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So here we have it. The culmination of 52 games in 5244 weeks. (Oops, I started two months late but still pushed through 52 games of varying length and quality before the calendar reset to 2018!) For those following at home who didn't have a handy-dandy notebook on hand because of some guy named Steve, I flat out just copy-pasted my own tracking .txt file so you can look back and follow along with the path I took. Some were questionable clears (Pokemon TCG is ultimately an online multiplayer game that I cleared the single-player "tutorial" on, Saturday Morning RPG was only 2/3rds completed, Loot Hero DX is hardly a game) and others maybe took less credit than they should have (All five episodes of Strong Bad CG4AP are technically stand-alone), but I stand by my decisions on such things. Amongst other decisions I stand by: the fact that this was at the very least an adequate way to distract myself from reality being ablaze, though it did its fair share of stressing me out, too.
Further decisions yet that I will stand by: these awards. For those who remember my nomination post, you might realize I did three nominees per award. This wasn't just for simplicity - instead, it means all of these games get awarded for their efforts if they reached the final goal of being in this post. Honorable mentions got their day in the limelight, now it's time for the more-than-honorable. Gold, Silver, and Bronze will be awarded in all the following categories.
So without further ado, your results.
GET BLUE SPHERES Award for: Most Excruciating Wait Between Starting a Game and Clearing It
BRONZE: The Legend of Zelda
No love lost here whatsoever. The original TLOZ was a bit of a cultural shibboleth to me, something that I knew was important despite believing it wasn't very good. My childhood memories are of Golden Axe Warrior and Crystalis, not Zelda. Even if I was waiting forever to get this cleared, I wasn't in any huge rush and actually had to forcibly make myself do it.
SILVER: Final Fantasy
This, on the other hand, was something I had always wanted to do and actually got inspired to do through experiences with oldschool RPGs and also a close personal friend starting to speedrun the FF1 randomizer. Yeah, there's one out there. Of course there is. Unlike Zelda, this one stayed in my collection (as a physical cart) a fair bit longer, though it always lost out to Dragon Warrior 4 or SNES RPGs, or things like that.
GOLD: Phantasy Star IV: End of the Millennium
I wasn't kidding when I said I'd tried to play this throughout my teenage years. I only got to choose one RPG in the Genesis post-clamshell era, and I (rightfully, I believe) chose Shining Force 2 over Phantasy Star 4, though I regretted it almost immediately when I saw those slick-ass comic book cutscenes. Then when I got the internet, cue about a decade of fighting with Genecyst, not knowing why it would always crash an hour into the game without fail. Then emulators that actually worked showed up and I burned out in the unending slog of the Air Castle. This time I was determined to push through despite all odds, and I did it. I don't know if it was worth it, but I cleared it.
WHAT, ME WORRY? Award for: Most Engrossing Casual Pick-Up-And-Play Game
BRONZE: Regency Solitaire
It's that kind of solitaire you play where they arrange the cards in artsy-fartsy formations and you have special powerups to cut through their newfangled computer game bullshit. I have a game like that on my phone and it didn't cost me money. It's good, but I can only handle so much Victorian Era Pomp.
SILVER: Tadpole Treble
I wanted this to be Gold. I really did. Unfortunately, after my initial clearing, I tried loading it up again and got some nasty-ass lag issues that made it borderline unplayable. I don't know what was different then - maybe a virus scan was running, or something - but with a rhythm game, chunky gameplay is a dealbreaker. If it was the Wii U version, or if it was coded in something a little more optimized than goddamn Unity, then it probably would have won. Sadly, we have to take my computer's specs into consideration, too.
GOLD: Draw Puzzle
This is a relaxing, if somewhat hand-cramping and eyestrain-producing puzzle game. What actually pushes it over the edge into "something I will play constantly", though, is the soundtrack that sounds like it came straight out of Stardew Valley. This is pretty solid anti-anxiety game and will stay nicely nestled up next to my collection of many, many, many Picross games.
AURAL SEX Award for: Best Soundtrack
BRONZE: Double Dragon Neon
There's not much at all to say about this category. What you see is what you get. The music links are new, by the way. As for why this got bronze: Sometimes I'm not in the mood for 80s buttrock. It's rare, but it happens.
SILVER: Sonic Mania
I said "what you see is what you get". It's the exact order I mentioned them. Why did this get silver? Entirely because the winner won me over THAT much harder. This soundtrack is still never leaving my playlist, ever.
GOLD: Tadpole Treble
This soundtrack is just... okay, look. Matthew Taranto had a prodigious level skill with music even when he was doing a goofy Smash Brothers webcomic. Go back to Brawl in the Family some time and listen to the audio interludes that cropped up on certain milestones. His music is better than his art by orders of magnitude. Good music can get me hyped up and energetic, but great music can actually evoke emotional reactions out of me, positive and negative. This is great music.
NOT FUCKING THIS Award for: Most Violent Ragequit
BULLSHIT BRONZE: Super Win The Game
Super Win The Game was reasonable, and fair, and pretty okay until suddenly it wasn't. The only part of the game I really felt was "bad" was three screens out of the entire thing, three screens where you had to do a VVVVVV-esque plummet through a chasm of spikes with no opportunity to stop and catch your breath or have a checkopint. Three screens of screaming is not as bad as what it's up against.
SHITTY SILVER: Castlevania: Circle of the Moon
CotM's number inflation and overly fast enemies did, authentically, ruin the game for me. I was having fun, but then everything turned to garbage, and I had to shove my face against a millstone to just will myself through this grindy bullshit. I can't see how people play the optional modes in this, unlike the other exploration-based Castlevanias. It's just such a slog.
GODDAMN IT GOLD: Xeodrifter
The only game to make me legitimately quit the game and walk away. I came back to Circle of the Moon after a few days to stop screaming in rage, and Super Win The Game only put me back a couple of hours. I haven't gone back to Xeodrifter and its single boss in progressively more awful configurations. It's a shame, too - their earlier game, Mutant Mudds, was actually pretty enjoyable.
FUNY-MATION Award for: Least Cringe-Worthy Pop Culture References
BRONZONG: Chroma Squad
Hanging lampshades on all of those tropes isn't really any better when you do it well, just more tolerable. But you know what wasn't tolerable? John Peters, you know, the farmer. He backed this odd little indie game on Kickstarter and now superheroes are saving him from aliens! Gosh!
SILVER THE HEDGEHOG: Epic Battle Fantasy 4
While this wasn't really obtrusive with its references (though it made quite a few in item descriptions poking at the Big Names of JRPGs like Final Fantasy 7), it still had about the level of believability and tone as you'd expect from a goofy gaming webcomic. Also, it's got a lot of self-referential nods to its earlier, mostly flash-based entries that you're not at all gonna get if you didn't play them.
BOOSTER GOLD: Love You To Bits
As Celine noted, Love You To Bits integrated its references and nods to other things so quietly and with such little fanfare that you wouldn't even know they were there unless someone pointed them out. The best way to handle pop culture is to do so with care, and quietly so as to not rile it up. Going at it with airhorns and vuvuzelas is just going to anger pop culture and get your face clawed off by memes.
MEGA MAN UNLIMITED Award for: Nearest to Perfection Without Quite Getting There
SILVER: Guacamelee: Gold Edition
This was a solid platformer with a coherent, consistent Day of the Dead motif and only a few parts that were hand-crampingly hard. It was hammy like a telenovela and punchy like a luchador match. I'm still not sure if I'm racist for having played it, though.
BETTER SILVER: Sonic Generations
This is basically the video game equivalent of an awkward, end-of-series clip montage for a sitcom. Everything that the Sonic series is known for is showcased here: speedy, energetic 2D momentum platforming, slightly awkward and clunky 3D platforming... tragic, horribly-designed boss fights. It sure is the Sonic franchise... warts and all.
BEST SILVER: Renowned Explorers: International Society
The worst things I have to say about this game are "I'm bad at it" and "I can't think of any one part that stands out". It's all... amazingly average. Amazing but also average. It is greater than the sum of its parts, because none of its parts excel but it, itself, excels.
RAINING INDOORS Award for: Game That Gave Me The Most Feels
BRONZE: Phantasy Star IV: End of the Millennium
While at this point my reaction to Her Last Breath is akin to Bumbie's Mom, there's not really anything in the rest of the game that elicits more of an emotional reaction than "hype" or "GODDAMN IT ANOTHER GARBAGE RANDOM BATTLE I CAN'T RUN FROM". It's a drop of water in a pool of blood.
SILVER: Tadpole Treble
I admit it, the end of this game made me tear up. Saltwater Cape and its implications didn't help any. Remember what I said about great music evoking emotional response? Yeah, this tugged at the heartstring, and seeing Baton's cartoony eyes filled with despair right before the final stage didn't help any either.
GOLD: Owlboy
Surprising absolutely nobody, this stirring, emotional story about a band of fuckups and how everybody's constantly mad at them struck incredibly close to home. Everyone else I know had Night in the Woods feeling way too real, well... this was my Night in the Woods. Sometimes... sometimes stories don't have happy endings. Sometimes they can only ever end bittersweetly.
CRUNCHY PIXELS Award for: Best Trip Through Nostalgia
BRONZE: Final Fantasy
I only play games that are pop-u-laaar, I only buy the games that the magazines tell me to buy~ *cough* That is to say... well. Sure, it's nostalgia, but it's not my nostalgia. My nostalgia was Shining Force. This is... pseudo-nostalgia. Newgrounds nostalgia.
SILVER: West of Loathing
Kingdom of Loathing was, in its own way nostalgic... not necessarily of any one particular pop culture thing, but of those days when you would draw goofy stick figures in the margins of your school notes and they were totally fighting tanks or eating an entire chainsaw. West of Loathing invokes that nostalgia, the nostalgia of KoL itself - which is now a fourteen year old website, I might note - and also the nostalgia for old spaghetti westerns. It's a triple threat of memories. It's also fun to play.
GOLD: Sonic Mania
This is everything Sonic fans have been asking for since 1996, back when we were hearing rumors of things like "Sonic X-Treme". This is what we wanted all along. It's finally here, even if it's about twenty years late. While I admit the remixed/revisited stages are a bit uninspired in the grand scheme of things, it also wouldn't be a Sonic game if it wasn't at least a little lazy. Never forget that Sega of America passed off its unfixable physics bugs as "Dr. Robotnik's nefarious speed traps".
APPLE iMBROKE Award for: Best Mobile Game
$0.99 BRONZE PACK: FRAMED
Framed is good for what it is! It's got a nice aesthetic, good, fitting music, and a plot that makes no damn sense. Unfortunately, it's super short and ultimately boils down to "move around comic panels until they're in the right configuration for you to not die horribly". You can clear it in two hours without trying, meaning you paid entirely for the aesthetic.
$8.99 SILVER SAVINGS: Final Fantasy Record Keeper
I was all primed to give this the gold. FFRK is by far the game I've sunk the most hours into, the only game this year I enjoy enough to own multiple accounts on - something I have likewise done in the past with Kingdom of Loathing and fucking around on MU*s both - and there's enough meat to the game to keep me constantly engaged even though I'm at the "big fat grind sandwich" portion of the gameplay meta.
And then, while talking to Xyzzy I realized: This game singlehandedly reawakened my gambling addiction. I spend money on this I really can't afford to spend, for the chance of getting a neat JPEG of a sword that gives one of my pixel dudes a neat animation that does a lot of damage. No matter how good it is, this is still a gacha game. This is still gambling. As of the past few weeks, I've resolved to stop putting another cent into the game, and while I'll still enjoy it as much as I can, I can't rightfully give the top prize to a thing that lured me into that sort of mindset.
$99.99 YOU STOLE YOUR PARENTS GOLD CREDIT CARD: Love You To Bits
It's not as meaty as FFRK, but it's also refreshingly honest. It's got more replay value than Framed, with all the aesthetic and good music. I loved this game enough that I may consider playing it again some time in the future. I loved it to bits. If only I had some sunglasses and The Who.
MOOGLE AND WOODRAT Award for: Biggest Furry Crush
BRONZE: Pokémon Ultra Sun
This one was cheating. I'm always interested in Pokémon, but Ultra Sun is more or less a remixed take on a game that I beat two years ago, and has offered nothing new over Pokémon Sun/Moon as far as things that are aesthetically pleasing goes. It's still good enough to stay in the running, but it's not new enough to come out on top.
SILVER: Phantasy Star IV: End of the Millennium
there is not a single piece of swole furby porn out there on any website and that is a goddamn crime, i can find a picture of the cutie mark crusaders in ps4's seizure dungeon but nothing of the buff owlbear who i want to make out with
GOLD: Ever Oasis
Between lanky dragon ladies, chufty weird scorpion-men, twinkish bunnypeople, and capitalism borbs there is absolutely everything and anything I could ever want out of this game. Give it to me.
IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM Award for: Most Artistic Game
Remember how I said "there may be a stealth add or two"? Well, looks like there was.
MEGA MAN UNLIMITED: The Count Lucanor
Sorry, Lucanor. You're the only one on the list with reused assets - albeit public domain classical music. You cut corners, so no matter how good you are, you were the first one on the chopping block when something else stepped in that was better. Nobody leaves without a prize, though, so you get a fourth MMU Silver Medal.
BRONZE: Epistory - Typing Chronicles
The papercraft aesthetic is pleasing on the eyes, and the music is ambient and inobtrusive. The voice acting is good, but that indirect, teasingly coy, blatantly "we're going to cut to a hospital scene riiiiight... here" plot is just way too obnoxiously arthouse for me. It would've been better without that. Also, come to think of it, the concept of the ground springing up around you out of nothing... that sounds familiar...
SILVER: Bastion
As far as overall aesthetic solidarity, this and our top prize are neck and neck. Both have a cohesive idea they're going for and nail literally everything about it. At that point, it comes to the judge's fiat, and unfortunately, Bastion has two points against it: One, the stylization is a little odder, more plasticine. Two, the xenophobia allegories are about as subtle as a brick to the genitals and given this year's general political clime, I'd rather not.
GOLD: Owlboy
This and Bastion hold a lot in common. Bastion feels a little more complete, but despite having crunchier pixels and a less refined control scheme, Owlboy just feels... more sincere, I suppose? At this point it really is splitting hairs down to the difference of fractions of a score, but Owlboy appeals more to me personally than Bastion, so it gets the victory.
INSERT COIN? Award for: Unfinished Game Most Likely To Be Continued
NICKEL: Apotheon
This is a great game and it nails the aesthetic, but man. Man. That combat is a right bear to try to slog through. I'd sooner watch an LP - it's just not that fun to play.
DIME: Jumpjet Rex
Physically exhausting, and pings my completionist gland way too hard to be comfortable, but... this was fun enough and more importantly it was welcoming enough. I got through the first boss of four without too much trouble, so I feel like I could clear this if I wanted to. The trick is being in the right mood for it.
QUARTER: Pixel Shopkeeper
The main reason I stopped this is because I didn't feel like a grind at the time, plus I didn't want to have to worry about getting it cleared in time for the 52. (I'm bad at multitasking.) Nothing's explicitly bad about it, I just don't think it's very good for game clearing intents.
YOU'RE WINNER Award for: Worst Game Of The Year
BROWNS:Loot Hound
7.8/10 ran out of poop bags
SLIVER: Saturday Morning RPG
I hate you, Milkman Dan.
YAY: Loot Hero DX
"could have been programmed on the back of a postage stamp with room to spare" - Katarani, 2006.
THE BIG A-SWORD Award for: Best Game Of The Year
DRUMROLL, PLEASE. No, that's an eggroll. Drum rolls are the thing you do with the noise and the sticks and the anticipation.
BRONZE: West of Loathing
I want to reiterate that these games are the best of the best. These are the ones I enjoyed playing, played through multiple times, will enjoy playing forever. These are the games I am glad to own, no matter what. That West of Loathing is the least of three options speaks not poorly of it, but so much better of the other two. This game is a sterling example of how Western-minded (Western as in English-speaking, not as in "draw, pardner", though this has that too) RPGs should be handled. Skill checks are obvious and give you a visible idea of how skilled you need to be, almost every altercation can be talked, swindled, or tricked your way out of, there's about twenty different plot threads that you CAN deal with and mess around with, but none of them are MANDATORY. And unlike Fallout, dealing with them doesn't feel like a goddamn SLOG when you're doing it. This is definitely the best RPG I played this year, bar none.
SILVER: Tadpole Treble
The biggest things dragging this down are its relatively short size and its unoptimized engine. Again, if I had the Wii U version, I would be happier, but such things are not the case. Unity is not always the best engine, and while I credit BitFinity for making a rhythm game in Unity work, it's not without its issues. Regardless, if I hadn't docked this points for being made by an existing artist - "for reasons", in other words - then it would be a solid shot at the top spot for the Artistic Game, too. This is definitely the best rhythm game I played this year, bar none... and I spent plenty of time with Crypt of the Necrodancer.
THE BIG GOLDEN HEDGEHOG: Sonic Mania
Like I said before... this is what Sonic fans - myself included - have been asking for, for twenty years. This was a long time coming, and even with the bulshit of a delayed release and Denuvo inclusion and even with the awkward realization that Sonic games have always had kind of fucking terrible bosses... this was a treat to play. This was a blast to play. I will play this again and again whenever the urge strikes me, and it probably will never be uninstalled from my computer unless I get it on a console at some point, in which case I'll just install it there. This is definitely my favorite game that I played this year, bar none.
You guys did it. Both the games, for being amazing (or, occasionally, amazingly bad), and the people reading this, for being encouragement for me to keep going through this clusterfuck of a task even when life proceeded to treat me like a chew toy.
So what am I doing next year? Well, first of all, I'm not gonna focus on game clearing any more. If I'm motivated to clear, I'll definitely try my hardest. Thing is, my Steam library has a lot of abject trash in it, trash I don't even want to TOUCH. And... hey. Let's look at what my Backloggery page says for a minute, shall we?
Trying to at least get rid of my backlog of ENTIRELY untouched games [...] I may not complete them but I'll at least try them out.
So that's that. Next year, at least once a week, I am either going to choose a game or leave it up to the whims of Backloggery's Fortune Cookie, and I am going to try that game out. I am going to blog my thoughts about it. And if I want to not beat the games? That's fine. If I want to play other games at the same time? That's fine, too. I just want to try out the new things.
I feel like I should end this on a "like comment and subscribe" joke, but those of you that actually can read this deserve more class out of me than that.
Yes, even though I just wrote a paragraph about wanting to mack on a blue fuzzy axe-man.
Further decisions yet that I will stand by: these awards. For those who remember my nomination post, you might realize I did three nominees per award. This wasn't just for simplicity - instead, it means all of these games get awarded for their efforts if they reached the final goal of being in this post. Honorable mentions got their day in the limelight, now it's time for the more-than-honorable. Gold, Silver, and Bronze will be awarded in all the following categories.
So without further ado, your results.
GET BLUE SPHERES Award for: Most Excruciating Wait Between Starting a Game and Clearing It
BRONZE: The Legend of Zelda
No love lost here whatsoever. The original TLOZ was a bit of a cultural shibboleth to me, something that I knew was important despite believing it wasn't very good. My childhood memories are of Golden Axe Warrior and Crystalis, not Zelda. Even if I was waiting forever to get this cleared, I wasn't in any huge rush and actually had to forcibly make myself do it.
SILVER: Final Fantasy
This, on the other hand, was something I had always wanted to do and actually got inspired to do through experiences with oldschool RPGs and also a close personal friend starting to speedrun the FF1 randomizer. Yeah, there's one out there. Of course there is. Unlike Zelda, this one stayed in my collection (as a physical cart) a fair bit longer, though it always lost out to Dragon Warrior 4 or SNES RPGs, or things like that.
GOLD: Phantasy Star IV: End of the Millennium
I wasn't kidding when I said I'd tried to play this throughout my teenage years. I only got to choose one RPG in the Genesis post-clamshell era, and I (rightfully, I believe) chose Shining Force 2 over Phantasy Star 4, though I regretted it almost immediately when I saw those slick-ass comic book cutscenes. Then when I got the internet, cue about a decade of fighting with Genecyst, not knowing why it would always crash an hour into the game without fail. Then emulators that actually worked showed up and I burned out in the unending slog of the Air Castle. This time I was determined to push through despite all odds, and I did it. I don't know if it was worth it, but I cleared it.
WHAT, ME WORRY? Award for: Most Engrossing Casual Pick-Up-And-Play Game
BRONZE: Regency Solitaire
It's that kind of solitaire you play where they arrange the cards in artsy-fartsy formations and you have special powerups to cut through their newfangled computer game bullshit. I have a game like that on my phone and it didn't cost me money. It's good, but I can only handle so much Victorian Era Pomp.
SILVER: Tadpole Treble
I wanted this to be Gold. I really did. Unfortunately, after my initial clearing, I tried loading it up again and got some nasty-ass lag issues that made it borderline unplayable. I don't know what was different then - maybe a virus scan was running, or something - but with a rhythm game, chunky gameplay is a dealbreaker. If it was the Wii U version, or if it was coded in something a little more optimized than goddamn Unity, then it probably would have won. Sadly, we have to take my computer's specs into consideration, too.
GOLD: Draw Puzzle
This is a relaxing, if somewhat hand-cramping and eyestrain-producing puzzle game. What actually pushes it over the edge into "something I will play constantly", though, is the soundtrack that sounds like it came straight out of Stardew Valley. This is pretty solid anti-anxiety game and will stay nicely nestled up next to my collection of many, many, many Picross games.
AURAL SEX Award for: Best Soundtrack
BRONZE: Double Dragon Neon
There's not much at all to say about this category. What you see is what you get. The music links are new, by the way. As for why this got bronze: Sometimes I'm not in the mood for 80s buttrock. It's rare, but it happens.
SILVER: Sonic Mania
I said "what you see is what you get". It's the exact order I mentioned them. Why did this get silver? Entirely because the winner won me over THAT much harder. This soundtrack is still never leaving my playlist, ever.
GOLD: Tadpole Treble
This soundtrack is just... okay, look. Matthew Taranto had a prodigious level skill with music even when he was doing a goofy Smash Brothers webcomic. Go back to Brawl in the Family some time and listen to the audio interludes that cropped up on certain milestones. His music is better than his art by orders of magnitude. Good music can get me hyped up and energetic, but great music can actually evoke emotional reactions out of me, positive and negative. This is great music.
NOT FUCKING THIS Award for: Most Violent Ragequit
BULLSHIT BRONZE: Super Win The Game
Super Win The Game was reasonable, and fair, and pretty okay until suddenly it wasn't. The only part of the game I really felt was "bad" was three screens out of the entire thing, three screens where you had to do a VVVVVV-esque plummet through a chasm of spikes with no opportunity to stop and catch your breath or have a checkopint. Three screens of screaming is not as bad as what it's up against.
SHITTY SILVER: Castlevania: Circle of the Moon
CotM's number inflation and overly fast enemies did, authentically, ruin the game for me. I was having fun, but then everything turned to garbage, and I had to shove my face against a millstone to just will myself through this grindy bullshit. I can't see how people play the optional modes in this, unlike the other exploration-based Castlevanias. It's just such a slog.
GODDAMN IT GOLD: Xeodrifter
The only game to make me legitimately quit the game and walk away. I came back to Circle of the Moon after a few days to stop screaming in rage, and Super Win The Game only put me back a couple of hours. I haven't gone back to Xeodrifter and its single boss in progressively more awful configurations. It's a shame, too - their earlier game, Mutant Mudds, was actually pretty enjoyable.
FUNY-MATION Award for: Least Cringe-Worthy Pop Culture References
BRONZONG: Chroma Squad
Hanging lampshades on all of those tropes isn't really any better when you do it well, just more tolerable. But you know what wasn't tolerable? John Peters, you know, the farmer. He backed this odd little indie game on Kickstarter and now superheroes are saving him from aliens! Gosh!
SILVER THE HEDGEHOG: Epic Battle Fantasy 4
While this wasn't really obtrusive with its references (though it made quite a few in item descriptions poking at the Big Names of JRPGs like Final Fantasy 7), it still had about the level of believability and tone as you'd expect from a goofy gaming webcomic. Also, it's got a lot of self-referential nods to its earlier, mostly flash-based entries that you're not at all gonna get if you didn't play them.
BOOSTER GOLD: Love You To Bits
As Celine noted, Love You To Bits integrated its references and nods to other things so quietly and with such little fanfare that you wouldn't even know they were there unless someone pointed them out. The best way to handle pop culture is to do so with care, and quietly so as to not rile it up. Going at it with airhorns and vuvuzelas is just going to anger pop culture and get your face clawed off by memes.
MEGA MAN UNLIMITED Award for: Nearest to Perfection Without Quite Getting There
SILVER: Guacamelee: Gold Edition
This was a solid platformer with a coherent, consistent Day of the Dead motif and only a few parts that were hand-crampingly hard. It was hammy like a telenovela and punchy like a luchador match. I'm still not sure if I'm racist for having played it, though.
BETTER SILVER: Sonic Generations
This is basically the video game equivalent of an awkward, end-of-series clip montage for a sitcom. Everything that the Sonic series is known for is showcased here: speedy, energetic 2D momentum platforming, slightly awkward and clunky 3D platforming... tragic, horribly-designed boss fights. It sure is the Sonic franchise... warts and all.
BEST SILVER: Renowned Explorers: International Society
The worst things I have to say about this game are "I'm bad at it" and "I can't think of any one part that stands out". It's all... amazingly average. Amazing but also average. It is greater than the sum of its parts, because none of its parts excel but it, itself, excels.
RAINING INDOORS Award for: Game That Gave Me The Most Feels
BRONZE: Phantasy Star IV: End of the Millennium
While at this point my reaction to Her Last Breath is akin to Bumbie's Mom, there's not really anything in the rest of the game that elicits more of an emotional reaction than "hype" or "GODDAMN IT ANOTHER GARBAGE RANDOM BATTLE I CAN'T RUN FROM". It's a drop of water in a pool of blood.
SILVER: Tadpole Treble
I admit it, the end of this game made me tear up. Saltwater Cape and its implications didn't help any. Remember what I said about great music evoking emotional response? Yeah, this tugged at the heartstring, and seeing Baton's cartoony eyes filled with despair right before the final stage didn't help any either.
GOLD: Owlboy
Surprising absolutely nobody, this stirring, emotional story about a band of fuckups and how everybody's constantly mad at them struck incredibly close to home. Everyone else I know had Night in the Woods feeling way too real, well... this was my Night in the Woods. Sometimes... sometimes stories don't have happy endings. Sometimes they can only ever end bittersweetly.
CRUNCHY PIXELS Award for: Best Trip Through Nostalgia
BRONZE: Final Fantasy
I only play games that are pop-u-laaar, I only buy the games that the magazines tell me to buy~ *cough* That is to say... well. Sure, it's nostalgia, but it's not my nostalgia. My nostalgia was Shining Force. This is... pseudo-nostalgia. Newgrounds nostalgia.
SILVER: West of Loathing
Kingdom of Loathing was, in its own way nostalgic... not necessarily of any one particular pop culture thing, but of those days when you would draw goofy stick figures in the margins of your school notes and they were totally fighting tanks or eating an entire chainsaw. West of Loathing invokes that nostalgia, the nostalgia of KoL itself - which is now a fourteen year old website, I might note - and also the nostalgia for old spaghetti westerns. It's a triple threat of memories. It's also fun to play.
GOLD: Sonic Mania
This is everything Sonic fans have been asking for since 1996, back when we were hearing rumors of things like "Sonic X-Treme". This is what we wanted all along. It's finally here, even if it's about twenty years late. While I admit the remixed/revisited stages are a bit uninspired in the grand scheme of things, it also wouldn't be a Sonic game if it wasn't at least a little lazy. Never forget that Sega of America passed off its unfixable physics bugs as "Dr. Robotnik's nefarious speed traps".
APPLE iMBROKE Award for: Best Mobile Game
$0.99 BRONZE PACK: FRAMED
Framed is good for what it is! It's got a nice aesthetic, good, fitting music, and a plot that makes no damn sense. Unfortunately, it's super short and ultimately boils down to "move around comic panels until they're in the right configuration for you to not die horribly". You can clear it in two hours without trying, meaning you paid entirely for the aesthetic.
$8.99 SILVER SAVINGS: Final Fantasy Record Keeper
I was all primed to give this the gold. FFRK is by far the game I've sunk the most hours into, the only game this year I enjoy enough to own multiple accounts on - something I have likewise done in the past with Kingdom of Loathing and fucking around on MU*s both - and there's enough meat to the game to keep me constantly engaged even though I'm at the "big fat grind sandwich" portion of the gameplay meta.
And then, while talking to Xyzzy I realized: This game singlehandedly reawakened my gambling addiction. I spend money on this I really can't afford to spend, for the chance of getting a neat JPEG of a sword that gives one of my pixel dudes a neat animation that does a lot of damage. No matter how good it is, this is still a gacha game. This is still gambling. As of the past few weeks, I've resolved to stop putting another cent into the game, and while I'll still enjoy it as much as I can, I can't rightfully give the top prize to a thing that lured me into that sort of mindset.
$99.99 YOU STOLE YOUR PARENTS GOLD CREDIT CARD: Love You To Bits
It's not as meaty as FFRK, but it's also refreshingly honest. It's got more replay value than Framed, with all the aesthetic and good music. I loved this game enough that I may consider playing it again some time in the future. I loved it to bits. If only I had some sunglasses and The Who.
MOOGLE AND WOODRAT Award for: Biggest Furry Crush
BRONZE: Pokémon Ultra Sun
This one was cheating. I'm always interested in Pokémon, but Ultra Sun is more or less a remixed take on a game that I beat two years ago, and has offered nothing new over Pokémon Sun/Moon as far as things that are aesthetically pleasing goes. It's still good enough to stay in the running, but it's not new enough to come out on top.
SILVER: Phantasy Star IV: End of the Millennium
there is not a single piece of swole furby porn out there on any website and that is a goddamn crime, i can find a picture of the cutie mark crusaders in ps4's seizure dungeon but nothing of the buff owlbear who i want to make out with
GOLD: Ever Oasis
Between lanky dragon ladies, chufty weird scorpion-men, twinkish bunnypeople, and capitalism borbs there is absolutely everything and anything I could ever want out of this game. Give it to me.
IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM Award for: Most Artistic Game
Remember how I said "there may be a stealth add or two"? Well, looks like there was.
MEGA MAN UNLIMITED: The Count Lucanor
Sorry, Lucanor. You're the only one on the list with reused assets - albeit public domain classical music. You cut corners, so no matter how good you are, you were the first one on the chopping block when something else stepped in that was better. Nobody leaves without a prize, though, so you get a fourth MMU Silver Medal.
BRONZE: Epistory - Typing Chronicles
The papercraft aesthetic is pleasing on the eyes, and the music is ambient and inobtrusive. The voice acting is good, but that indirect, teasingly coy, blatantly "we're going to cut to a hospital scene riiiiight... here" plot is just way too obnoxiously arthouse for me. It would've been better without that. Also, come to think of it, the concept of the ground springing up around you out of nothing... that sounds familiar...
SILVER: Bastion
As far as overall aesthetic solidarity, this and our top prize are neck and neck. Both have a cohesive idea they're going for and nail literally everything about it. At that point, it comes to the judge's fiat, and unfortunately, Bastion has two points against it: One, the stylization is a little odder, more plasticine. Two, the xenophobia allegories are about as subtle as a brick to the genitals and given this year's general political clime, I'd rather not.
GOLD: Owlboy
This and Bastion hold a lot in common. Bastion feels a little more complete, but despite having crunchier pixels and a less refined control scheme, Owlboy just feels... more sincere, I suppose? At this point it really is splitting hairs down to the difference of fractions of a score, but Owlboy appeals more to me personally than Bastion, so it gets the victory.
INSERT COIN? Award for: Unfinished Game Most Likely To Be Continued
NICKEL: Apotheon
This is a great game and it nails the aesthetic, but man. Man. That combat is a right bear to try to slog through. I'd sooner watch an LP - it's just not that fun to play.
DIME: Jumpjet Rex
Physically exhausting, and pings my completionist gland way too hard to be comfortable, but... this was fun enough and more importantly it was welcoming enough. I got through the first boss of four without too much trouble, so I feel like I could clear this if I wanted to. The trick is being in the right mood for it.
QUARTER: Pixel Shopkeeper
The main reason I stopped this is because I didn't feel like a grind at the time, plus I didn't want to have to worry about getting it cleared in time for the 52. (I'm bad at multitasking.) Nothing's explicitly bad about it, I just don't think it's very good for game clearing intents.
YOU'RE WINNER Award for: Worst Game Of The Year
BROWNS:Loot Hound
7.8/10 ran out of poop bags
SLIVER: Saturday Morning RPG
I hate you, Milkman Dan.
YAY: Loot Hero DX
"could have been programmed on the back of a postage stamp with room to spare" - Katarani, 2006.
THE BIG A-SWORD Award for: Best Game Of The Year
DRUMROLL, PLEASE. No, that's an eggroll. Drum rolls are the thing you do with the noise and the sticks and the anticipation.
BRONZE: West of Loathing
I want to reiterate that these games are the best of the best. These are the ones I enjoyed playing, played through multiple times, will enjoy playing forever. These are the games I am glad to own, no matter what. That West of Loathing is the least of three options speaks not poorly of it, but so much better of the other two. This game is a sterling example of how Western-minded (Western as in English-speaking, not as in "draw, pardner", though this has that too) RPGs should be handled. Skill checks are obvious and give you a visible idea of how skilled you need to be, almost every altercation can be talked, swindled, or tricked your way out of, there's about twenty different plot threads that you CAN deal with and mess around with, but none of them are MANDATORY. And unlike Fallout, dealing with them doesn't feel like a goddamn SLOG when you're doing it. This is definitely the best RPG I played this year, bar none.
SILVER: Tadpole Treble
The biggest things dragging this down are its relatively short size and its unoptimized engine. Again, if I had the Wii U version, I would be happier, but such things are not the case. Unity is not always the best engine, and while I credit BitFinity for making a rhythm game in Unity work, it's not without its issues. Regardless, if I hadn't docked this points for being made by an existing artist - "for reasons", in other words - then it would be a solid shot at the top spot for the Artistic Game, too. This is definitely the best rhythm game I played this year, bar none... and I spent plenty of time with Crypt of the Necrodancer.
THE BIG GOLDEN HEDGEHOG: Sonic Mania
Like I said before... this is what Sonic fans - myself included - have been asking for, for twenty years. This was a long time coming, and even with the bulshit of a delayed release and Denuvo inclusion and even with the awkward realization that Sonic games have always had kind of fucking terrible bosses... this was a treat to play. This was a blast to play. I will play this again and again whenever the urge strikes me, and it probably will never be uninstalled from my computer unless I get it on a console at some point, in which case I'll just install it there. This is definitely my favorite game that I played this year, bar none.
You guys did it. Both the games, for being amazing (or, occasionally, amazingly bad), and the people reading this, for being encouragement for me to keep going through this clusterfuck of a task even when life proceeded to treat me like a chew toy.
So what am I doing next year? Well, first of all, I'm not gonna focus on game clearing any more. If I'm motivated to clear, I'll definitely try my hardest. Thing is, my Steam library has a lot of abject trash in it, trash I don't even want to TOUCH. And... hey. Let's look at what my Backloggery page says for a minute, shall we?
Trying to at least get rid of my backlog of ENTIRELY untouched games [...] I may not complete them but I'll at least try them out.
So that's that. Next year, at least once a week, I am either going to choose a game or leave it up to the whims of Backloggery's Fortune Cookie, and I am going to try that game out. I am going to blog my thoughts about it. And if I want to not beat the games? That's fine. If I want to play other games at the same time? That's fine, too. I just want to try out the new things.
I feel like I should end this on a "like comment and subscribe" joke, but those of you that actually can read this deserve more class out of me than that.
Yes, even though I just wrote a paragraph about wanting to mack on a blue fuzzy axe-man.
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Your plan going forward sounds like a good one. I do love reading your gameblogging, and I love that you're a part of this whole... our friend circle is gameblogging and Dreamwidth is active somehow... thing. I know I for one feel the benefits and accomplishment from having gone through a year of game reports and awards, and you deserve to as well. In short, this is awesome and I'm delighted to see you keeping it up.
the change that it's more about trying something than finishing it is a good one, too. Games are meant to be fun, and that's why Xyzzy and I have our NOT COMPLETE and ABANDONED entries, respectively. Like, I didn't force myself to keep playing MANOS. I wrote about it, had the experience, moved on, took a few more swipes at it in the "obviously not MANOS lol" portion of the award wrapup, and that was all fine and fun and valid. You are absolutely allowed to nope out of things.
Anyway, it's been a hell of a year in gaming in direct contrast to being a hell year IRL (which is another reason I'm glad we all did this.) Congratulations to all the well-deserved winners, and here's to more gaming fun in 2018.
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Thank you, GameFreak.