This list is definitely incomplete, and skips many titles I played less than a few hours of, but is still at least 80% accurate. I think
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Pretty much anything I could say about this game has already been written. I would hazard it’s the most talked-about title from 2017, and sparked a thousand middling essays and also probably a couple good ones I haven’t stumbled across yet. We’ve also recorded an entire podcast devoted to it. A masterpiece of a game that tries to reinvent the open world genre, it doesn’t entirely work and is great despite on many occasions failing to be good. I don’t know, it’s probably just easier to listen to the podcast.
Super Mario Odyssey
This was fine. Totally fine. I beat it, and had fine experiences with it. Certainly less impressed with it than I was with BotW, or for that matter Mario Galaxy, but that’s not really much of an insult. For the life of me I can’t figure out what the big deal was about this game. Maybe Blake will one day be able to explain it to me. At least it has that dinosaur with a hat—I could use more games featuring dinosaurs wearing over-the-top headwear.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Exactly what I want Smash Bros. to be, which is to say over-the-top in every way. Too many characters and stages, too many items and spirits, and all of this is important because for this series too many is the perfect amount. The game has the perfect level of controlled chaos, with near-perfect play control and a level of visual polish I would describe as “marquee Nintendo.” I say all this without having played almost any multiplayer, and so in essence I have barely touched the actual game.
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker
I liked this Mario title quite a bit more than Odyssey, so take that critical establishment. A completely tight, well-controlled package is a lot more what I look for these days in my single-player adventure games, and this delivered.
Trauma Center: Second Opinion
Played this for a while, but quit when things were too hard/stupid. Unfortunately, a lot of time the controls here just didn’t work, and while it’s a noble experiment, it’s also not a success. The story was as wonderfully bonkers as could be hoped, but not worth replaying some of those levels dozens of times in order to keep seeing it. And all of this was done while playing on the easiest difficulty available.
Link’s Crossbow Training
Let me explain this by saying that I have a weird love for motion controls, and a completionist brain for Zelda. This was a totally fun experience for about 45 minutes, which was fine for the $2.00 in store credit I spent on it.
Star Fox Zero
Star Fox 64 was one of my favorite games as a kid, something me and my friends obsessed over and replayed with the zeal only a group of kids with two games a year can. Couple this with my love for Platinum Games’ action sensibility and I had to give this a try, despite its reputation. Unfortunately, the control scheme has an impossible learning curve, and made the game largely unplayable once I hit levels where it assumed mastery. I have a stupid hope that this will one day get remade without them, but the level of work that would require makes that the type of pipe dream that will never come to fruition.
Star Fox Guard
Conversely, I played this just because it came with my copy of Zero and was surprised by how much fun I had. A tower defense game mixed with a shooter, I had a blast with this and recommend it to any of the five remaining individuals who still own a Wii U.
Metal Gear Solid
Replayed this and probably liked it even more the second time through. Like with any well-constructed thriller, it’s a joy to see how all the foreshadowing functions and try to dissect how the story was being told. Ultimately, it’s very difficult to analyze storytelling games the first time through, at least it is when they’re this complex, and it’s easy for me to understand why Blake’s played through this so many times. We only have a few more letters planned for this before MGS2, so maybe we can figure out how to get those finished up before 2020.
Spelunky
Actually played a lot of this before we recorded our podcast, and was happy to see that it held up as well as I’d hoped. If I had friends to compete with, I’d still play the daily challenge err… daily.
Hearthstone
Had some great experiences with the game, but as always at this point in the year I’m well past ready for the next set rotation. More than anything, I feel like Brian Kibler’s call for a fundamental change to how the standard format works are warranted, and that as diverse as the meta is right now, there is a certain samey-ness to Hearthstone that games like Magic: The Gathering don’t have due to their rotation structure. So here’s hoping that they announce some big changes soon.
Fallout: New Vegas
So much better than Fallout 3 it’s kind of absurd. I’m still nowhere near close to finished, but have thoroughly enjoyed my stay in New Vegas thus far and seeing how its surprisingly complex stories unfold. The sign of a truly good RPG is that you get lost in the sidequests simply because the characters and stories within them are as interesting as the main story, and that’s certainly the case here.
Call of Duty: Black Ops III
Started playing some of this with Blake, and hope to finish whenever we have time for co-op again. Was super entertained by the weird zombie mode stuff, but I’m also well aware that it is not for people at our point in life. Still, can’t help but wish I was still 15 and could get three people to obsess with me over the campaign and figure out all of its arcane secrets.
Dying Light
Had a good time playing this with Blake through about half of the game, then felt kinda bogged down as we tried to finish it. I’m still very excited for the sequel, though.
Persona 4 Arena
Kind of wonderfully stupid in that particularly strange, anime-influenced JRPG sort of way. By no means necessary to play for fans of the Persona games, but I will still probably go through the sequel at some point because I enjoy just how ridiculous this shit has gotten.
LittleBigPlanet
I still had a copy from when I first bought a PS3 and wanted to see more of this cutesy platformer, but my god some of these levels get tough. Pretty much a case study in how kiddy-style graphics with misleadingly tough gampeplay is a bad idea.
Dungeon Siege III
I love Obsidian/Black Isle, and if I’m a fan of a developer it means I’ll pick up pretty much anything they put out the same way I’ll follow an author or film director. But this Diablo-clone completely lacks in the studio’s main strength: storytelling. Not sure how many hours I got into it, but it wasn’t many.
Mass Effect 3
A lot of weird misfires going on here. It’s not a bad game, but ultimately this experiment in grand design (setting out to tell an entire trilogy from the start) didn’t pan out as hoped. By this point in the series, I put the difficulty on super easy and played 100% for the story, even though it was readily apparent that the combat engine was better than in the first two.
Tales of Monkey Island
Not much to say here. I will keep playing Telltale games, even the old ones, even the bad ones, whenever I remember to. I like what they do, even when I shouldn’t. I’ve played through most of the first-generation, pre-Walking Dead Telltale games at this point, including probably some more in 2018, but they don’t make for good pithy comments. Maybe I should write something longer about this type of adventure games at some point, but seeing as the format is largely dead it’s hard to get up the energy.
Monster Hunter: World
My most-played game for the year except for Breath of the Wild. I quit when it became repetitive, with just slightly tougher versions of the same monsters and a stupidly designed end-game boss, but by that point I’d put in at least 60 hours. I’ll definitely pick up the sequel, though, and regardless of my feelings about the games consider palicos to be the best fantasy race in not just this medium, but any.
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture
A terrible game, and so far I’m yet to enjoy a walking simulator. Trash.
The Last of Us
I guess I finished this in January of 2018, though it feels like I played it much longer ago. Practically nothing negative to say about this, and it’s one of the few games I’ve ever played that featured legitimately good writing (not just good writing for games). Naughty Dog’s storytelling is at this point in a different league from any other AAA studio, at least that I’ve played.
Mechs vs. Minions
I always mean to write more about board games here, but I also didn’t play nearly as many of them in 2018 as I hoped (or in 2017 for that matter…). Life is annoying that way sometimes. Still, I went through this campaign and thought it was excellent. Has some of the same issues as any campaign-based system (not a ton of fun to replay a level if you lose at the buzzer), but still fun if you like programming, and the timer-based aspect adds the perfect amount of goofy chaos to what would otherwise be a very clinical game.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1
Also started another campaign of this title, as I’d like to play season two with my wife but need to get through this first. Like with MGS, it’s been a lot of fun to watch how the mechanisms work when you already know what’s coming. An absolute masterpiece of the medium, and still my favorite board game—I will get Blake to play this one day, and it will blow his mind.
