The Top Ten Video Games I Played in 2016

Last year I wrote that I might not compile this list any more due to life becoming busier and my seeking to enjoy games on their own merit rather than trying to get through as many as possible to write something that probably ten people will read.  Well, life did get busier and I think I did do a better job of enjoying playing through games (and didn’t finish as many), but I still wound up with plenty of fodder for this 5^th-annual tradition.  And so it continues

 

10. Forza Horizon (Xbox 360)

Those who know my tastes probably wouldn’t expect to find a fairly realistic racing game on my list.  Believe me, I’m surprised too.  But Forza Horizon does a great job of making the driving accessible while still fun, thanks to great (adjustable) controls, gorgeous landscapes in an open-world mockup of Colorado, dozens of cool real-world cars, and a thumpin’ soundtrack of licensed rock and electronic music that may have 2012 written all over it but still sounds grteat today.  No matter how easy you have the difficulty set, Horizon doesn’t slow your progress to unlock new events and cars and still makes you feel like a total badass racer, while still being able to sit back and enjoy the drive.

9. South Park: The Stick of Truth (PC)

I watched a fair amount of South Park back in the day but haven’t really since it was one of the few American shows I wanted to watch on German MTV back in 2004.  But man this game.  It pulls no punches and certainly goes to some very uncensored but funny places.  It looks and plays out like a three or four episode arc of the show, but also throws in a good game to boot.  Exploring the town as a fairly open world is a cool experience, and the Paper Mario-inspired battle system is more engaging than those found in many recent JRPGs, though I found it to be fairly easy once I learned to set enemies on fire as much as possible.  Still, this is one of those games that you’d never expect to come together as well as it did, so props to Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and some of my favorite RPG developers at Obsidian for pulling it off.

8. Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call (3DS)

After numerous swings and misses, here is what I would rate as the ultimate Final Fantasy fan service game.  It’s a rhythm game featuring songs from FFs 1 through 14 and several side games such as Final Fantasy Tactics, some of which are more ingrained into my brain than any Top 40 hit from my childhood.  You build a team of characters from all the different games and take them into different game modes that you have tapping, holding, and swiping the touch screen with your stylus in time with the music somewhat similar to Guitar Hero.  You unlock new songs and characters and your characters gain experience and unlock special abilities to give you the edge in tough songs, so there’s always a new reward just around the corner.  I got so hooked and good enough that I cleared all 200+ songs on the hardest difficulty, a completionist feat I rarely do with a game.  If you enjoy rhythm games and have any attachment to the music of Final Fantasy, it’s a no brainer.

 7. Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii)

After a 2015 that was filled with Mario, I thought I’d explore another late-era Nintendo  need to own any, mainly because they get damn hard in the later levels.  DKCR retains that tradition but introduces Super Kong to play levels you die on a lot for you, which no, I’m not ashamed about using.  Besides that, I really enjoyed the inventive level design, colorful graphics, and great music that’s a mix of old arrangements and new stuff.  Fairly often nowadays I’m finding myself pulled towards games where I don’t have to worry about figuring out quests in some open world, and can just focus on beating a few levels to make some solid progress.  Donkey Kong Country Returns fits that bill perfectly.

6. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate (3DS)

Having heard about how awesome this series is supposed to be for years, I finally decided to dip my toes in with this iteration, supposedly the most friendly to newcomers (until MH Generations came out in 2016).  At least with MH4U, I’m not really sure what all the fuss about complexity is about.  It’s actually fairly straightforward at least in comparison to many other games of its ilk.  You take quests to go hunt big monsters that are drawn out boss battles; in between you kill smaller creatures and gather materials to craft better equipment and items that will help you take down the big nasties.  That’s about it.  Combat is action-heavy and you can freely switch between more than a dozen weapons that each have their own gameplay style and do take some practice (they are basically like classes in other games).  Battles are long and require patience, but man, it is a great feeling every time one of the monsters goes down to your blade, or hammer, or bowgun.  It also looks great on the small 3DS screen.  I put over 40 hours into MH4U before mostly moving on to other things (and the difficulty ramping up quite a bit), but I’m sure I’ll be back and wish I had others to play it with, as I’m sure multiplayer is a real blast.  Totally enjoyable solo as well, though.

 

 

5. Puppeteer (PS3)

Another 2D platformer, Puppeteer is a game that consistently surprised and impressed me.  My wife and I played through this entirely together, with me controlling the hero Kutaro and her controlling his helping spirits, and we had a great time.  Puppeteer easily wins best art design of the year, as it is entirely presented as a puppet marionette play with the scenes and stages constantly changing in front of you.  The designers through every setting they can think of at you as you guide Kutaro on his journey, from a pirate ship to a Mexican village to the moon.  Gameplay involves unique cloth-based mechanics as Kutaro uses his magical scissors to climb, traverse, and slice up enemies.  For a game localized from Japan, the dialogue is snappy and performed well, including a sometimes snarky narrator.  Puppeteer is just a great, unique game I’d highly recommend to anyone looking for a family-friendly experience to share with their partner or kids.

4. Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3)

Popular opinion on the FF13 trilogy of games, which I’ve now completed, is deservedly divided.  This one is certainly…different, which I think is why I ended up liking it the most of all three.   It’s a lot less linear and a lot more ugly than the first two games, at times looking like a PS2 game, though that’s clearly because the developers are stretching this game engine in ways it was never intended to be.  As the name suggests, Lightning is back and tasked with saving as many souls as possible before the world ends in a week (to get more into the story than this would require a novella).  She does this by travelling through four huge open world areas and completing many different quests both on the side and while interacting with major story characters from the previous games.  The player has almost total freedom in how and what order to explore and complete the quests, with more time allotted to Lightning the better she does in saving souls.  The battle system is thankfully revamped as well, being much more action-oriented and requiring more reaction than pressing X a lot and occasionally switching paradigms.  I’m certainly glad Square dared to be different with this last entry in the FF13 world, as it resulted in a unique game that found its way this high on my list.

3. The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (GBA)

Hey, listen!  It’s another classic overhead-style Zelda game that I like more than any of the 3D iterations.  Did you like Link to the Past?  Well then, you’ll like this.  Very similar with the added gameplay twist of being able to shrink to microscopic size to work your way through certain areas.  Other than that, it’s just classic Zelda exploration and dungeon-crawling with just that right mix of combat and challenging-but-not-frustrating puzzle solving.  Really there’s not much else to say.  If you like classic Zelda, you know what you’re getting, so go play it.

2. Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen (PS3)

What if a Japanese developer made a 3^rd-person party-oriented Skyrim?  That’s basicallwhat you’re getting with Dragon’s Dogma-a huge fantasy open world to explore with lots of quests and creatures to fight.  Combat really ramps up in intensity when you encounter huge foes that you can actually climb on to attack – crawling up a cyclops to stab it in the eye to bring it down was definitely one of my gaming highlights of the year, though enemies don’t scale in difficulty so eventually those cyclopses become rudimentary foes.  The pawn party system is unique, in they they actually help you out in a fight more than any characters you don’t have any control over that I’ve ever seen and you can even send your pawns on adventures with other players, from which they can gain knowledge that they’ll use to help you.  I also appreciate that, like Monster Hunter, you are free to change classes at any time which lets you explore every play style in the same playthrough (assassin ftw).  I can see what the hype coming from this game’s hardcore fanbase was about, though as with MH, it also wasn’t as difficult as some made it out to be.  Just a fun, open-world experience with some nifty and different mechanics.

1. Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. (3DS)

At times I feel like this game’s biggest advocate, though I’m sure that’s not true in the vast world of the Internet.  Given that I wrote an entire article defending it, I don’t see how I had any choice in making it my game of the year.  Read that article for the full details, but suffice to say this action/strategy hybrid dripping with steampunk goodness and famous characters from American literature got its hooks in me and wouldn't let go.  And then there's that awesome, awesome soundtrack where metal, industrial and orchestral meet in head-bangin' perfection.  Join the task force and help Abe Lincoln ride a giant mech and punch killer aliens in their stupid face.

Thoughts Upon the Electoral College Vote

With today's certification of November's presidential election results by the Electoral College, it is official that come January 20, 2017 America will be living under the presidency of Donald Trump.  The Constitution's framers created the College partially to serve as a last bulwark against the people electing someone spectacularly unfit to serve as President.  This was, of course, before the rise and entrenchment of political parties that quickly came to define how everything operates in American politics.  And while everything that has happened and been revealed since the election suggests that if there were ever a time the College should go against the electoral vote results (but not against a majority of Americans who do not want Trump as President), it is now, but there was simply never any chance the Republican electors would put their country before the chance to install their glorious leader.  I would argue that the Electoral College should be tossed into the trash, but at this point it likely doesn't matter anyway.  There will be a presidential election in 2020, but it will probably be about as "legitimate" as Russia's.

We are now a minority-ruled country.  Whatever happens in the next four years, I will take some small amount of hope in knowing that a majority of Americans did not vote for it.  Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million.  Democrats won the Senate popular vote as well.  They lost the House popular vote but have won it in previous elections while still retaining minority status (2012).  But thanks to the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and the concentration of Democratic voters in urban areas, Republicans will control the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court (due to Senate Republicans deciding that Obama only counts as 7/8ths of a President).  They also only need to control one more set of state legislatures before they can pass Constitutional amendments with abandon.  In other words, whatever happens in the next four years, it's on them.  They will, of course, try to blame everything bad on Obama and/or those Senate Democrats brave enough to stand up in opposition.  So I'd advise you to take stock of where the country is now, December 2016.  Our soldiers aren't dying by the hundreds or thousands in some pointless war.  Violent crime is at its lowest point in decades, despite what Trump will tell you.  The economy is faring relatively well though could certainly be better especially with regards to rising income inequality (which I'm sure will be a top priority of the Trump administration...).  It's certainly leagues better than the economy on the brink of collapse that Obama was handed.  This is the status quo by which the last 8 years should be judged, as well as whatever comes next.

I will never forgive Republican politicians for their support of Trump.  Do we need to remember what they accepted to win control of government?  An astoundingly incompetent candidate who trashed our military, our intelligence agencies, and our decades-long alliances that people served and died to build and protect; mocked the disabled; accused a GOP rival's father of helping to kill JFK, promised startlingly anti-American, authoritarian solutions to often overblown problems that played on peoples' hate and fear of the "other;" and openly admitted to being a sexual predator.  And that was all before the election.  Since then there has been the appointment of a Cabinet filled with the worst-suited people in America for basically every position, outright corruption and conflict-of-interest stories that would get a Democratic President impeached on January 21, the entrenchment and acceptance of a new facts-free reality in which truth and science don't matter against what FreedomEagle.Facebook tells you is the REAL STORY, and the confirmation that a hostile government intervened in our democratic process to elect Trump (had they done this to elect a Democrat during a GOP administration the bombs would already be dropping on Moscow and the candidate would be death row for treason).  None of that was enough for the GOP and its electors to repudiate Trump.  What did they get for their part in this devil's bargain?  The opportunity to take away health insurance from tens of millions, give a bunch more money to rich people, and ensure that people roughly my age and younger will have to work until at least 75 before we have a chance to get a pittance of Social Security and Medicare we will have paid into for fifty years.  How noble of them.

That's not to let Democratic leaders off the hook either.  Incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer already seems ready to strike some deals with Trump.  President Obama, displaying the obliviousness that has been my biggest frustration with him, is peddling the patently ridiculous notion that Trump will undergo a "sobering process" after becoming President and speaks of our values carrying us through, seemingly still ignorant of how Republicans have treated him for 8 years and the fact the Trump rose to political prominence by leading the damn birther movement against him!  Or Bernie Sanders is still out there talking about free college and living wages as if the next four years aren't actually going to be a struggle to maintain every inch of progress we've made since the Great Depression, if not the Civil War.  It's pretty telling when Evan MacMullin, a conservative who I probably disagree with on 90% of policy issues, has emerged as one of the strongest voices in opposition to Trump.

These coming years American democracy, or what's left of it, will be put to the test perhaps like no other time besides the Civil War.  I hope that our media will learn to do its job rather than normalize Trump (as they are already doing), and spin controversial stories into "both sides are just as bad" false narratives, which they have done for decades and enabled Trump and his Russian allies to play them like a fiddle.  I hope that those who supported Trump will come to realize they have been sold a bill of goods, as should be painfully obvious simply by what he has done since the election.  To be honest, I am not very optimistic about these things right now.  Truly dark days lie ahead for our country.  Be strong, be vigilant, take care of yourself and those around you, and get to know people who have vastly different life experiences than you. We will soon be under the rule of the most authoritarian government in American history, but what comes after will be up to us.