Up until its release, I’d written off Catherine as a niche porno game. While there’s nothing wrong with that if you’re into that scene, that style of game is not for me. As it turns out, this is not that type of experience at all. Instead, it’s equal parts puzzle game and dating simulator. It’s also one of the most unique and awesome games to come out of this generation.
This is one of my backlog shelves. I strategically position them in a way that it is easiest for me to reach while I’m sitting at my gaming desk. I like to think that having those particular games sit in prime shelf space serve as a reminder that I want to get around to these eventually. Between physical and digital releases, I have a few dozen unplayed games lying around.
Having the luxury to play something new to me at a moment’s notice is nice. However, there is a certain point where the expectation of completing a backlog becomes unrealistic.
Just before playing Skyrim for the first time, I watched my brother play Oblivion for an hour. We had a copy that was given to us years ago that we just decided to crack open. Man, that game didn’t age well. Besides the obvious degradation in graphical fidelity, its take on the middle ages appeared very rote and the mechanics looked like Dungeons and Dragons to a fault.
Skyrim blew the doors off of its predecessor and pretty much every other game out there. There wasn’t a game with a world as big, graphics as pretty, or an experience as immersive. For dozens of hours of my life, I thought the game was damn near magical.
How do you follow up one of the greatest games ever made? Well, if you’re Nintendo and you’re trying to create the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, you wait 22 years before making and releasing The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. Exclusively on the Nintendo 3DS, it retraces some of the steps of its predecessor while introducing some of the boldest innovations to the formula yet. The end result is a game that brought out the same child-like joy I felt playing as Link at his 2D best while set in the freshest Zelda adventure in a long time.
The turn-based strategy genre has been largely stagnant for ages. Sure, I greatly enjoy the semi-regular Fire Emblem entries, though there’s surely room in the market for more, right? 2K Games agrees, as they took a huge risk with XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I’m so glad that they did, as its earned a slot in my top 10 games of this generation.
One of the first products to come out as part of the PlayStation 4’s big indie push is Contrast. Created by Compulsion Games, this is a puzzle platformer that forces you to think of shadows in a different light (no pun intended). While it definitely looks cool and has an interesting gameplay hook on paper, some glaring production issues put me off fairly quickly.
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Outside of the fighting game community, most saw Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 as an overpriced DLC pack for the original game. While that argument wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, it was moot in the eyes of the competitive community. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was a game that was scorching hot at tournaments, but contained a number of flaws that stopped it from living up to its full potential. This game addressed all of those faults, from a shortage of characters, to the dreaded DHC glitch. For someone like me who had played hundreds of hours of the original and still hungry for more? This was excellent.
I never understood the insanely high praise that Grand Theft Auto IV got from critics. Sure, it was a great game for its time, but I had some fundamental issues with its story and gameplay that stop me from calling it a masterpiece. I wasn’t much of a Niko Belic fan, whose empty words about chasing the American Dream meant nothing when his in-game actions reflected those of a cold-hearted sociopath. I thought the game’s story took too long to ramp up. I also hated driving in that game, as all of the cars were a nightmare to steer with any sort of precision.
Grand Theft Auto V goes well beyond simply addressing those faults to provides an experience that’s incredible in scope and detail.
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Portal and I didn’t get off on the right foot. My first encounter with it happened in the middle of my brother’s playthrough, where he was already halfway in. I picked up the controller just to try it out. Sure, the concept of creating and traveling through portals was immediately alluring, but I couldn’t have solved that level if my life depended on it. Based on that, I figured that I would always be too dumb for it.
Had I not watched my girlfriend play it from the beginning, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second chance. What a shame that would have been had I gone any longer without it.
I’m experimenting with posting my PS4 videos here. It doesn’t let you spit out to YouTube, but it does let me host it in Facebook. I can’t embed a Facebook player here, but I can link to it. We’ll give it a shot and see how this goes. You don’t even need a Facebook account to watch the video! Magic.
First up, my create-a-character gets away with a few extra steps. Click on the image to see the video!
In Third Person 