When Austin asked if I wanted to write a GOTY list for the site I was excited. This year I had written my first game review and now I was getting the opportunity so soon after to write another article! Little did I know that, of all years, my list for 2018 would be particularly difficult to order. Something about my favorite games this year made it feel wrong to give them some specific hierarchy. They’re all such different games, it felt like comparing apples to oranges, and I really did enjoy them all pretty equally, just for different reasons. I’m sure this is a dilemma most games writers have come up against, but my dumbass got hung up on the question of ordering the list. What if I presented them in a grid? Or better yet a circle of paragraphs? What if I just made a quick thing in VR and placed the paragraphs in space in a ring around the player’s head so they would have to choose which way to look first? Austin suggested I could make a twine game, which made me realize what I really needed for my list was programmatic randomness! And so here we are, my 10 favorite games in 2018, presented in a random order. Yes I realize there will still be a first game you read and the last game you read, but I can’t do much about existing in linear time now can I?
(set: $GOTYlist to (a: "Hollow Knight", "Deltarune", "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate", "Dragon Ball FighterZ","Return of the Obra Dinn","Life Is Strange 2","BattleTech", "Monster Hunter: World","Into the Breach", "Destiny 2: Forsaken"))\
(set: $GOTYhistory to $GOTYlist)\
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(link-goto: "Let's get started!", $nextgame)Deltarune
*Undertale* is a game that I think about often, even now, three years after its release. It’s a game whose separate elements and narrative beats come together in such a cohesive way that the author’s intent rings loud and clear. And to this day, if *anyone* I know its playing through and I have an opportunity to watch along with their final moments in the game, I will absolutely drop everything to experience that again (Just ask Natalie). So when the *Undertale* twitter account teased a new announcement I was excited yet trepidatious. *Undertale* wrapped up in a really satisfying way and had a sense of finality to it, a sequel would have to be carefully crafted.
The next day, from seemingly nowhere, TobyFox released *Deltarune*. Or at least the first three hours of *Deltarune*. From the jump this game sets out to differentiate itself from *Undertale* by making it clear that your choices don’t matter. You create a character at the beginning of the game only for that character to be thrown out. This game is going to tell a story and how you make your way through will not affect the outcome. It also wrestles with the idea of non-violence from the first game, introducing shades of gray that further complicate the idea of “don’t kill, and don’t be killed” that you’re presented with at the end of *Undertale*. And that has me excited for the rest of this game in a way I rarely am for sequels (or prequels, or Alternate Universes, it’s really hard to tell what *Deltarune* is to *Undertale* yet, but if one thing is for sure, they are *absolutely* related).
(set: $GOTYlist to $GOTYlist - (a: "Deltarune"))\
(if: $GOTYlist contains any of $GOTYhistory)[(set: $nextgame to (either: ...$GOTYlist))]\
(else:)[(set: $nextgame to "end")]\
(if: $nextgame is "end")[(link-goto: "That's it! No more games", $nextgame)]
(else:)[(link-goto: "Lets play another game", $nextgame)]Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
“I’ve got just enough time to get at least a couple spirits.” This was my refrain as I boarded the subway for the first few days I had Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. I could consistently finish a few fights before I had to get off the train, so I went into the Yarn Yoshi fight with confidence. “How hard can they really be?” I thought as I scanned over the details of the fight. Yeah there were 4 of them, but the conditions said “Fighters are easy to launch”. Sure they were the first Spirit with a power level over 4000 I had come across, but I had a type advantage.
I didn’t get *any* Spirits that morning.
And I wasn’t even mad! The fight was challenging, but *of course* it was. There were 4 Yoshis! Fighters (*including* myself) were easier to launch! And they had an easy 5000 power level over my equipped Spirit. This is the fight that moved World of Light from “Fun series of quirky fights” to “surprisingly deep single player experience in a multi-player focused game.” I needed to take every condition of this battle into account. Luckily World of Light has many branching paths, so I left that fight for another day. It wouldn’t be for many hours more, but once I returned I was ready, willing, and prepared to fight.
(You can find my review on SSBU’s World of Light (link-repeat: "here")[(open-url: "https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/kzvpz3/smash-ultimate-gave-me-more-than-a-sequel-it-brought-me-home-review")])
(set: $GOTYlist to $GOTYlist - (a: "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate"))\
(if: $GOTYlist contains any of $GOTYhistory)[(set: $nextgame to (either: ...$GOTYlist))]\
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(if: $nextgame is "end")[(link-goto: "That's it! No more games", $nextgame)]
(else:)[(link-goto: "Lets play another game", $nextgame)]Hollow Knight
When I play a game on Switch, 9 times out of 10 its going to be in handheld mode as I travel from one place to another. This means that each game that I considered buying for the Switch had to pass the “commute test.” If I couldn’t make a satisfying amount of progress on my commute it’s very likely that I would drop off the game early and never finish it. That’s why I held off on buying Hollow Knight for so long, I was worried that an exploration heavy, souls like, metroid-vania style game wouldn’t play well in small chunks. But the longer the Switch version had been out, and the more snippets of video or screenshots I saw, the more I felt myself being pulled into the orbit of this game. The art style! The cute bugs! The beautiful environments! I had to play it for myself to see how it felt, so I took the plunge, and I’m so glad I did. In the game’s opening moments, there’s a small hole you can drop into that has spikes at the bottom. I thought for sure I was a goner, but I still instinctively hit buttons to see if there was *anything* I might do to save myself. To my surprise, when I attacked downward, my bug actually *bounced off* the spikes in the pit. I wasn’t fast enough to do it a second time, but once I respawned at the top of the pit I jumped back down, because I swore I had seen something else at the bottom. Sure enough, there was a small tunnel, also floored with spikes, off to the left. Using my newly discovered movement option I bounced along the tunnel to find a crest, one of the game’s equippable items. From the jump the game was surprising me and forcing me to consider the environment in different ways, to the point where I didn’t care if I got to a good spot on my commute, I would suspend the game, then pick right back up during my lunch break or when I was waiting for something to render. It’s promise of a strange and interesting world to explore in new ways hooked me early, and hooked me strong enough to shake me from my ingrained day to day mode of play.
(You can hear Patrick, Austin, and Natalie do a deep dive into Hollow Knight (link-repeat: "here!")[(open-url: "https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/a3magb/our-favorite-games-of-2018-hollow-knight")])
(set: $GOTYlist to $GOTYlist - (a: "Hollow Knight"))\
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(else:)[(link-goto: "Lets play another game", $nextgame)]So that’s it! My list of my 10 favorite games of 2018. Quick shout outs to my honorable mentions Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu!, Mario Tennis Aces, Sea of Thieves, No Man's Sky: NEXT, and Donut County.
2018 was a big year for me. I got hired at my favorite gaming site, a dream job if there ever was one. I would like to thank Austin, Patrick, Rob, Danielle, Natalie, and Joel for being so welcoming and helping me settle in to my new role. I love my job and y’all are a huge part of why! And thank you to every person that has ever sent a nice note to me when I’ve been on the podcast, I can’t say enough how helpful and validating that has been. See you all in 2019.
Dragon Ball FighterZ
In August of 2018, I hadn’t played a fighting game in about a year and a half. I was never really good at them, I could never get the hang of dragon punch on a stick, so I took to playing on d-pad or my keyboard. It limited who I could play (any characters with full circle inputs were out), but I still enjoyed my time with *Street Fighter V*. I didn’t get the Arcade Edition when it released, partially due to feeling like I had hit a wall with how much better I could get.
Then EVO happened. Like every year, it rolls around explicitly to make me consider getting back into a fighting game. This year, instead of re-installing the last Street Fighter game I owned, the new kid on the scene caught my eye. *Dragon Ball FighterZ* had been getting a lot of buzz, but when it came out early in 2018 I was still unemployed, and had my eyes set on saving enough money to get *BattleTech* at launch. Sure, Dragon Ball Z had been a foundational anime in my childhood, and it was awesome to see those characters so lovingly rendered in a new game, but I wasn’t good at fighting games, so it didn’t feel like a worthwhile purchase to make when I was so strapped for expendable income.
I hadn’t really seen the game first hand, and I was immediately struck by its tempo. It had this regular cadence to it, to the point where commentator Michael “Yipes” Mendoza was punctuating each combo. “Uh, uh, uh, uh, UH!” The game was beautiful on screen, and chaotic and quick, but this tempo helped me follow the action of a game I had no first hand experience with. “uh, uh, uh, uh, UH, get offa me!” I would quickly learn that part of that cadence comes from the game’s Auto-combo system. There are baked-in combos that require little else but hitting the same input to the right tempo. This sounded amazing to me, the bad fighting game player, and I immediately went to download the beta that was running on Switch that same weekend.
First thing that struck me is that many of the fighter’s moves sets used the same inputs. It kinda reminded me of Smash, where every fighter uses the same inputs, but the animation and possible combos are what separate them. The tutorials were a bit messy, but they expounded the depth that exited behind the low bar for entry. You choose a team of three FighterZ that you can call in to assist you, or tag out at any moment. You could even use the switching mechanic to lengthen combos, something I had seen happen in Marvel vs. Capcom games but could never quite get the hang of. Dragon Ball FighterZ brought all of this within reach to the novice player, and that made me fall back in love with fighting games this year.
Also you can play as a team of 3 Gokus and that’s wonderful.
(set: $GOTYlist to $GOTYlist - (a: "Dragon Ball FighterZ"))\
(if: $GOTYlist contains any of $GOTYhistory)[(set: $nextgame to (either: ...$GOTYlist))]\
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(else:)[(link-goto: "Lets play another game", $nextgame)]Return of the Obra Dinn
*The names and deductions made in this section have been fabricated to avoid spoilers for this game.*
“That dude looks like a Harvey.”
“What does a ‘Harvey’ even look like?” My wife was squinting at the screen, face scrunched up as she peered at the 1-bit pointillist tableau set before us.
“Like this asshole. Look at the way he slumped over after he was stabbed, total Harvey move.” I was joking, but we were determined to confirm this poor soul’s identity, and sometimes you just need a place to start from. We had been on a bit of a dry spell with our deductions, a lot of “difficult” level characters had been revealed on the game’s checklist-via-artist-portraits, but we just weren’t able to piece together which of the 60 names on the ship’s manifest to assign to their likenesses.
“Wait, what is THAT?” She points to an object a few feet away from the body.
“The sword he was probably stabbed with?”
“No, THAT!” She points more vigorously, her finger just above where the sword lies, where I notice a shape near the door. I move our over there to get a closer look, and we find … a gun! We instantly look at each other as we have the same realization.
“There was that guy! With the gun in the last death scene!”
“YOU’RE RIGHT OMG WHICH ONE WAS HE!”
“Quick quick quick, go back to that other one!”
We exit the tableau, and use our magic stopwatch to travel to the previous death scene we had been in. We’re brought into a different room, where one of the other sailors is dying from starvation. I make a beeline to the room we find Harvey dead in later, where we find him alive, enjoying his final meal, while another sailor, sword on belt, watches menacingly from a dark corner. When we had seen the sword next to Harvey we assumed this was our murderer, but when we entered this information into the ship's manifest nothing happened. Whenever you correctly enter the name and cause of death of three people the game locks them in, with a satisfying musical sting and confirmation screen to go along with it.
I move over to the adjacent room, where we had seen an officer with a gun on his belt before. I hit the button that brings us to this character’s information page, where we can see that we’ve already confirmed that this is First Mate Mullard. We enter “Harvey, shot by First Mate Mullard,” and hold our breaths. The screen goes black, and a satisfying musical sting finally plays.
(set: $GOTYlist to $GOTYlist - (a: "Return of the Obra Dinn"))\
(if: $GOTYlist contains any of $GOTYhistory)[(set: $nextgame to (either: ...$GOTYlist))]\
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(if: $nextgame is "end")[(link-goto: "That's it! No more games", $nextgame)]
(else:)[(link-goto: "Lets play another game", $nextgame)]Life Is Strange 2 – Episode 1
“Oh my god. She’s *watching* us”
My wife and I are playing Life is Strange 2. Its the story of two Mexican-American brothers, Sean and Daniel, who after losing their dad head out on their own to find what family they have left in Mexico. They live in Washington so the trip will be a long and arduous, made no easier by the fact that they had to leave in a hurry, with only the shirts on their backs and the contents of Sean’s backpack. We’ve made our way down a highway and are stopping at a gas station. We had a small amount of money, something like $18 dollars. I looked at a bag of chips, and to my surprise, I got two options. “Buy” and “steal.” I instinctively looked over at the cashier. She is absolutely watching.
---
“Is that golf cart following us?” My friend Andrew and I were outside of our high school, coming back from the open air mall next door.
“I don’t wanna walk around to the other side, lets just get over the gate” We were staying late to finish up some art projects so we’d walked over to get some food, but the side of the school that faced the mall was locked down, and the open gate was far, or at least far enough that a teenager would rather jump a fence than walk.
“Dude I think that golf cart is *following* us.” *Following* got caught in my throat, as if I was worried that saying it out loud would make it true.
“Ugh I can’t climb this one, but I think this gap at the bottom is big enough to roll under?” He wasn’t paying attention. The golf cart rolled past the driveway we were in, and stopped halfway down the block.
“I think they’re watching us.” Andrew stood up and smacked the dirt off of his paint spattered jeans.
“That’s weird,” he said, peering towards the cart. “Are those the mall cops?”
“Why are they following us?”
“I don’t know, lets just get under the fence.” There was a new sense of urgency in his voice. The cart started up again, doing a small u-turn before heading straight for us.
“Shit, what do they want?”
“HEY YOU! Don’t move!” We both froze. I could feel my heart beating hard in my throat. I wanted to run but I was rooted to the pavement. I will never forget the look of terror on my friend’s face.
---
“I can’t believe she’s watching us”
“Weren’t our pictures in the paper today? Maybe she recognizes us.”
“She probably would’ve called the cops if she recognized us.”
“True. God this is eerie.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I think we just need to try and make the best of it with the money we got. We’re already wanted, no need to take anymore risks” I pick up a bag of chips and some water, something to tide us over to the next day.
We head towards the cashier. She seems nice enough, and doesn’t let on if she has any suspicions about two young Latinx walking around without supervision. Moments later, we’re sitting with Daniel, looking over the things we have for dinner. An elder gentleman comes over to us from inside the station. “Sure hope you paid for all of that.” I felt my heart beating in my throat.
(Listen to me, Danielle, and Patrick talk about Life is Strange 2 (link-repeat: "here")[(open-url: "https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/mbyken/our-favorite-games-of-2018-life-is-strange-2")])
(set: $GOTYlist to $GOTYlist - (a: "Life Is Strange 2"))\
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(else:)[(link-goto: "Lets play another game", $nextgame)]Destiny 2: Forsaken
Destiny 2 is a game I've always enjoyed playing, but also wished it's story was just a little bit more interesting. The lore in Destiny had been excellent since the first game, so it felt odd that the in game narrative always seemed to fall flat, especially after the main campaign began and you entered the endgame. They had managed to build an interesting and rich world through their lore, but failed to tell those same kind of stories in the game itself. Even the campaign of this year’s large expansion, “Forsaken,” was only a slight improvement over the base game’s usual sci-fi fare. One thing that changed was the NPCs. They had become chattier and more animated, and more and more story beats were being delivered through them rather than cutscenes. Eventually, after the campaign has ended, you receive a quest to enter “The Dreaming City.” A near constant landmark on the horizon during the regular campaign, this was the most interesting and part of this expansion. An entire map filled with secrets, pulled straight from the game’s lore. It could’ve been enough for them to make a beautiful new environment for us to explore and have quests in, which is what we expected given Bungie’s track record. What we got was an ever evolving space, a cursed city stuck in a 3 week time loop, where every week we would get new snippets of story and new campaign missions that all weave into the Raid and the larger Destiny story in new and surprising ways. Just last week there was a new cutscene dropped into the game that has a twist that will have major long term repercussions, a full 3 months after the DLC originally dropped. This is an unprecedented amount of post-release content for a Destiny expansion, where usually once you had finished the campaign the only thing to do was repeat past activities to grind your level up to be Raid ready. It’s made the world of Destiny feel really alive for the first time, transforming the space from a sandbox where we finish quests and grind levels to a place filled with real people, with real stakes, and the promise of more to come.
(set: $GOTYlist to $GOTYlist - (a: "Destiny 2: Forsaken"))\
(if: $GOTYlist contains any of $GOTYhistory)[(set: $nextgame to (either: ...$GOTYlist))]\
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(else:)[(link-goto: "Lets play another game", $nextgame)]BattleTech
It had been a long time since I had thought about BattleTech. I was first introduced to the Clix version in high school. It was my entry point into the larger world of tabletop gaming, I loved the mix of precise movement and placement rules alongside easy to track damage. You could take a look at the board and have a pretty solid idea of where you stood. It was less about being surprised by some ace in your enemy’s pocket, and more about making sure you can tilt the odds in your favor through clever movement and use of cover.
XCOM 2 felt the same way in its opening hours, but my time with the game became increasingly frustrated as I was surprised by undisclosed abilities that would often lead in catastrophic loses. Often times I’d lose a campaign to these moments. I was fresh off one of these losses when I finally dove into BattleTech. I almost instantly fell in love with how much it resembled my memories of playing MechWarrior: Dark Age. I knew where they enemy was, I could click on them to see what they had equipped, I can easily see the ideal firing range of my weapons. All of the stress of not knowing in XCOM washed away, replaced by pure strategic bliss. Not only did the strategy really scratch the tactics itch I was looking for, but there is also a really interesting story with amazing illustrations and a really fun management layer that gives your crew an extra touch of characterization. Your MechWarriors became like family, making losing a pilot that much more impactful. And the mech customization is easy to understand but leaves you with a lot of options. Want to make a long-range mech with no back armor and extra large weapons? How about a lasers only mech with a ton of heat sinks? Or an extra mobile mech with too many jump jets? These are just a few of the really bad mech ideas that I tried in the game, and sure they maybe didn’t work out the way I thought they would, but ultimately I still had fun, even if losing both legs on that jumping mech cost me a month of salaries.
(You can hear Austin, Rob, and I talk about BattleTech (link-repeat: "here")[(open-url: "https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/8xp7vp/our-favorite-games-of-2018-battletech")])
(set: $GOTYlist to $GOTYlist - (a: "BattleTech"))\
(if: $GOTYlist contains any of $GOTYhistory)[(set: $nextgame to (either: ...$GOTYlist))]\
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(else:)[(link-goto: "Lets play another game", $nextgame)]Monster Hunter: World
I had been hunting the Anjananth for 30 minutes. This pink, fire-breathing T-Rex lookin’ monster was the biggest monster I had seen up to this point in the game. It’s was rough fight, especially because I had just swapped weapons and was still getting the hang of the Charge Blade. I had been knocked out twice already, one more would send me packing back to Astera, the hunter’s HQ, with my tail between my legs. But I kept at it, collecting materials all the while, slowly wearing down the towering beast. Finally, I found it fighting a Great Jagras and its offspring in a sun dappled clearing in the forest. This was my chance! I could get some solid hits in while it was distracted, and possibly even kill it here and now.
That’s when I noticed it seems to be having trouble fighting this monster that was a 1/4 its size. “That seems weird,” I thought to myself “I swear I’ve seen an Anjananth eat one of these before.” It struggled to get a good hit in, and its movements felt sluggish. Finally it killed the Jagras, and then it did something I hadn’t seen happen before, *It started limping*. Like a wounded puppy, it made its way up a ramp of tree roots. I followed at a safe distance, stunned by how hurt and vulnerable this once ferocious and deadly monster now seemed. It stopped in a small room made of vines, laid down, and went to sleep.
I stood there, next to this behemoth that had bested me twice already. I could easily kill it now and take my spoils, but I didn’t want to. I couldn’t bring myself to bring my fully charged blade down on its sleeping head. I paused the game and then went to look up how to capture monsters. It had been mentioned off hand in one of the game’s early tutorials, but it was such a short blip that I never really considered looking into it further. From that moment on, as long as it was an option, I captured every monster in the game.
(You can listen to Patrick, Natalie, and Austin talk about Monster Hunter: World (link-repeat: "here")[(open-url: "https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/59vjd5/our-favorite-games-of-2018-monster-hunter-world")])
(set: $GOTYlist to $GOTYlist - (a: "Monster Hunter: World"))\
(if: $GOTYlist contains any of $GOTYhistory)[(set: $nextgame to (either: ...$GOTYlist))]\
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(if: $nextgame is "end")[(link-goto: "That's it! No more games", $nextgame)]
(else:)[(link-goto: "Lets play another game", $nextgame)]Into the Breach
When I started playing Into the Breach, I was coming off of a particularly difficult run in XCOM 2. Having just lost an entire squad in that game, I was really looking forward to what seemed at first like a more manageable strategy game. So, of course, I spent my first half hour in this game losing over and over and over again. Something wasn’t clicking, and nothing I tried seemed to bring me closer to a victory. Then I noticed something I had been ignoring. The “Attack Order” tab. I held tab and numbers appeared on each of the enemies. Suddenly everything made sense. I pushed an enemy towards another, right into its line of fire. It still had a bead on a building, but if everything worked out like I thought it would work out it should be dead before it had the chance. For once, instead of trying to get the most damage out on one turn, I focused more on the positioning on the board. The enemy turn began, and one by one, each Vek was killed by another, leaving just one left at the end of the round. I truly felt like I was galaxy braining, and I was only on the first of the game’s four islands!
As I progressed, and unlocked more squads, it became increasingly apparent that the game had *always* been about positioning and using every advantage you can come upon. There are squads where one or two of the mechs don’t even do any direct damage, but they all have abilities that allow you to reposition yourself or the enemy. What I ultimately realized is that Into the Breach, by giving you all the information upfront, feels more like a puzzle game to me.
Also I once suplexed a bug into a lake to kill it, and that’s fucking cool.
(set: $GOTYlist to $GOTYlist - (a: "Into the Breach"))\
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