Pokémon games I’ve played this year, for keeping me thoroughly captivated and invested in a world that, by all rights, I should have lost interest in a long time ago.

So how has the Pokémon franchise maintained its iron-fist grip on me throughout 2014? I have a couple of theories. First up, I became interested in competitive battling at the start of this year. Playing through the entire series in 2013 left me with a much greater appreciation of the games’ mechanics and the nuances of the battle system, to the point where I wanted to explore that side of the game in greater detail. I started to learn about EVs and IVs, about Natures and the competitive value of some moves that I’d previously considered useless. All this culminated in me starting to train and build my own competitive Pokémon team, which I put through its paces in a league devised my myself and my friends, coming second in the league tournament and winning the knockout cup. Even now this aspect of the series has a firm hold on me, and I’ve just finished training an all-Dark-type team to participate in the next season of the friendly league we set up. It kicks off on January 2^nd, and I cannot wait for it to begin.

The other big thing that has kept Pokémon at the forefront of my gaming habits this year is my discovery of the Nuzlocke format. For the uninitiated, a Nuzlocke is a playthrough of a Pokemon game under a self-imposed set of rules intended to make the game more challenging. The only two core rules are that you can only try to catch the first Pokémon you meet in each area, and that if a Pokémon faints, it is dead and can no longer be used. I first tried out this combination of limiting captures and permadeath with Pokémon FireRed, an adventure that I documented in blog form right here on Giant Bomb throughout the spring of 2014. While I didn’t win the Nuzlocke, I had an absolute blast with the game, and resolved to take part in more Nuzlockes and Nuzlocke variants in the future. Thus far my experience with the format has grown to include an ‘Egglocke’ of Pokémon X (in which every caught Pokémon was swapped for an unhatched egg donated by my league-buddies) and a currently-in-progress ‘Randomizer Nuzlocke’ of the original Pokémon Red (in which Pokémon locations are randomized to create a much less predictable playthrough). The Nuzlocke format has certainly breathed new life into old adventures, and I suspect that the Red Randomizer won’t be my last.

2015 is now just a few days away, and with it comes the promise of yet more time spent in the wonderful world of Pokémon. I’m slowly working my way through my copy of the series’ latest release, Pokémon Omega Ruby, in which I’ve just earned the fifth gym badge, and the Red Randomizer is still ongoing at the time of writing. My plan is to try and turn down my Pokémon activity once those two things are complete, and redirect my focus back onto my Pile of Shame (which has recently reached an embarrassing height of 170 titles). But when I’m dealing with a series as addictive as Pokémon, I can’t make any promises.

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So that’s it for this year. Ten awards, ten games (sort of), and the conclusion of a fun look back on the year that was. I hope that 2015 is a great year for all of you, both in front of your consoles and away from them. I’ve been Dan Kempster, and these have been my End of 2014 Awards. Thanks for reading, take care, and I’ll see you around.

Dan

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Currently playing - Pokémon Omega Ruby (3DS)