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Spend some time with Project CARS and you'll be fed up with how unforgiving each turn is on your over-eager vehicle. Spend a little more and you'll grow to appreciate each unique, licensed hunk of steel as it groans under the stress of constantly alternating between accelerating and braking. But play any more and you'll start to feel slightly detached, barreling aimlessly between locations and race courses.
It's always been easy to be optimistic with Destiny; the game almost enforces it. But this side of two expansions, it's difficult to know what we are looking forward to. There's plenty to suggest that the formula is set, the slow trickle of content constant. The arrogance of Destiny has been to assume that it is already an extended universe, already a franchise before it has earned that right.
Comparison to The Witcher 3 would embarrass almost any RPG. It excels at everything most games suck at, from comic timing to narrative follow-through. It has the most expressive faces, the best drunken banter, the funniest throwaway gags, the most casual sex, and the deftest camera movements. But its best trick is to mold narrative from the materials that games have lately used as a sort of flavorless stuffing. In almost every side-quest and monster-hunting contract you undertake, there are telltale signs of someone at CD Projekt Red actually giving a s***.
Games like Massive Chalice live or die on the emergent narratives they create, which makes designing death as an inevitability for your cast of heroes an admirable risk. They're trusting that, as the wheel of time turns, players will glimpse a larger shape coming into view. The stories that stand out are family epics, like the Buendias of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude. By following the tangled paths of lineage, we're left with tales too large to be understood in terms of the lone hero.
Telltale's Game of Thrones is looking more and more inconsequential.
It's sublime when a plan comes together, but squirming out of a nasty mess takes a higher degree of patience and pressurized innovation. Anyone can play a map enough to have near-omniscience on a level's layout and just waltz through with nary an eyebrow raised. Invisible, Inc. doesn't deny you this experience at the beginner level, but it's more rewarding when played without a net (and it also allows you to customize challenges if you truly can't deal with an anxiety-inflating alarm, for example). Play spy and nimbly case the joint, then follow up as a hard-knocking crew left to bungle your best laid schemes and tango with the consequences.
Rather than reconciling the aesthetic and the spectacular, "Chaos Theory" exploded them. It remains to be seen whether both elements will survive. Right now, anything could happen.
Splatoon, then, makes me optimistic about what games can do not with pastiche or duplication-as-serialization, but with sampling. We don't have a genre convention to slot Splatoon into, and that's a rare and wonderful thing.
Not a Hero's ultimate statement is a brutally cynical one, but its political nihilism is always portrayed with such glee and good cheer that the unease is hard to feel until the game is shut down.
In places, Life Is Strange utilizes familiar gestures toward unhurriedness, allowing the player to direct Max quickly to the obvious and clearly designated story/action waypoints, or to meander instead, examining objects and pursuing optional conversations. The moments in the second episode that truly stand out, however, are the ones where the game allows Max to just sit down, and, after a bit of not-great but not-awful internal monologue, just be where she is, as long as she and the player want.
Though Sunset delights in its complexity, it offers no answers to the friction that results from the intersection of its contrasts. The game consciously places itself at the liminal moment between two points: pure aesthetics and social commitment, wealth and poverty, night and day.
Chroma Squad is aware that its audience has grown up; it doesn't seem aware that its audience has matured.
Don't let its electro beat fool you. Crypt of the NecroDancer belongs in a jazz club, a live, imperfect performance, sometimes fumbling and sometimes transcendent, where preparation can become improvisation with an audience shouting "go, that's right, go!"
We live in an age of endless possibilities, especially when it comes to possibilities that don't better civilization in any mountable way or save the planet from its inevitable ghoul-faced doom. You can be a cat or a duck or a goat or a rock in a videogame! You can be all kinds of things! You can be bread. I can be bread. I can be destructive. I am destructive. I am bread.
The usual point-and-click caveats are present here: some puzzles are so obvious as to feel like filler material, one or two so esoteric as to drive the player to frustration. The division of Shay and Vella's worlds can sometimes make what is actually a sizeable game feel artificially constricted, particularly in the first act. But these are minor quibbles compared to the mix of delight and unease that a playthrough of Broken Age evokes.
To play Tropico 5 is to look behind the cult of personality surrounding iconic leaders throughout history—who are both lionized and loathed—to understand the rationale behind both their atrocities and their good deeds. The loopy dictator is only as loopy as the world that made him; his brand of insanity merely combats the surrounding insanity. Tropico is an open invitation to either revel in it or understand it.
None of this is anything like progress—Westerado isn't exploring new frontiers when it comes to genre work—but the romance inherent to the game's emphasis on freedom sometimes comes close to overpowering a bitter remembrance of the very real history it cribs from.
What happens when you combine the roguelike with a traditional JRPG? Nothing good
MLB 15: The Show is remarkable in that it adheres to a method of gameplay that's absent in most sports games. By privileging patience, attention to detail, and creating a system that rewards minor adjustments to the way we play (not unlike strategy adjustments in the real life MLB), MLB 15: The Show remains one of the only sports games on the market that not only has a distinctive and engaging look and feel, but also pushes an admirable ideology that, however subtly, explores how we engage with sports and videogames.
Titan Souls gives you the opportunity to feel that success first-hand, a joy forged in the crucible of failure.