Two Thousand and Fourteen

It's been a while since I updated this blog. I have a half-dozen posts in perpetual draft mode, so I may one day get back to them.

2014's nearly over and out of interest I decided to take a look at my Steam account history. This last year alone I've purchased more games on Steam than I had in the other 5 years since creating my current account. It's partly due to the fact that I have some more disposable income lately, and partly because I got my first debit card this year, allowing me to buy stuff online without having to borrow someone else's card.

One of my new years' resolutions for 2013 was to play a lot of interesting games, and I did a pretty good job - I'd make a facebook post every week or so with a brief description of the games I'd recently played - most weeks I had a couple of new games out of the backlog and under my belt. I didn't do so well this year, but I thought I might dust off the old blog and make a big roundup of all the great games I've played this year.

Blade Symphony

When I was in high school, I played Jedi Academy online with a friend. It was one of the first online games I'd played, and jumping around swinging lightsabers at your friends is a really fun time. Blade Symphony takes the idea of a multiplayer swordfighting game and turns it into something balanced, competitive and elegant. Playing from a third-person perspective, you execute combo attacks using directional input and different buttons to vary things up. There's a handful of characters to play as, with different combos, strengths and weaknesses for each. Mouse input lets you guide your swings for maximum effect. I only played for a couple of weeks early in the year, but had a good time. I might come back to it now that it's seen a release.

PixelJunk: Eden

Picked up cheap in a bundle with Shooter (a more straightforward co-op shoot-em-up game), Eden is a chilled-out game of exploration and gardening. Playing through varied levels with unique quirks, you control a little avatar, grappling and floating each level's little garden, finding items to grow new plants that you can swing from. With simple aesthetics and mechanics, it's not going to blow anyone's mind but it might be good to chill out after a long day.

Outlast

Bought on the same day as the relaxing Eden, Outlast is the polar opposite - a tense and terrifying first-person survival horror game. Like Amnesia, Outlast shuns weapons and combat in favor of hiding and fleeing, so there's no permanent escape from the relentless and vicious patients of the asylum you're investigating. Playing as a journalist brought to the asylum by an anonymous tip, you're armed with only a handheld video camera whose night-vision mode will help you see in the dark. The setup is perhaps uninspired and the final chapter takes a sharp downward turn in quality, but the bulk of Outlast's content is pure horror.

Dark Souls II

My 400-hour love affair with the original Dark Souls is a hard act to follow. I've put almost 200 hours into Dark Souls 2 and will probably dump a bunch more into it when the next edition comes out with prettier graphics and better online play. So much has already been said about the Souls games so I won't try to break new ground, but I will say this: DS2, like Dark Souls, is a great action RPG that gives the player a lot of freedom. You can make the game as hard or as easy as you like through choice of player build and use of co-op. It's a nice varied world with a lot of great encounters - this time around the game runs at 60fps on PC, which is great. Here's a short video of me helping someone lose a boss battle:

Luftrausers

Originally a free flash game, Luftrausers is a side-on airplane shoot-em-up with some fantastic plane handling mechanics. You get a boost button to fire the engine, a button to turn left and one to turn right, and a fire button. You turn faster when not firing or boosting, and you regenerate health when not firing - this gives some strong incentive to play with finesse, only firing when you've lined up a target. As your plane engages dozens of hostile airplanes, jets, boats, battleships, blimps, missiles, submarines and so on, there's a mix of tension and poise as you gracefully weave through enemy fire only to fly up, turn around mid-air and unload on the pursuing enemies as you ride gravity down to the sea. The full game comes with customizable ship parts and different missions and difficulties, adding plenty of variety.

MirrorMoon EP

MirrorMoon is one of those weird games that doesn't offer any strong guidance about what to do - it just drops you into the cockpit of a spaceship and lets you press buttons and twist dials until something interesting happens. From the spaceship, players can navigate around space in search of worlds to explore. Most worlds are small, procedurally-generated moonlets with obtuse structures dotting the globe. A copy of the world sits in low orbit around the main world, and you can move and rotate this mirror moon to see what's around, mark spots to navigate to or block out the sun, changing the landscape. There's a light multiplayer element: if you're the first person to solve a planet's puzzles, you get to name it. It's a curious exploration game with a meta-game on top - The galaxy is reset periodically, with new unique and random worlds to find each 'season'.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

I'm not sure if there's a name for the kind of game Revengeance is - Spectacle Fighter maybe? Whatever Revengeance is, it and its cousins Devil May Cry and Bayonetta are incredibly satisfying games to master. Though I'm still fairly new to these games, I've had an absolute blast with Platinum Games' extension of Raiden's story - from nervous rookie to defiant warrior in MGS2 to incredibly-badass cyborg ninja in MGS4, Raiden takes another step toward ultimate warrior status in Revengeance as he upgrades his hardware and learns to embrace his own bloodlust. Despite being in a different genre with a different focus to the mainline Metal Gear series, Revengeance has a lot of the same charm - cute stealth sections (though Raiden's new idea of stealth is a lot deadlier), cardboard boxes, similar themes, great boss battles and plenty of easter eggs. Playing through this game again recently, I realize now that I was basically button-mashing through the first time - now that I've learned to parry better and use combos, it's a whole new game. MGRR's satisfying mix of camp charm and high-speed skilful death dealing keeps me coming back for just one more playthrough.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes

Having played through Metal Gear Solids 1 through 4 recently, I was thrilled to hear that MGSV was coming to PC. Released only recently on the PC, Ground Zeroes is a short story that sets the scene for Big Boss to return in The Phantom Pain - the 'main' game, set for release in 2015. For the $15 price tag I've already had a whole lot of fun with it. While the Ground Zeroes 'story' mission can be completed in 5 minutes (it took me 40 or so), a half dozen side missions help pad out the replay value. The game takes place in a US-controlled military base in Cuba, with Big Boss sent in to extract two prisoners in the story mission - characters from MGS: Peace Walker. Going from MGS 3 to 4 in a short time really highlights the big change in control style in 4, going to a more 3rd-person-shooter style control scheme. Ground Zeroes takes the third-person style further and sharpens it greatly - everything in the game controls beautifully on a 360 gamepad. Stealth and combat are much improved, and I found myself deliberately being caught by guards just so I could sprint around the base fighting waves of soldiers. The port runs extremely well on my machine, and I've heard that it runs well on older hardware too. With Revengeance and Dark Souls 2 also getting good PC ports, it's good to see that my platform of choice is getting some more attention from big-name Japanese developers. I'm all set for MGSV's release next year, bring on a Legacy Collection port too!

Half-Life VR

My friend got an Oculus Rift DK2, so I visited him to try it out. Shortly afterward, I ordered an Oculus Rift DK2. Shortly after that I bought a Razer Hydra from eBay, and when both had arrived I played through Half-Life 2 again, but in a totally new way. The Rift's beauty is that it detaches your game look direction from the aim/move direction, conveys a remarkable sense of presence and provides the best 3d experience since real life was cool. The Hydra is basically a couple of Wiimotes, which is probably why it didn't do too well on PC when it first came out. It's got great 1:1-ish motion tracking though, so rather than orbiting a crosshair around your center-of-mass in regular HL2, you just point your hand at what you want to shoot at. This detachment of aiming from body direction adds another layer of depth and presence to the already amazing immersive VR experience, and adds a surprising amount of gameplay depth - you can shoot over cover, around corners or behind you as you run away. HLVR's got its problems though - there's a handful of bugged maps that don't work, the motion tech is not taken far enough and the weapons are all attached to your right hand - you can't use two hands to aim the crossbow, which would allow for better precision. As a proof of concept it's amazing. As a re-invigorated playthrough of HL2, it's amazing. As an actual implementation of VR tech - it's got some problems. Give it a few years and I guarantee you that we'll be seeing a lot more VR games like this one. Here's a video of me shooting dudes:

Honorable Mentions

These games were all interesting but not quite enough for me to dump a paragraph on each of them:

• Insurgency: Highly tactical team-based FPS where players die very easily, so you've gotta think before charging a machinegun. Great co-op
• Continue?9876543210: A really sombre adventure game where you play a game character who's died but isn't ready to be garbage-collected yet. Run through decaying worlds in the computer's memory as you struggle to find meaning and accept your fate
• Jazzpunk: A comedy game that's 25% hit, 75% miss
• Batman Arkham City: Beat-em-up where you're batman. Solid but repetitive combat system, big world to explore and find secrets in.

There are dozens of other games I played this year, and just because they're not on this list doesn't mean they weren't awesome - after all, these are just from my steam account history. I hope your 2014 was as packed with great games as mine was - bring on 2015!