The 2021 Tau Awards

 

At time of writing it has just gone midnight and it has become 2022.  To celebrate the new year lets look at the games I played over the last year and give a bunch of fakey award titles to them.  Only games I beat or games that I am currently playing are eligble for a Tau award and you can see the list of games I beat in 2021 over on Twitter and you can see my now playing list over on Discord

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257

Game of the Year

 

Obviously it's Shin Megami Tensei 5.  Once again mainline SMT delivers a top quality product and despite some bullshitty day 1 DLC, it's pretty much everything I could have hoped for.  I bought the Switch specifically for this game and before it's release, I was sort of regretting my purchase but this thing made it all worth it.  Do yourself a favor and go play it 

Best First Playthrough 2021

LISA may have come out in 2014 but I was extremely late to this one but I can't think of a game that I played this year that stuck with me quite as strongly as LISA did.  It's dark, its funny, its challenging, its got crows that are save points that explode when you use them, what more could you possibly want?  Also the soundtrack fucking SLAPS.  The game is like, 7 pounds on Steam so go buy it 

Biggest Liar

This game was a massive piece of shit with its uninteresting story and completely idiotic lead character but the worst offence this game pulls is telling you that repeated deaths will result in a deleted save game.  Well guess what? That's not true.  The dev team had to lie to you to create a sense of tension because the game is so poorly written and poorly made that it can't do it by itself.  Fuck this game

Biggest Dissapointment 

I was pretty interested in Everhood when I first saw it.  It's very clearly trying to do an Undertale but the rhythm game based combat looked like something that was right up my alley.  Playing it was also pretty promising at first too but it's trying so hard to be deep (like Undertale) and mysteries (like Yume Nikki et al) and instead just comes off as pretentious crap.  The soundtrack was good and there are some really strong moments but overall the game felt like a total slog.  If games that have their heads shoved so far up their own arse that they can use their own skulls as periscopes appeal to you, then maybe you'll like it, but I shall not be doing a repeat playthrough of this one in a hurry 

Pleasantest Surprise

So if you look through the Twitter thread you'll notice that this game isn't on there because I'm stupid and forgot to add it to the list when I beat it.  I guess that makes its title in this article also rather appropriate.

I got this game for free off the Epic Game Store and wasn't expecting a lot from it and granted, it's not really anything special.  It's a sort of generic hairy dad game with the hairy dad replaced with a teenage girl and the voice acting is a bit weird but it' rather pleasing visually and I found myself getting pretty attatched to the characters by the end.  Also the game climaxes with you having an all out rat war with the catholic church and that's pretty cool.  Not a masterpiece by any stretch but I was expecting a pile of stinky poop garbage and got something pretty playable that I kept wanting to go back to until I beat it and I'm genuinely happy its getting a sequel. 

Worst Game

I played through many a stinker.  Benbo Quest, Summer of 58, Slender the Arrival, The Tape and a bunch more but none of them were quite as putrid and as unplayable as Bendy and the Ink Machine.  An uninteresting, unscary, slow, boring and buggy mess of a game that did nothing but waste my time and piss me off to no end.  Don't buy this, dont play it even if you get it for free, it's an absolute disgrace to the horror genre and the people who put this out into the world should be ashamed of themselves for creating something so irredeemably vile

Well that's it, that's all I can be bothered to write about this late at night.  I'm now going to wrap up under my sheets and play GOTY Shin Megami Tensei 5 until I fall asleep.  

Happy New Year everyone!

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

 https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

Game of the Year? Who cares?

The end of the year is nearly upon us and you know what this means?  Every single piece of shit website in the world putting up their lists of "best games of 2015!"  Well who fucking cares?  It's not like anyone can agree on what the best game was anyway.

Now, me moaning about this shit doesn't mean that I think 2015 was a bad year for gaming, quite the opposite really, 2015s actually been pretty damn good.  The reason I'm taking time out of my day to moan about GotY articles is because they are so fucking pointless and predictable that without even looking I can guess what some of the winners or nominees are going to be.  Let's just list off a few that will probably get awarded something

Witcher 3
MGS5
Fallout 4
Bloodborne
Batman
Xenoblade X
Mario Maker

just to name a few.  But what do all these games have in common?  Well it's the fact that you already fucking know they are really good.  People have gone to great lengths to talk about these games BECAUSE they are so good, so why the fuck do you need some twat on IGN who couldn't tell a controller from a horse dildo to re-tell you that these games are great?

These articles have exactly one purpose, and that's so fucking kids can brag about how daddy got them GotY for Christmas or whatever?

"Uhh what did you get for Christmas?"
"I got Mario Maker"
"Well that game sucks because my mummy gave me Fallout 4 and THAT was Gamespot's GotY 2015 don't ya know" *smug smug smug*

No one over the age of fucking 15 gives a shit what the game of the year is.  Are people so insecure about their own fucking opinions on games that they need to have them validated by twats writing for big news sites?

But wait, here's the best part!  I promise you, beyond a shadow of a doubt that most of these writers voting on and deciding the best games of 2015 haven't even begin to dig through the thousands of titles that were released in the year.  All these fucking websites are probably happily skipping over a ton of games that got buried under AAA hype or shit that didn't ever get an English release.  Sure, you can name Dancing All Night as 2015s best rhythm game but have ANY of these writers played Chunithm?  Musica?  RevX Beat? the latest versions of IIDX or any other long standing Konami arcade rhythm game?  No of course they fucking haven't.  I imagine that the pool of games that they have enough knowledge about in order to vote on is actually pretty small and that's what really makes these lists a complete waste of time.

Share your favorites with your friends, that's a great idea because maybe your buddy played something that you missed but don't waste your time with these stupid fucking IGN, Gamespot, Polygon fucking stupid lists.  You already know what's on them and you've probably already played them or heard them talked about to death.  Why not go dig through the steam listings or your local game store to see if you can find a hidden 2015 gem?  Seems like a better use of your time then being told that the good thing was good.

Who Cares About VGX?

Here we go again folks!  It's getting to the end of the year, so it's now time once again for everyone to start putting their game of the year lists together!

If anyone doesn't know what VGX is it's some video game award thing hosted by Spike TV and it involves talking about games for a bit, and then announcing a load of awards given to whoever made the best of whatever category they are pushing.  The show is produced by Geoff Keighley, the man known to the masses as "Dorito Pope", so you know it's probably a load of bollocks.

Now when I woke up this morning it was already underway but having a quick look at my twitter turned me right off the whole thing.  The first thing I saw was that Nintendo announced a new Donkey Kong game, which I thought was cool but apparently the rest of the internet was just complaining about it.  The day has come when people are cursing a new DKC game....and that's a sad day.

So aside from the Dorito Pope the whole thing was hosted by Joel Mchale, who I'm not familiar with but he's not much of a game fan by the looks of things.  From what I saw and heard about the goings on, he spent most of his time looking like he didn't want to be there but he did manage to ask a couple of really awkward questions to certain people, which gave me a little chuckle.

Now I have a bit of a problem with these kinds of award shows because the winners are always really really predictable.  The game of the year winner at VGX was, surprise surprise, Grand Theft Auto 5.  Not that I'm saying that there's anything wrong with GTA5, I've not played it yet, it's probably a good game at the very least however the game of the year really can only go to like 1 of maybe 3 games off the top of my head.  Most of the big review sites will probably give their game of the year award to either The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite or Grand Theft Auto 5. 

In fact, I'll make a bet with people right now, for every major gaming site that gives it's GOTY to something different, I'll give £5 to charity, so make sure you email me and make me aware because I'm not going to go hunting for it.

Not that those 3 are bad games, they are all passable titles, well put together with lots of polish and all that jazz but the fact that every gaming site will give their awards to one of these three is a little boring and sort of smells a bit of that whole "paid review" thing that gets talked about sometimes.  I just wish that they would be more open about what their game of the year could be, so that when I watch I don't just fast forward through nominees because I know exactly what they are going to pick.

I heard though that fucking Gone Home of all goddamn things won indie game of the year.  THIS I don't fucking agree with, because it's barely even qualifies as a game.  If you want to tell me that Gone Home was better that Rouge Legacy, Don't Starve, Gunpoint, Antichamber and many others (that's just going off my sidebar) then take your shitty opinion and fuck off out of my face, I reject your awful taste in video games.  I'm not sure if it actually did though, so if I'm wrong I'll be happy to discover that.

I didn't ignore the VGX completely but what I did see seemed low budget, badly made bullshit.  The reveal about DKC was cool and I didn't see the others but the awards were so predictable I ended up closing the tab and playing fucking Gynoug on the Mega Drive.  Do people actually give a flying fuck about these award shows? They know which handful of games is probably going to win so why bother?

Although if the VGX did one thing right it bored me enough to make me get up from my computer and work through my PS3 backlog for a few hours.

My Personal Best Game of 2012

Well it's finally happened, we have stepped in to the new year.

I was hoping to maybe put together a list of the best 5 or so games that I played this year, but I found this to be way more hassle than I thought it would be.  Not really because I'm lazy, and not because games this year were bad or anything like that.  The problem is that everything that came out this year was just pretty forgettable. 

I was talking this over with a friend of mine and when I said "best game of 2012? GO!", it was followed by a long pause and then a "I dunno".  When we sat and thought about it for a while, we couldn't think of a game that either of us had played, released this year, that blew our minds or really stood out.

Still, that doesn't mean I don't have a pick for my personal favourite of the year, it means I just don't have a list.  So, my personal favourite game of the year is........

The Legend of Grimrock for PC!  I found it to be extremely enjoyable and got a kick out of playing an old school dungeon crawl again.  Sure, it wasn't as obnoxiously designed or as difficult as classics in the genre (stuff I like by the way), but it was still a lot of fun and probably the only game from this year that really sticks out in my head.  Also the dungeon editor was a nice feature though I haven't bothered to do anything big in it.

If I had to name a runner up it would be Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition but that technically came out 2011, so I don't really know if it counts or not.  But who cares, PC gamers got to enjoy it and the new content was just swell.

Hopefully 2013 will be a little more memorable