Y’know what they say, when in Rome, do everything you can to viciously antagonize an old man, waste a poor fool running a gelato shop, and knock out a bunch of CIA agents.

Wait. What?

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This is one of the episodes where I don’t really have a lot more to add to what we discussed in the recording. This usually happens at some point in any Let’s Play, and I’m only surprised it took this long.

Part of that has to do with the fact that we didn’t talk much about why we made many of the comments that we did. For example, I called Madison Saint James “one of the biggest coincidences in the game”, mentioning that she just kinda stumbled onto Alan Parker’s old workstation. That’s part of it, but no where near approaching the whole story.

Same with Marburg. He go into some detail about his role in Alpha Protocol, and who he works for, but we haven’t talked about his plans for Rome, and what we’re going to try to stop.

Hopefully next session, we’ll get far enough in where we can talk about that in more detail.

And here we are, at the Grand Finale. Despite a rocky start, I’m extraordinarily proud of both of this mission and the run as a whole.


I can’t imagine how many people will watching and shout at their computers “The crowbar is just to the left! Why aren’t you going left!?”. That said, I have to admit that I’m glad that it went down in this way, because I got to see an aspect of Hitman that I normally don’t.

And even once I found the crowbar, so that I could find the dagger for the Janus Mission Story, we had an incredible moment where I couldn’t stop getting bodies discovered. It was remarkable the way all the systems seemed to be conspiring against me, and it felt awesome to just change outfits and walk away as if nothing happened.

Even more incredible is that despite the extraordinary level of carnage on display, the rest of the run went smoothly, and I never felt the kind of suspicion or danger you might expect from a security force where a large amount of their co-workers suddenly got murdered by one man. I was genuinely surprised at how resilient the system was in this case, and how everyone went back to their routines after the “danger had passed”, allowing me to continue play normally.

And as for the kills, they were ungodly satisfying. I didn’t realize how badly I wanted a genuinely deserving callback to the funeral in Blood Money until it happened in this recording. They used Ave Maria towards the end in Absolution that felt unearned and out of place. This is not that at all. I couldn’t be happier that I was able to do that on stream.

The other one was excellent too, thought more for the person I was impersonating than for the actual assassination itself. Hearing the constant scare him out of voting in favor by saying that “It’ll be communism” was one of the most darkly hilarious conversations I’ve eavesdropped on in a video game. Even better was evacuating the Constant without any difficulty after leaving the blood to dry. As a said, very few things can evoke that same feeling on complete control in the way that finale march out of the Isle of Sgail did.

Thank you to everyone who took part, either here or on stream. The fact that you all choose to spent your free time here with me is so incredible impactful, and I hope I live up to your expectations. We’ll still be doing all the future Elusive Targets, and expect other games/streams as we move into 2019! 🙂

And now, our Improvisation Run moves from the slums to the suburbs in Whittleton Creek. Separating from the ICA to pursue his own agenda, Agent 47 is out to finish what he started as a little boy.

As I said during the recording, part of me wants to see the version of Hitman 2 where IO leaned more heavily into the idea that Agent 47 is going into this (and the next) mission without ICA backup. I understand why they didn’t do that, but I would have liked to see something like they did with Hokkaido in Hitman 2016. It would be cool to need to reach a certain mastery level before the full suite of item slots, or the ability to smuggle in large items was unlocked.

That said, it was still cool that since the ICA isn’t backing us up, we needed to look for clues as to where the final mission will take place. I think they could have improved on the design, since it does suck to get repeat clues when you’re looking for the last one you need (and I’m very sure that Ark Society robe was supposed to give me my third clue), but it’s a great idea.
The other thing I wanted to talk about it just how glitchy my experience has been with Hitman 2. On top of the hard crash seen on stream, and the save problems that we had last week, I’ve also had issues where loading into a map caused my monitor to go black, requiring me to restart my entire computer to bring it back. Part of it comes back to the budget problem this game had to have had, but it really sucks to see Hitman suffer in that way.

Now that the game’s save system is back online, we can safely continue the Improvisation Run. We return to Mumbai to finish what we started.

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I was surprised at how quickly this run in Mumbai went after last time. Part of it obviously comes down to map knowledge, since I know much more about the level layout and mission stories than I did before.

But part of it is how good Hitman is at informing the player of what’s going on in their surroundings at any given moment. Given any particular screenshot, I would be able to identify exactly what is happening in the shot, even if I didn’t know anything in the map prior to that. Dots over enforcers heads, instinct to see other people through walls, HUD elements to show when players are either trespassing or in a hostile area, and the new picture-and-picture system from Blood Money all make the game incredibly readable.
That said, I’m a little disappointed in how smooth this whole mission went. I want things to be a little chaotic, and this was far too smooth to experience what happens when things go wrong.

Now that I’ve gotten all the positivity of gaming in 2018 out of the way, it’s time to go into the games that left me unsatisfied. As per usual, just because a game is on this list doesn’t make it necessarily bad. All it means is that, either or technical issues or questionable design choices, it left a sour taste in my mouth.
That being said, the disappointments of 2018, presented in random order, are:

Artifact
Holy crap, we’re starting with this? Okay then.
As someone who plays and has played a lot of different card games over the years, the monetization model for Artifact was so obnoxious, and colors the rest of game so much, that despite hearing how fun it is to play, I never want to hand over the $20 necessary to get started. Will Partin over at Waypoint penned an unintentionally damning criticism of it, and to avoid copying his points I would instead encourage you to check it out. In short, there is no way to try the game for free, and no way to acquire cards without spending in some form, either on packs, draft tickets, or on the Steam marketplace.
This is a barrier that not even physical Magic the Gathering puts in place. If you, the reader, went to a local game store, you could ask for a Welcome Deck in MTG, which would be provided to you for free. It’s a starter deck, so it doesn’t have many great cards (as one could say of any starter in any TCG/CCG you could imagine), but it gives you a chance to try the game out before you commit money to it.
I’m not surprised Valve took this approach with Artifact, but I’m certainly disappointed.
THE QUIET MAN
I genuinely have no idea how or why Square Enix greenlit this game, and chose to publish it. No matter what point I am in the game, there is something wrong with what’s going on on screen.
The decision to remove audio from most of the game, while an intriguing idea, is badly executed. Unfortunately, the rest of the package doesn’t do enough to make up for the loss of audio, and I spent most of my first run confused. While spoken lines are strictly necessary to tell a story, other, non-verbal, communication skills like body movements and hand gestures would have gone a long way towards improving the experience. Even worse, this choice was supposedly made to help players empathize with the deaf protagonist, which would be fine if he didn’t clearly understand and respond to the people speaking to him.
On top the that, the game is just sloppy, with loose controls, animations that frequently phase from objects in the world, and a mildly incestuous story that barely makes sense when the audio is introduced in the second playthrough.
At least it was fun to riff on it for a few streams.
Overwatch
I had been playing Overwatch on and off since it was released in May 2016, but as of this summer I have permanently uninstalled the game from my PC. And I have no further interest in continuing to play it.
At a core level, I disagree with many of the most recent design choices, the final straw being what they did to Symmetra. In a full confession, I have difficulty with precise aiming in fast paced shooters, which is why I tend to gravitate towards characters like Reaper, whose shotguns have wide close-range spread, and old Symmetra, whose beam locks onto targets. As of June 2018, this characteristic of Symmetra has been adjusted so that precise aiming of her beam is required, and it no longer locks-on to targets.
As a player, I could overcome my aiming weakness and get better with practice, or choose another character like Mercy or Moira to play a different role using the skill set I already have. However, that’s not what I wanted out of Overwatch. I wanted to play Symmetra because they style, even if not competitive, was fun for me. Similar reworks seem to herald an awkward homogenization in Overwatch’s design in an effort to make every character “viable”, and I cannot continue playing the game if that’s the intended direction.
But more than that, I remember a Rock Paper Shotgun piece that came out right around the announcement of the rework. They referenced a YouTuber names Latif who reviewed the original release of Overwatch from an accessibility standpoint, as a less-abled gamer. He praised how “innovative” Symmetra’s lock-on was for people like him, so that they can still contribute to the team, even if they don’t have the physical ability to aim the way most people can. Not through lack of practice (like me), but due to the way their own body functions.
I think about people like him, and how Overwatch seems to be leaving them behind, and it makes me genuinely sad in a way that hinders my ability to enjoy it anymore.
Fallout 76
This is another one of those games like Artifact that, while I haven’t played it, I exist in a space adjacent to it and I would be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to at least talk about it here.
Listening to people I know play Fallout 76, and reading/watching the stories of people playing, make me question what is going on at Bethesda, and whether or not they truly understand what people enjoy about their flagship games, and that’s before we even get into its many technical issues.
I was already bouncing off the Bethesda bandwagon after Fallout 4. Like Jeff Gerstmann in Giant Bomb, I was growing tired of the bugginess that is common to their games. Further, I was starting to bounce off Bethesda’s core design ethos. When I play one of their games, I want to go on varied and interesting side quests, much like I remember from my time in Oblivion and Fallout 3. Somewhere along the lines, that shift towards a more procedural, systems-driven design focused far too heavily on character growth and fetch quests.
My best experience weren’t the ones hacking away at skeletons or ghouls. They were the moments where I was using a high sneak skill and invisibility to rob bystanders of all their valuables, or voting out the eponymous president of the Republic of Dave. Fallout 76 (and even Fallout 4 to some extent) was made out of the filler, not the meat.
So not only do I look at Fallout 76 with apathy and disinterest, Fallout 76 makes me look at the next Elders Scrolls game with apathy and disinterest.
The Inpatient
I feel bad for Supermassive Games. After Until Dawn, it sometimes feel like they aren’t sure what else they can do. Their follow-up, Hidden Agenda, was an interesting idea built on heavily flawed technology.
With The Inpatient, they attempted to leverage a different tech, Virtual Reality, to tell a prequel story explained why the asylum in Until Dawn exists in its decrepit state. Unlike Moss, I didn’t find that the addition of virtual reality did anything to add to my experience. In fact, I was often taken out the experience thanks to fairly unwieldy controls for navigating the 3D space.
Like A Way Out, this story wasn’t anything to write home about. Unlike A Way Out, it’s gimmicks and characters did nothing on top of that to keep my interested for its relatively short 2-hour runtime.
I can’t help but feel disappointed, even though I probably shouldn’t have been.
Detroit: Become Human
I praised Detroit earlier for the portions of the game revolving the android Connor and his human partner Hank. If their third of the game was all the game had to offer, as they try to solve the cases of Androids going rogue and rebelling against their owners, it could easily be one of my favorite games this year.
Unfortunately, there are the segments with Kara, an android who is trying to escape an abusive owner with his daughter in tow, and Marcus, who leads the android rebellion. Kara has the problem that every playable female character in a David Cage games does: She is a perpetual victim, and exists in an uncomfortable space as a result. Considering how tertiary her entire storyline is to the game’s overall themes, it makes me wonder if there was a point to including her beyond “she’s the lady from the tech demo”.
As for Marcus, the game leans on, and honestly abuses, imagery from the Civil Rights Movement in American history. Everything from Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, to the Million Man March are misappropriated in used in contexts simultaneously pay lip service to their meaning, while disavowing them to “tell a story about Androids”.
To top it off with a ton of unpleasant Holocaust imagery used in a similar manner, it’s no wonder my friends and I were left speechless at the end of our stream series.
Dissidia: Final Fantasy NT
It absolutely hurts to put Dissidia NT on my list of disappointing games. While I certainly had my share of fun playing it casually for the first month or so after release, but I couldn’t help but think of how much more fun I had with the PSP Dissidia games the entire time I was playing.
Bluntly, the decision to move the 1 v 1 combat in the PSP games to a 3 v 3 multiplayer system took a lot away from what made those games enjoyable. It feels terrible to lose a game because someone on my team wasn’t pulling their weight, or the enemy decided to 2 v 1 one of my friends, leaving us exposed.
What made it worst was an incredible cluttered and cumbersome UI, and the on-screen action can be hard to read due to the number of enemies and attacks going off at the same time. Even when I got used to, I still found it difficult to keep focus on any one object/character in view, as the UI takes up most of the screen real estate.
I still want to see a Dissidia on home consoles, but this isn’t the way I want to see it.
Sea of Thieves
I really enjoyed the 2 hours of so I spent playing Sea of Thieves, and I wonder if I’ll ever go back to it now that expansions have been released for the game. Sailing the high seas with my friends, exploring uncharted islands, plundering treasure, and singing sea shanties all the way.
The problem is that, at least when we played it, that was all there was to do. I have no doubt that if I had played much more, my playgroup and I would have quickly grown bored of what was there. Without any sense of reward or progression to sustain what limited content there was, I had no real reason to keep with it.
There was a solid core here, but not enough to do with it.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
At the risk of repeating myself, I think back how much Sam and I loved the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, compare that feeling to my thoughts on the sequels, and wonder just what the hell happened to this IP.
I didn’t realize at the time, but my praise of the 2013 reboot, and my tolerance of its gratuitous death scenes, was contingent upon an unspoken promise: That afterwards, Lara would take up the reigns as Tomb Raider, and begin to grow into a capable and confident hero, similar to her prior incarnation, albeit more grounded.
Yet this never happened. Instead, the third game was billed as the “end to her origin story” and I’m still waiting for Lara Croft to become the Tomb Raider that the box claims her to be. Considering how many unique and interesting directions they could’ve gone with a modern interpretation of one of gaming’s most famous heroines, having three origin stories in a row makes it clear they never intended for her to be anything more than what she was in the 2013 reboot.
What a waste.
Far Cry 5
Well, well, well…. What a game to end this list on.
I’ve already spoken at length about how I feel about Far Cry 5’s core message(whether or not Ubisoft intended to have one), so I won’t speak on that further.
What I will take is how formulaic and mediocre the game felt, even divorced from that context. I can’t think of a single moment in the game’s runtime that I could call a highlight of the experience. Aside from the abysmal ending sequence and the aforementioned article I wrote on it, the first thing that comes to mind is how I mistaking calling the female herald Faith Seed’s name for “Grace Seed” on accident.
With a standalone DLC expansion on the horizon, I find myself wholly disinterested in the Far Cry brand as a whole at this point. It’s just another standard Ubisoft open-world games, and I’ve honestly played enough of those to last a lifetime.
And there you have it. Compared to previous year, I feel like I have more meat for this list than I’m used to. I hope that’s not a sign of years to come.

As I like to say, whenever you see a fascist, you should do their best to kill them, unless they’d get caught. In that case, find someone who won’t get caught and have them do it for you.

With that in mind, of course I would try my hand at the new Elusive Target. Codename: The Revolutionary.
I tend to go into Elusive Targets with more caution than I ordinarily would, given that I only have one chance. While this often manifests in success, it also creates some pretty unwatchable footage. Here’s the one-hour “scouting run” that lead into my final run.

Given my love for the Dishonored games, and immersive sims as a whole, I’m no stranger to randomized positions for key objectives. They can serve as effective tools both to make replays interesting, since the player still needs to discover which of the possible objectives is the “true” objective, or to disincentive tactics like save scumming.
Here in the Elusive Target, the obvious desire is to prevent a reliance on restarting the mission over and over until players can just figure out what to do through trial and error. Considering that the parameter that they only have one chance, which highly incentivizes that same behavior until the run is “locked in”, this seems misguided. I’m not sure what IO was thinking there.
Furthermore, they also forgot that there needs to be a central “quest” to guide players to locate the target’s position. As you saw in the scouting video, I spend most of my time just trying to figure out where he was, and I never even found the third possible location he could be. Much of that frustration could have been easily fixed by providing more clues in the environment (like letting details of the location slip onto the video).
Not a bad ET overall, but more frustrating than it had to be.

The Improvisation Run continues, this time in the slums of Mumbai. And remember, if you want to watch content that this as it’s record live, be sure to follow me on Twitch.


So obviously, this is only a part one. Since I wasn’t able my load my games due to a bug introduced in the patch they released 2 days prior to recording, (This issue has since been fixed.) I couldn’t restart from the last auto-save point, nor could I make any manual saves after completing objectives.

To be clear, the Improvisation Run is not an ironman run. The idea isn’t to run through a level without dying or reloading a save, but rather to discourage abuse of save states, and allow the interlocking systems of the game to run their course.

When playing through story missions normally, I am the kind of person who will save scum to get the desired outcome. For me, this is a way to experience Hitman differently. To see how it copes, and lets me cope, with mistakes. I want to feel the imperfect run, where things don’t go smoothly and I need to work with I have (to “improvise”).

It’s okay when I screw up the Barber opportunity and need to find some other way to kill my target. I don’t need to reload a save when that happens, I just need to roll with the punches. Some of the people in the chat may have felt that they led me astray, but watching how Hitman 2 functions despite that is part of the reason I’m doing this in the first place. Without a stream to keep me honest, I would probably degenerate back into save scumming.

But losing 30 minutes of progress because of one mistake is exactly why I go the route of my self-titled “Improvisation Runs” over a true ironman playthrough. To be honest, I don’t cope well with such a loss of progress, and it shows in this recording. I wasn’t mad, but I was really bummed out about it.

Now that the glitch has been fixed, I will go through and continue my Improv run next time. That said, I am glad that this happened, because it gave me the perfect opportunity to talk about me and the way I play games, so you understand the person at the helm just slightly better.

With a new setup in tow, the Improvisation Run for Hitman 2 continues. Don’t forget to check out my Twitch channel if you want to see these as they are recorded live!

For those of you who are curious, I was able to fight the stream hiccups by switching from OBS to Nvidia Shadowplay, since I use one their GTX 980 graphics card. Since the software would’ve been designed to work with their own graphics card, I figured I’d have more success with it than with the more general use OBS. As you can see, it’s a lot more stable.

Some of my favorite moments in Hitman come from the smallest possible details, like P Powers’s tattoo sleeves. When 47 takes the tattoo artist disguise from him, the first thing to notice is that despite never having tattoos before, 47’s arms are emblazoned with the same tattoos the now knocked out celebrity had. The second thing of note is that the artist’s ink is gone, replaced with smooth skin.

As with the GAMA director’s toupee in Hokkaido, the conclusion is that despite making a career as a famous purveyor of body art, Paul Powers doesn’t have any tattoos of his own, wearing sleeves to keep up his image. With just one little detail, IO unveils so much about a single character, and that’s part of what makes Hitman so good.

While playing through these new missions in Hitman 2, I’ve noticed also that they’ve given Agent 47 a lot more spoken lines, both to better sell the aspect of being a “master of disguise” and to add just a bit of characterization. As I talked briefly about on Twitter, also every line is some death-themed innuendo regarding the situation at hand. If nothing else, everyone’s favorite murder-boy thinks about killing.

They also play up the angle that no one is paying a hint of attention to the fact that this extremely dangerous looking person is somehow just waltzing in and posing as a tattoo artist to the stars, or whatever else he happens to be dressed up as. IO knows how ridiculous this concept is, and they play it up remarkably well.

Another year has past, and with it another assortment of fantastic games. It seems that as the years go by, I find it harder and harder to keep up with the near constant flood. Even if I quit my job and spent all my free time playing, I’d never be able to come close to touching all of the remarkable games that game out in 2018 alone.
That said, there is still a respectable number of games that I did play this year. And, as in previous years, this space is dedicated to the ones that stood out. This list is presented in random order, and just because a game you like doesn’t make this list doesn’t mean it’s bad. Rather, it means it didn’t evoke strong enough feelings from me to make this list, or I just didn’t get around to playing it.
With that said, the highlights for 2018 are:

Deltarune
I was lucky enough to get in on ground zero of the craze that became Undertale before it grew into the phenomenon that it has become. I feel in love with its wonderful cast of characters, and its premise, well before it got lost in a barrage of memes and internet in-jokes.
So when Toby Fox silently released this game around Halloween, out of nowhere, I had to do the same once more. Taking place in an alternate universe from Undertale, Deltarune feels like a logical extension of what made Toby Fox’s magnum opus so great. This time, though, players are given a whole adventuring party of humans and monsters to spare the foes that stand in their way.
Odds are, if you’ve been on Twitter for any length of time, I don’t have to tell you about Deltarune. You already know.
Detroit: Become Human
Good lord, how on Earth did a David Cage game make in onto my highlights list in the year of our Lord 2018.
Those of you who watched the Interactive Friction season on Detroit: Become Human will be familiar with my adoration for Bryan Dechart’s and Clancy Brown’s performances as Connor and Hank respectively. The way the two characters play off each other is so genuine, and the actors clearly had a great time on set.
I may have… strong opinions about the other 2/3rds of Detroit, but this section is so great that I would gladly play a standalone game of Connor and Hank solving cases and fighting crime.
Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom
I wasn’t a fan of the first Ni No Kuni when it came out. I thought the monster capture/recruitment mechanic was completely unnecessary, and a lot of the bosses were more frustrating than fun to fight.
Ni No Kuni 2 fixed that problem, but it kept that same whimsical nature that drew me into the first game. In times like these, I needed that more than ever.
What impressed me even more is that despite clearly being developed for a younger demographic, Ni No Kuni 2 doesn’t shy away from more mature or adult themes like racism, worker exploitation, and what it means to rule. (Waypoint wrote more about it in their coverage of the game.) Some might call it’s outlook naive, but that’s exactly the kind of game I needed at the time.
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
Seeing Odyssey come only a year after Origins made me nervous, especially since franchise fatigue is what I was starting to associate with Assassin’s Creed. Fortunately, Odyssey, while clearly taking much from its predecessor, did a lot to stand out on its own.
Even now, I can think back to some of my exploits in raiding fortresses. It always start out simply enough, stabbing a few guards and trying to hide the bodies as best as I can. Then, something goes wrong… I fail to notice a patrolling guard as I make my move, my carefully aimed sniper shot just misses, or I just decide it’s easier to go in and kill everyone in a bloody spree.
It’s never the reinforcements that cause a problem, on the rare occasions the guards successfully light the signal fire. Those are just extra small fry, not worth fretting over. No, what scares me are my fellow mercenaries. Every witnessed kill, every theft or crime while I’m raiding this fortress adds to the bounty on my head. And a big enough reward attracts the strongest of warriors to join this cascade of mooks on my tail.
Even after I complete my raid, the bounty persists, and I have to decide to wait out the storm, pay off or kill witnesses, or use my notoriety as an opportunity to slay my way through the ranks of mercenaries on my journey to the top. Stories like that mark my time in Odyssey well, and often I deliberately get caught to see these mechanics come into play.
On top of that, the quest to hunt down the Cult of Kosmos is one of the most satisfying Assassin’s Creed has had in a long time. It was delightful to scour the realm for clues as to the identity of each cultist, and stalk them in the open world, and take my chance when I saw the opportunity. It is moments like those the make it clear where Odyssey shines, and it shines bright.
Dragonball FighterZ
Dragonball FighterZ was, to me and my playgroup, more of a year-long event than it was a video game. We played this game together more than we did any other this year. Not only did FighterZ tap into the nostalgia I have for the number of hours I wasted away my youth watching Dragonball Z on Toonami, but it’s a solid fighting game on top of that.
It’s also one of the easiest fighting games to get into right now, devoid of the many overly complex button inputs seen in its contemporaries. Combined with its noticeably lenient demands for timing/execution, it’s hard to recommend a fighting game other than this to get someone into the genre.
But anyone who calls it “simple” is dead wrong. As the likes of GO1 and SonicFoxdemonstrate when they go at it, experts get just as much out of it, if not more, than people like me do. I rarely watch competitive fighting game play, but I tuned in to every Dragonball FighterZ event I could see.
Not only that, this was the game that got me back into Dragonball. I started watching the most recent Dragonball movies and Super because I was playing FighterZ, and I’m glad I did because the Tournament of Power was one of the best storylines this franchise has ever produced.
So thanks to Dragonball FighterZ for both giving me so many great nights with my friends and rekindling a spark I didn’t think I still had.
God of War (2018)
Never, in a million years, would I ever think that I’d begin to show sympathy for Kratos, out of all the characters in gaming, but the new God of War managed to do that.
The latest in the Sad Dad series of video games started by The Last of Us, God of War takes place well after Kratos has killed the Greek Pantheon and caused untold damage in that world. It’s a story about his relationship with his son, Boy, and their journey to fulfill his mother’s dying wish.
At the time, a lot of popular discourse, and even discussion between my friends and I, revolved around the choices to make the entire game one continuous shot. There are no cuts, even during “cutscenes”. Whether people thought it was a mistake, the gold standard we should expect from here on out, or somewhere in between, it was a bold artistic decision, and I can’t imagine how much work went into it.
Beyond that, nothing God of War did was particularly unique in the realm of video games, but it was all polished to a mirror shine. It’s rare to see a game as graphically stunning and technically proficient as this, and that deserves to be commended.
Under Night In-Birth Exe: Late[st]
Though I didn’t give Under Night anywhere near as much time as I’ve given to Dragonball FighterZ, what time I have given it with my playgroup has been an excellent time.
It’s hard to say if I would have given this game the same commitment I gave FighterZ if it was the only game in that slot for me, but the fact that FighterZ did come out really such made such a time sink that much more difficult.
Still, for the few fight nights I spent playing Under Night in good company, it deserves a shout out.
Yakuza 2 Kiwami (and 3-5)
(I know that Yakuza 3, 4, and 5 weren’t released this year, but I played them for the first time in 2018, after I beat Kiwami 2 and I want to mention them in the same breath. Shame I didn’t have time for Yakuza 6: The Song of Life.)
What can I say about the Yakuza series that I didn’t already say about 0 and Kiwami last year? Well, Yakuza has an extraordinary ability to transform otherwise mundane everyday tasks into interesting and varied gameplay.
I have fond memories of playing as Kiryu in Yakuza 5, and spending hours on the taxi driving side missions. Though I only needed to complete a few of them as part of the story, I sat there ferrying people from point A to point B, obeying all the traffic laws and keeping up conversation with my passengers, having a fantastic experience. As odd as that sounds, similar experiences mark each of the games in the series in their own way.
Something also needs to be said for the developers allow players to feel the passage of time from installment to installment. It feels nostalgic to come back to Kamurocho and exploring to see what has changed. The city begins to feel like home, and I found myself learning building placements and street names between games in a way that I never do with most other games. Yakuza offers a sense of continuity and place that’s so rare that I couldn’t help but notice it.
I not only grew fond of Kiryu, Haruka, and the people they work with. I grew fond of the world they inhabit. There’s something special about that.
Magic the Gathering (and MTG Arena) / Eternal
If last year was the year where I dove earnestly into Magic, this year was the one where I began to figure out the best way for me to make the most of the game.
Now that Arena is in Open Beta, and Kaladesh (and Amonkhet) has rotated out, playing Standard feels a lot better than it did last year. The game is in a healthier state with more varied and interesting decks than there used to be.
In addition, I’ve started playing Commander, a 100-card singleton format, with a play group on a semi-regular basis. I find myself thinking about deck construction and matchups far more than I have before, trying to keep my play group competitive, but healthy. We have players who are competitively-minded, and players who are focused more on their decks flavor, and finding a compromise in power level was tricky, but satisfying challenge.
Eternal sits on this list for reason as well, but it also challenged my conceptions of what a card game can be in the digital game. It took the best aspects on Magic, and retooling some of the more irritating mechanics (like the mana system). On top of that, it’s digital nature lets it get use effects that one can’t do in a physical game like Magic (like cloning cards, casting them from the top of your deck, or permanently altering its properties for the duration of a match). I play Arena more often, but I will gladly come back to Eternal.
I’ve learned much about myself, and how I engage with card games relative to other people this year, and I hope to keep learning as I go into 2019.
Spyro: Reignited Trilogy
Though the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy last year was a blast from the past, the Spyro series is my favorite of the two unofficial PlayStation mascot platformers. I had high hopes for this remaster, and Toys For Bob delivered.
I spent so much time on Twitter gawking at the various updates that have been made to the game beyond just pure visual fidelity. So much additional detail and world building has been inserted into the game to make each level feel more like a place. I remember posting a lot about many of the extra background details in the first game alone, like the books in Dark Hollow that make the space feel like a library, or the additional buildings around Gnasty’s World that breathe life into what was once a small metal island surrounded a singular water texture.
And that goes double for the updated character designs. Anyone who was online when the remake came out was inundated with fanart and screencaps of the various dragon designs. It became a phenomenon on its own. (I, myself, also took part in that trend.)
It’s also just fun to explore the much more open (when compared to Crash Bandicoot) levels. Even back then, Spyro has a very tight set of core mechanics that only ever went through marginal upgrades as the series went on. I could go on, but then you’d never stop hearing me gush about things like the long glide on Autumn Plains, the satisfaction of beating Gnasty’s Loot or the Super Bonus Round, and giving Moneybags his due.
SoulCalibur VI
SoulCalibur VI hearkens back to the days I spent way back in elementary school, where my friends would get together at my house and we would spend hours going against each other in versus and 8 v 8 team battles in SoulCalibur 2 and 3. Though there are new systems like Critical and Reversal Edges, picking up the controller brought me right back to those days.
Characters that I used to play heavily back in the day, like Raphael and Talim, felt exactly as I remembered, down to the very specific moves that would vex my friends every time we fought, before both of those characters got nerfed in SoCal 3. This is the best SoulCalibur has felt in a very long time, and I’m so glad to say that in 2018.
While I don’t necessarily need a character creator to get the most out of SoulCalibur, there’s no denying that this is one of the most robust custom character toolkits I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen so many amazing characters, both original and recreations from other properties, that I can’t help but be impressed.
The Soul Still Burns.
Return of the Obra Dinn
Out of all the games I’ve played this year, Return of the Obra Dinn has the distinction of being a game that very uniquely appeals to me. Specifically, to my desire to play detective. Created by Lucas Pope, the creator of Papers, Please, has players assume the role of an insurance adjuster investigating the events of that occurred on the Obra Dinn.
Armed with a magic compass that, when pointed at a dead body, creates a diorama of its final moments, a journal, and a manifest of 60 crew members, the player is tasked with identifying each deceased passenger, and figuring out what happened to them.
What separates this from any other puzzle came is that the game provides minimal guidance when going to solve the mysteries of the Obra Dinn. The player has to instead rely on logical deduction to answer the questions that the game is asking. Brute force has been made less effective as well, since the game only locks in the fate of the Obra Dinn’s crew 3 members at a time.
Giving specific examples would ruin the game, so I can’t get into detail. That said, as someone who is used to being guided through mysteries in games like LA Noire and Murdered: Soul Suspect, it was nice to be have a game trust me to do my own thinking and work through the possibilities on my own.
Marvel’s Spider-man
I know that practically everyone who has played this game has said it, but “This game really makes you feel like Spider-man” is an incredibly accurate statement.
Web swinging has a heft and momentum to it that I can never get enough of. I’ve spent hours just traversing New York City without getting bored. Spider-man is one of the few games where I see that the next story mission is all the way on the other side of the map and don’t react to it. Where I would normally groan at needing to travel all that distance, I relish being able to take advantage of all the many options to stay in the air while maintaining my speed.
On top that, as I was saying when talking with some of my friends, it’s nice to just play as someone who is trying to do good and be a good person, in an age where every character seems to have some shade of gray (much like Ni No Kuni 2, in that respect). Yet, despite that, Peter Parker is, by no means, a flat character. There’s so much believable human drama in this story that I can’t help but be impressed by the writing team.
It’s the best Marvel movie to come out this year, by far.
Celeste
While Celeste is an excellent indie platformer, I want to shout it out for it’s brilliant accessibility options. As Mark Brown discussed in his GameMaker’s Toolkit episode on the subject, the game’s Assist Mode offers so many options for players to make difficult challengers easier for people who are having trouble with the game.
Furthermore, the Assist Mode ties into the game’s core themes of self-love, and learning to reach out for help when you need it.
Octopath Traveler
Up until I launched Octopath Traveler for the first time on my Switch, I didn’t realize how badly I wanted to play a classic Final Fantasy-esque JRPG. It had everything I could ever want: A diverse and interesting cast of playable characters, deep customization through a job class system, and an innovative combat system that rewards smart play and exploitation of enemy weaknesses.
The game isn’t without flaws, but I have fond memories of experimenting with class combination to figure out what would work best for me. In particular, I remember giving Cyrus, the Scholar, who specializes in exploiting elemental weaknesses, the Dancer, who specializes in buffing themselves and their teammates, as a subclass. While the intent was to give him MP regeneration and the Peacock Strut ability to strengthen his magic, I ultimately just started laughing every time his voice actor enthusiastically exclaimed “The Peacock shall STRUT!”.
And while I had a setup that worked for me, what I enjoyed was comparing my party with other people, to see what bizarre and interesting combinations they came up with. Class-based systems like the one in Octopath encourage this kind of customization and experimentation, adding a social element that you rarely find in other JRPGs, despite being a strictly single-player game.
I’m so happy that Octopath did as well as it did, because I could use more games like it.
Valkyria Chronicles 4
I consider Valkyria Chronicles to be one the best games released on the PS3. More than just a graphical marvel, it very seamlessly blended real-time and turn-based strategy into a wonderfully unique RPG experience in what I often describe as “anime World War 2”.
Unfortunately, the subsequent 2 games were developed for the PSP, and that transition to portable, and the restraints of the hardware, destroyed much of the magic the first game captured.
Valkyria 4 represents a form of resurrection for the series, since it’s back on consoles. After a series of failed experiments, the franchise has finally gone back to what made it so good in the first place.
And even more thankfully, all of the degenerate tactics I had mastered over my time in the original Valkyria. I enjoyed giving one of my Scouts defense/attack boosts and having them rush to the enemy base to end the entire battle in a single turn. It’s fun to figure out the best way to angle my tanks and shocktroopers so that they intercept and defeat enemies moving towards my own base. It is everything I’ve wanted and more from a Valkyria Chronicles game for the past 10 years, and there’s something to be said about that.
Monster Hunter: World
I feel bad for Monster Hunter: World. I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of the game, and if it weren’t for all the many games I wanted to spend time with, I might have stuck with it for the long haul.
That’s not to say that I didn’t give the game a fair shake: I spent a good 50 hours slaying, capture, and making meals/equipment out of the various beasts I’ve encountered, both on my own and with friends. I wish I had time to start getting into the end-game, where crafting, character builds, and preparation become so much more relevant, but that just wasn’t in the cards.
Cheers to you, MH:W, and the alternate universe in which I could dedicate more time to you.
Dead Cells
I was on board with Dead Cells while it was still in Early Access, when it was just this Metroidvania/Roguelike hybrid the unlocked more and more equipment and skills for you as you played. Since then, the game has only gotten better.
What struck me while playing through the full release was just how much was changed/added, and how all of those modifications stayed true to the core identity that had been established back when I was playing the Early Access build.
Whereas before each stat corresponded to either weapon damage, item recharge rate, or health (meaning that glass cannon became one of the best possible builds), now each stat scales the damage on a weapon type(s). The addition of mutations, enhancements that can also scale with certain stats, also helps create an environment where players are encouraged to experiment with new and interesting builds and item combinations.
There’s a love and care put into this game that I couldn’t do justice to in words, but shines through every time I open up my Switch on a long trip and start jamming out a few runs.
Hitman 2
As someone who played the 2016 Hitman game on and off for almost a year, and already dumped 45 hours into Hitman 2 (and since I’m streaming it, that will only go up) when it’s only been out for about a month or so, it is obvious to most people who know me that I have a fondness for the series.
I’ve spoken at length about all the things I enjoy about Hitman to such an absurd degree that it feels silly going into detail here, but Hitman is the kind of game I can keep installed on my PC because I know that I will always want to come back to it, even when the content updates eventually dry up.
Whether I’m hiding in plain sight, sneaking around in the shadows, or just barging into the Paris fashion show with an assault rifle in the garb of the Vampire Magician, I will never tire of the ridiculous antics of everyone’s favorite stone-faced murder boy.
Hitman is the gift that keeps on hitting.
Moss
I didn’t get as much mileage out of my VR headset as I would have liked to this year, but games like Moss remind me how much potential there is in VR.
It’s hard to express how being in the world, as a direct observer rather than a third party viewing through a TV, impacts the experience as these woodland animals talk to you, and come to rely on you as a partner of sorts to guide them through their trials and tribulations.
Even watching footage of it doesn’t do it justice, it’s something you have to take part in first hand to truly understand.
A Way Out
There is nothing particular special regarding the actual story of A Way Out. It’s a by-the-numbers jailbreak story, with a decent twist at the end and enough character development for it’s two leads that I did begin to feel some limited emotional investment in them by the time the game was over.
But accepting it for what it is, as a love-letter to those kinds of stories, then it does a good job of that. And as a co-op game, it is genuinely fun to have all sorts of crazy hi-jinks in between these dramatic setpieces (and sometimes within those same setpieces).
I don’t think of the moment where the game transforms into a cheap Uncharted co-op clone at the end of the game when I think of A Way Out. I think of the time I beat my friend in Connect Four while looking for my wife in the hospital, or playing horseshoes when we have an old couple hog-tied and trapped behind a bookshelf when we’re supposed in a hurry to find an escape vehicle.
The game excels at those smaller moments, and they can be worth more than one might imagine.
Vampyr
I don’t know if I can honestly say that Vampyr is a good game, but it is a compelling and unique game that I might recommend regardless.
As I wrote aboutbefore, the most compelling part of Vampyr is the main character’s occupation as a medical doctor, and the juxtaposition, both in story and mechanically, between that and his nature as a blood-sucking vampire. Making the rounds, and checking up on the health and well-being on each district, I am also constantly tempted by that lingering UI element that tells me how much stronger I could become if I just gave in and fed on the people I am sworn to care for.
And as enemies grow stronger with each passing story beat, that temptation only grows. To abstain from the vampire’s basic impulse to feed is to exercise an incredible amount of willpower, and choosing to defy that compulsion has consequences, even if the world around me is better off for it. The game has since been updated to include an easier difficulty setting, but I’ll never forget how Vampyr made me understand the life of the mystical blood sucker mechanically, beyond anything it did in the story.
Prey: Mooncrash
Though this was only a DLC for last year’s Prey, this is compelling enough on its own that I have to shout it out.
It is hard to overstate how innovative it was to combine the best of both run-based roguelikes and immersive sims, which is exactly what Prey: Mooncrash does. The premise of Mooncrash is that players are running a simulation of the last moments in a moon base that was taken over by the Typhon from the first games. Taking the role of 5 survivors of the event, they are tasked with getting all of them to escape in a single run.
The map takes the game general structure, but many aspects of it from how destroyed the environment is to what enemies are patrolling the area change from run to run. While I was gaining a general idea of where I was going and what I was supposed to do from run to run, I still had to adapt and adjust to changing circumstances.
There’s no greater feeling than taking up one character, and using their powers and abilities to not only make sure they escape, but set up the escape of future characters in the same run. And for that, Mooncrash is something I can’t help but recommend.
And there you have it, those were all the games that left a strong positive impression on me this year. Next up, the disappointments list, and oh boy are we in for a few doozies.

A shorter, but very impactful recording this time. We’ve finished up with Taipei and lightly touch on Rome, which we’ll start in earnest next time.

If you want to watch content like this as it’s recorded live, be sure to subscribe to my Twitch channel to be informed when we go live.

The whole issue with Ronald Sung brings up a point that the “newdarkcloud” from 5 years ago didn’t understand as well as I do today, the difference between a plot hole and a character flaw. Way back when we recorded Disclosure Alert, I described Sung’s desire to neither wear a bulletproof vest or call in riot police unless he is given concrete proof of the events against him as a plot hole, when that’s honestly incorrect and unfair.

Ignoring my limited grasp of international politics back then (and honestly, even now), what’s happening isn’t a flaw in the story (at least, not that specific point), but rather a quirk of Sung as a character. As someone who seeks independence from China, he has his position to consider, and that means that he can’t afford to bow down, nor can he afford to look like a brutal dictator to the people who support him. To him, his cause is more important than his life. At the time, I didn’t really understand this, which is why I end coming across as a bit of a fool in retrospect.

Now, that said, even when that particular point is considered, there are problems with the setup. For example, if Omen Deng is so sure Thorton is going to kill Sung, why would he let Thorton into Sung’s office to hand deliver the information in the first place? And if he saw that, why would he continue to suspect him of the crime?

Even worse, considering how important the situation between Taiwan and China is to the whole premise behind the story of the Taipei segment, wouldn’t it be a good idea to talk about it in a bit more detail, with either Scarlet or the people involved? We called it the most “incomplete” hub of the three main ones, and there’s a good reason for that. There’s a solid foundation for a story here, but so much of the connective and emotion issue behind it is missing.

And now that we’re starting Rome, that’s coming into starker relief. Rome is, by far, the most put together of the three. I can’t wait to start talking more about it.
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