I know this blog is read by a lot of people who don’t keep
up with the world of video games, so I will try to make it relate to normal
people – meaning, people other than me. As someone who has written about games
semi-professionally in the past and is currently pretending to write about
games professionally in my spare time, I feel the need to do what all the
entertainment journalists do – write year-end “best of” lists.
In my case, though, as someone who makes his living
monitoring security equipment for a bank – i.e. not by writing about video games full time – I have very little
free time for actually playing video
games anymore. Where I used to toil away hours learning the intricacies of
every level in Rayman Legends, I now spend my free time trying to come up with
new ways to make my daughter laugh. I wouldn’t trade the latter for the former,
but if I could just add hours to each day, so I could squeeze in both, that’d
be great.
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| Photo courtesy bgr.com |
As it goes now, I pretty much have to decide when it’s
appropriate to ignore my wife and retreat to my man cave/ baby playroom to play
any number of the games I still have yet to complete. Games I play typically
take anywhere from 3 to 40 hours to complete, and I’ve had much more time for
those 3 hour games than for those 40 hour epics this year. Sorry Dragon Age,
your world is massive and gorgeous, but it’s hard for me to dedicate the kind
of attention you demand/ deserve.
So this year has been a particularly challenging one for me
in regards to picking a game of the year. I’ll be completely transparent here.
Most of the games I’ve completed in 2014 were smaller games that require much
less time and much less attention. This has led to me discovering the joy of
mindless, endless mobile games like Flappy Bird, Caveman Pong and Desert
Golfing. These are the sorts of games that require only half your attention and
for only about thirty second stretches at a time. They’re toilet games
basically.
Flappy Bird in particular, really challenged my perception
of what constitutes a “good” game. It stole its art assets from Super Mario
Bros. and it’s so simplistic in its design that I wouldn’t be surprised if Dong
Nguyen created it in less than an hour. Yet, it’s so addictive and, dare I say,
fun to play. It’s the perfect distillation of the way old school games could turn
normal people into masochists.
While we’re on the subject of games that challenged my
perception of “good” – let’s talk
Destiny. If you’re unfamiliar with Destiny, it’s a game made by hundreds of
people at developer Bungie, the company behind the wildly successful Halo
series. It was supposed to be the action gamer’s answer to the also wildly
successful World of Warcraft – a massively multiplayer online game. It was
supposed to usher in a new era of gaming only possible on the fancy new
platforms. These were all expectations that eager fans – myself included –
thrust upon the game before Bungie took the public relations shield off the
final product and we all saw what it really was… much less than we had hoped.
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| Photo courtesy 8bitchamp.com |
Yet it still managed to become a massive success – and for
my friends and I – the game many of us played the most this year. If hours
played was the sole stipulation for game of the year considerations, Destiny
would be mine by a mile. Like Flappy Bird before it, the game just fits my
lifestyle. I could jump in and do any number of activities at any time,
depending on my mood and if my friends were playing, we could keep in touch.
And the core loop of rewarding gameplay still gives me the itch to play even
four months after the initial launch.
I actually had to force myself to stop playing Destiny and
try out other games that I’d heard good things about. Middle-Earth: Shadow of
Mordor was one of those games. I had a hard time getting into it because I was
still recovering from my Destiny hangover, but now that I’ve separated from
Destiny, I am able to appreciate the nuances and innovations that game brings
to the industry at a time when such things have become alarmingly scarce. I
haven’t played enough of it to call it my definitive game of the year, but if
there were an award for “Game I Can’t Wait to Finish Next Year”, it would go to
Shadow of Mordor.
That’s three examples now, in which I’ve unintentionally
crowned games with fake consolation awards – let’s hear it for Flappy Bird,
“Best Toilet Game!” Give it up for Destiny, taking way too long with its
acceptance speech for “Most Hours Played!” And of course we can’t forget Shadow
of Mordor for “Game I Can’t Wait to Finish Next Year!”
What the hell am I doing with my life?
This is really just a one thousand-word way for me to say
that I’m not qualified to choose a game of the year for 2014, so I’m not even
going to try. If you really want to see a bit more about the games I’ve enjoyed
the most this year, check out the game of the year videos I’ve posted in the
last few weeks. They’re all deserving of the top prize, and if I had more time
to focus on games, I would totally tell you the specific one game that rules
them all in 2014, but I can’t.
I appreciate you sticking with me through all this, but
really, that’s the gist of it – my official “Weekend Paper Game of the Year for
2014” is….
All of them.
Check out the video montage below to see all the games I played
on my Playstation 4 in 2014.
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