2016 Games To Get To Eventually Hopefully

For all that happened in 2016, most seem to be in agreement that the year was very good for video games. Doom surprised everyone with one of the best single-player first person shooter campaigns in years, The Witness showed that Jonathan Blow isn’t a one-trick pony, Watch_Dogs 2 and Titanfall 2 acted as further proof of the ability of sequels to be drastic improvements over their forebears, independant games continued to surprise and delight, and for all its development woes Final Fantasy XV was shockingly not terrible. With all the great games that came out, I’m sad to say I ended up missing a lot of them, and even the ones that I did play I didn’t play enough to have a proper Best of 2016 list. So instead, I’ve decided to list the top 10 games I missed out on throughout the year but really hope to find the time for next year.
Please note: This list does not encompass every game from 2016 I missed out on and want to check out, just the ones that I’d most like to find time to play in the future, even if that means touching them for 5 minutes and realizing I don’t really like them. Also, for ease of creating this list, I opted to remove any and all games I’d played, regardless of the actual amount of time played. For instance, since I played the new Guilty Gear game, it’s not on the list even though I played for less than an hour and absolutely want to play it more eventually

With that out of the way, here is my list in no particular order:

Dragon Quest Builders

Being in early high school upon Minecraft’s initial release, it was always fascinating to watch the game’s progression. From a simple little thing about grabbing and placing blocks wherein craftable cakes was a major update, into a game where players fight massive enemies, build huge structures, and create functioning Atari 2600 emulators, the transformation has been bizarre. Through it all, I could never dive into it the way many could. It’s a common problem to hear, and every time I hear it lately it’s in conjunction with a recommendation for Dragon Quest Builders, Square Enix’s foray into the block-based construction and exploration genre with a dash of its wildly popular (in Japan, at least) franchise, Dragon Quest.

Dragon Quest Builder is third-person Minecraft with an important addition: direction. In a game typically bereft of any guide towards what to do, Builders has a main story which takes place after the bad ending of the first Dragon Quest games, strangely enough. As the only person in the world with knowledge of what “building” is, you are tasked with taking the rubble of the world and building it up anew. As such, you’re given objectives regarding what materials you need to find, and what you need to make with them. Odd as the concept is, it turns out many people enjoy the Minecraft formula quite a bit more with just a few directions in terms of what you can do, and combining that with an apparently-substantial story, I’d really like an opportunity to give the game a proper shot.

Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth

While Pokemon was the strict ruler of the roost in the video game realm, as a child I was always a Digimon kid when it came to cartoons. The story of the DigiDestined, trying to find their way home and save the world, was far more engaging to me as a child then Ash Ketchum bumbling his way through his Pokemon journey to get his ass kicked in the Pokemon League. Despite my preference towards Digimon in saturday morning cartoon viewing I never once purchased a video game from the franchise, save a poorly-made decision to buy a tactical RPG alongside Bandai’s WonderSwan handheld, a console which astute readers will note was not released in the US ever. So where better to start than the latest game in the franchise, Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth?

It should be noted that I have little to no idea what this game actually is. I know it’s some sort of RPG, it got decent reviews, and there was a time in my life where I could name all the digital monsters on the box. Otherwise, basically in the dark. What kind of RPG is it specifically? Not sure. What’s the plot like? No idea. How does it tie into the stories of the cartoon, if at all? Hell if I know. I’d basically be going in blind, but I’d still love to give it a go.

I Am Setsuna

I’ve never been fond of the idea that we need to somehow “return” to the “good old days” of JRPGs. I love old Final Fantasy games as much as anyone, but with the Persona series holding onto the more traditional tropes of the genre and Xenoblade Chronicles X and even the latest Final Fantasy showing that the genre can expand and incorporate more western design philosophies, there really isn’t a need for something that’s just trying to looking like an old game.

Despite this, I still enjoyed Square Enix’s previous attempt at “old-school JRPG” in Bravely Default, and I’d love to dig into their second foray, I Am Setsuna. While I’m not certain how much I’d be up for the dark tone of the game (I’ve been led to understand the game opens with a character telling the titular Setsuna they’re her escort to the location she’ll be sacrificed at, which she’s ecstatic about because it means she won’t be alone when she dies), I’m very interested in the mechanics, which seem to be aping Chrono Trigger most of all.

Hell, I like Chrono Trigger. Why the hell not.

Superhot

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

(NOTE: Between writing this list and posting it, I have purchased and played through Superhot. It's very good)

Hitman (2016)

Common perception among people watching it’s development, including myself, was that the latest game in the long-running Hitman franchise was going to be a goddamn trainwreck. A scant two months before the game’s release, all pre-orders for Hitman were cancelled, with Square Enix suddenly announcing that the game would be made an episodic release. General consensus was that this was a sign of fear and lack of trust in the performance of the product; It seemed as if the game wasn’t shaping up well, but Square Enix wasn’t willing to delay the game (again) and was forcing whatever existed of the game to be released, with the rest coming later in further “episodes”. The episodic structure had worked out well for absolutely no one except for Telltale with their Walking Dead series, and even their use of “episodes” has been criticized for ruining the flow of the games, especially considering the often months-long wait between releases. Hitman, it seemed to many, was destined to be a failure at best, and an abject disaster at worst.

Wondrously enough for the team at IO Interactive, their apparently failure turned out to be a huge boon to the game: In a franchise famous for so called “clockwork levels”, with many moving parts and potential for fun and interesting interactions between all the NPCs going about their business, the mandatory break between new levels forced players to play through them multiple times, exploring the levels thoroughly and learning all of their ins and outs as they went about their assassinating business. This, in turn, led players to come to really appreciate the amount of work which went into the levels, as one could discover all of the various patterns and opportunities laid throughout the levels that you simply wouldn’t get from playing through a level a single time and moving on to the next.

While I’ve never been one for games where stealth and planning was a common requirement, it’s hard not to feel the buzz for Hitman. It seems as if nobody can stop talking about it, and I have a feeling from the amount of positive coverage I’ve seen it’ll be topping quite a few “Game of the Year” lists. The genre really isn’t my forte, and while Hitman may not be stealth in the same way as Dishonored, Thief, or Deus Ex, the simple act of staying incognito tends to grate on me enough to make me wary, hence why I never picked up the game throughout the year of loud praise.

Maybe my lack of experience with the genre will cause issues; perhaps the game doesn’t work quite as well when you’re not forced to stick around in a single location; maybe my lack of patience will cause me to give up the game in a frustrated huff. But hey, you can only see so many videos of people nailing a dude from across a room with a fire extinguisher before you wanna give it a shot yourself.

Quadrilateral Cowboy

My only prior experience with the works of Blendo Games is Thirty Flights of Loving, a self-billed “First Person Short Story” which I don’t recall much of. The only things I remember are a sequence where you eat oranges with someone and also that I didn’t like it very much. I’m curious if I’d be more open to the title now, given that I’ve developed a greater appreciation of games that aren’t trying to fit in with the mainstream perception of gaming, but at the time I wasn’t particularly happy with the couple of dollars I spent on a game I finished in 11 minutes.

Fast forward to now, and Blendo Games’ newest title Quadrilateral Cowboy follows the aesthetic of Thirty Flights, with it’s blocky people and surreal landscapes, but introduces a somewhat more game-y structure, tasking the player with pulling off various heists using a hacking interface and a variety of gadgets.

I’m not sure how much I’d actually enjoy Quadrilateral Cowboy. The programming in the game is actual proper programming and the minutiae of such things were never particularly interesting to me, and the application of it to logic puzzles in other games (which admittedly is only really Double Fine’s Hack N Slash as far as I know) never grabbed me. But the videos I’ve seen of Quadrilateral Cowboy hint at some crazy shit happening later on, and I’m up to crack some ice on a high-stakes heist.

…

Moving on.

Thumper

Thumper looks fucking rad. As a rhythm game fan, Thumper looks like an awesome change-up from the typical note maps and highways of your Rock Bands and your Hatsune Mikus. The oppressive atmosphere that permeates the look *and* sound of the game, combined with the strangest sense of dread, makes it unlike any other game in the genre, and the game definitely fits its self-declared “Rhythm Violence” tag.

For goodness sake, Thumper is a music game that dares to use the forbidden time signatures, barely recognizable from chaos unless you’re so immersed that you forget what typical music sounds like. Seriously, look up the later levels in Thumper and how long it takes to follow the songs. Games don’t do that. Hell, a lot of music doesn’t do that.

Thumper looks fast. Thumper looks chaotic. Thumper looks fucking terrifying at times, to be frank. I cannot wait to dive in.

ReCore

ReCore is a game that I’m disappointed didn’t review well. The action-adventure third-person-shooter game that casts you as a woman going on a desert adventure with a bunch of robots had a great look, and was one of the standouts in the Microsoft E3 2015 press conference. But as we inched closer to release, after delays, very little advertising, and the announcement of a lower price point, it began to seem like ReCore might be a little iffy.

From what I’ve heard, Iffy seems to be right on the money. While the shooting, platforming, and Cores (AI companions which could be slotted into different robots to fit different roles) were all routinely praised, it was widely felt that the exploration had too much backtracking, the atrocious loading times which reportedly lasted as long as 4 minutes broke the flow too often, crashes and other bugs occurred regularly, and the experience as a whole overstayed its positively-received welcome.

There’s not much deep thought to this choice: It looked neat, some people said it was maybe less neat than hoped for, but I still wanna check it out. I’m not sure why, the reception was cool at best, but I still kinda wanna see for myself, y’know?

Steep

Steep could not have had less fanfare as it was released. It was shown off in an extended demo at Ubisoft’s E3 press conference, then I feel like I literally did not hear about it again until it came out a scant few weeks ago. For those who missed it, which was incredibly easy, Steep is a freeform mountain sport game. In a mountain range, you can choose to descend via skiing, snowboarding, wingsuiting, or paragliding. There are races to undertake and a persistent online thing which shows other players around you, but there’s no real structure to the game besides messing around on a mountain and potentially dying horrifically by crashing into a rock while gliding down the hill in excess of 200mph.

My main reason for wanting to check Steep out is that I haven’t had a snowboarding game to play in a while. SSX Tricky was a regular choice in video game rental as a child, and I loved the over-the-top nature of the game, from the characters to the tracks to the tricks you could do. I messed around a bit with the 2012 SSX title when it was a free game for a while, but I could never really get attached to the title, since it abandoned the silliness of Tricky in favor of somewhat more severe gravitas which didn’t really work in my brief time with the game.

Steep represents an opportunity to have fun boarding down a mountain in a video game again, and go about it a few other ways as well. The lack of structure may cause me to lose interest fast, but given that the people who looked at the game seemed to feel positively, I’ll see what it’s all about. Just...not this year.

Headlander

I want to try out Headlander because it is a game by Double Fine. I will wholly admit that is the reason. I’m not a fan of Metroidvania-type games that require backtracking and exploration limited by slowly distributed upgrades. The game was led by Lee Petty, whose previous game Stacking I was not overly fond of. The look of the game, which draws inspiration from 60s and 70s science fiction, is not unappealing but as a born-in-the-90s Millennial I also don’t feel much of an attachment to the aesthetic.

What I do like, is supporting developers whose games I enjoy. Psychonauts is one of my favorite games of all time. My sister and I have many fond memories of Costume Quest. The Amnesia Fortnight events, where they spent 2 weeks building prototypes and livestreamed much of the process, was a fascinating and fun look into game development, as were the public livestreams during the development of Massive Chalice and the Double Fine Adventure documentary series covering the development, from Kickstarter campaign to concept to planning to delays to eventual release, of Broken Age. Not everything in Double Fine’s history has been so great: Their Broken Age documentaries are enlightening now but the “open” development was overly secretive to non-backers at the time, and I’m still a bit sour about how Spacebase DF-9 turned out. But Double Fine is still the studio to go to for entertaining and humourous games that feel special; that go their own way and have a unique look and playstyle, even if following the pack would likely lead to greater success for the studio.

Headlander is, in most ways, not my usual flavor. But Double Fine is a studio whose work I enjoy, and I’ve been surprised enough times in the past that I’m willing to give it another shot. Even if I end up disliking the game, I’ll have helped keep the studio afloat long enough for the next weird thing I love to be released. And that’s good enough for me.

HONORABLE MENTION: Mighty No. 9

I just...I just gotta know if they really screwed the pooch that bad, you know?

Borb the Birb

In all the hubbub around world events and the unknown future, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. When stress threatens to make you break down and give up, a kind word from a friend or family member can be just what you need to keep going. But, if your friends are unavailable and you don’t want to talk to family, you can do what I did: check out Borb the Birb.

Borb the Birb, by Ludonaut and available on itch.io, is incredibly simple: When you click on the screen, you’ll get a random animated picture of the titular character, with a random animated inspiring quote or helpful bit of advice above them, in random colors, while some chill music plays in the background. The arrow keys can be used to move the quote on the screen, which will rotate around its center if it bumps into Borb. If you press the spacebar, a picture will be saved onto your computer. If you click again, you’ll get a new image and quote to interact with. That’s all.

There’s not much to Borb the Birb, to be sure. If one were interested in the question, there could be a debate about whether or not it qualifies as a game or just an interactive software-based toy. Whatever you’d classify it as, I was surprised by how much it turned out I needed Borb the Birb.

Without going into too much detail, I was having a bad week when I discovered Borb the Birb. The kind of week that makes you afraid for the future of everything, and questioning a lot of things about your life. Here I was, in the midst of the most fear and depression I had felt in years, and there was Borb the Birb. There was this silly, chubby little bird, giving me compliments and telling me everything was gonna be okay. Empty platitudes, honestly. There was no way this thing, this program, could know everything would be alright. I still don’t know it will. But it felt good that someone, or something, was willing to say it. It was reassuring. It was pleasant.

I came closer than I’d like to admit to crying.

So, the question of whether Borb the Birb is a “game” or not is completely irrelevant in my opinion. I certainly think it is. Someone very likely feels it’s not. What it is, is nice. And charming, and sweet, and endearing, and positive. It’s exactly what I needed it to be when I found it, and that’s good enough for me.

On Pokemon's Future, Past, and Nostalgia

This piece includes minor spoilers for Pokemon Sun & Moon

To say nostalgia influences pop culture would be an understatement. There is, of course, the natural inspiration a creator may get from remembering or revisiting a beloved property, but we see it in much more overt ways as well; the recent years have introduced hugely successful films based on Transformers and G.I. Joe, children's cartoons from the 80s, and J.K. Rowling is still writing stories based on her Harry Potter series. Games, ultimately, are no different, with companies like Nintendo using their established properties and the strong feelings people have towards them to sell products. Just because a game uses nostalgia doesn’t mean it’s just empty reminders of the past, however. Good nostalgic games, like good nostalgic movies or books, will go “Okay. What here is essential? What needs to be the same to invoke what we’re trying to evoke? What needs to be different for this to work in the modern day? What should be changed, but can’t be altered for fear of backlash? What’s disliked, but essential for what this game was about?”

Take, for instance, the Pokemon series. For over twenty years, the games have delighted children the world over, and with a twenty year legacy comes a swath of fans now in their early to mid-adulthood. I myself, very young at the release of the first generation, grew up with the games, and consider them a very dear part of both my childhood and my adolescence. To this day I love the series and eagerly await this Friday, when the latest generation of Pokemon, the seventh generation, Sun & Moon, will be released and (with a convenient day off of work that I swear I didn’t ask for) I’ll be spending the whole day exploring the new Alola region, and discovering all the new Pokemon and people to challenge and befriend. As the day fast approaches, I look back and consider the best and worst of the series, at least in my opinion; the worst being the most recent installments, X & Y; the best, their predecessors, Black & White. Why? It all comes down to nostalgia, or to be exact, how those twenty long years of nostalgia are used.

X & Y tried to make you remember the past in the same way a parent might reprimand you; harshly and unsubtly. The third Pokemon you see in the games, after the local professors Gogoat and your mothers Fletchling, is a Rhyhorn; not only one of the original 151 Pokemon from Red & Blue, the first games in the series, but the pre-evolution (a prior form) of Rhydon, the very first Pokemon ever designed! A nice deep-cut for the real, old school fans. Later, when you enter the tall grass where wild creatures roam, what’s the first Pokemon you’d find, guaranteed, with 100% programmed certainty? Why, it’s a Pidgey! The bird you find in the grass in the original Red & Blue, right at the start! It’s like you’re playing those great old games from your childhood again! In the following area, a forest (and oh boy, a forest as the first dungeon! Just like Red & Blue!), you may encounter a Pikachu, the mascot of the series. What’s this? Replacing the electronic noise of a typical Pokemon call is a voice clip of “Pikachu!”, pulled straight from the cartoon you surely remember from when you were a kid.

It feels like the games are trying to distract you from the new, as if they’re afraid you won’t like what they bring to the series, so better to bury it amongst trite reminders of games and experiences long past. Indeed, the game seems reluctant to allow you to see any of it’s new Pokemon. On the first route you can find Pokemon on in the game, barely over half of the encounters (statistically speaking) will be with new Pokemon. In the following area, the aforementioned forest, there’s a measly 30% chance of encountering a Pokemon original to the sixth generation. X & Y lean on the old, and it works at first glance, but once you notice their crutch, you can tell how close they are (or feel they are) to falling over.

In sharp contrast, Black & White’s use of nostalgia was finessed. They didn’t hide their new Pokemon behind old; in fact, no old Pokemon appear in the games before you’d beaten the main story. Much like the experience of the original games, you had to traverse the land and meet new Pokemon to befriend and battle with. If you’re looking for references to the anime, then they certainly did work in the game to characterize the gym leaders and make them important characters in the story, doing the work in-game that would normally be kept for the television screen. Compared to the gym leaders in X & Y, who I felt were largely forgettable and only one of whom had lines outside of their gym battle to my recollection, the leaders in Black & White were downright nuanced.

Black & White were willing to step away from the norm in some pretty big ways as well; instead of only occasionally changing which Pokemon you encounter, the aesthetic of certain areas are entirely different depending on which game you get. Pokemon Black looked to be a Tron-esque future and Pokemon White appeared to eschew technology in favor of more natural beauty. There’s even an entire location that was different depending on which game you had, with players being able to battle a rotating cast of trainers in Black City, or capture rare pokemon in White Forest. A geographic difference between the two versions had never been in the games before, and certainly didn’t make a return in X & Y.

In addition, the story of Black & White were a step up from their predecessors as well, with the opposed Team Plasma being dedicated to freeing Pokemon from what they claimed was the tyrannical control of man. Admittedly, the game did little besides pay lip service to this idea; after a quick anti-Pokemon-capturing rally, you next saw Team Plasma grunts kicking a defenseless psychic tapir, presumably to assure children that no, the evil team doesn’t have a point and you don’t have to worry that you’re being cruel to Pokemon. But the fact that it even brought up something so often joked about in a semi-serious way was somewhat startling, and for all the harm his cronies may do, it’s made clear that your primary antagonist, the young idealist called N, sincerely believed that to be a trainer is to oppress Pokemon; capturing and controlling them against their wishes.

Compare and contrast this with the story in X & Y: a bad man wants to destroy the world. Stop him. Also, friendship.

I turn my eye towards the upcoming Pokemon titles and wonder which direction they’ll go in. I have ample reason to be skeptical; the main Interesting Thing™ of Sun & Moon are Alolan forms of existing Pokemon which grant different appearances and skills; dataminers digging through the released demo and copies of the games acquired early show these only exist for Pokemon from Red & Blue. In addition, there has been plenty of fussing and discussion about the inclusion of NPCs from previous Pokemon games, especially the titular protagonist and rival from Red & Blue. Once again, it seems as though the games will be trying to make up for deficiencies with blatant and poorly made appeals to players’ childhood.

And yet, at the same time, so much of what Sun & Moon are doing, or seem to be doing, are off the beaten path. For instance, the standard rhythm of the games, wherein the player goes to defeat eight different gyms, before facing off against the final challenge of the Elite Four and regional Champion, is gone. In fact, it’s an element of the story that the traditional Pokemon League is still in the process of being founded in Alola. Instead, players will go through the Trials of each of the four islands of the region, consisting of various tasks assigned by the island’s Trial Captain, followed by a battle against the island’s Kahuna. There’s also been a focus on the story of the games in trailers, involving mysterious Ultra Beasts and the Aether Foundation which works, in part, to study them (and who have, for their efforts, been treated with much suspicion by the Pokemon fandom at large). In addition, Team Skull is fulfilling the Team Rocket role of the game by stealing other trainers’ Pokemon. How this will all play out, and how all these pieces will play off each other, remains to be seen, but I’m looking forward to finding out for myself.

Pokemon is uniquely nostalgic for a new generation; I think it’s fair to say it may be to my generation what G.I. Joe or Transformers were to the generation before, the beloved childhood series that did no wrong as far as we can see looking back. This legacy gives Pokemon the ability to excite fans in two ways: It can merely show us what came before, content to retread old ground and confident it will suffice. Or, it can show us the best version of that, evolving and growing better with age without losing what made the games so loved in the first place. Game Freak, the developers of Pokemon, have both succeeded and faltered in taking those original games, the first generation, Red & Blue, and improving and modernizing them for the needs of the time. We’ll see soon enough if Sun & Moon can step forward, or if they’re too busy looking behind.

Titanfall 2 Impressions

So, Titanfall 2 came out about a week ago and I've played it a bit via rental! I was planning on reviewing it, but I can't force myself to play competitive team multiplayer stuff, and so I haven't played nearly enough of the multiplayer to feel good about calling my feelings a "review". In addition, the process of attempting to review this game made me realize that, since I spent so much time being an elitist dick who didn't like military shooters like Call of Duty and their ilk because they were popular, I don't have the experience or knowledge to tell how capital-g Good a modern multiplayer shooter is. Hopefully, I can try a few out this year and be better equipped for when the 2017 collection releases. Instead, I'm gonna write what is basically a kind-of bad review, and call it my impressions! Enjoy!

Titanfall 2 attempts to rectify the mistakes of its predecessor, both real and imagined. Despite critical and commercial success, along with interesting twists on standard modern shooter fare thanks to increased mobility and the ability to call in the titular Titans, gigantic rideable robot soldiers, the original Titanfall had difficulty retaining players. Between a lackluster progression system, a small variety of Titans and weapons to choose from, and being a console exclusive at launch to the much-maligned-at-the-time Xbox One, players unfortunately left the game quickly, leaving Titanfall's legacy as one of failure, despite its successes. With Titanfall 2, developers Respawn Entertainment aim to make something that is, without a doubt, a success. And while, again, I don't feel comfortable calling this a Definitive Verdict, I've certainly had a ton of fun with Titanfall thus far.

While the original Titanfall's "campaign" was only a series of audio logs over multiplayer matches, Titanfall 2 has opted to go a more traditional route, providing a proper and surprisingly compelling story. You play as Jack Cooper, rifleman in the Frontier Militia, fighting a war against the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation, or IMC. When sent on a mission to a frontier planet, Cooper and his squad are shot down and ambushed, resulting in the death of his mentor, Captain Lastimosa. Before dying, Lastimosa transfers control of his Titan, BT-7274, over to Cooper, and together the two must finish Lastimosa's mission.

The big plot beats were fairly standard but some smaller, more focused aspects of the story go places I certainly did not expect. Character development is also good, with small dialog choices doing a good job establishing what kind of person Jack Cooper, and BT's "I'm a robot that takes stuff literally" schtick is clichéd but effective for making you care about the big guy. Even side characters who are only around for less than 15 minutes manage to be characterized well enough to do their job for the story, without feeling like nothing.

One thing I didn’t expect was how much variety there would be in the gameplay. Much of the campaign feels like a tutorial for, and an introduction to the multiplayer, touching on how to use your basic combat options effectively, as well as letting you try out all 6 Titan varieties that can be found online. There are also level-long mechanics in the game, such as swapping between two points in time (yes, really) which allows the game to both force you to deal with two different combat encounters, and include Mighty Switch Force!-esque jumping puzzles. Another section of the game gives you the Smart Pistol weapon, which is capable of locking onto enemies and killing them in one shot, to run through an area with, decimating your foes. The breadth of additions to the standard shooting honestly reminded me a bit of Half-Life 2, and I had a ton of fun playing around with them all.

Multiplayer is, obviously, the meat and potatoes of a game like Titanfall, and what I've played of it has been, mostly, very fun. I've been able to try the Attrition, Bounty Hunt, Last Titan Standing, and Hardpoint Domination modes. Attrition is the main mode from the original game, and honestly I can see why. In a team deathmatch-like format, both teams of six players are assisted by a bevy of AI grunts. Amass points by killing opponents both AI and human controlled; first to 500 wins. Bounty hunt is similar, but the AI will attack both sides, and you can "cash in" your points for killing the bounties to double your points. Last Titan Standing is what it sounds like; team deathmatch where everyone starts with a Titan; once a team loses all of their Titans, they lose, even if the pilots remain alive. Hardpoint Domination tasks you with gaining control of, and holding, points on the map which will amass points over time. There's a wide variety of options for players, and I wish I had been able to try more out before the time of writing; besides Hardpoint Domination, which went absolutely horribly for my team due to disconnects, and enemy players taunted us over voice chat like assholes, I had a good time.

One of the things I really appreciated about trying out multiplayer was seeing how the different Titans and player abilities could be used, and how well they worked in various multiplayer contexts. The Scorch Titan, for example, uses its main weapon to create streaks of flame that maintain on the ground and cause damage. I was never able to use it well in the campaign, but in Bounty Hunt I was stopped in my tracks from attacking the bounties more than once by good, careful placement of flames. In a game of Last Titan Standing, the Legion Titan dominated thanks to protection from its gun-mounted shield ability. Various pilot abilities can also turn the tide; I had fun using the grappling hook to “rodeo” enemy Titans, and weaken them so my teammates could deliver the final blow, and I was taken out more than once by an opponent using the invisibility-providing Cloak ability.

As I close my thoughts, I think I would be remiss to not mention my favorite moment playing the game. Maybe this happens all the time, but I still feel it's noteworthy. It was towards the end of a match of Attrition, and my team was winning, but just barely. As the match wound down, I found myself in my Titan but very close to death, the game informing me that I could self-destruct with three quick presses of the square button, rather than going down with my ship. Normally, I'm more than willing to die in my robot, but an enemy player, perhaps wanting to take down an easy foe or just acting on opportunity, had hopped onto my robot and started the process of sabotaging me. "Well, that's no good," I thought, and quickly tapped in the self destruct sequence. My character launched high into the air, as expected, but the enemy who had lassoed me shot up, too. I'm still not sure if you get launched up if you're on an enemy Titan when it explodes, or if they had simply timed it just so to come up as well. In any case, my opponent (who in my mind had just destroyed my Titan, even if I was technically the one who pulled the trigger) and I found ourselves floating through the air on the force of the explosion. Thinking quickly, I pulled the left trigger to aim down the sights, lined up the reticle with my opponent, shot him out of the sky, landed safely on the ground, and continued on. Even with my lack of experience, my lack of skill, my lack of dedication to the genre, I know this: any game that can make me feel as cool as I did in that moment can't be all bad.

My time with Titanfall 2 was a ton of fun. I’m honestly thinking about purchasing the game; multiplayer shooters may not be my bag, but I still had a lot of fun playing Titanfall 2. Many are worried that, since the game was released between Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Titanfall 2 will be passed over. Indeed, I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that Titanfall 2’s player count has been disappointing for a AAA title released so recently. If you’re reading this, I urge you: if you have any interest in the genre at all, consider checking out Titanfall 2. I had a lot of fun, and it deserves to get some attention.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition review

Bethesda made a bit of a stir last november in the lead-up to the release of Fallout 4 by casually mentioning that, to learn the ropes of developing on the Xbox One, the studio ported The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim to the console. The much-beloved 2011 RPG was going to be coming back, it seemed, and a rabid fanbase swelled with excitement! And, despite claims by Bethesda that it had no plans to actually *release* this port, it was announced at E3 2016 that, yes, Skyrim was totally coming back on Playstation 4 and Xbox One, along with an updated version for PC.

For those of you who haven't played the original, Skyrim is an open-world action RPG similar to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, or The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. Gameplay consists of running around the titular country of Skyrim, diving into dungeons and abandoned forts to slay the denizens within and find cool stuff. You swing swords, you cast spells, you sneak, you steal, the works! Leveling in the game is based on what you do; as you use skills, they will increase in efficacy. Increase them enough, and you'll level up, granting a skill point which you can use to unlock special abilities and perks for the skills you've leveled. Compared to how leveling worked in Oblivion, where you set which skills needed to be increased to level allowing players to only pick abilities they wouldn't use and steamroll the game, it's smart and a good way to make your character play to the skills you use.

The combat was never particularly complex; You can sneak up on enemies to get bonus damage, or cast spells on the ground that activate like traps, or use the occasional conveniently placed environmental object to give you an edge, but for the most part you just swing your weapon or throw your fireball and run away when the enemy gets close and starts swinging. But it's engaging enough to get you through hours and hours of dungeons, which look fairly samey after a while but never to the degree that they feel copy-pasted.

In Skyrim, you play as the Dragonborn, an adventurer of legend who can absorb the souls of dragons. It's good that you show up when you do, too, since Dragons have suddenly reappeared in the world after centuries of absence to destroy mankind (and elfkind, and catkind, and lizardkind; there's a wide variety in Skyrim) and take over the world! To combat the dragons, you use your aforementioned skills along with your "Thu'ums", or "Shouts", turning the language of the dragons against them and your other enemies in battle. These "Shouts" are effectively powerful spells on a cooldown that you earn by both learning the words, typically on a mural at the end of dungeons, and spending souls you collect after fighting Dragons to unlock them, with a variety of abilities such as a powerful knockback, fire breath, or pacifying your foe. While hardly ever necessary, the abilities are still cool to play with, and provide yet another incentive to journey through every location you stumble across.

The main story of the game is dealing with the Dragon menace, assisted by what's left of the organization known as The Blades (a much smaller organization after the events of the previous games). In addition, the game has a B-plot of sorts surrounding the civil war between the Imperial Legion, the rulers of the entire continent of Tamriel, and the Stormcloaks, 'true sons of Skyrim' who want it to be ruled independently rather than as part of the Empire. Players can choose to take a side in the conflict, helping the Imperials stomp out the Stormcloak resistance or assist the Stormcloaks in driving out the Imperials.

These stories, where you take on the dragon menace or decide which side of the civil war to fight on, are there if you want to do them, but I've dumped hundreds of hours into Skyrim and never gotten close to finishing either. This is mainly because of the massive amount of dungeons and sidequests to be found in the game, which can be ludicrously distracting from any set goal for yourself. You'll be running back to town to get to the business of dragon hunting when, oh dang, I don't think I've seen that dungeon before. Oh, there's a dude here with a cool mask! I gotta fight him and get it! Okay, now that's taken care of I can go and- whoa, dragon! Gotta fight it! Alright, finally time to- oh, a courier just gave me a letter telling me there's some daedric shit going on in a town on the other side of the map! Gotta check it out! So on and so forth for hours. There's a lot to do in the game, and it never feels boring even after all this time.

Speaking of the dragons, I feel the need to note that, for all the pomp and circumstance surrounding their inclusion and the amazing rush the first few fights are, eventually fighting them becomes boring. You see them in the horizon, you head in that direction, and once the dragon notices you it kind flies in a circle for a bit and breathes fire or ice at you. After a while it'll land, allowing you to get some swings in if you're not using a ranged weapon. Rinse, repeat, and there you go: dead dragon. For the huge variety of abilities you get as Dragonborn, and for as much as the game emphasizes that your "Shouts" are just what happens when Dragon gets spoken, you never see the interesting abilities being used by the dragons against you. In a game with so much stuff, it feels like a missed opportunity.

You'll notice that, so far, I'm speaking on the original 2011 Skyrim and not the newly-released 2016 Skyrim Special Edition. That is because besides the graphical improvements, it is the exact same game. There is very nice lighting! The draw distance is much improved! I've heard that the game has some behind-the-scenes changes that make it able to handle more stuff without crashing! But it is, in almost every sense of the word, a repainted version of the original Skyrim. There's no new content, unless you count the original game’s DLC, which I don't.

It's so much the exact same thing that one of the first things I did upon booting the game up was try one of my favorite speedrunning glitches: in the first indoor area of the game, you can pick up a bowl and use it to pass through a wall. The game doesn't handle collision with curved objects particularly well, so if you hold the bowl in front of your character the bowl will clip into the wall and your character will clip into the bowl, which sort of chains off itself and causes you to clip through the wall. I picked up a bowl off a table, pointed at the wall, and ran forward. And I instantly passed through. Mining will also only notify you of the first and last piece of ore being put into your inventory, with no notification of the third piece you get in between. I also put a bucket on an storekeepers head, which the game counted as obscuring the NPCs vision, and stole every loose item in their store by exploiting this glitch that I could have sworn they fixed already in the base game?

I cannot emphasize enough how much I've heard the game runs a bit smoother under the hood, but as far as I can tell none of the glitches or other weird issues in the game have been addressed.

Bethesda has decided that their graphical upgrade (many aspects of which still don't compare to downloading mods if you're a PC player by the way) and Skyrim’s existence on a new console is worth full price. Skyrim Special Edition, which does little to nothing besides add a fresh coat of paint, will cost you a whopping $60 to pick up and play at home. For almost the exact same game that was released 5 years ago.

I can't bring myself to recommend it. I was able to get the game for free; if you own the original Skyrim and all of its DLC on PC you get the Special Edition for free and I'm certainly not complaining about having another excuse to dive in, especially considering that the improved draw distance leads to some stunning vistas that I never noticed in the original game. But if I was expected to pay full price for the game again, I would balk, and rightfully so. Nicer textures and less fog do little to disguise the fact that it's just the same game again; even if you somehow don't already own the game, you can get a version that looks only marginally worse for significantly less money. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a fantastic and fun game that can provide hundreds of hours of dungeon delving fun, and I cannot recommend it enough. But in 2016, the value proposition that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition makes simply does not add up. Play Skyrim, if you haven't. But for now, until a price drop, you can safely skip its Special Edition.