Baba Is You

Over the last few weeks I have been doing this series where I recount the games that were important to me during a specific year of the last decade. We have now reached the end and it is time for me to talk about this past year… a year that I seemed to have way more issue narrowing down than the others. I guess as time passes your thoughts galvanize around specific games as they stand the test of time. For this past year everything feels very fresh in my mind, and as a result I just look out at a great year full of a lot of games I enjoyed. For those who have not been following along, here are all of the other posts and links.

Now let’s dig into what is going to prove to be the longest of the posts. I am bad at whittling things down. Let’s start off with a few honorable mentions.

Anthem

This game is a controversial title for this year, and I have a bunch of mixed feelings about it. It was very much an important game to me this year, but also serves as the biggest disappointment. I had been tracking this title since it first showed up at E3 with what was apparently a cobbled together demo reel that did not represent anything close to what the game was like at that moment. We found all of this out after the failed release of the title thanks to a Jason Schreier tell all piece about just how bad the development cycle went. Why I am conflicted is that I loved the game that was there. I loved jetting around in an Iron Man suit and firing down heavy ordinance while bopping things in the head with my electrified mace and then detonating bombs as I jetted away. I want this game to find its feet and turn into what I hope it could be. For the time being however I am not playing it and based on my friends list… no one is given I added hundreds of people from one of the discord communities. I hope in 2020 it can have a resurrection story we will all be proud of, but for now I am giving it an Honorable Mention footnote.

Kind Words

This one is also going on the honorable mention list, largely because it is not really a game at all. It is more of a social experiment where you are placed behind the veil of anonymity and asked to say nice things to strangers. The funny thing is… this almost single-handedly dismantles the greater internet fuckwad theory, which assumes that anonymity leads to toxic behavior. This experience places you in a sandbox and directs you to say nice things…. and it works. I spent a few days messing around with this thoroughly charming “game” and have not touched it since. However if you need something good and pure in your life I highly suggest you checking it out.

For the first real contender of the year we have the insanely charming puzzle game called Baba Is You. The game is deceptively simple and requires you to screw around with what feels like programming logic until you reach the “Is Win” condition. This involves you pushing things around until you can move whatever the “Is You” object over to the “Is Win” condition. This all sounds like madness I am sure until you have played it, but the end result is countless hours of making your way through puzzles that sometimes make you feel like a god damned genius when you finally arrive at the solution. I never quite beat the game but I often times wander away from things when a shiny object enters my field of view. I did however spend an awful lot of time playing this and enjoying every moment.

Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

Remember that whole rule I set out and then violated about not adding expansions to a list? Yeah I am breaking it again because Shadowbringers is quite possibly the best Final Fantasy game I have ever played and also quite possibly the best JRPG. I was enthralled the entire time this expansion was expanding before me and there were several times where it made leaps that I had no clue was going to happen. It also tells a fresh story that I had not really seen in a game like this before that while it in itself is a bunch of remixed elements we have seen, is presented to make something fresh, I still don’t want to dive into the spoilers of this story because it is that damned good and if you have not experienced it before then you absolutely need to do so. Post launch I have fallen back out of habit of logging into Final Fantasy XIV, but at some point I will come back and gobble up the story goodness that has arrived in my passing.

The Outer Worlds

A running theme of this year is about wish fulfillment, and one of the things I have wanted for years is a spiritual successor to Fallout New Vegas. I like Fallout 3 and 4, and think they are good at doing the things that they are doing… but I will always have a deep burning fire in my heart for New Vegas. Outer Worlds is a completely new property set in a dystonian universe where capitalism has gone to its absolute furthest possible nefarious ends. It is a time of monolithic MegaCorps, but they are presented not in a cyberpunk future but instead of one of a space western that draws heavily upon similar genres like the Firefly series. What makes this game shine are its characters and the writing that brings them to life. Parvati is pure and precious and I will fight to my last breath to keep her and her fledgling relationship with Junlei safe.

Jedi Fallen Order

I am being completely honest here that this is a game I never expected to see the light of day. EA has had this habit of killing off anything that looked like a great new Star Wars game in favor of trying to create lootbox hell holes. When this was first announced, I fully expected it to either turn out to be vapor ware or get cancelled. I cannot explain how happy I am to be wrong, and to have what is seemingly the first “Soulsian” game that I have really loved. I am not sure what it is about the specific blend of elements but this is one of the best games of this decade, not just this year. The variable difficulty is key, but so is the way that this game makes you feel like you actually are a Jedi with lots of interesting tools to solve problems as they arise. BD-1 also is the best dog in video games ever, and I want a droid buddy that will sit on my shoulder as I go on adventures.

World of Warcraft Classic

For the longest time I have not really known if World of Warcraft was just a better game back in those early years or if I was simply viewing the world through rose colored glasses. While I have enjoyed a lot of the quality of life improvements, there was something lost along the way and Classic shone a spotlight on that with blaring clarity. While I am not actively playing it for various reasons, I fully expect to return at some day and push my character the rest of the way to 60. I enjoyed this game with my whole being right up until the point that the whole Hong Kong nonsense started and I felt bad for supporting anything made by Blizzard. I’ve stepped down off of that soap box and made my peace, but it was just enough time to knock me out of the rhythm of playing this game. It is still a thoroughly enjoyable experience and I hope I can figure out how to make my brain crave again.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

We are wrapping things up for the year with a bit more of that wish fulfillment. Castlevania Symphony of the Night is quite possibly my favorite game to have ever been developed. So when I heard in 2015 that Koji Igarashi was going to be creating a brand new franchise that would serve as the spiritual successor to this game I loved, I was ready to throw a near infinite amount of money at the screen. At that time it was slotted for a 2017 release and while the game ultimately was two years late, the delays were worth every moment. This is an example of a creator and team listening to the fans and going back to the drawing board to create better ways of delivering the end product. The only blemish however is the Switch release which ultimately still lags behind the quality of the other available platforms. The game itself is a masterpiece of the Metroidvania genre and introduces a brand new setting with its own deeply interesting lore and characters. I am hooked and I am hoping that the game as a whole made enough of a splash to warrant many future adventures. That’s it folks… the end of my series on the games of this past decade. What are your thoughts, and what are some of the games that you felt I missed along the way? Drop me a note in the comments.

Today is going to be the first day back after a lengthy break, and as such I am struggling a little bit to get up and around this morning. Last week was the universal spring break week for Oklahoma schools and with that I opted to take Wednesday through Friday off to spend time with my wife. We went back and forth about taking some sort of a trip, but instead just dealt with a lot of things around the house that needed dealing with. I cleaned and organized my office, she tackled the closet, we got a new rug for the living room, made two trips to my mechanic to fix my drivers side window that was having trouble rolling up, finally dealt with our taxes and didn’t have to pay… and a slew of other small things that filled most of the time I took off. In between all of the running around I got in a fair amount of gaming, with the largest single target being The Division 2.

I am completely in the swing of this game and am slowly pushing my way across the map clearing control points and side missions along the way. At this point I have largely cleared the White House surrounding area, Downtown East, Federal Triangle, East Mall and have been focusing my time on clearing out content in the Southwest area. I am spending 99.9% of my time soloing the content and it is going more or less fairly well. My jam is still some sort of a fast firing single shot rifle and a shotgun to back it up when things get too close. What I am actually using for either of those varies based on what I happen to have seen drop… which is the weird thing about this game is the large number of drops I seem to get that are in no way upgrades to the weapon I was using from 3 levels earlier. However as with any Division game… the really important drops are the ones with a teal border like the one shown above.

Another major accomplishment of the weekend is that I finished the Final Fantasy XIV 4.5 content. I was ONE dungeon away from doing so but Anthem launched and then Division 2… and I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to log in and take care of it. Huge kudos to the awesome player who guided three of us newbies through Ghimlyt Dark and did an excellent job explaining the mechanics. I have to say though… it was a WAY easier dungeon than the Burn… which I think Thalen still needs? I need to check into that and help him out this week if that is the case. All in all I am ready for the next content drop to finally explain how we get from this point… to the point shown in the Full Trailer released at Fanfest Tokyo over the weekend. One of my employees is a super serious raider type… so I will be quizzing him this morning as to his thoughts about what was shown.

Another thing that has been stealing my time… namely the hanging out in bed before going to sleep time… is Baba is You. This is a weird puzzle game where you essentially hack reality and rewrite the rules of the universe to get a win condition. It reminds me of this mix between the old shareware title Paganitsu and Basic Programming logic. Paga was a significant title for me growing up because it fit neatly onto a floppy and we could play it clandestine like from the computer lab at school. Baba Is You is great because so often in puzzle games you get introduced to the mechanics and then they simply start dialing up the precision and speed that you need to react in order to complete puzzles. Baba on the other hand keeps challenging your conceptions and does not care at all about the fine motor skills or speed of execution… and as such gives you unlimited rollbacks as you sorta figure out how the pieces move on each map. Well worth checking out if you are interested in such things.

Lastly I started messing around with Breath of the Wild again… but if that were the end of that statement it would not be as nonsense as it ultimately is. I own this game on Wii U and Switch… but last night I started dinking around with Cemu the Wii U Emulator to see just how well it runs and what sort of resolution I could get it working at. The game looks gorgeous running in 4K but requires a bunch of fiddling to get it there. Not to mention just the act of getting it up in running was a pain in the butt which involved a whole slew of hoops to jump through to get the game patched and the emulator running. Then there was the added step of getting it working through Parsec so I could have the same experience while hanging out on the laptop downstairs… which involved installing controller emulators.

Basically I have NO CLUE why I did this thing, but I had a lot of fun and made it as far as Kakariko Village last night. I never made it terribly far into Breath of the Wild in part because of the restart. When the game first came out I did not have a Switch, and then at some point along the line I managed to find one in stock and re-bought the game on that platform. That meant having to redo everything over, which sorta killed my forward momentum. I seemed to log in more to summon treasure chests with Amiibos than I did to actually do anything else. My save game is littered with chests around the Dueling Peaks stable. It is truly shocking how well it runs, but there are a lot of frustrations… because the first time you encounter anything new there is a massive game freeze as it builds shader cache, however from that point on things are fluid again.

Basically chock this up to a long line of stupid things I have done like created a Chinese account so I could try Monster Hunter Online and setting up a Sega of Japan account to play Phantasy Star Online 2. I will likely wander away from it boredly at some point in the near future, but last night I had an awful lot of fun doing things that I should be able to do. I will however due to the potentially shady nature of this not be assembling a guide. I own two copies of Breath of the Wild so I figured it was completely legit for me to do shenanigans, but the real more stable answer to playing Breath of the Wild is to get a Switch.

Games of the Decade: 2019