Coint and Plick 2013 - The Sixth Annual ILX Video Game Poll

i voted for that!

That SSX GIF is killer! Nicely done, Z S.

http://i47.tinypic.com/264newp.gif
#39: Dear Esther – PC – 16 pts – 1 vote - 1 top game votes

http://www.pageofreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/Dear-Esther1.jpg

Official Game Site

Metacritic

Gameplay Video

http://cdni.wired.co.uk/620x413/a_c/2012-02-13_00004.png

Brainy Gamer: Dear Eisenstein

PopMatters - Isolation in Gaming

Postmortem

The Thin Play of Dear Esther

”Speedrun”

Nightmare Mode: The Wonderful Accessibility of Dear Esther

Dear Esteban

Soundtrack

http://www.primagames.com/media/images/games/hub/hero/dear-esther.jpg

http://i47.tinypic.com/9srl3s.gif
#38: Hotline Miami – PC – 16 pts – 3 votes

http://gamingirresponsibly.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Hotline-Miami-Logo-Small.png

Official Game Site

Metacritic

Gameplay Video

http://thecontrolleronline.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Hotline-Miami.jpg

Errant Signal

Zero Punctuation

Wreck-It Richard

Dev Interview

Soundtrack

http://25.media.tumblr.com/f125fa78bbab68f320e8a8cb10880917/tumblr_meoxcscnY51qbqo3ao1_1280.jpg

WillM: The flip side of the Fez coin. I didn't get too far, like Fez. I didn't quite love the gameplay. I thought the overt story bits were so super hokey. But there was something about the feel of it. Again, probably the music and the visuals and the pacing of the whole thing. the whole game feels like the sticky floor of a movie theatre. Kind of gross, kind of foreign, best not to think about it too much.

#37: Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward – 3DS – 18 pts – 2 votes - Top 3DS Game

http://www.technologytell.com/gaming/files/2012/11/zero-escape-virtues-last-reward-e1352227187810.jpg

Official Game Site

Metacritic

Gameplay Video

http://cdn.dualshockers.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Zero-Escape-Virtues-Last-Reward_2012_10-22-12_003.jpg_600.jpg

Quarter to Three

Dev Interview

YouTube Soundtrack Playlist

”Why ZE:VLR should be Game of the Year”

http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/8/85333/2361540-zero_escape_vol._2__virtue_s_last_reward__17_.jpg

if: I loved 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors. The sequel most importantly keeps the general sadistic Crystal Maze approach, and also removes most of the annoyances in mechanics terms, has some particularly clever puzzles and ups the scale and complexity of the story to this amazing meta thing with hilarious/stunning twists everywhere. The prose is still overwrought but when you don't have to read it several times it doesn't seem a bit issue All of which makes it all the more annoying in the few occasions where it also takes the dubious innuendo/character design that infected the first game in places and puts much more uncomfortable needless sexism into the mouth of the first person main character.

lamp: In the movies of my childhood the heroes
after skilled swordplay and moral victories
leave with absolutely nothing
to do for the rest of their lives

http://i47.tinypic.com/awxi4k.gif
#33 (Tie): Motorstorm: RC – PSVita – 20 pts - 1 vote - Top PSVita Game

http://beefjack.com/files/2012/02/motorstorm-RC-review.jpg

Official Game Site

Metacritic

Gameplay Video

http://roxarmy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/motorstorm-rc-vita1.jpg

Dev Interview

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7ocDzS84eRg/T1gBJDzhcFI/AAAAAAAAEwg/Z_YaMfatzf8/s1600/MotorstormRC2.jpg

JCL: Top-down, remote control car racer with tons of content and challenge. For some reason, I feel like this game has been over-looked, but damn, it’s really good. If only it had online multiplayer, it could have been perfect.

http://i.imgur.com/iJ8gDd9.gif
#33 (Tie): Sine Mora – PSN, XBLA – 20 pts - 1 vote

http://bulk2.destructoid.com/ul/224060-review-sine-mora/SM_screenshot_3-620x.jpg

Official Game Site

Metacritic

Gameplay Video

http://www.onlysp.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Sine_Mora.jpg

Quarter to Three

YouTube Soundtrack Playlist

http://cdnl.complex.com/m.php/CHANNEL_IMAGES/VIDEO_GAMES/2012/06/the-top-25-video-games-of-2012-so-far/sine_mora_new_screenshot_010_270369.jpg

JCL: Probably the best looking STG ever. The soundtrack, by Akira Yamaoka, is wonderful. Also just a really solid game.

http://i48.tinypic.com/5y9uhd.gif
#33 (Tie): Star Wars: The Old Republic – PC – 20 pts - 1 vote

http://www.universostarwars.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/star-wars-the-old-republic-gameplay.jpg

Official Game Site

Metacritic

Gameplay Video

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-m4DAgQcR7ns/TvCCYh651_I/AAAAAAAAAd4/BBFOdw2dUTw/s1600/Star+Wars+Old+Republic+gameplay.jpg

How I Got Through SW:TOR

Zero Punctuation

Gamasutra: The Burning of SW: TOR

Darth Hater

Late 2012 Dev Interview

Soundtrack

Dev Blogs

Tanking the Old Republic

http://www.gamersbliss.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Star-Wars-The-Old-Republic-Legacy-Update-Tauntaun-Pet-600x300.png

Zora: I know this has been out a while, but you said MMOs were ok, and I only started playing it in 2012. What can I say about it? It's an MMO, it's star wars, it's exactly what you'd expect, but... just a little better. Well written, well voiced, nicely balanced. The PvP lets it down something fierce, because it all takes place in instanced scenarios, and they are really, really well designed but there's only so many of them, so it suffers from that paintball problem all instanced PvP is subject to. Coming from years of open-world PvP in Dark Age of Camelot and EVE Online, the instances are repetitive, frenetic, and ultimately feel a bit silly. Think of this as a multiplayer adventure game, however, and it's not going to disappoint.

http://i49.tinypic.com/110avrd.gif
#33 (Tie): Unchained Blades – PSP – 20 pts - 1 vote - Top PSP Game

http://gamingbolt.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/UnchainedBladesSlider.jpg

Official Game Site

Metacritic

Gameplay Video

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2013/01/ucb.jpg

Dev Interview

YouTube Soundtrack Playlist

XSEED Blog - How To Do What You Love (If Your Love Is Nerdy and Awesome)

XSEED in 2013

http://www.gameplox.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/unchained-blades1.jpg

lamp: so much depends
upon
the way you
level

so basically this list is making me feel bad about how few games i played this year.

u totally wasted your life not playing games dude

Amazed that nobody else gave Dear Esther a vote! Best thing I played all year. By dropping everything else gamey and just letting itself be a journey through a landscape, it really achieved what in truth I think lots of games aim for but then fall short of, because they then trip up over their own combat or menus or levelling or whatever - it felt a real visit to a real place.

I really enjoyed the writing and voice acting and experimental story structure too. But they all felt secondary to that sense of place.

xp they're all out there and readily available and MUCH CHEAPER now, so rejoice!

it was a pretty solid year, more than i realized, as i often feel during these yearly recaps

JCL votes in character, nice

SSX was a lot of fun, and didn't overstay its welcome. wish it had a better soundtrack, better multiplayer and a little more variance in the levels, but i really appreciate what was there for a "fresh" start

I would've rated Hotline Miami higher if I'd played a little more before voting, it's fucking great btw. i mean really great, easily on par with the best stuff I played this year. deserves to be a LOT higher in this list.

recommended review: http://hardcoregaming101.net/hotlinemiami/hotlinemiami.htm

haha forx did you just link a couple of random XSEED-related blog posts in the 'unchained blades' entry??

seemed appropriate. i like what they do but it's all of one color, isn't it?

i think theres probably a greater aesthetic/cultural consistency than there is in gameplay

Infectonator and Rebuild are ace.

I've just installed Super Monsters Ate My Condo on my iPod, but it looks like the sort of thing I'll enjoy for a while despite being absolutely shit at it, then give up in the not-so-distant future. I can't even imagine how you guys are getting such high scores.

Dear Esther looks AMAZING and right up my alley, I might spend some of my birthday money on it.

Sine Mora OMG I waaaant it
I always forget about 2D space shooters and then they appear

emil.y: Super MAMC is all about appropriate boost selection once you've unlocked all of them. There are a few that look like they will be indispensable at first that turn out to be kind of terrible and others whose possibilities explode once you start using the monsters' powers more effectively. Scoring high in the game is all dependent upon extending the gameplay time and raising your multiplier; once you unlock enough of the starting boosts where you can begin focusing on that (and making chain combos) you'll find it very hard to score less than a billion points in a game.

For example, a strategy I like is choosing the "double pink condo" boost, where every time, pig and multiplier condo you create for the first 15 seconds creates a double and then creating and feeding bronzes and silvers to the blue monster, who doubles the value of all pink condos matched, right at the beginning of the game. If you can get your matches right and you are lucky with chains, you can end up with 5 minutes of time on the clock and a multiplier that's pushing 300 after the first 15 seconds of play. If you can then balance between making matches with time condos while blue's power is active and activating yellow before going into Megazone, you will find that every time you launch Megazone you can rack up over a billion points. Then it becomes a game of "how long can I keep this going" wrt combos and keeping blue active as long as possible.

xxp yeah, that's what i mean by color i guess

My high is 376 million. And I thought I was doing good.

I've settled on using the peace, long combo and double pink boosts as my go-tos; I think if I swapped out the peace boost for either the dog or the cat I could probably take my baseline score up to the next level

also I play this game compulsively

how do you "afford" to use the boosts though? seems like you'd only be able to use them once every few games, and the rest of the time save up money

My money management strategy for the first 30 "levels" of the game was to only use the peace boost and to avoid events until I had over 10,000 gold; then I added another cheap boost and kept playing until I could reliably make 1000 gold per game, at which point I added a third cheap boost. I would also take whatever free boost I won on the wheel.

So, for a while until I built up my bank, I only played with peace, yellow, and +10 multiplier and would regularly end the game with 1000+ gold, which when added to the incidental gold you make during the game and the bonus gold you can win on the wheel, meant that I was always coming out positive in the coins. I recently switched to long combo/peace/double pink, which is 2000 gold, and have been reliably scoring 1800-2100 gold at the end of the game which has kept me at about the break even point while I work on figuring out how to get to the trillion mark. If I get too low in funds due to a string of bad games, I just go back down to the peace boost and play some games to get my bank back up.

in mamc i always am held back by not wanting to feed my bronze/silver/gold/etc to the monsters because i want to build more of them

its like i kinda keep refusing to play it correctly

haha yeah, I understand that; the realization that I could make more points by feeding bronzes to blue rather than hoarding them was a long time coming, mostly because in the original MAMC blue was useless except for in very specific situations where I was likely to not even have him swapped in

doesnt the blue do the same thing?

keep the tower straight no matter what?

in the original, blue keeps the tower from falling and that's it
in super MAMC, blue keeps the tower from falling AND doubles any time bonus, coin bonus or multiplier bonus you get from matching pink condos

he basically went from being the least useful monster to the most useful IMO; he's the only one that radically boosts your ability to extend the time limit on the game, giving you more of an opportunity to score points

ohhhhhhh

http://i.imgur.com/rTFDA1m.gif
#32: Atelier Meruru: The Apprentice of Arland – PS3 – 20 pts - 1 vote - 1 top game votes

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7025/6842904475_d3a60afdb9_z.jpg

Official Game Site

Metacritic

Gameplay Video

http://m5.paperblog.com/i/24/240244/ss-reviews-atelier-meruru-the-apprentice-of-a-L-V1SRlK.jpeg

Localization Interview

RPGamer

Coming to Vita

http://d1vr6n66ssr06c.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Atelier-Meruru-Apprentice-of-Arland-gallery-01.jpg

zappi: If you can get past the ubertwee cutesy graphics (and switch off the English dub, ugh nobody needs to hear that garbage) there is a really fun worldbuilding JPRG underneath. Oh and half the game is spent tooling around in menus combining items to create new ones through alchemy.

that was the worst gif, right there

http://i.imgur.com/evELBtU.gif
#30 (Tie): Far Cry 3 – PS3, X360, PC – 20 pts – 2 votes

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02413/Far-Cry-3-cover_2413312b.jpg

Official Game Site

Metacritic

Gameplay Video

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18at7esoy8pp7jpg/xlarge.jpg

Zero Punctuation

Quarter to Three

I Broke Far Cry 3

California Literary Review

Author Interview

Producer Interview

YouTube Soundtrack Playlist

http://www.capsulecomputers.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Farcry-3-Story-Trailer-Screenshot-01-600x336.png

The Crysis/Far Cry/Crytek-in-general thread

Jordan: The best hang-gliding sim of the year.

jjjusten: YES THE STORY IS STUPID PROBABLY. NO I DIDN'T ASK FOR A GAME WHERE MY PROGRESS IS MEASURED BY A TRIBAL TATTOO.
Okay, now that that's out of the way, FC3 a much more enjoyable followup to FC2, with the nice changes as listed here:
1. Your character might be a jerk, but he isn't actually an inherently evil and terrible person.
2. Sound and visual design is as good as it gets. Seriously.
3. Respawning murderous animals makes a lot more sense than respawning guard posts, probably.
4. Lots of diversity in mission design.
5. Great use of vertical space. In a lot of ways, the map feels like Just Cause 2, but with less abject stupidity (dont get me wrong, love that game but wow is it dumb).

serious questoin: is the tribal tattoo/progress bar symmetrical and located directly above the butt?

http://i.imgur.com/xPpkicz.gif
#30 (Tie): Wargames: WOPR – iOS – 20 pts – 2 votes

http://bulk2.destructoid.com/ul/230127-WOPR-Header.jpg

Official Game Site

Metacritic

Gameplay Video

http://www.gametrailers.com/side-mission/files/2012/12/wargames.jpg

Developer Interview

A Brief History of Match Three

http://www.pixelitis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/wargames_wopr.jpg

S. Clover: Wargames certainly profited from a retro tie-in, officially franchised no less! But the story is mainly confined to some clips and dialogue between levels. The rpg-puzzling itself is where the action is at. More than other draw-a-line matchers, there's both scarcity and time constraints in the wargames world. The field is basically littered with ticking bombs, and against a sufficiently powerful opponent you'll always, eventually lose. So play is strategic, but also over quickly. And unlike the steady grind of some other similar games, you can just jump into a level of your choice.

Forksclovetofu: Late to the game on this one but I think it's not unfair to say this is nearly as good as 10000000. http://i.somethingawful.com/forumsystem/emoticons/emot-colbert.gif

tribal tattoo is on the arm because main character IS A TOUGH GUY MAN GODDAMNIT

http://i.imgur.com/maOKvlY.gif
#29: Fairway Solitaire – iOS – 21 pts – 3 votes

http://cdn3.mos.techradar.futurecdn.net//art/features/10%20more%20free%20iPhone%20games%20and%20edits/25-freeway-solitaire-580-90.jpg

Official Game Site

Metacritic

Gameplay Video

http://blog.swagbucks.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/fairway-solitaire-2.jpg

Play Free Online

Dev Interview, Part One

Dev Interview, Part Two

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tmaH7-jeWzM/Tz8iEX3HFYI/AAAAAAAABJc/-0dc7ypf7T4/s640/FairwaySolitaireCheat.png

EZSnappin: Loved the PC version, but the iOS one is better. Once they added the daily challenges I was hooked. Worth that 5 minutes of play each day.

ok to be fair, the game is actually weirdly good at defeating that same mythos as much as celebrating it, but still, dudertown tribal armband thing is dumb as shit

http://i.imgur.com/BjEqiCd.gif
#27 (Tie): I Am Alive – PS3 – 25 pts – 1 vote

http://static9.cdn.ubi.com/en-US/images/IAA_Screenshot_12_620x350tcm1932369.jpg

Official Game Site

Metacritic

Gameplay Video

http://thecontrolleronline.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/i-am-alive-trailer.png

Zero Punctuation

Rock Paper Shotgun

Dev Interview

”Development Disaster”

Soundtrack on Spotify

http://media.t3.com/img/resized/i_/xl_I_Am_Alive_4_624.jpg

come anticipate a TS w/me: infamous Vs. prototype Vs. I am alive

Jordan: I am the only person alive who liked this game. It worked within its limitations so well that it always felt bigger than it was.

http://i.imgur.com/Hv0bt6L.gif
#27 (Tie): Pro Evolution Soccer 2013 – PS3 – 25 pts – 1 vote

http://cdn.pocket-lint.com/images/4S5W/pes-2013-pro-evolution-soccer-2013-review-1.jpg?20120923-193438

Official Game Site

Metacritic

Gameplay Video

http://www.ubergizmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/pes-ps3.jpg

Dev Video Interview

”Brand Manager” Interview

YouTube Soundtrack Playlist

http://screenshots.nl.sftcdn.net/nl/scrn/3342000/3342271/pro-evolution-soccer-2013-02-700x393.png

EZSnappin: The best soccer game got better, primarily through better AI. Remember when we all wanted some of the processing power to go towards better AI? At least one group of developers got the message.

http://i.imgur.com/Fgj9cLp.gif
#26: Puzzle Craft – iOS – 26 pts – 2 votes

http://quickman.gameological.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/120905_sawbuck_puzzlecraft_featured.jpg

Official Game Site

Metacritic

Gameplay Video

http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/feature/180102/PUZZLECRAFTFINAL.jpg

Quarter to Three

Gamasutra: The Evolution of Puzzle Craft

Dev Interview

”Good At Killing Time, Not Good At Usability”

http://www.hookshotinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Puzzle-Craft-1.jpg

Top 25 to come.
Can a fella hear a little enthusiasm?

I know nothing about video games of the 21st century, but I am v much enjoying the rollout and imagining in my head what the games might be.

are any of these games available for free in browser or are all those types of games only on iOS now

Rebuild, Burrito Bison, Infectonator, Fairway Solitaire - all definitely available for free in browser. I played them all as browser games first, but I think most/all were last year or before, hence it being iOS versions that are in this poll.

I cannot even comprehend what would compel anyone to vote for these community sim games. Like, fine, waste your precious hours playing them, I get it. Life is meaningless. But to recommend that practice to others is cruel.

oh thanks xp. i noticed there were a lot more iOS games this year, and i usually use these threads to find new distractions. played Rebuild a while ago, was a fun hour or two.

puzzle craft is another one that i probably would've voted for w/ a bigger ballot but just too small and inconsequential to feel like one of the 10 best games of the year. the 'puzzle' element is practically non-existent too.