The Games I Played [2016]: The Little Honors
The Little Honors are for the oddities and misfits that gave me joy in 2016, but didn’t quite make it to the Big Ten for a reason or another.
There are a lot of games, and there are a lot of Game of the Year lists. They’re pretty arbitrary, and often they end up telling you more about what the games community paid attention than anything about the games themselves. At the same time, they’re a place to let us take a look at what moved us, left us with good memories. So I’m taking this moment to appreciate the little moments of joy of a trying year. I’ve broken them down in a few categories, for some form of organization.
The 2015 Returning Favorites
Games don’t stop being relevant just because they’re old. And what better way to illustrate that than with SEGA 3D Classics Collection? If you know anything about me you probably saw this one coming, as it was also on my list last year. In 2016 the actual boxed release hit stores, with physical exclusive bonus games such as Power Drift and Puyo Puyo. M2 have done work on these games not only translating them to 3D with meticulous detail, but adding several modes and quality of life features. They go a long way towards helping you understand the technical and design achievements of these games in a modern context. Except Altered Beast, that game is still mediocre.
This year I finally finished up the winding saga that is Yakuza 5. It’s a meandering game, with five fucking separate protagonists, five separate cities to explore, and a idol game somehow inexplicably tied into a vast criminal conspiracy. It’s also got a wry sense of humor and plenty of unbelievable moments and distractions along the way. It’s the only game where you can get off your taxi job, enjoy a night of drinking and local food, visit the local clubs and then fights gangsters in a Santa costume in the next week.
Lemma is a freerunning game where you quickly gain the ability to create surfaces underneath you as you run. It’s often messy, but it has a good gimmick and feels good to run and jump around in. It made me feel the way I wanted Mirror’s Edge Catalyst to.
Refunct somehow manages to introduce enjoyable first person platforming, iterate on it, and bring a few surprises all within the space of 25 minutes. A joyful little moment of the year.
After working overnight for more hours than I’d like, I’d come home early in the morning and fire up either Blacklight Retribution or Galak-Z and listen to COUNTER/Weight, a cyberpunk roleplaying podcast by Friends at the Table. COUNTER/Weight provided the story and characters I cared about, while Galak-Z, once I understood both what it was and what it wanted, kept my hands busy enough for my mind and body to drift away into familiar rhythms. Plus, you can transform into a robot and beam saber wannabe Macross aliens. Absolutely deculture!
If Only There Was More Time…
GoNNER is the only game on this list that gets an animated GIF because it has to be seen in motion to be appreciated. I wish I’d unraveled more of its secrets, or at least been better at playing it so I could tell you more. All I can tell you is that it’s got charm all its own and aesthetics so tuned I was still enjoying myself even after the fiftieth time I had to run across a room literally collecting myself.
I should have liked Enter the Gungeon a lot more than I did. It’s got clever bullet patterns, a fresh arsenal, and a lot of cheeky gun based humor. Maybe fatigue with the genre, or just fatigue with work, kept me from opening up to it properly last year. (It’s a bit too demanding to wind down to). Regardless, I’m playing it daily now and enjoying simply filling out the encyclopedia just for the joy of reading the item descriptions.
An unashamed 2D take on Dark Souls, Salt and Sanctuary proved to be one of the most appealing takes on From’s series in a year where I arguably played too much Dark Souls. Unlike other imitators such as Lords of the Fallen, it managed to bring its own identity to the genre and avoid bogging it down with tedium. Like its progenitors, it’s probably also more demanding than I’ll ever have space for.
I managed to move away from Chicago as all my friends began to move in, so I never got to properly play Overcooked, aside from some beautiful, chaotic sessions over the holiday. If circumstances were different I’m sure it’d be one of my favorites of the year. Between the good food, absurd humor, and always one too many tasks its all things I’m about.
The Tim Rogers Crunchy Mechanics and Rousing eSPORTS! Awards
It’s Videoball. It’s always been Videoball and it’s never stopped being Videoball. We’re all Videoball.
The Bug Butcher is like Pang!/Buster Bros except they replaced the bubbles with cartoon bugs that make a good squishy sound when you juggle them with bullets.
Most of the time Ray Gigant a gorgeously painted dungeon crawler streamlined to the point where it can become nothing but flashing numbers. Sometimes it’s a basic ass rhythm game. And sometimes it pretends it has some Persona like agenda for character development. But mostly its a crunchy dungeon crawler for people who like that kind of thing. Sometimes that’s me.
100 % __ a e s t h e t i c.
SEGA made a lot of fighters for their Model 2 arcade board. Virtua Fighter 2 is the showstopper, but the rest have their own merits. Fighting Vipers has armor breaks, caged arenas, and roster with characters who look suspiciously like they came from Aliens or JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Sonic the Fighters has a colorful cartoon style that uses squash and stretch for expressive, slapstick animations. And Last Bronx is a dystopian gang war with some real mean weapon combat.
Season with SEGA hi-energy jams and iconic low-poly style.
This game does an unbelievable amount with three buttons. A good combo in it feels like nailing the drifts in Ridge Racer.
The campaign didn’t end up holding my attention, the extra modes were more limited than I wanted, but it looks great, has some of the best Mobile Suits and is true to its name, extremely fast. It’s the Marvel Vs Capcom 3 of robot fighting.
In all sincerity there is nothing more my aesthetic than a story of poverty, dysphoria, and an unattainable thirst for adventure filtered through the colors and culture of an alien spaceport.
That’s all for now! I’ll have a proper ordered list soon, but until then, go take in these little joys.
