It's not as good as Sonic Mania.

Yeah, in fact I'd prefer nothing.

Pie'd it.

What's all this then, your guesses?

1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
2. Super Mario Odyssey
3. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
4. Splatoon 2
5. Sonic Mania

When will you tally the votes up, Elf?  I've got a feeling my votes will be updated well into the new year, as per.  Got Pyre, Nier and Steamworld Dig 2 with an outside chance of making the list for starters.

Update 2:

1. Mario Odyssey
2. Yakuza 0
3. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
4. Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle
5. The End is Nigh
↓6. Sonic Mania
↓7. Nex Machina
↓8. ARMS
↓9. Cuphead
10. What Remains of Edith Finch

Out go Rime and Uncharted LL.  I really liked Rime too.  What a year.

Happy to close for rallying at... end of Feb?

hylian_elf wrote:

When will you tally the votes up, Elf?  I've got a feeling my votes will be updated well into the new year, as per.  Got Pyre, Nier and Steamworld Dig 2 with an outside chance of making the list for starters.

Can I still vote on last years? I've played enough 2016 games now to make a list.

Yes. I’m always happy to update the lists.

Cheers mate, just had a quick look at the thread and realise I need to play The Last Guardian and Mafia 3 first.

End June maybe?

1 Splatoon 2
2 BOTW
3 Mario
4 Nier
5 Golf Story

I'll do my best to come back and vote on these later, but I've had an exceedingly difficult time with games this year and I don't know when i'll get around to play some of the stuff i really want to play. Humour me, then, as I was nonsensical over the stuff I did play, in no particular order, which I may fix later. That's every rule broken I think? Cool. 

Hollow Knight
This game is a journey into a warren of dark interconnected tunnels, where a wrong turn won't necessarily greet you with a blocked path, but a sharp reminder that you're overconfident and under prepared for the big bad world of the Deepnest. It's a Souls game by way of Metroid, the game that arguably set up what Miyazaki later knocked out of the park. Hollow Knight refines Metroid's disparate environs, and makes its artificial world feel all the more real (something I wrote about over on Kotaku) and interconnected. Beyond all those allusions and comparisons, it's also it's own thing. A game that asks you to delve without the immediate crutch of a map, a game of wonderfully animated characters and pixel perfect combat. It's an exceptional experience in many ways, even if its narrative does ultimately ring a little hollow. It would have been nice to see Team Cherry come up with something other than a retread of the Soul's style story, especially when they nailed the feeling of the From Software games without really borrowing much else from them wholesale.

What Remains of Edith Finch
I really need to get back to this one and give it a replay, but my first run through was entirely magical. All of its trickery and gameplay shuffling are all well and good, but they wouldn't work if they weren't draped on a narrative that is well told and resists various readings. It's 100 Years of Solitude by way of ...If On A Winter's Night a Traveller and old, old spectrum artgame thingy Deus Ex Machina - sans the dodgy music. Each vignette is well poised, generally contrasting two disparate elements for great effect. The one every talks about, the Fish Factory, is easily identifiable as the most elaborate and cohesive of all the segments, but I liked the smaller moments such as the Swing, the Photography, and the Bathtub. Unlike Virgina before it, it doesn't rely on dead-headed obfuscation to get you thinking, but simple questions of perspective and the nature of telling stories give it the kind of meat that I don't think games often ever try for. There's nothing pretentious about it, it's just a good and honest.

Super Mario Odyssey 
The big glaring omission on my list will be Breath of the Wild. I am endlessly thankful to the forum for providing me with a Switch, and I am also regretful that my mental state over the year has made Zelda feel like a looming, frightening spectre. It's too vast, and it asks too much of me. I know it's a great game, but it's not a good game for me to play right now. Mario, though, which I buckled and bought when I found an old Game Gift Card when sorting out stuff, was exactly the right size and pace for me. It's breezy checklist mentality chimed with me right when I got it. Instead of asking me to go out and make my own adventure, it brought the fun to me. Every nook and cranny that you can think to explore has been anticipated by Nintendo EPD, which is in itself quite a feat. It has an incredibly varied move set which is ultimately redundant, but for those 30 or so hours it's delightful to barrel around and be rewarded for everything you do. Moons aren't participation medals though, they're fun little bursts of joy that are giving you a thumbs up for playing. Not playing a game, but just playing - as a quick diversion there's an amusing amount of theory in game's academia about how play resists rules and games are built on rules, and I feel like Odyssey's low barrier of entry is a concession to that very idea that play is tougher to discern than people really anticipate it to be - and that's a real triumph these days. I am not confident it is the best Mario game ever, but it's certainly a brilliantly dissonant and whimsical experience from start to finish. 

Destiny 2
I'll not say much on this one because I think it's a failure. However, much like Odyssey, it really worked for me. Daily checklists and routines got me through a rough patch. Playing with friends is enough to rescue any game usually, but I think working out Destiny's Raid over multiple blind runs is something that isn't just "playing with friends", rather it's a unique and impossible to repeat experience. After beating it, everything that followed was pointless. I don't care about the ongoing service of the game, or the arguments surrounding it. I've had my fun, and that's all that matters.

Fortnite: Battle Royale
Given that the world is now Fully Plunkbagged Up and, like a particularly weird case of deja vu, the game seems to have been released for what feels like the third of the fourth time despite me 100% knowing it came out like nine months ago, how do people manage to miss the absolute meteoric rise of a came that toppled all the player charts on Steam, what am I missing here? hang on, sentence structure... this might feel like a poor-man's version. And it is, in many respects. Smaller, narrower in scope, a game carved out of the corpse of one of the three Epic failures this year, also looking like a knock off Team Fortress 2-ass thing. Fortnite should have very little going for it, except it's exceptionally well made, and god, better paced than 90% of the PUBG matches I have seen. Comparisons seem trite because I have not been able to drop the £30 that PUBG demands atop its throne of racist, sexist shitbag streamers, but I like what Fortnite does more than I like the idea of what PUBG does. It's tight and its matches are compelling and punchy. Building, a dumb thing that should be awful, is in fact excellent - it adds so much more to the narrative of each match and the nuances of encountering an enemy. The way your opponents interacts with the map builds tension and dread in such brilliant, entirely silent and almost accidental ways. Turtling is perhaps a little broken at times, but having an enemy approach you by speed building a dang bridge over your position to secure easy headshots, only for you to kill them because you can shoot out the supports from under them with the right fire power is something not replicated elsewhere. It's cartoon chaos, and whilst the long stretches of traversal in PUBG are enticing, I am happy that I can get the B-Movie with bells on version for free, and I am also happy that is very much its own thing. 

Total War: Warhammer 2 
It would be improper to say that I have played this anywhere near enough to see every element of its grand tapestry, but I have seen enough to know its magnificence. TWarhammer2 is a rocket up the ass of strategy games. I've written of my love for TwarWar before now - I think it was my GOTY 2016? - but the dark secret behind that is that it wasn't actually great as a game. It was a fantastic emulation of a world that is now dead to Games Workshop, I world I lived and breathed as a teen, but it suffered from meandering, objectiveless campaign, a dire endgame, and a shitty Strategy Map AI that would always pull stuff you couldn't predict due to its nuts and bolts access to the game's awkward map movement mechanics. TwarWarTwo is as vast and as overbearing as its predecessor, but it also has exquisite campaign pacing. Without labouring over the structure too much, it essentially pits all Four Races against each other to complete 5 rituals and wrest control of a magical portal, at which point a final defence is mounted. Unlike Civ, progress is transparent - you always know who is ahead, who is behind, and what your chances are. You also get to dictate the ritual events when you meet the requirements, chancing your hand by firing them early, or reinforcing but losing precious turns. It's a disgustingly well oiled machine, unctuous and replete with endless quality of life features that do everything in their power to disseminate as much information to you about the state of the game as they can, only hiding things you couldn't feasibly know. 

All of this says nothing of the attention to detail they have lavished on each of the four races - the primal Lizardmen, the squabbling Skaven, the debauched Dark Elves, and the lofty High Elves of Ulthuan. Easily understandable at a glance, every unit bristles with detail and purpose, battlefields are no longer the static lines colliding they were in TwarWar the First, because the four races have at their command incredible warhmachines and beasts that obliterate ranks of troops with devastating blows. Every army has tricks and unit types up their sleeve that serve simple purposes such as flanking and pinning, but in ways that are only fit with the race's themes: whilst the Lizardmen send stealthy Skinks ahead to harry flanks, Skaven can burrow up INTO their flanks with weak units that scatter and disorient foes. The cruel Wytches of the Dark Elves whip themselves up into a bloodfrenzy as incredible shock troops, whilst the High Elves Lothern Seaguard serve the same role whilst also supporting their allies as mid-range archers. These defined personalities map onto the grand strategy level too: as the Skaven armies increase in strength, consuming resources and expanding at a rapid rate, so too does their tendency to betray you and rebel. The Dark Elves stay true to their corsair roots, using slaves as their currency and population buff, whilst also creating giant floating cities that can support armies and bombard enemies from afar. 

Repeating myself from last year, it is a complete Warhammer package. It is breathlessly enthusiastic about its lore, and the attention to detail shines through in every part, from nods and winks in item descriptions, to the way the Lizardmen catch flies with their tongues when they're idle. The ongoing Trilogy is a massive undertaking, and when it is better I don't think there will be a videogame loveletter to a IP as perfectly pitched as the Warhammer series. When Star Wars is getting such short shrift year after year, it's heartening to see a developer that is allowed to translate their adoration of a fictional world into something as expansive and well realised as this. Hopefully in 2018 I can fully commit to second and third attempts at the campaign, because god knows I need next year to have some passion in it.

I've not played PUBG, but Fortnite appeals to me way, way more.

Tempy just reminded me, who was it that owed me a fiver for recommending Virginia?

El Tigro's List of Great Games.

(1) ARMS
Overlooked. This is great fun.

(2) Fortnite

I've played a lot of this. It's great.

(3) For Honor

This was very fun. Could have been great if it launched with dedicated servers.

(4) Sonic Mania

Some great stuff in here. New zones are pretty weak in retrospect and I'm not sure I'd want to see a sequel. A welcome nostalgia trip.

(5) Zelda: BOTW


I've only played this for an hour or so but it's clearly great so deserves a few points.