f13.net

Discuss. Prove me wrong.

Last year was pretty bad though.

This salvaged 2014 for me.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/wowjuswow/60/09.jpg)

Can't prove you wrong. If it's any consolation though, there's some potentially good stuff in Q1 barring any further delays including The Order: 1886, Evolve, Witcher 3, Bloodbourne, GTA V for the PC for those who aren't console gamers, and Dying Light depending on what your level of optimism is for that.

I've got Dragon Age 3 to keep me busy for a while at least, and I'm very grudgingly picking up the new Smash Bros. for when I have friends over even though I have no love for the series myself.

(http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/scale_small/14/149021/2699270-9879652365-img_g.jpg)

I dunno, there's a lot I'm looking forward to seeing on sale.
-Shadows of Mordor looks pretty awesome
-Styx is interesting to me, though I don't think that's a sentiment a lot of people share, ditto the new Sherlock Holmes game
-Alien: Isolation is supposed to be pretty good, I heard (except for the ending, apparently)
-Civilization: Beyond Urf is ideal sale fodder, in that it looks like an interesting repaint of a fun game but I don't want to pay $50 for it
-Endless Legend looks like it might be fun, too
-Wolfenstein NWO looks fun, too
-Shadowrun Dragonfall is pretty sweet
-Arguably the best pigeon based dating simulator of all time has finally landed on Steam
-Secret of the Magic Crystals horse coloring book (http://store.steampowered.com/app/321420/)

Plus a bunch of stuff for consoles (Smash Bros, Destiny, that kind of thing).  Doesn't look TOO bad to me.

I imagine I will pick up Dragon Age 3 at some point, so there's that.  I am also theoretically interested in the GTA5 re-release, but I cannot figure out what system to get it for or whether I will actually play it.  And Bloodbourne, which is what, Demon Souls part deux?  I still have not finished Dark Souls 1, or even cracked open Dark Souls 2.  And then there is that Grimlock game that Ironwood and Jeff Kelly made sound interesting that I am hoping will go on a Steam Sale.

I other words, that is already way too much.  I already have more on my plate than I can manage to get through.

The M&B Vikings might salvage the end of the year for me if it turns out to be great. It has the potential since it's from the makers of Brytenwalda mod in cooperation with Taleworlds so they might have actually improved on things that suffered from the limitations of modding M&B (though I may be putting too much hope into it).

I also bought Dragon Age though my hopes for it are somewhat more muted (which is kind of sad when you remember that Vikings is just a dlc from a modding group and made for an aged game)

Excitement for sales means exactly what I'm saying. This season fucking blows.

All I see is lots of broken as shit AAA titles getting released for $70 (AC Unity), Games that have forgone even the pretense of a "story" or actual fun gameplay for a "immersive online experience" (Destiny, Titanfall, Evolve), micro transactions (e.g.AC Unity, Dragon Age 3), Games that still have issues even after months/years (Battlefield 4, Driveclub). Even experienced companies fucking up online (Blizzard's WoD launch and constant 5000+ queues). Companies moving single player games to require always online (Sim City, Elite Dangerous) just making the experience shittier but not adding value.

Lots and lots of "we make no pretense that this is anything more than video poker" free to play shit. Also lots and lots of "hasn't everything been better twenty years ago" retro titles "inspired" by 8 and 16 bit classics and indie titles exploring everything except actual gameplay.

Which is nice and all but if everything is now either a rehash of a game I've already played twenty years ago or a soul and lifeless "online experience" designed to extract the maximum amount of money out of me while exposing me to the absolute filth and low life scum that is the online player base I could just play Dota or WOW instead.
I've had more fun playing Mario 3D World, Mario Kart and Legend of Grimrock 2 than almost anything elapse I've played this year and that fact makes me sad.

Not entirely sure how Evolve forgoes fun gameplay. Outside of the small thread here I've heard almost nothing but good things about it. Also not sure what Dragon Age has to do with microtransactions. I guess you could be talking about multiplayer, but I never once felt like I needed to spend money in ME3's multiplayer and I currently don't expect this to be any different.

Doing the same five maps over and over and over again just for the illusion of progression while preteen scumbags scream insults at me over voice chat  is not what I would consider to be fun.

I was really hoping to get linked to some weird not AAA shit in this thread that might appeal to me.

Alas. 2014 really is that shitty for gaming.

I can't think of much really. Most of the stuff I've played is actually from 2013. Even the stuff that is hot right now or is getting a release on PS4/XB 1 is just re-releases of stuff from one or two years ago (Spelunky, Binding of Isaac, etc)

Captain Toad and Bayonetta 2 are probably the only new and somewhat interesting releases coming up, which says a lot really abou the current state of affairs.

Well, there's the possibility that Set 2 of Hex actually releases when they're saying, not that it will do you much good while you're on vacation.

I will be picking up Shadows of Mordor and Alien: Isolation but only when they're really discounted (75% is my general target these days). I'm also very interested in Bloodbourne but I don't have a PS4 nor any intention of buying one.

But I'm only playing sandbox games these days, and that's not a field that's aggressively developed for, so I don't expect game release schedules to interest me much :)

... that looks suspiciously like it could be some giant robot team management harem game. What is it?

Part of this comes from my total inability to understand what makes repetitive gameplay interesting. Ever since LAN networking became a thing I could not understand why people would play the same 5 deathmatch maps over and over for days on end. I could get that playing competitively is fun for some but after running the same level for an hour I get so utterly bored that even the fact that I'm playing other people is no longer fun or interesting to me.

Games have gotten much better at that though. I've played WOW for years and even though it's the same repetitive style of gaming it's much better at hiding that. Games are also much better at making you play even though you just don't want to these days and that's what I find scary. The sentiment I always hear when people talk about Destiny is that people really don't know why they are still playing the game even though it stopped being fun long ago. DotA is the same. Hell I stopped playing WOW long ago because I did ask me the same question eventually.

This is where games are headed though. Destiny, Titanfall, Evolve, they are all modelled after DotA or League of Legends style competitive online games that are 'addicting' in a real sense and make people spend hundreds of hours playing the same arenas over again and to spend money on microtransactions. It's basically the "Insert Coin" of a post-arcade world. Even anually released series are treating single player more and more as an afterthought and focus more on 'engaging online experiences' which is simply marketing doublespeak for "making sure that our playerbase is playing for as long as we can make them and is still spending money on this game a year from now"

Meanwhile the mobile gaming scene has dropped the pretense of making anything resembling a game in the first place long ago and blatantly focus on the iOS and Android versions of "gambling addiction the game" (fun for the whole family, as long as your CC is chargeable). If this ever gets regulated like casino gambling the resulting market crash will be heard from the next solar system over.

The problem is that companies are now focusing exclusively on how much playtime and money they can extract from their player base instead of gameplay and it shows. Half the GDC talks are now business models and customer retention strategies. I'd compare it to the heyday of arcades right before consoles made that market obsolete pretty much overnight and just how much bullshit companies pulled just to get people to insert as much money into those cabinets as they could.

Add to that the ever increasing budgets and teams for AAA titles (ten dev teams worked on AC: Unity over the course of its development and GTA now has a larger dev budget than most tech companies allocate on R&D for a project) and you get the 2014 crop of new titles. Utterly conservative, devoid of any innovation, myopically focused on online, customer retention and the business model attached to the franchise and also pretty lacklustre if you take the budgets they have into consideration.

If just one of those > $300 millon multi year "betting my company on Assassins of Duty 5" crashes and burns (and one will eventually) the resulting upheaval will be interesting to see. It might even take a large publisher like Ubisoft down in its wake.

I have wondered why this year isn't yet crash and burn mode for the industry.

Of course, I wondered the same last year. It honestly seems like it's due for that contraction.

I guess it's sort of like the movie industry, where the mechanisms of a collapse are practically unavoidably in place (dvd markets imploding, etc), but the machine keeps lumbering on, bolstered by asinine shit.

Basketball always uses the same court and people go play pick up games in the park or at YMCA or whatever every day/week for years on end.

I agree with a lot of the rest.  Making good games isn't really the focus of the gaming industry anymore for the most part.  Even Valve, who has managed to do it better than anyone else with DOTA 2 style free to play (pay for cosmetic items only), still makes me nervous with the "we are offering services" kind of talk.  But I rarely get excited for any game anymore.  I've definitely been moving back towards table top games lately, where at least I can go hang out with some people at my LGS.

I haven't been legitimately excited about a game release very frequently lately and nothing coming up looks like it will change that trend.

Yeah, that was a good read Jeff and I agree with it, but you can't really slate people who enjoy the repetitive stuff, since when you're playing against people, every game has the potential to be different.  In my younger days, I loved deathmatch and was addicted to Doom/Quake/Unreal et al, so I get WHY people love it.  Even today, the SC and LOL and other stuff isn't my cup of tea, but I GET it at least.  And I can never ever quit a good game of Chess with a new person, just in case.

However, it really, really is an excuse for development laziness and that I have no time for.


This thread is mega depressing though, since it's so very true.  There's fuck all out, or even on the horizon, that's really interesting.

I just wanted to lead into my rant with why I don't like many of the games that are hot right now. Just to say that part of my disinterest is because those games aren't fun to me. I get why other people might like them it's just that I don't. It shouldn't sound absolute like "all games today are shit". It's about that too, but games have changed in a way that makes it so I like them less and less for personal reasons too.

I appreciate the comparisons to other games but even there I'll probably play a few games and then do something else. I like a great game of chess or basketball but I probably won't play anything - including Chess or Basketball - continuously for hours on end if it's to repetitive. My obsession with WOW was to a large part not because I particularly liked the repetitive gameplay but because the game is really really good in hooking you into playing the same shit day after day. I don't know if that was on purpose or by accident but the gameplay is addicting in a real sense

I get why other people like it and I don't want it to sound like I diss them.

I think gamers as an audience would be fine with far less sprawling experiences with these sandbox titles if publishers were willing to try it.

A lot of the lamest games released this year (like Watch Dogs) gave me the impression that if you had the same team and half the budget, you could've gotten the kind of experience everyone wanted just by scaling it down and gamers wouldn't have complained that it wasn't some sprawling gigantic epic.

Sleeping Dogs proved this; they didn't feel compelled nor did they have the budget to add in a gigantic pointless nature area with rice paddies and forests and shit to drive through. It was supposed to be Hong Kong and they made a smaller version of Hong Kong because that setting is plenty good enough on its own. They didn't need a GTA-sized map.

What I've noticed though is that a lot of the talk about making games has shifted from how to make fun and engaging games to how to engage the player for as long as possible. Don't get me wrong games have been a billion dollar industry for a long time and I'm not saying that everything was better when I was young because that would be naive. Companies always looked for a way to make a quick buck.

Budgets got so big though that one game can make or break your company and much of the talk as a consequence of this is now about 'player engagement' and 'business models', 'retention strategies' and 'monetarization'. Which is really just an euphemism for getting the most money out of players in addition to the $60 for the game. What we see now is gameplay loops being optimized for 'maximum engagement' and not necessarily maximum fun.

Which - taken to its extreme - is basically the same as what casinos and gambling venues do in the design of their machines.

GTA V is an achievement in game development. That they could get that sort of performance out of basicaly ten year old hardware is amazing and puts the crappy AC: Unity even more into context though.

It's a wasted effort though because the game part is pretty mediocre and most of that world is devoid of content. Why put so much effort in an open world when you can't be arsed or lack the resources to put content in. I feel like that is a problem for most open world games today. Which wastes a lot of allocated budget.

It's already been covered in responses to Jeff, but re: repetitive gameplay, when you mentioned people playing the same map, I immediately thought of poker as well as the experience of flow & mastery. Poker in particular is an extremely repetitive, body-withering experience, but it keeps people interested because of its mechanical and psychological complexity and the variety of personality and play styles you get.

Yup.  Not a great idea that.

It's not that surprising that folks here are sort of incapable of considering the possibility that they're part of the problem.

I mean, if I were a developer and someone handed me a task sheet that said, "Make a game that Schild thinks is really great, but don't lose money for the company doing it", I might just save time and go out back and eat a gunshot in the mouth instead.

We're basically like film buffs who've been watching tons of releases since 1960, thought that the great serious films of the early 1970s were the best time ever not only because the films were great but because the mass audience liked them too, and have been jaded and annoyed and burnt-out long since about movies.

We've seen it all with games, and so we're both incapable of understanding how some games look and play to people who haven't played a zillion of them and we're unable to just enjoy stuff on its own terms when it comes to us--our settings are tuned to "extreme hypercritical" about everything except ourselves.

Look, right now, here's what I see when I can step back a little:

a) More independent games in general than 5, 6, 7 or so years ago, when AAA titles were swamping everything and the PC looked to be dying as a platform. Ok, so many of them are kind of crappy, but some are great. Ethan Crane, This War of Mine, Kerbal Space Program, Sir You Are Being Hunted, etc. So ok, some are less than they could be, but there are a lot of good ideas and interesting work in many of them.
b) More sandbox than 5, 6, 7 years ago. Maybe not as much as what some of us, including me, want, but much more, largely due to the success of Minecraft and the desire of a few developers to make a version of Dwarf Fortress that doesn't make you want to stab your eyes out with a fork.
c) Some fun retro games along with a lot of crappy ones. Wasteland 2 and Divinity: Original Sin. When the good ones have problems or shortcomings, even the problems are kind of entertainingly retro.
d) The occasional AAA game that does something new or that's so well put together that it's distinctive. Shadows of Mordor and probably for me at least Dragon Age 3 and maybe the new M&B, though I'm not sure that counts as AAA. Or a good sequel, like Dark Souls 2. So? How often have there been years with 5+ distinctively great AAA titles that sustain lots of gameplay and don't leave you feeling vaguely dirty afterwards for the amount of time you wasted on repetitive subpar gaming experiences? Probably the last time there was such a year, it was a year that was a long time ago when you hadn't played the shit out of games as a cultural form.

Getting old is a bitch in general, but when it leads to a kind of cantankerous bitchiness about everything it gets old real fast in a very different sense of the word. Nobody wants to hang around while people hatewatch and hateplay everything that they come across except other folks who enjoy doing the same.

I'm pretty much counting on Dragon Age 3 to be my gaming savior of the season. GTA V will get picked up eventually just because I didn't get around to finishing it on 360 and I think the first person approach might be really fun.
Probably not in most people here's wheel houses, but I'm actually looking forward to 2k's WWE game coming out - it's the first one done for next gen machines and the first real "upgrade" to the series in years.

Other than that... Next thing I see coming that I care about is probably SR4:Gat out of Hell in January?

My Steam wish list has 133 games and there's probably only 5 AAA titles in there. If this is the thread where we complain about the shortcomings of the AAA industry, sign me in. Otherwise, I'll go back to my 128 artsy indie games and be happy with it. There's a lot of stuff I wanna play and the only part that sucks is that my holidays aren't long enough for all of it.

Anyway, without going too much into obscure territories, and trying to stay away from early accesses, here's what I am looking forward to buy in the next couple of months:

- Dying Light
- Mount & Blade Vikings
- This War of Mine
- Elite Dangerous
- Hotline Miami 2
- The Crew
- and Dragon Age 3, because I enjoy a big huge trash show from time to time.

I would have said Evolve but after trying it I have no intention of getting it. And I am not counting Bloodbourne cause it comes out in March, so not exactly Holiday season.

Anyway, I think there's a lot of good games out there. Not sure about "GREAT", but there's a lot of good games. The problem is that we are less excitable, less entusastic, less passioante about it. That's what jaded means, and at the same time we have seen everything, we have played everything, of cours it all feels like more of the same. We'd love for designers to come up with something new, really new, and on top of that amazingly executed, but that isn't so easy especially because sometimes in a company they have (the ideas) or the other (the polish) but not both. We played so many games, it's not easy now to make us raise an eyebrow. And Schild's eyebrows in particular, they hardly ever twitch (but when they do, it's time to reach for the wallet).


One last word about competitive games. As someone else said, you don't quit playing football or hockey because the field looks always the same, or chess because the board is always black and white. When it comes to competing directly versus other humans, no game plays the same and it's easier to understand this if you have ever been in sports. WoW is certainly not good at hiding repetition, it just happens to be your favourite flavour of repetition. Sports (and eSports) are not repetitive as every engagement is always and inevitable unpredictable while at the same time fair, which is the catch. But for the same reason, as happy as I am that there are some great PvP games (World of Tanks, Smite, LoL, Dota, Counterstrike, Team Fortress, MechWarrior, PES), I agree that the proliferation (and the surplus of it) is part of the problem as developers and publishers see an easy opportunity to make money without risking too much, and invest less and less in more interesting projects.

I've waited for someone to bring that old familiar friend 'you're all just a bunch of jaded fucks' to the discussion and I was not disappointed. You mention movies. Interestingly enough movies and games share some of the issues.

Do you know why Peter Jackson split the Hobbit into three movies, why they usually work on a second or third installment of a franchise well before the first one is in cinemas and why Marvel just announced a fuckton of Superhero movies the last of which releases in 2020? It's because to make a current effects heavy blockbuster work financially you'll have to split the cost and the risk over two to three films if you don't want one movie to potentially tank your whole business. You're also only attracting enough investment capital if you can guarantee a return on the $200 million+ budget of a blockbuster. That's why blockbuster movies tend to be so conservative nowadays.

Budgets have also gotten so big due to production values (and lots of intermediates that add no value but only cost) that independent productions get more and more 'priced out' of being made at all. A sub $10 million dollar film won't even get to run at festivals and will therefore not get into distribution and no one hands a rookie with a great idea a appropriate budget to waste it on something 'innovative'. A similar trend can also be seen in smaller games that now tend to employ teams of > 20 people and need budgets that reflect that. Bastion was made by a team of maybe five people and still probably cost a six figure sum to make, the Transistor team was probably closer to twenty. That's a budget you'll need a publisher for and they want to see some sort of return on invest so good luck being too innovative.

There the comparison ends. AAA games and blockbuster movies may have similar budgets but The Avengers has a potential audience that is magnitudes higher so it's easier to justify a >$20 million budget on a smaller title that will make that money back in ticket sales or DVD/streaming fees eventually while the potential market for $60 games is much smaller. That said even the movie business needs to nickel and dime you with concession stand fees, higher prices for 3d movies and charging you again if you want to own it on DVD/Blu Ray or digitally.

There's also televison that has become sort of a creative haven for creatives fed up by the movie business and that can afford risky ventures easier due to the different business models.

I expect the age of indie development to end soon though as budgets increase overall. As the marketplace for indie titles gets more crowded production values become important as a way to differentiate yourself (and justify your budget).

I wouldn't have thought that a statement about why I personally dislike certain games (I as in me as in not everybody) would get me so much flack  :why_so_serious:

The other thing is that competitive games are actually really hard to make good for like, hours 50+.  Pretty much any new game can be kind of intriguing and interesting for a while.  It often takes a while before you realize - oh wait, the balance in this game is terrible and because I was new I didn't notice.  Too bad I already spent 30 bucks on some of the free to play stuff.

There is a VERY short list of actually good competitive games.

DA3 made me install Origin, which says something about my expectations of the game if I've finally given up fighting against that shitty delivery system.

Farcry 4 is coming out, and I expect that to be complete garbage given what Ubisoft is pulling lately with PC games.

The guys that did Two Worlds are putting out a pirate game called Raven's Cry here shortly. Will it suck? Not sure, but it looks interesting and likely janky as fuck.

Eternal Winter which is that weird game where you try to survive in the snow. Could be weird and fun.

I think you are right on many things Jeff, especially the financial observations. I also think it's fair to say we are all extremely disappointed in the AAA industry because we feel they could do so much more with all that money and talent, while at the same time we all probably play one or two of their games every year (maybe in secret? heh). I couldn't wrap my head around why so many people on f13 cared about Destiny, Shadow of Mordor, Assassin's Creed, and the likes. But then again, I loved The Last of Us and I am about to buy Dragon Age 3, so to each their own comfort food.

But I stand by my impression that we have become much harder to impress while at the same time we demand to be impressed. It is obvious that lots of people who could come up with impressive games (Schild himself for example) aren't being funded nor supported and that sucks, but at the same time I am sure that our age and our experience are working against us and our ability to have fun with videogames. Not making it impossible, but making it harder. We have played sooo many things that we carry around a fatigue for all genres, and more often than in the past we pass on a given game as soon as we read that ONE feature is not what we wanted it to be, or one element of the interface is not where we'd prefer it, or the tutorial isn't designed specifically for our unique mind map. Or at least this is a behaviour that I see prevalent among the people I know, and with myself. It's certainly and rightfully less patience for bullshit, but not just that. We are flooded, overserved, overburdened.

Also Jeff, you might be right about production value becoming (again) a factor that could crush a lot of future indie developers, but let's not forget that for all the reasons we just agreed on the more you raise the production value, and so the cost, the more you limit the span of your innovative design. Because of this, since their rebirth of a few years ago, chances are there will always be a niche of "innovators" working in a basement to build the next amazing project that AAA companies will cannibalize for the next two decades. I am not an optimist, but I am sure we'll see more great games. It's chaos theory, it's bound to happen even if only by mistake.

I hope you're right.  The  current indie boom gave us so many great titles. I've seen the opposite time and time again though. Even during the 8 bit days it was indie first and then pretty much publisher funded later as production values increased teams got bigger and expectations of customers got higher.

I dunno.  I mean Quake 3 is STILL the best pure deathmatch game available. CounterStrike: GO is still the best of it's subgenre.  TF2 is still the best of its kind.  You can argue DOTA 2 vs. LoL all you want, but DOTA 2 - being almost a copy of DOTA 1 is at least arguably still the best of its genre.  We are getting plenty of good, solid games these days.  But few seem to rank in that all-time good category.  Now, obviously few games in general achieve that kind of status. But you'd think we'd at least see some giving those classics a run for their money.  It almost never happens.  And I think Jeff is right - it is because that kind of game doesn't pay nearly as well as a flashy single player campaign with a new DLC every 3 months, a game of the year edition with all of it bundled at the end of its cycle and then pumping out another one.

I can't be bothered to buy and play AAA games anymore. The impressive part of them isn't the gameplay, it's the spectacle... and I can see that by watching people play the game on Youtube. The last AAA title I bought was Portal 2, because I loved Portal and I like puzzles. Cover-based FPS leaves me cold and it's 99% of the AAA market. Can the experience of actually playing a game provide a depth of feeling and investment in a narrative? Sure. Who is putting energy into really exercising that aspect of game design anymore?

Last of Us was an incredible movie bolted onto a viscerally tuned but ultimately pretty standard cover-based sneaking/shooting gallery.

Why would I want my movie interrupted with a frustrating murder simulator?

Khaldun is right: I'm not the target audience, and the sales numbers show that the target audience is happy. Ultimately the expensive end of the game industry is well served to ignore my opinons.

This is something I've noticed as well, and why I almost never bother with single player games anymore.  When the experience of watching your game is almost identical to the experience of PLAYING your game, you've made a terrible game.

I'm trying to decide what it means when you're a jaded fuck about being called a jaded fuck.

I'm getting the one game I want this holiday season.  It'll take forever to complete.  I'm happy.  :awesome_for_real:

I won't even disagree with you that I'm a jaded old fuck - because I am.

At the same time my old jaded self is seeing lots and lots of innovation and quite a few gems each year in other types of media, film, literature, music. Compared to that though the indie games revolution is just the niche inside a niche and not enough for me to not get a tad frustrated about cover and/or stealth based murder simulators (now with your favorite gears of war inspired online mode) and "this is really video poker but we call it free to play" experiences so utterly dominating the market right now.

Especially when they eat up R&D budgets a medium sized tech company would kill for.

I can count on one hand the number of times I ever heard anyone talk *at all* in ME3 multiplayer, let alone do so abusively. And we're talking probably a thousand matches give or take. (EDIT: OK that might be an exaggeration. Hundreds, though.)

So... what is the consensus so far?
Dragon Age: LEGO Hair
Captain Toad
Amiibo
??

Oh yeah, I know this is a burn on those of us who kickstarted Hex or well anything for that matter (guilty myself, several times) but can we make it a rule of thumb to not buy early access or alpha games?

We can call it the "Doublefine Rule".

But "released" games may as well be early access half the time anyway. Pretty sure they're gonna have to rewrite the entire script for Dragon Age because apparently it's fucking horrific.

I'm in an alpha for a game right now and it feels more like an early beta.  Is 'alpha' the new 'beta'?  Seems beta is now little more than a polish and marketing campaign for release rather than an actual beta test. 

I sorta view that as the right and just punishment for buying a post-ME3 Bioware game. If you did, you really should know better.

I have low expectations for it, but as long as it lets me make numbers bigger, it'll do for now.

On a whim, I decided to replay Mass Effect 3 last week and boy did I not miss it.  Hopefully Dragon Age 3 doesn't suffer quite so terribly from sequilitis.

This Christmas season is probably the shittiest holiday season because we have 3 new consoles in an entirely new console generation and it is completely and utterly bereft of ideas. These 3 systems have been out for over a year, and I have yet to see 1 game released that I had to go out and buy. Persona 5 is about the only thing that might make me consider it and even then, I'm not sure I'll go buy a new system for it.

Meanwhile, on my PC I have a fuckload of games to play, none of which are "new" or that I paid full price for and I am damned happy about that. The last game I paid full price for was X-COM. The rest, including the DLC? I waited for that shit to go on sale and bought it at prices that fit my budget and more importantly, that I thought were more accurate prices. $50 for a game is still just fucking nuts and $60? Fuck you. I have paid full price for the BF4 expansions but other than that, most of the DLC I have bought has been at 50-75% off because I'm fucking cheap. And as a result, there are over 100 unplayed games in my Steam Library so that I don't have to pay full price for shit again.

That isn't to say there aren't good games coming out but there isn't anything I'm going to pay full price for (maybe the yearly Football Manager games but I don't mind paying for that). But of the games I've put tons of time into this year, some are repetitive (Football Manager 2014 - over 100 hours, BF4 - over 200 hours) and some are emergent (Crusader Kings II - and talk about the kings of pimping out nickel and dime DLC but I've still spent over 75 hours on that game, or State of Decay). And the indie games have provided some good fun too - Blackguards being the one I'm loving right now.

Gaming is fine if you don't have to buy every goddamn thing that comes out the minute it comes out. Of course, the industry is built on you doing so that it may be fucked, but it was probably asking for it.

I think terms like "alpha" and "beta" are losing their meaning with all the early releases.  Heroes of the Storm is still in "alpha" despite being (mostly) complete and playable minus some community features and draft mode (AFAIK).  Something like Kinetic Void released in "beta" on Early Access and featured no gameplay or mechanics, just the ability to glom various meshes together and watch it float around in the void.

Hahaahaha.
I'm sorry. :(

Alpha is the new beta.  Beta is the new Open Beta.  Open Beta is the new release.  Release is the new "Wow you started playing this game really late"

There's not much coming up, but if I look back at all the AAA titles I bought over the past few years I'd say I've been happy with the majority of them. I'm having fun pootling about in Destiny at the moment, I loved the shit out of Skyrim and Deus Ex:HR.

Sunless Sea

BF4 expansion

um...

yea.

I am absolutely all over Sunless Sea. I didn't include it in my list because it's early access. But yes, totally.

I picked up Sunless Sea, I just couldn't be bothered to read that much when I got it.

I should do a thing for the front page, for it. It really is quite good; though I am not sold on the new combat system.

This is a horrible Holiday Season for games unless you have a Nintendo console :awesome_for_real:

The PS4 is especially bad with no exclusive games coming out between now and the end of the year. Little Big Planet 3 is the big Sony-exclusive coming out this week but it's on both the PS3 and PS4. The last PS4 exclusive was the poorly received Drive Club back in October. Sony is lucky 3rd party games play better on the PS4 and they are basically resting on their laurels right now.

This is definitely true. It's depressing to read Gamasutra or think about GDC. (I don't even bother going to GDC anymore, it's pointless) It seems that the vast majority of game developers are up their own asses with monetization, retention, all their fucking acronyms (ARPU etc), marketing, etc. There's very little interest in gameplay or the technical side of making games. If you find 10 articles ostensibly about making games 9 of them are actually about how to market a game, how to suck up to people on Twitter for coverage, etc, and one out of the 10 will have anything at all to do with actual game content.

Things like IGF and Indiecade have largely turned into lifestyle events - the actual games barely matter, it's more an excuse for white people with blue streaks in their hair to circle jerk each other about how meaningful their puzzle platformer or basic adventure game is.

AAA game developers have completely shit the bed this fall. A lot of their games just flat out don't work.

Actually, it's about ethics in games journalism.

That brought a tear of joy to my eye. Though I'd date one of those people. Blue streaks are cool.

Ethics in Games Journalism? Hah. Don't forget social Justice from people who can't believe human beings would act in a way that doesn't line up with their principles.

(http://s18.postimg.org/d3uqvtet5/YOU_DONT_SAY.jpg)

HMMMMMMMM

 :grin:

Bayonetta 2 is a pretty good example about the current state of games publishing.

When they announced that it would be a Wii U exclusive game they got asked why they chose Nintendo's platform for Bayonetta 2. Their answer was that Nintendo was the only publisher interested in the game at all and the only one willing to fund it. ("Nintendo were the only ones willing to 'white knight' the project") They'd have gladly made a XBox or PS4 version but no publisher - not even Microsoft or Sony - were interested in the game and so they went with Nintendo. Which is odd if you think about it. Bayonetta was well received and sold decently enough. According to the latest reliable numbers I could find Bayonetta sold 1.4 million copies (as of April 2010) and was - according to Platinum Games' president - "their best selling title"

Funding Bayonetta 2 wouldn't have broken the bank because it is certainly not on a AAA 100+ million dollar budget (even though Platinum considers it to be AAA I reckon that their dev budget is much smaller). It would have made back its investment eventually and both Microsoft and Sony could need another console exclusive game anyway. Even if Bayonetta wouldn't have sold an insane amount of copies it would certainly be enough to be profitable so I'd have expected it to be a no brainer to publish it.

Yet only Nintendo did. Even though Bayonetta goes against Nintendo's branding of the Wii and Wii U to an extend.

This means that even though a profitable first installment was already there that proved that the game had a large enough audience to warrant a second game in the series it didn't get funded. Probably because it 'only' sold 1.4 million copies and therefore wasn't profitable enough for publishers to bother as everyone is hellbent on going after thew 5 million+ copies blockbuster AAA market.

I don't think this had anything to do with money though, or the quality of the product. In the 4 years that separate Bayonetta from Bayonetta 2 a lot of things happened, and clearly Microsoft and Sony didn't want to be associated with what is seen as a game plagued with hypersexualization issues. Coming 2012/3 when they got offered tto back this project, they probably thought "we can do without more negative headlines".

I might have missed a headline or two but I don't think that was it at all.

This war of mine is worth looking into

You think that a business that regularly greenlights shit like Road to Hell: Retribution and is completely fine with being morally bankrupt, as long as shit sells, is in any way shape or form concerned about a tempest in a teacup debate like "hypersexualization" in Bayonetta?

A business in which Duke Nukem Forever's mysoginistic bullshit attitude not only exists but can be considered mainstream? A business which happily defends the artistic merits of shit like the "no russian" mission from MW 2? The business that gave us Dead or Alive's bouncy boob physics? Concerned about a moral issue?

I seriously doubt that. I mean come on.

Yes yesssss.. let the rage consume you. I always love eating KFC when I'm angry.

I approve, I don't get you but I do approve :drill:

On a more serious note. Germany, so no KFC.

What?  You poor soul.  Such a guilty pleasure.

Edit: The Czech Republic and Slovakia aren't that far away, road trip for you!

I'm surprised, the first (and last) time I ate at KFC was in Germany, in Hamburg to be exact. Directly next to the Reeperbahn.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm confident that I can assure you Microsoft and Sony's decision not to publish Bayonetta 2 had fuckall to do with any thoughts of bad PR from hypersexualization or the lack of ethics in games journalism. 1.4 million copies just isn't shit to them because they are both stuck in the mindset of "if it doesn't sell 3 million+, it's not worth funding because we won't give anyone less than $100 million." Profitability isn't even a concern anymore unless it reaches a certain super-hit threshold of profitability.

They are all over Poland as well.

Edit:  actually, just checked the wiki and it says they have over 100 KFC's in Germany.

Sorry, but that's rubbish. Sony has been funding indies and smaller games out the wazoo this generation. Knack was never going to be a 3 million seller, and neither is no Man's sky. Infamous 3 was a big success when it hit 1 million copies. same with Killzone: Shadowfall.

Bayonetta 2 wasn't funded presumably because the odds of it selling over a million copies for a sequel were very low, or because they thought the image of the game didn't fit with what they wanted (which is fair enough - the game looks ****ing stupid on first inspection).
 

Sony publishes God of War, why would they give a shit about controversy in Bayonetta?

Sega and Nintendo have a pretty good working relationship now, I'm sure that plays a part. (Sonic in Smash, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games, etc) Beyond that I assume what Haemish said is correct, that the game wasn't going to be a mega-hit so Sony / MS weren't interested. It's true that Sony funds a bunch of small indie games, but those are small investments from a different group within Sony and is done specifically to build up indie cred.

Agree this holiday season is weak. Assassins Creed is turning into the Star Trek movies of video games. The anticipated launches this year were either broken (Watch Dogs), weak (Titanfall) or limited (Destiny). And one of the best recent games (Shadows) was a surprise. DA:I doesn't suck, but that doesn't mean anyone was really anticipating it. CoD:whateverthefuck apparently doesn't suck either, but it's getting harder each year for anyone to care. And Far Cry 4 looks great, but isn't significantly different from 3.

The rest moved to next year, in part because the consoles are struggling. They're struggling because by the time they launched, $600 PC rigs were already better, midcore games (by way of Steam) gave us something of a PC gaming renaissance, and tablets took all the money so big companies could make small bets by relaunching yet again all the mechanics first invented for the Atari 2600 while the people with real ideas either sold out for stability or joined the I'm-an-arteest circuit.

tl;dr mature market is now elderly market

I'm still having fun. But we've arrived at the Drunk Wives of Beverly Hills (http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20141118.png) age of this shit.

I've never seen one in all of my 38 years. You can't throw a brick without hiiting a McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut or Starbuck but I've never sen even one KFC.

I know you didn't ask for this, but since it's random trivia time, Italy has plenty of McDonald's and Burger Kings, but no Pizza Hut, Starbucks or KFC at all.

I've been playing some GTA V on PS 4. It's a huge visual upgrade and it runs very very smooth - apart from a few minor judder issues due to the 30 fps. This makes the bullshit Ubisoft "CPU bottleneck and thousands of NPCs not shitty programming and project management" excuse for the broken as fuck AC:Unity launch even more of a bullshit excuse.

I wonder if they really think that anyone believes those stupid excuses.

Is there a particular reason why? I seem to recall you not liking the game too much on its original release.

You remember correctly. I bought it mainly to own at least one game that actually makes use of the PS4's performance. More of a 'let's see what that machine is actually apable of' purchase. (As most of us have done at least once after buying a new console or PC).

I'm mixed on GTA V. It's a very impressive technical achievement and I appreciate the amount of effort and technical prowess that was necessary to make it. From a systems programming standpoint it's impressive and one of a kind really. Prior to the release of GTA V a lot of industry professionals would have claimed that this kind of game is impossible to make on a PS3 or XBox 360.

That's why I also like it for the fact that it's pretty much a testament of what you can do even on outdated hardware if you're really committed to it and have a programming and design staff that actually knows what they're doing. It means you can always bring it up when yet another developer cops out of a crappy launch with weak excuses like "thousands of NPCs" or "CPU bottlenecks" or "games is hard, man". This is what you can achieve - from a technical standpoint - when you spend your huge dev budget on actually making a game instead of thinking up business models and co-marketing deals.

I don't particularly like the game they made on top of that impressive engine very much but I wanted to own at least one game that actually shows the PS4's capabilities to some extent. I'd rather double-dip on a game that I find technically impressive but just didn't like very much instead of trying my luck with Ubisoft or Bioware or the latest Call of Duty.

Might not make a whole lot of sense but that's it.

[edit: fixed two glaring errors that quite bothered me]

Maybe that summarizes the 2014 season up pretty well too. I'd rather buy a game I don't particularly like for a second time simply because it's the only thing coming out for my new console that I'm even remotely interested in.

Fair enough. It just stuck out because I reread a bunch of that thread a week or two back when it had been bumped up.

I was pretty angry because I felt - and still feel - that the impressive engine they've made deserves a much better game than the one they came up with. It's pretty sad that Rockstar isn't in the tech licensing business, I'd very much like to see a new Elder Scrolls or Fallout game that uses Rockstar's tech as a foundation.

Let's hope that Rockstar will eventually release add-ons for the single player since we probably won't be getting another Red Dead game any time soon. GTA San Andreas and GTA 4 had quite a few that were actually quite good (Lost and the Damned or the Ballad of Gay Tony for example)

I'm not sure what sort of non-AAA things might appeal to Schild, but I thought this looked pretty cool. (http://store.steampowered.com/app/295790/)  And interesting.

I'm fairly sure I'll pick up a copy for eldest for Christmas.  Possibly two or three (or four) so the family can play together.

I love the look of that game.  I wish I were coordinated enough to play it.

I met one of the developers a while back. I like what they've been trying to do with it.

FIFY  :cry:

Actually, I take it back. If they do get around to it, it will probably be way too late to be worth the bother (Manhunt, Bully).

Sky, at this point it seems like you should know at least one soul that owns a last gen console, and another that owns Red Dead.  Borrow that motherfucker, is what I am saying.  Still ranks on my top 10, maybe top 5 all time games.  You obviously want to play it, why wait for something that is never going to happen?

I don't actually know anyone who owns a console (that I know of), locally.

I had thought of grabbing a PS4 at some point, but it's tough for me to drop enough money for a nice new gpu++ on a walled garden that will only play two games (RDR and Madden). Though I do also dislike the crappy thumbstick layout of the PS4 controller. And I don't know if it's backward compat anyway.

Console exclusives can bounce up and down on a rusty knife. I mean in their butts.

Backward compatibility is not strictly available in the PS4.  We are free to re-purchase new versions of old games, or to stream some for a hourly fee, but you can't put any other disk in there and have it work.

Although I haven't actually tried any PS2 or PS1 disc, I expect it won't work.

I've realized that the path to PS3 games on PS4 is via the streaming service, since it allows Sony to avoid writing any emulator and to charge a hourly fee.

And thus ends my brief flirtation with consoles that began when I bought a first gen PS3 (which to its credit had full backwards compatibility).  I can still get games I played in the 90s to work on my PC without having to pay anyone an hourly rate.  PC master race for life, yo.

Wait...an hourly rate?  That is their solution to the BC issue, to stream shit at you for an hourly charge?  How much is it per hour?  Do you pay for the game and the streaming?

Mind blown.  So dumb.

http://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/psnow/

Web site says something about a weeklong rental being about a dollar a day.  I only ever rented games when I was a poor kid in 1980's Alabama (correlates to 1960s anywhere else) with a dad who preferred to ridicule my gaming hobby over pretty much anything else he might have done with me.  Now that I'm a grown-ass man, I'm not into renting games at all.  Or visiting my dad.

PSNow is a stillborn abomination.

You really should visit your dad. 

Speaking of Sony services, I have to say that after an initally cracking start, PS Plus has become utter shit.  Happened right about when PS4 came out.  It was once the case that you could look forward to a pretty decent PS3 title for free every month (an aged AAA title or whatever).  Now you get a shit indie title for PS4, some other shit title for PS3 and then the obligatory VITA game no one has ever heard of.  I've basically stopped checking.  Maybe I should check.

Yep.  Mine was set to renew on 12/1, but I cancelled.  I don't think they had a game in the last six months I downloaded. 

Let me give you his phone number.

Wait. They call it 'pee snow'?

Well, it is a streaming service.  What would you call it?

'Explosive diarrhea' doesn't really flow off the tongue as nicely.

No, no.  You don't get the shit all at once with PSNow. :why_so_serious:

I was going to make a Frank Zappa joke but I see you guys went full scat.

I think there's still a few things worth being excited about.

-Shadow of Mordor was better than AC has been in years.

-DA:I is apparently everything DA fans wanted it to be.

-Bayonetta 2 was fantastic even if it's not on a platform you use

I'm also really looking forward to Captain Toad's Treasure Tracker, which fleshes out the best part from my favorite game last year into a whole game.

Most of the AAA console/PC releases from the past 2 years have been awful, boring, or both. The last 2 holiday seasons have been pretty decent for Nintendo platforms though.

Did you actually play Bayonetta 2? Been looking for some impressions from f13ers; I loved the first one and now that there are a handful of Wii U titles I was thinking about pulling the trigger.

Yeah, I'm about 3/4 through it. The weapon balance is better this time around and the production values are higher. If you liked the first one you really can't go wrong.

Cool, thanks. Hopefully I can catch a Wii U on a decent sale this weekend.

(http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_small/13/132162/2964921-scatman-crothers-3.jpg)

I'm a proud member of the Eurodance generation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6oXW_YiV6g

(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_bSk6yN_RU3Q/S8kjpAC5UPI/AAAAAAAAHAU/lR_P4bHhpiE/s320/scatman+crothers.jpg)

So what's the extended argument that 2014 was just a shitty year in games overall

Seemed fine to me, but let the hate flow.

I bought 5 games and 2 came with the Wii U i bought only for Mario Kart 8.

Maybe there's a causal relationship with you being married now.

Jenny plays as many games as me. She bought 4 or 5 games for herself this year.

I don't have time for more new good games than what I have already gotten this year.  Mordor somehow fell off my rotation, probably due to Destiny in which I'm only lv28 (although that honestly doesn't accurately indicate time spent in this game).  I have a friend with three lv30s, but he is a single childless waiter.  Now I'm embroiled in Dragon Age MP since I unlocked the Elementalist.  This short list is all it takes to consume my free time, which is inflated since I generally get 4-5 hours of sleep every night.

I'm fine with this year's crop.  You can't have a Borderlands 2 every year.

Getting Endless Legend for half off yesterday is probably going to carry me through to the end of the year.  I'll actually take a look at the Dragon Age MP this weekend, too, since at least I know one person who's playing it.

e: Schild, just because she games doesn't mean that she's not also distracting you from spending more time gaming than you would otherwise.  I imagine you didn't get much gaming time in over the last few weeks, after all.

16 hours playing Hex over the weekend disagrees with what you said.

It was pretty lackluster.  I had stuff I played, but nothing that excited me like years past.  In fact, I went back to older games a lot more this year.

MGSV Ground Zeroes just came out on PC. That may save a boring Boxing Day.

I tried, but I don't like any of those games.

Metacritic scores are a bad gauge of quality (http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/year/all?sort=desc) but just use this as a list to remind you of everything that came out this year. Now take out all the ports (and mobile games if you're so inclined).

If I made a list of my top 10 games this year half of them would be VC GBA games.


Mobile games (and to a lesser extent indie darlings) get a free pass from critics so it's worth taking them out. It's like comparing a group of students graded on an A-B curve to a group of students graded on an A-F curve.

Is that Metacritic link using US release dates to quantify what came out in 2014? Excluding ports, I've only played 2 of the games on the first page and only have any interest in 2 more.

Can't sort by user ranking and the score is so tiny. For something that matters so much, it's hard to believe Metacritic isn't in bed with publishers to remove outlier scores that bring down the average.

Interestingly enough, if I use the Metacritic page to see what came out in 2014, and I filter them by PC games (things seem to be even worse for consoles), turns out Dark Souls 2 is the highest rated game and ultimately what made 2014 for me.

And I am not counting Smite because it has been in Open Beta since 2013 even though official release happened in 2014, but that's the best PvP/arena game of the year.

Honestly, is that enough to save a year? Probably not. It's telling that I have to fish in the indie department to pull out the other things specifically from 2014 that I loved: Divinity Original Sin (which I'll admit I haven't actually played), This War of Mine, The Long Dark or Sunless Sea which aren't even out yet. Legend of Grimrock 2, which is a carbon copy of a game that came out 25 years ago. Special mention for The Crew for the sheer immensity and detail of its game world. Alien Isolation, maybe? Haven't played it. I guess Dragon Age 3 could be in some lists, but I am not sure it'd make it in mine.

Yeah, overall hard not to call it a very slow year. Just get Dark Souls 2 and carry on.

As a glorious PC master race specimen, the only AAA game this year that managed to get and keep my interest was Dark Souls 2. Other than that, it's indies all the way down. I found Shadowrun Dragonfall, Divinity:OS and Blackguards fun (in roughly this order)... Wasteland 2 would be in the running too, but it's way too janky.

One could make the argument that the Wii U had the best lineup this year, with Mario Kart, Smash Bros., and Bayonetta 2. I don't necessarily think it is the best lineup, but a case could be made and that's bad enough.

Notable Wii U 2014 releases:

Bayonetta 2
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
Mario Kart 8
Super Smash Bros. WiiU
Hyrule Warriors

Arguably best.

Which is amusing now as people were saying the Wii U was a terrible console.

Video games are dead.

Is and always was a terrible console. Bad consoles can have great games. Even the Atari Jaguar had Cannon Fodder.

That Wii U list is great, but it's pretty much all Nintendo has left. Mario Kart and Smash Bros are both one-per-system, and Bayonetta 2 is the one third party title anyone gave a shit about on the console. I'll be surprised if they release 3 more games on par with the above over the lifetime of the system.

I'm not commenting on its quality directly.  Just that it was lambasted, yet seemed to have gotten the best games of the year.

Perhaps it's more sad than anything.

More sad.

Ugh, depends who you ask, really. Out of that list I would only play Bayonetta and Hyrule Warriors and it doesn't seem like they were GOTY material anyway. I do not represent the planet, but I am sure I am not alone in not caring about the millionth rehash of Nintendo's old glories and platformers with Nintendo graphics, Nintendo style, and Nintendo target demographic.

I haven't played any of those WiiU games but I understand they are mostly OK and somewhat popular, which is enough to trump most of the new things I've seen on PC and real consoles this year.  Even Shin Megami Tensei IV came out on an Nintendo console.

I wonder if this is a rose-colored glasses kind of situation?  What was the last year you guys can remember when you said "omg, there are so many good games coming out" and weren't horribly disappointed by a bunch of them?

2005? 6? A while ago. But this year is notably shitty in that Nintendo had the best lineup. I can't remember a time post 1996 or 1997 where that happened.

This year was particularly bad, especially in what should be the big months. Not only were many of the games disappointing but a bunch of them didn't even work. Not a taste issue, just a basic functionality issue. The PS4 and XB1 still both desperately need exclusives worth a damn - Halo and Drive Club were supposed to be the biggest holiday exclusives and neither worked.

There's a Zelda and a Star Fox coming out. For 3rd parties there's Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem and Xenoblade Chronicles X.

SMT IV came out in 2013.

For my personal tastes, 2010 was a pretty good year with Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Skate 3, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Red Dead Redemption, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Halo: Reach, and Fallout: New Vegas. There were some other notable releases like Gran Turismo 5, or Just Cause 2, that I'm not really into.

Alan Wake, Alpha Protocol, Heavy Rain, Civ V, and God of War 3 were disappointments that year, but not horrible games.

Splatoon also had some buzz around it at E3, and there is Mario Maker as well.

$20 dollar spent.
Still nothing sticks.
And my friend just trolled me by buying me Sakura Spirits.

(http://2guystalkingmetsbaseball.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Businessman_Holding_Gun_To_Head_MON098143.jpg)

I spent about a 100 euros, and I am very very happy with all my purchases.

- This War of Mine. 16€ / Outstanding. GOTY runner-up. Shut up.
- The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. 11€ / Haven't had enough time to play it so far but it seems great and has the arguably the best graphics I've ever seen on a PC.
- The Old City: Leviathan. 10€ / Exploration game & walking simulation at its best. Another win for us Dear Esther enthusiasts.
- Ether One. 7€ / 10 hours in, already a favourite. Has overshadowed everything else in the past few days.
- The Moon Sliver. 1.50€ / Another walking simulation, another hit home based on the first few minutes. Especially considering the price.
- Our Darker Purpose. 3.80€ / Spiritual successor to Binding of Isaac, which was great. This doesn't disappoint.
- Sunless Sea. 16€ / The "Early Access" tag is the only thing that keeps this out of the GOTY runner-up competition.


Plus some less memorable things, either because they are not that amazing, or because they aren't new at all.

- How to Survive. 1,40€ / 1 Euro, not even 2 with the DLC.
- Darkwood. 10€ / I am not regretting the purchase, but this one scares me too much so I am probably never gonna play it. Also Early Access and it shows.
- Dream. 6€ / Another Early Access that needs work, direction and polish. Might be the weakest of the lot.
- Valkyria Chronicles. 16€ / OMG! <3

Grand Total: 99€ (about 121$)

So, for 100 money I got 11 games and I am between very and extremely satisfied with at least 7 of them. Great holiday season for me.

Yea, sad. The Wii U only matters for the first party stuff. I don't recall that not being the case for the original Wii either, though given its lifespan, I gotta imagine at least 1-2 third party titles were awesome?

Anyway, this year was marred not just by lack of awesome AAA titles, but that the ones which did make it were all jank on a scale between "coulda had another month of QA" to "wait, did we put the wrong year into the SKU plan?!". Seriously, broken AAA launch is becoming synonymous with "welp, Sony got hacked... again" as memes in the space.

However, I think the bigger point of this and last year is that "best of" lists are relying on old rules of ranking. Glad so many of you are including indie and mobile titles. The old style "top 10" lists are becoming about as relevant a bellwhether of "video games" as NPD retail sales only data  :oh_i_see:

I think I posted my own list here, so won't do it again. Especially because it'll probably change again before 1/1  :grin:

I still think we have this conversation every year.

I don't have any comment on how good or bad this year has been, as I have finally reached the point where I realize buying games is stupid until I play the games I already have in my massive backlog.  So I haven't paid attention at all.

Falc, for what it's worth, out of that large list of games you just put together I've only heard of one of them.

I'm at the point where I'm realizing that I'm probably 3-6 months out on games. Which means unless it's under $10, or it's amazingly awesome to move to the front of the line, forget it.

That's why this Steam sale has been meh to me. I could easily get something like the AC:Pirates! but why would I when it's going to the back of the line behind the AC3 I haven't finished yet? By the time I get to it in the summer it's cheaper.

By friend you mean your waifu, right?

Trying to convince myself to buy Endless Legend. I haven't liked a 4x game since Alpha Centauri. Hmm.

Easily worth it at sale price, IMO.

That's on my $10 list too.

There's a game that might be right up your ally on today's sale.  Only 10 hours left!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/296470/

Age check? WTF (and how do I disable that)

Err, you mean the basic prompt where you can enter in what ever age you want?  Or are you actually being blocked from viewing the games page somehow?

Blocked. "Sorry, you are not authorized to view this content."

Weird.

Just search for "Mount Your Friends" in steam/Google.    :awesome_for_real:

That's the swinging dongs game Signe was amused by in some other thread.

I don't swing that way, gentlemen. *backs away slowly*

Size doesn't matter.

Rock Paper Shotgun, a questionable website like all the others that also loves to feel original, posted their list of best games of 2014. (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/12/01/best-pc-games-2014/) I could post the list of PC Gamer, or IGN, or my son's, and it would be very different lists. equally questsionable, and none of them would be worth more than your own, so I am not posting this as evidence of anything. Just felt like dropping here what is -for the most part- a collection of games that has been vastly overlooked by the mainstream market because of we have been trained to not take too serioulsy anything that hasn't been hugely advertised or that had millions of dollars invested in the making. As stated multiple times in this thread, 2014 wsn't so bad if you could accept that this year fun came with downgraded graphics, especially considering that as an added bonus it was going to cost you less.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3584773/RPS%20Best%20games%20of%202014.png)

It's a bad year, Endless Legend is a solid 4X and singularly beats the most recent incarnation of SMAC.

The best RPG is probably Divinity: Original Sin, a kick starter.

Bethesda didn't release any RPG's this year and all the FPS's are just stupid rehashes of too well worn series.

Despite it being a nonsense award, I feel obligated to point out that Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance came out in February 2013.

It's a PC games list.

Aha.

PC Master Race has its own time zone and possibly its own measurement system.

Probably why our airplanes keep disappearing.

Who gives a fuck? That doesn't mean shit in itself as a metric of whether something will be a good or bad game or fun.

Some people are tired of playing the same game over and over again; certainly tired of paying $60 every year for the privilege. YMMV.

Especially when the old ones actually tend to be better games.  CS 1.6 stuck around for so long because Source was garbage and no one else can make a half way decent twitch shooter.  Call of Duty is popular exclusively because it was the first to do a competent job making a shooter for consoles.  They are decent shooters, but they are hardly  deserving of what they've become.  Same with Halo. Good games elevated to greatness because of the poverty of options.

I'm still waiting for a game I can replace Quake 3 (now Quake Live) with for christ's sake, but no one has managed to make a deathmatch game as good as that in nearly 15 fucking years. 

If there were an annual, updated version of a popular football franchise made available for the PC, I would buy it annually. Even when there was an annual franchise release, it was years behind the console version.

I'm sure it probably wouldn't sell much because people don't really watch football.

Have I mentioned I'm still not over EA sewing up exclusivity for their mediocre football game?

That people actually coined the term "PC master race" and use it unironically and in earnest tells you all you need to know about the state of games in 2014 and why the business is as shitty as it is. The fact that this label is not only offensive and tone deaf but also mainly highlights the somewhat superficial and subjective technical aspects of PC versions of multi platform games is deeply disturbing yet par for the course for a fan base that is in large parts as morally corrupt and cynical as the executives that fuck them on a regular basis.  As if cynical fucked up messes full of money grabbing bullshit and disdain for the consumer - like AC:Unity - suddenly became better games just because they now crash and burn in 4k with 16x FSAA.

That they use the label to claim moral superiority and essentially dominion over all gamers and that they claim to support better games than the "console peasants" while spending inane amounts of money on the privilege of watching a preordered $70 mess of a game crash and burn in "glorious 4k resolution" and shitting on everything that doesn't fit their definition of being a "game" deeply offends me. Because right now a game like crossy road or desert golfing is probably better than all the AC: Unitys or Halo MCCs of the world because those games actually work and are fun instead of being utterly broken barely playable monetization schemes.

That Nintendo probably had the best lineup of fun AAA games on the Wii U and the 3DS, unarguably the least powerful platforms of them all, is so deeply ironic on such an universal level that I can't help but laugh at the absurdity that is the video game business in 2014.

 :uhrr:

A lot of really great games came out in 2014 that everyone ignored or loudly complained about before ignoring them while a lot of the same people willingly spent thousands of dollars on the privilege of getting screwed over by EA and Ubisoft yet again.

Yet we let people get away with stupid and offensive shit like PC master races and gamer gates or let them get away with loudly declaring what is and isn't a game, who is allowed to make games and who isn't and who is allowed to play games or not.

Excuse me for being angry about that but there's not just cynical and morally bankrupt executives giving us bland and broken retreads year over year but also the shitheads that enable them and I hope they both go away or at least grow the fuck up in 2015 because otherwise it will be just another shitty season.

Psycho.

Whoa. :woot:

Maybe.

On the other hand nothing exists in a vacuum and going over a whole lot of top ten list I realized that there were actually quite a few really great games that came out this year. Games that have been largely ignored while people bitched about Destiny and how broken Unity is.

It makes me wonder if you can really claim that 2014 has been shitty just because of the big publishers when that year also gave us gamer gate and made shitty labels like PC master race reach mainstream usage.

Let's face it 2014 has been shitty because there are so many shitty people on both sides being involved in games

What are those great games that everyone ignored?

You can set your prescriptions to auto-fill and be delivered to your home.

I swear I am not mentally ill.  Probably.  Although I guess almost no one who is mentally ill is aware of it.

2014 was shitty because the economy improved and consumers have enough free cash to blow it on unfinished crap. So publishers learned they can release and make money on unfinished crap.

It has nothing to do with the people involved in games, other than the fact they learned that their customers are mostly stupid with their cash.

It doesn't have a lot to do with the PC Master Race people, as far as I know.  That's a different sort of ailment which I mainly attribute to people being bad with thumbsticks.

Also, "PC Master Race" is a six year old term from Yahtzee's review of The Witcher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0dXtOVi2yo

Which has more to do with thumbsticks being bad rather than any particular failing of the user.  :geezer:

Thanks for continuing my logic for me by way of example. :awesome_for_real:

That said, did I mention that I'm too old to play Smash Bros?  I'm not too old to play Destiny with a thumbstick, but my reaction time and accuracy are probably holding me back.  Then again, I was never great at games like Unreal Tournament or Quake deathmatch.

Or, maybe you need a bigger stick.

I mean, I was and I'm still good at handling this kind of stick:


But this?...Oh god, I never learnt what I'm supposed to do with this:


Definitely too small for my tastes.

Yeah.

Are you making some sort of sexual joke?

I think Lucas is saying he doesn't know how to please a woman.  

Jeff is saying he accidentally Bob's meds.

I'm not even half as angry as I come off here. Also my meds are fine, I'm currently on my second glass of a 20 year highland single malt that was more expensive than I care to admit  :grin:

I just consumed a lot of game of the year stuff and due to Steam's holiday sale (and the fact that I'm on holiday and have the time) caught up on a few smaller titles everyone recommended.

This has made me sad for two reasons. Firstly because not even the sites that put those games on those lists really talked about them that much in a "this was one of the ten best games this year we never really talked about" sort of way. Secondly because of the incessant whining on steam's forums about basically every aspect of those games from price to "this is not a real game".

This made me suddenly realize that a hobby where people complain about really good games costing $10 yet still preorder $70 monetization schemes from companies that fucked them over multiple times has bigger issues than just having a bad year.

The juxtaposition of experiencing a great game like 80 days or the fall or banner saga or Valiant Hearts and people that supposedly "really like games" shitting all over them for bullshit reasons because it apparently doesn't validate their purchase of a dual 980 gaming rig is jarring. Yet after my second glass of whiskey more bearable. :why_so_serious:

Why are you typing so much about nothing? I don't understand.

This year sucked. There's not really an argument to be made unless your standards are shit. In which case, the argument is "My standards are shit, 2014 was great for me."

That was my basic argument a few posts back.

Ah, I think I found the problem.

A friend was collecting ideas for "best game of 2014" and the best I had was Monument Valley, which is a wonderful little piece of artwork but it's not much of a game.  Very few of the games I played and enjoyed this year were new releases.

I'm not sure where this $70 AAA new release and PC gamergate frothing is coming from, apart from Jeff stealing Bob's drugs and/or pricing working differently in Europe.  Who pays full price for PC games any more in the first world?  The main reason my PS3 is gathering dust is that for anything that's not a console exclusive, I can pay $60 for the PS3 version or I can pay $20 for the PC version during a Steam sale.  (Regardless, I don't understand what this has to do with ethics in game journalism, but I long ago gave up trying to make sense of any of that.)

Seriously. One benefit of having more games than time is I can afford to wait on pretty much everything and get it at a serious discount. New MMOGs and FIFA are the exceptions  :grin:

Speaking of the game, I just lost it.

God dammit.  I think I had a multiple year streak going there.

I like to think of myself as an optimist.

2014 was a banner year for old men yelling at clouds.

Evidently. Invest now in Old Men Yelling at Clouds, I like its prospects in the coming year.

Pays dividends for those with the butt plugin. For teh browser, I mean. Or whatever, I'm not the cops, plug it if you want.

*updates his Jeff Kelly.txt*

Jeff, we need more pearls of your wisdom.
I might start printing them out and stick them on the wall.

I see that Jeff Kelly was late for the Festivus Airing of Grievances this year.  :why_so_serious:

I think the idea that rk47 keeps txt's on everyone is kinda :drill:. That's old school.

Pretty sure "PC Master Race" was always a self-mocking label used by and for people who are thoroughly tired of the Platform Wars. I don't think I've ever seen it used un-ironically before Jeff's Godwinning rant up there.

--Dave

Less intelligent members of /r/gaming use it unironically all the time.

Then please don't go to reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace or similarly titled threads/subforums at GAF or other outlets. (No, seriously, please don't if you want to keep your sanity)

I never knew that PC master race was even a thing until that subreddit hit the front page and I kind of wish I still didn't. What you say might have been the case at some point in the past but right now it's turned for the most part into self affirmations about ridiculous purchases (my triple 980 setup is totally worth it guys, amirite?) and Facebook stalking/reposting stuff by "peasants" to mock/ridicule them. Oh and also weird Gabe Newell fetish posts.

It's exactly the same kind of misanthropic, misguided and toxic stance that makes video games the kind of fun place to be around lately. Also due to my background and upbringing I can't get past just how utterly fucked up I think it is to label any sort of fandom as being part of a master race and I don't care if it's used "ironically" or not. Irony has since become a catch all excuse for getting away with all kinds of stupid shit anyways.

Honestly, your first mistake is going to reddit at all.  That whole place should be nuked from orbit. 

I disagree mainly because reddit has a way of keeping those asshats semi-visible to a greater public. If we nuke reddit or similar sites those people won't just vanish or totally see the error of their ways, they'll simply regroup and set up shop on other sites. I'd like to keep them where people can better and more easily see just how dumb they are.

Gamergaters just went to 8chan once they got expunged from reddit et al. which has made them even more partisan yet less visible at the same time.

This. This right here.

I should probably still stop going there though for my own sanity at least.

I sort of disagree because certain subreddits that deal with specific subjects (or for gaming with a certain game) can be decent, because either the quality is better or they simply function as a news-aggregator to keep up to date about something.

The general public reddit part is garbage of course.

I think I see the problem here.

--Dave

Gonewild is fun. Don't hate.

See... tumblr is like that but better.

Tears flowing  :cry2:

http://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-shopkeeper-skin/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1d4W5nyc-M

I have no problem with PCMasterRace... without the millions of bucks behind the PS4/Xbone any promotion of the platform is going to be "grass roots" and those don't tend to be polished or balanced. But given it was not too many years ago when "PC gaming is dead" was a thing I think some pride is allowed. Don't like it there's a different sub-reddit for console people clamouring over the next exclusive.

It's all froth of course, the best outcome is no platform exclusives unless the platform has a specific advantage. Which still gives consoles the big-TV and sofa space because media-PC's are hard, custom and the valve-box is running on valve time.

That said I've appreciated triple-A games being mediocre, I wouldn't have bought a console anyway but it is nice not feeling I'm missing much.

Look, I have no problem with self affirmation. I have a problem though when you use such a loaded term that stands for all kinds of awful things,

*types furiously to update .txt*

Heer, Heer!  :why_so_serious:

The term was invented as an insult (only a PC gamer could enjoy the degree of complexity and tedium in the Witcher) and then appropriated.

You are welcome to point out to Yahtzee that he uses insensitive terms... he might not have realized.

It's NOT Racist to :heart: your PC

www.PCMasterRace.com

Love Lives Here

*self-affirms self*

pcmasterrace directed me to the TWC page when a domain isn't in use. I went to buy it. Not available. However, I could buy shit.jobs - which would make a GREAT domain for writing about game development.

Also, shit.lawyer. Which would make a great domain for any lawyer.

To be completely honest if someone is using "PC Master Race" unironically, you probably shouldn't listen to them in the first place.  Also, if you're finding yourself in such places where this happens, you probably should evaluate what you're doing in your life to require such karmic retribution.  And bury that hooker in your trunk.

I've got two of those three done already.

Everyone knows that if you can't bury a body right away, you freeze it.

--Dave

2014 seemed to be pretty shit overall. You want really funny, look up the article PCGamer did in Jan 2014 predicting what would be the best games of the year (The Stomping Land, lol).

Usually I have to debate what were the really great games of the year, but this year? I admire DA:I, but it's not game of the year material. Same for GTA V (a game about heists that has you do four heists over 80 hours of story). Borderlands TPS was a letdown. Beyond Earth was a letdown. The games I currently play the most of were released in 2012 or 2013. Destiny was great for a few weeks, then ran out of game.

At this moment I may not have a game of the year for 2014. How sad.

I think my most played game of 2014 was PnP Dungeons and Dragons, followed by Clicker Heroes.  I don't know if it was a bad year for games, but it was certainly a bad year for me.

It's not so much that 2014 was a shitty year for gaming (it was) but the fact that I actively hated the few 2014 releases I bought and played. Also that I never felt so disconnected from what got hyped and even got nominated for 'game of the year' lists and what I actually liked and would play again. I'm jaded and old and grumpy and when I was young, yada, yada get off my lawn... but prior to 2014 I've never had so many instances of a game being the shit on the internet and me thinking 'why is everybody hyping this bad shitty game'.

The game releases I've played the most were Super Mario 3D World (that came out in 2013), Zelda: ALBW, Rogue Legacy and Mario Kart 8 and that's because I actually enjoyed playing those games beyond the initial hype. Something that can't be said for Tomb Raider, GTA V or Assassin's Creed.

GTA V came out in 2013.

I'm not sure I even played a game that was officially released in 2014 other than Blackguards. Everything else I played was from 2013 or earlier (Football Manager 2014, Crusader Kings 2, Rocksmith 2014) or haven't been released yet like Hex.

I got South Park Stick of Truth, Hearthstone, Tropico 5, and Dragon Age Inquisition

GTA 5 is also technically coming out in 2015...PC release!  I think!  Maybe even in a couple days.

I think Stick of Truth may actually be my 2014 game of the year.  People pooh-poohed it as a not serious RPG, but I loved every damn minute of it.  Shadows of Mordor doesn't win because I simply stopped playing it for some reason.  I also played a shitload of FTL (I don't know when it actually came out).  That is one of those games I feel that everyone should play.

2014 was a fucking awesome year for non-AAA RPGs. Div:OS, Dragonfall (and DC), and Blackguards are some of the best RPGs I've played in a decade, and Grimrock 2 is pretty neat (not my type of game, though). Hell, even Lords of Xulima is decent. Valkyria Chronicles and Trails in the Sky weren't too bad if you're into jrpgs on the PC....

e: i spel gud

Shadow of Mordor gets the "Will Cause Great Games To Be Made In Five Years" award, as well as the less-auspicious "Monolith?  Really?" award.  I really liked that Nemesis system but... not much else going on there.

Destiny only gets the "More Fun Than Halo" award, which was also given to Divinity:OS and my penis.

Dragon Age: Inquisition gets the "This Looks Awesome" award, as well as the "This Will Take Many Hours Or YouTube To See The Ending" award, and the "I Seem To Be Playing The Multiplayer A Lot" award.  Possibly Game Of The Year if you count the awards.

I probably need to spend some time on Zetor's list.

Unfortunately it gets the "Says EA on the Box Award" as well, which removes it from winning any other award.

OK, so four awards.  Even better.

I'm pretty sure I play way too much Destiny for my opinion to be taken seriously.

This is what we've got to look forward to for the rest of Q1 (also known as "Shit, we need to get this game out by the end of the fiscal year!").
I've left out the PS3 and Vita Weeaboo jank that's coming out. I assume if one is into that kind of thing, there's probably some forum on the deep web somewhere for discussing that stuff.
1/3 of the games listed are HD remakes or ports to current gen systems.

January 20th

Saints Row IV: Re-Elected + Gat out of Hell - PS4, XB1
Saints Row IV ported to current gen consoles with all the DLC included.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1CvOVmc-KY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1CvOVmc-KY)

Resident Evil HD Remaster - PC, PS3, PS4, 360, XB1
Yeah I'll probably pick this up at some point. It's still an up-resed port of a 13 year old game that itself is a remake of a game that is now 19 years old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyqrz6xuxN4 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyqrz6xuxN4)

January 23rd

Grey Goo - PC
New RTS from Petroglyph. The mechanics of the titular Grey Goo faction seem to be one of the game's selling points.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dShqN1Zrms (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dShqN1Zrms)

January 27th

Dying Light - PC, PS4, XB1
Techland's follow-up to Dead Island. This time with parkour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W1YxFJKl28 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W1YxFJKl28)

January 29th

Heroes of Might and Magic III HD Edition - PC
Ubisoft updates a 16 year old game with slightly better graphics. It wouldn't be surprising if they put in towers you have to climb also.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrRr0DMnBc4 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrRr0DMnBc4)


Cities XXL - PC
I guess it's probably not worse than that last SimCity game.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cities+xxl (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cities+xxl)

February 10th

Evolve - PC, PS4, XB1
The Left4Dead creators new 4v1 shooter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omDW-Ie67-k (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omDW-Ie67-k)

February 13th

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D - 3DS
It's Majora's Mask. On the 3DS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DGWKAdIKcc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DGWKAdIKcc)

February 17th

Totat War: Atilla - PC
Someone, somewhere still cares about this series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-hoMr44MdY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-hoMr44MdY)

DEAD OR ALIVE 5  Last Round - PS4, XB1
Someone, somewhere still cares about... ok probably not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WVSgthvG0A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WVSgthvG0A)

February 20th

The Order: 1886 - PS4
SCE Santa Monica Studio teams up with the guys that made the God of War PSP games to release this generic looking third person shooting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s4t4X8hiac (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s4t4X8hiac)

Kirby & The Rainbow Curse - Wii U
If you like Kirby games I assume you'll like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMROhx08Mnw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMROhx08Mnw)

February 27th

Trainz: A New Era - PC
Yep.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_9SVgeOiVY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_9SVgeOiVY)

March 10th

Story of Seasons - 3DS
From the developers of the Harvest Moon games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ5SxW6xDoo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ5SxW6xDoo)

Etrian Mystery Dungeon - 3DS
Atlus. Etrian Odyssey. Mystery Dungeon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Snpt2HKhXV0 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Snpt2HKhXV0)

Mario Party 10 - Wii U
Might belong in the shit board games thread.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L69Z39bgdU4 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L69Z39bgdU4)

March 17th

Final Fantasy Type-0 HD - PS4, XB1
If you want an HD port of a PSP game that was originally designed with mobile in mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X5krdtd6yU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X5krdtd6yU)

Battlefield Hardline - PC, PS4, XB1, PS3, 360
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfOEmtppbYE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfOEmtppbYE)

Project Cars - PC, PS4, XB1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH0ntsg9g9w (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH0ntsg9g9w)

March 24th

GTA V - PC
Couldn't find any PC specific footage.

Bloodborne - PS4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHT2RSD5GAM (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHT2RSD5GAM)

March 26th

Pillars of Eternity - PC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfz0hu8Zjqg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfz0hu8Zjqg)

It should be noted that what I've heard of Type-0 from people who've played the fan-patched PSP version has been pretty positive.

It's also an HD port of a PSP game the West never got, so that accounts for something at least.

Yeah, I've heard good things about it. I saw that footage though and it looked pretty horrible. Seems like an odd fit for consoles.

Almost anything can fit in the enormous gaps between good console games in 2014-2015.

Lack of weeaboo jank means lack of interest in list.

That also.  I don't know where the weeaboo forum is, though.

Me neither. /v/ maybe, but that place is kind of a cesspit, even by 4chan standards.

There's also the Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires game coming out either late January or late February, on the main consoles and PC (Steam)! I'm actually likely to buy that for my guilty pleasure purchase of the year. I know.. Dynasty Warriors, but I find it an enjoyable button masher for when I want to play a button masher and its the closest thing I'll get to a new Romance of the Three Kingdoms (I still play 11 occasionally).

Saints Row:  Gat out of hell is only 5 bucks at gamestop with digital download.  Not sure if it is supposed to be that way but it is.

http://www.gamestop.com/pc/games/saints-row-gat-out-of-hell/118076

Their online store is broken :oh_i_see:

(Gives error when trying to pay by PayPal).

I used my card earlier and it worked.  Maybe just a paypal thing?

Could be. First time I tried the PayPal button I got an error from PayPal about an obsolete bookmark. And there's also an extra redirect in the checkout flow that goes to some random dodgy site right after the age verification that might be messing things up.

Sunless Sea is coming out February 5th. Bloodborne March 24th. Looks like I'm all set up until at least May.

Just go to the Vita section on the coming soon page of any game retailer for that stuff. You can find GOTY contenders like Criminal Girls Invite Only, and not one, but two Idea Factory games with Hyper in the title (there's a third one listed also but sadly isn't coming out until May). If you're more of a console gamer, the PS3 has you covered with the amazingly titled Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late. If that has too much actual gameplay in it, Aksys is also releasing the "it's more than just a visual novel" Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters (also available on Vita). There's also The Awakened Fate Ultimatum. I'd tell you what it's about but Gamestop put in a description of a Persona game instead by accident, and apparently the only person who noticed is the one guy who posted a comment on that page.

I knew about both of the Nep Nep games and Criminal Girls, but hadn't heard of Under Night. Awful title but the game actually looks good.

When talking purely about gameplay, Idea Factory would easily rank in the top 3 for the worst companies in gaming.