Tau's Top 5 Games of 2014

God damn!  It's finally 2015 and I think we have an exciting year ahead for us.  It's been really hard to put out any content recently since New Year is an extremely busy time.  However, I should have a significant increase to my free time in the 2015 so now is a good time to get started on producing all sorts of stuff! 

So let's kick things off with my top 5 games of 2014!  To clarify, I'm only picking off games featured on the list on the right hand side of the page.  There were a ton of great games this year and I'm aware that there are a lot of fantastic titles I didn't get to play due to restraints of time and money so don't freak out if YOUR favorite game isn't on the list.

5) Transistor

Made by the same dudes who gave us Bastion, Transistor was one of those games I had a lot of excitement for prior to release.  While I felt it wasn't quite as good as Bastion, Transistor was fun, stylish and rather challenging if you wanted it to be.

The gameplay was smooth, the music was awesome and it was just about the right length.  I had a few issues with it and the story didn't really pull me in all that well but I had a damn good time fighting the Process through Cloudbank.

4) Dark Souls 2

I loved Dark Souls 2, it was fucking fantastic.  It only comes in at number 4 since I didn't feel it was QUITE as good as Dark Souls for various reasons but it had me hooked really hard from start to finish nonetheless.

While Dark Souls 2 was extremely fun some of the changes made to the game play stripped away part of the challenge that I loved so much which soured me to it a little.  Also the world and over arching plot didn't feel as epic to me as the first game did.  That could be just me but I felt that DS1 had a lot more character than the sequel.

However, these are only little problems that I have and don't ruin the fun of a generally superb game.

3)  Hatsune Miku Project Diva F2nd

Yeah yeah, roll your eyes and call me a weaboo or whatever but I don't give a fuck because this game is AWESOME!  A great rhythm game with a really good selection of great Hatsune Miku (and others) songs.

If you aren't into poppy Japanese music then maybe this game isn't for you but if you don't mind it then there's a really fun game here.  It was also made considerably harder than the 1st one but I really enjoyed the fact that I'm not just breezing through all the songs on extreme like I did before.

It's the kind of game that I keep coming back to.  If I have a spare few minutes to kill I can just load it up and play a song or two then put it down again.  Would recommend for any Vita owner.

2) Shovel Knight

Shovel Knight was so fucking cool, it took ideas from a bunch of different games and just smashed them together and the result is magical.  There's not really all that much to say about Shovel Knight other than it's fucking good and you should go play it.  Fun, challenging, looks great and has a awesome soundtrack, it's the kind of game that everyone should at least try.

1)  South Park: The Stick of Truth

So here it is, my game of 2014.  While it was simplistic in its RPG elements, it made up for with it's character and humor.  The game is really fun to play and it's not just a weak excuse to re-run old South Park jokes for 8 to 10 hours.

While there are plenty of little nods to the show and its long history, Stick of Truth has so much to offer on its own.  I've not genuinely been this tickled by a video game in a long LOOONG time and some moments in the game had me hitting the pause button.

Even if you aren't familiar with South Park I still think you could get a lot out of it.  It's a really fun game with a ton of shit to do and if you go for 100% you'll be at it for a pretty fair amount of time.

I got it during a Steam sale but it's one of the only games I've experienced in a long time worthy of it's full asking price.

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So that's my top 5 for the year.  There's a lot of games that I didn't get round to playing that may have made the list like This War of Mine and Grimrock 2 but I'm gonna be catching up with them pretty soon.

So while you're waiting for the 2015 releases to get going, go play these 5 games, you'll be more than entertained.

Transistor

I remember when I first saw the trailers for Transistor way back when, they blew my goddamn mind and while the end product is highly enjoyable it didn't QUITE live up to my expectations.  That said, I'm a snobby asshole who's hard to please so don't let this opening part turn you away from maybe buying the game.

A long long time ago, in 2011, a developer called Supergiant Games released a title called Bastion.  Bastion was an action RPG about a kid running around a world that was fucked while the story was narrated by a man who might have the worlds sexist voice.  This year saw the release of Transistor which is an action RPG about an extremely classy women running around completely fucked cyberpunk world while her sword narrates the story by way of slightly less sexily voiced man. 

One of Bastions really good points was its plot and one thing I'm rather disappointed with is that when it came to Transistors plot they kind of dropped the ball a little bit.  The basic jist of what's going on is a woman called Red has her voice stolen and she wakes up next to a man who has been impaled by a greatsword.  She takes the sword and goes after the group called the Camarata to get her voice back but it turns out that the sword can absorb peoples data or something so the impaled man talks to her throughout the game and plays the role of communicating with corpses for clues.  While all this is going on the city is being fucked by these robot looking things called the Process so your job isn't only revenge but saving the world too.

While the plot for Transistor isn't particularly bad, I just didn't really care.  A lot of it is quite vague and there's an awful lot of reading to be done if you want to get more back story and stuff like that.  The plot didn't compel me enough to really get into all the extra tidbits they had put in to flesh out the world and while I wasn't skipping anything I also wasn't really going out of my way to read everything I could about the city of Cloudbank and its inhabitants.  There are also certain elements of the story that make it feel just a little bit unfinished or rushed out.  The big glaring one I recall was with an enemy called "The Spine" who is this big fuck off thing with tentacles that they play up really hard and have its mere presence fuck with the narrators very being and yet after a few battles with it the thing just vanishes and is never spoken of again.

Still, white Transistor's story leaves a little to be desired the game play is absolutely fantastic. Unlike their previous games real time hack and slashy type game play, Transistor opts for a kind of turn based/real time hybrid type thing that actually works really well.  The idea is that you equip the Transistor with 4 skills and you are free to use these skills as much as you like as you run around.  However, by design the skills are quite slow and clunky and if you try to use some of the more powerful moves just out in the open then you are liable to lose a lot of HP.  This is where the turn based mode comes in because upon hitting the space bar you can freeze time and plan a series of attacks and when you finish Red will act out your plan.  You then enter a short cool down phase where your skills are locked so it is up to you to plan your skills and attacks so that your combat efficiency doesn't fall during this time.

The system with the skills is also very cool.  Every skill has 3 types of active, support and passive lets say.  Putting a skill in the active slot is what you do to use it in combat, putting it in the support slot with another skill gives the equipped active skill an enhanced effect and putting it in the passive slot gives you some more general buffs.  Every skill can go inside any slot so you're free to mix and match and try out lots of different combinations which is really cool.  Also for those who weren't as disinterested with the story as me, each skill has a load of back story attached to it that can only be unlocked by equipping it in each slot so if you're the kind of person who has to know EVERYTHING about the inhabitants of Clouback then you are forced to use every skill in every slot at least one time.

There are also these things called Limiters which you can toggle on and off at the save points in order to make the combat harder.  Doing this not only adds a little bit of extra challenge for those who want it but also nets you a higher experience reward and it's a great way to add a little bit of extra spice to the already fun combat.

Transistor is a really good game and I suggest that everyone buys it and supports Supergiant Games because so far they've been making really enjoyable stuff.  It's not QUITE as good as Bastion but I feel that's an unfair comparison because they weren't making a Bastion 2, they were making something original.  So go give it a go, the game play is fun and the sound track is AMAZING.  It's not that highly priced too at £15 so you don't need to break the bank for this fun and pretty well made little indie title.

Why I Enjoy Video Games So Damn Much

The above image was selected for this post because that was the first game I ever owned.

Anyway, over the last couple of weeks there's been a lot of shit going on in the world of gaming.  Almost every day on every site people have been talking about this GamerGate stuff which basically involves a lot of people flinging shit and not really getting anywhere, at least not that I can see at time of writing this article.  Not that the whole issue about women in games and honesty of gaming media isn't a topic worth discussing but there's so much bile involved.  If you take a look through my recent posts then you can even see that it was starting to get to me, where I'm guilty of blogging about all the bullshit and actually getting quite angry about it.  Usually when I rage at stuff it's not REAL rage but this whole situation was getting my pantaloons twisted.

But then I took a step back, stopped reading these fucking "news" sites and forums and I loaded up a game.  I played that game for a good few hours and you know what? I had fun.  The drama over the course of the last two weeks made me forget for just a second why I love this medium and why I play video games.  So in a way of kind of getting myself back on track with what I'm here for and to look a bit sappy on the internet, I thought I'd write this post today about just why I love gaming so damn much.

Gaming is a thing I've been doing since I was 4 years old starting with the Megadrive then going a generation or two backwards before eventually getting my hands on a SNES and subsequently a Saturn/PS1 etc.

As a person I enjoy challenging myself and gaming as an entertainment medium fit that bill entirely.  I could watch a movie or read a book and I enjoyed it, sure, but books and movies never quite gave me the same sense of satisfaction that a game did.  When the characters in a book or a movie succeed, that's because it was written for them to succeed while in a game it felt like the characters success was based on MY input.  Sure the stories were basic and/or shitty but the challenge was there and that's why I personally enjoyed them the most.

Gaming evolved and things started to change, the visuals and technology was getting better and developers were getting better at writing stories.  As I got older games stopped just being about beating a level or overcoming a boss battle but  they were affecting me emotionally as well.  Not only that but there was such variety and every experience I had in a game was a memory made either alone or with friends and they are memories that I cherish.

It's not so much like that now though, over the years I think the game industry has become just a little bit shittier by hitting the mainstream.  Games aren't about innovation and experiences any more as much as they are about making safe shit for the lowest common denominator that will make the most sales.

But that doesn't mean gaming itself is shit, I still love the fuck out of video games.  Nowadays I use them to relax after a long day of work.  I can just sink into a chair and enjoy a game or if I play a shitty one and can come onto this blog and tear it a new asshole so even lowest common denominator bullshit has its place.  Gaming is also that one hobby that all of my friends had and it's that one thing that has kept us all together despite me being halfway across the globe from most of them.  I've heard about lots of people falling out of contact with each other but within my circle of friends we always try to make a little time to have a game of something with each other or collectively get excited or rage at latest gaming news, and that's great.


Don't take this post as an indication of me going soft.  If someone posts something stupid or a game sucks I'm still going to get on my soapbox and yell, tough love and all that.  But games journalists are always going to be shit, they always have and there's always going to be massive dickholes shitting up a given space but just don't forget to enjoy a fucking game once in a while, will ya?

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go play some Transistor, that game rocks!

Hype Train Going So Fast it Might Derail

God damn if I get any more hyped for shit coming out this year I think my eyes are going to burst.

So yesterday I made a post about how much I'm looking forward to Shin Megami Tensei 4, so today we're going for round two with Transistor!

Transistor is a game I know very little about.  All I know is that it's made by the same guys who did Bastion, looks sort of the same gameplay wise as Bastion and I've been told it has the same narrator guy, but I'm not too sure if that one is true.  Anyway the point is, it sort of seems like we're getting another Bastion-esqe game from the same company, and that's awesome!

Bastion blew my god damn mind when I played it a while back, and what this seems to be is that, but in a different setting and with a different story.  You couldn't really ask for anything better, could you?  Supergiant Games made it quite evident with Bastion that they don't fuck about when it comes to writing and setting and the gameplay seems to be a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"

But you don't need me telling you to get hype for this thing, just go watch the trailer and hype yourself up instead!