GB's Vidya 2016: Year In Review

You guys know the drill by now! Every year I give a short review to every video game I beat in the past twelve months, ranking them from least favorite to most favorite as I try to find my favorite video game of the year. Two years ago I played only a handful of games, and last year I played a whole bunch but many of them were small, quick games played more for the blogpost than anything else. This year I focused on "major" games - only nine titles are represented (I have combined two of them into one entry, so there are eight reviews here), but the majority of them were long games I had to sink a lot of hours into. With three Pokemon games, two Ace Attorney games, and another RPG on top of that, I spent a lot of time gaming this year - just not on a lot of different games!

First, lemme just give a shoutout to last year's winner, Robot Arena 2. Just as I was finally tiring of it, I found another mod that completely overhauls the game, introduces a bunch of real-world robot opponents, and basically just breathes new life back into a well-worn game. I still mess around with this game almost daily, if only for a few minutes. Definitely deserved that win last year if I'm still playing the dang thing.

Let's get started.

43 Games I Haven't Reviewed Yet

For years, I've been doing mini-reviews of my video games. I started with the "100 Games" project in January 2013, and since then have done a roundup of everything I beat each year. But that means that some games got left out - ones I didn't include on my initial list.

Not getting on the original 100 Games list doesn't mean these games are bad. On the contrary, I rather enjoyed quite a few of them, and some of them probably deserved to make the list. I never claimed to be good at ranking stuff, as fun as it is.

As usual, only games I cared about enough to see to the end get listed here, and everything I haven't already written about is up for grabs. Sifting through my Backloggery turned up 43 entries' worth of games (a few games are combined into one entry). Instead of trying to rank them, I'll cover them alphabetically.

I've also linked a gameplay video for each game. It's a longplay whenever one is available. Looking at how few games DIDN'T have a complete longplay up on YouTube speaks volumes as to how good longplayers are at doing their job.

GB's Vidya 2015: Year In Review

It's that time again! Every year I make a sequel to my 2012 "100 Games" series by reviewing every single vidya I beat that year. As usual, the only qualification for a game to make the list is that I completed the main objective. Sometimes legit, sometimes I cheese it, whatever - if I saw the end, I put it on the list and talk about it.

After last year's disappointingly short list, I knew I had to step up my gaming. I pulled it off, and this year's list is three times the length of last year's, clocking in at 15 titles. This is, however, still inferior to 2013's 21-strong roster.

Longtime readers will know the drill - I've ranked these games in a rough order from worst to first, but as usual I'm not that great at ranking, although I enjoy doing it - I can usually figure out the worst game and the best game pretty quickly, or at least make tiers, but ordering within a tier is not easy and can often change on a whim. Suffice it to say I consider everything I beat this year save the bottom-ranked game to be at least decent, and the bottom game was at least not offensively bad!

The crop this year is even more old and obscure than usual - 13 of the 15 games are over a decade old, and many of them are over two decades old. I hope to include some more mainstream titles next time, but I do prefer talking about games people don't know about, since you can only write "super mario 64 was a good game" so many times before people stop caring, y'know? Anyway, on with the show.

GB's Vidya 2014: Year in Review

Ouch. I didn't beat too many games this year. Nonetheless, I'm doing my yearly wrapup, ranking, and review!

I only finished five games all year, and two of them were disqualified for reasons you'll soon see. However, I beat two other games very late last year - so late that they missed the last writeup - so they are being added to this year's list, bringing me back to five games. Without further ado, here's the games I beat this year and my opinions on them!

Honorable Mentions: Pokemon Emerald and Crystal
Systems: Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color
Developer: Game Freak
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: RPG
Date Beaten: April 18 and April 22, 2014

Why are they honorable mentions? Because I can't really count them - I technically never beat Pokemon Emerald or Crystal until this year, but I had already beaten the near-identical Ruby, Sapphire, and Gold versions. I generally consider all of those near-identical "versions" to be the same game, so Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald together are all "Pokemon GBA Hoenn" while Gold, Silver, and Crystal are all "Pokemon GBC Johto". Remakes like FireRed and LeafGreen are separate, however, so Omega Ruby will have its time at bat next year.

My Crystal run was a pure nostalgia run, although the ability to speed up play with the emulator made grinding bearable. The highlight of the run was finding a shiny Skarmory and adding it to the team. Later in summer I returned to Crystal and beat Kanto, capping things off with a nice fight against Red.

The Emerald run was... unconventional, thanks to the game being wrung through Pokemon Randomizer. You can get all the details about the upside-down world Ariel was thrust into here.

GB's Vidya 2013: Year In Review

Last year I made the twenty-one post series "GB's 100 Games", wherein I gave short writeups of 100 games I had beaten that I considered to be good or better. Since then, I've beaten over a dozen more video games. I've decided to make a sequel of sorts to 100 Games in the form of a "Year In Review" that gives writeups on every game I beat this year. In addition to that, I'll be putting the games in a rough ranking. Remember, the game can be released in any year, and I can first acquire the game in any year - as long as I first finished the game in 2013, it qualifies for the list.

First, however, to get them out of the way...

Unranked: A Horde of Atari Games
Trying to place all the new Atari 2600 games I played this year would be far too difficult. It's hard enough ranking such old games alongside modern ones as it is - with this many, it'd just be a pain and the list would be littered with them, so they all get shoved here.

Games in bold were played on an actual Atari 2600 with a cartridge. Games in italics were played on my Atari Flashback plug-and-play system.

Atari Climber - A game similar in some respects to Donkey Kong. You must climb from the bottom of the stage to the top, avoiding hazards and scoring points.

Atlantis - You control three cannons and try to shoot down flying ships that want to bomb your city. The cannons cannot aim or move, so timing is literally everything. Nice graphics for the 2600.

Demon Attack - A very similar game to Phoenix. Demon Attack is a static shooter in which you fight wave after wave of "demons". They come in many shapes, but they mostly behave the same.

Dragonfire - In this medieval quest, you alternate between two screens. The first screen is about jumping over and ducking under fireballs to reach a castle. Once there, you gather treasure for points while dodging the attacks of an angry dragon.

Off the Wall - I've never been good at Breakout-type games. Off the Wall is not an exception.

Secret Quest - One of the rare games on Atari that cries out for instructions. I can't give this Zeldaesque game a fair shake because I didn't know what to do a few levels in.

Space Jockey - Space Jockey is hurt by technical limitations - only three enemies are onscreen at once, making the game far too dull. A difficulty option to make the enemies move randomly may help your experience somewhat.

Video Checkers - Not sure how I'm supposed to win. The computer seems to counter my every move. Then again, I don't play much checkers.

Video Chess - Same problem - the computer consistently outfoxed me even on the lowest difficulty. I played chess a lot back in elementary school, and I don't remember being this bad at it.

Yar's Revenge - One of the strongest Atari games I've played. Yar's is more complicated than most Atari games, but it can be figured out pretty quickly, and it's a lot of fun. Once upon a time I had a Game Boy Color version of this game, but I wasn't any good at it and wound up selling the cartridge in a yard sale.

GB's 100 Games: 5-1

I cannot believe I wrote this whole thing nonstop every day (save the one-day Chatzy Madness break). But it's finally over. We've seen good games, bad games, and so-bad-they're-good games. Games I cribbed characters from to make RP characters, games I played in my early childhood, games I played last year. Games I played in an arcade, games I played on compilations, games I played on Virtual Console, games I found at garage sales, at Wal-Mart, at GameStop, got as Christmas presents, the works. Shooting games, fighting games, role-playing games, platform games and beat-em-up games.

In short, a freakin' truckload of vidya, representing the last twenty years of my life.

And now it's time to finally finish it. My favorite five games ever made. Suffice it to say, if anything ever beats these juggernauts I will be so hyped and you will never hear the end of it.

GB's 100 Games: 10-6

We're no longer talking about games that were just fun, or engrossing. We're talking about games that had significant influence on my childhood and teen years. Games I bonded with people over, games that I've memorized up and down, games that have implanted themselves into my subconscious. These are THE video games.

It's the first half of the final ten.

GB's 100 Games: 16-11

We've now reached the games I consider permanent classics. Two are from my childhood and early teen years, but the other three are all relatively recent. Two of them I just played last year. Even though I sometimes feel concerned that I'm losing touch with video games and sometimes go long periods without playing one, games like these remind me that there's no getting off this train I'm on.

Today's update is brought to you by Saralex and Liberty Medical.

GB's 100 Games: 20-16

 
It feels like it's been ages since I began this series, and now the final twenty entries are here. These were the games that truly hooked me. I played them top to bottom and fell in love with their miniature worlds.

Let's begin.

GB's 100 Games: 25-21

 A good mix of the obscure and not-obscure today, including what is probably the highest-rated game on this list that nobody reading has ever heard of.

GB's 100 Games: 30-26

As Nappa would say, "This shit is getting crazy."

We are about to reach the games that were huge parts of my childhood and shaped my gaming preferences and direction. The games that my teen self eagerly discussed on GameFAQs message boards. The games that influence my writing and creative projects.

The game that began the long, tortured, twisting road to the Sarahkin.

It's all here, and the next thirty games are, as far as I'm concerned, some of the all-time greats.

Kick it.

GB's 100 Games: 35-31

As we reach the upper echelons of the 100 Games, we are starting to pass from "games that were pretty great" into "classics". Right now it's a bit of a hazy zone between the two categories.

Five different games from five different systems are the stars of today's installment. And yes, all five systems are from Nintendo. Again, though, a fair mix of the known and the unknown here, plus the highest-rated licensed game!

GB's 100 Games: 40-36

The list continues its' unstoppable march towards the mighty final ten games. As for todays' batch, one of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong.

GB's 100 Games: 45-41

As you've probably guessed from the list so far, I'm a bit of a Nintendo loyalist. I was a Sega fan in the early and mid-90s before Pokemon drove me to Nintendo. In recent years I've been taking advantage of my brother's purchases of a PS2 and Xbox 360 to branch out a bit, but I've always had a connection to family-friendly Nintendo fare, and it makes up the backbone of my collection.

Here, we have five different games from four different time periods - pre-Nintendo, Nintendo, late Nintendo, and the branching-out period. And only two of them are actually Nintendo-produced games, so... variety, I guess?

GB's 100 Games: 50-46

Poop jokes, tanooki tails, robot deathmatches and the best damn photography game ever await you as we return to GB's 100 Games!

Additionally, I think a much better spot to place Mario 64 and Sunshine would be somewhere around here, maybe a tad higher.

GB's 100 Games Intermission: The Bad Game Awards

With 100 Games having reached the halfway point, I'm taking a break from it to shed some light on the opposite end of the spectrum: Games that sucked.

There are many ways a game can suck. Terrible music, poor controls, glitches and bugs interrupting or interfering with gameplay, and most importantly a game that is boring, too easy, too hard, or poorly designed. The existence of Big Dumb Vidya Games not only in my collection but on the list of 100 proves a game can have some blemishes - significant blemishes - and still earn high marks. But if a game is not fun, it has failed as a game.

A game can also be bad by association. If your expectations are high based on the past of the series or the developers, and the game falls short, you may think of it as a "bad game" even if it's not bad. It could be mediocre, or even good, but it was not able to match your expectations. This has happened to me a couple of times.

So with that in mind, let's review three games in three categories: The game that most disappointed me, a game that's so bad it's good, and the outright worst thing I've ever put in a video game system.

GB's 100 Games: 55-51

We're all over the map in today's installment of GB's 100 Games! A game that everyone's heard of, a game that next to nobody's heard of, long entries, short entries, and everything in between.

And remember, U R MR GAY. And a hipster, as well.

GB's 100 Games: 60-56

A pretty motley crew in today's installment. We've got a couple obscure titles, a spinoff, and a port/remake up for evaluation, plus a company famous for doing only one thing finally deciding to make a game that did something else.

GB's 100 Games: 65-61

Another day, another group of five video games I'd like to share. Today's batch includes games from across my entire life, some obscure and some less so.

GB's 100 Games: 70-66

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR Edition.

All five games in today's group are older titles I played for the first time years after they were made, either as very late purchases or in collections. In one case I played a game three full decades after its' release!

Let's get this wagon train a-rolling.