The Ragey's 2013: The Rage Quitter Year End wrap up

God what are you people still doing here? This whole gamer blog fad was so last year, nobody reads this crap anymore.  Well, Since you're here, might as well pull up a chair. Because another year of video games have gone by and I've played a lot of them, so I might as welcome you to this year's year end wrap up of my best and worst games of the year.

The 2013 Ragey's:
Seriously So-Co, Who do I have to blow in that corporation to get you to Sponsor me?

10: The Picked last behind the Fat kid with one Leg in kickball award for "Game I wish I got to play" goes to....

Yakuza 5 (PS3)

Over the past year, I developed a burning fury for the people over at Sega. After three entertaining romps in the Yakuza franchise I have been eagerly anticipating the new installment. A year goes by, and Sega only responds to a western release with "no comment". They made a haiku in response to the inquiry about an announcement coming up. An announcement that says "hey we are making a new one, and you aren't getting that either! LOL." FUCK YOU SEGA.

Sega is sitting a on goldmine of slightly obscure but highly desired titles by people in the west, and they refuse to localize them because they don't think Americans "get it" and Yakuza 5 is the chief offender. The Sony Third Party Production division knows its one of the top two requests for western release. So yeah, just skip on the piles of money you could be making by releasing your actual good games. Keep putting out Sonic: Losing a Step so nobody will buy that either.   Fucking morons.....

And If you guys fuck up Atlus or me getting Persona 5? I will personally fly to your Japan HQ to suicide bomb the Sega CEO's office. (Facetious Satire, NSA)

9: The Trent Richardson 2.8 Yards Per Carry garbage award for "Biggest Disappointment" goes to.....

Assassin's Creed  3 (PS3)

I played this during the holiday launch window so I am counting it for the beginning of this year.  At the time of purchase, I was getting very frustrated the story wasn't going anywhere and I was getting sick of paying for new versions of the same game. So to cap off the actual 5th game of the franchise, I was treated to the worst protagonist in the series, most boring story, and the most slapdashed rushed climax to the Desmond narrative I have ever seen. Aside from the ship combat, there is virtually nothing good about this installment of the game. To be completely honest, this was a SERIOUS contender for my worst game of the year. However, as my pending review for Black Flag will tell you, there is still some hope for this series.

8. The Nilbog is Goblin spelled backwards award for "Biggest Surprise" goes to.....

Payday 2 (Xbox Live, PSN, Steam)

Originally, I was gonna go with Battleblock Theater for this one, but I got bored of that and it got surpassed in the last moments of 2013.  Payday 2 could possibly be my favorite FPS ever, and I usually hate FPS. Grand Theft Auto V taught me that pulling heists are pretty awesome.

And Payday 2 is just that: You are given a job with up to 3 other players, you case your location be it bank, jewel store, night club, or whatever. Figure out where the guards are, where the cameras are, where the staff walks. Sometimes you can be in and out of a place, clearing out a safe before the staff even knows you are there.

But MOST of the time, it turns into a game of survival mode as someone inevitably calls the cops. Typically it turns into a firefight as you wait for your drill to crack into a safe. While the maps are usually the same they sometimes spawn things in various areas or ramp up the detection. But what I love about it is that is constantly chaotic and stressful, and you feel like a complete badass when the heist starts to go your way in a hairy moment. Payday 2 fuckin' rules.


7. The Oh my god, I didn't fuckin' care when the dumb British royal twat's got married, and I don't care that they had a stupid kid either award for "Most Overhyped game" this year goes to.....

BioShock: Infinite (XB360)

You just can't throw out a phrase like "as close to perfection as a game can get" and not expect me to be critical of it. Don't get me wrong, I love these characters and the storytelling was peerless. But my problem with BioShock: Infinite is that it was a dumbed down version of a shooter I actually kind of liked.

Gone were the myriad of fun weapons for 2 generic weapon slots, gone were the terrifyingly insane Splicers for generic troopers in 1800's coats. Gone was the creepy and dark settings of Rapture, for the bright and sunny streets of whereeversville, Gone were the Big Daddies and Little Sisters.

There were some good bits to Infinite and it was clearly better than Bioshock 2. But frankly, its even more watered down to the first Bioshock as Bioshock was to SystemShock 2. Great story, but game perfection? Hardly.


6. The Charles Ramsey 15 Minutes of Fame award for "Flash in the Pan" game of the year.

Tomb Raider (PS3)

While Squenix didn't think this title to be a success in the market, I really had some fun with it. Sure, it took the Tomb Raider original formula, made Lara Croft less of raging psychopath at the start (but barely), and put in a ridiculous sprinkling of Uncharted an produced one of my favorite examples of how the 3rd person shooter genre is done correctly.

I wasn't a fan of the Tomb Raider series, and I haven't been since the start. But I really did enjoy this game a lot. One of the few games where I actually looked forward stealthing around a picking off targets with a bow and arrow. Its story got a bit ridiculous at times and clearly wasn't the best written game. But it was fun and solid purchase. It basically met me half way to bring me into a series I didn't care for. Good show Tomb Raider.

I still hate Lara Croft though.

5. The 750 Dollar Photo of an Xbox one Ebay Purchase award for "Worst Value" goes to....

Beyond: Two Souls (PS3)

You know Quantic Dream, maybe you should sell yourself as an animation studio, and less of a game studio. You sort of had me interested in this game medium you were selling in Heavy Rain but you completely dropped the ball here by not learning from your mistakes. The Graphics in this are amazing, Page and Dafoe show that they are consummate actors and deserve proper billing.

But I play games to PLAY FUCKING GAMES. So watching Ellen Page be sad for 10 hours while occasionally knocking over some papers is hardly engaging game play. Every game dev should sit with their product and then ask themselves "Am I having fun?". A great story is one thing, but there is a good reason movies are 2 hours, not 10. If you are gonna stretch it out that long, you have to have engaging middle bits. Not worth 60 bucks. Should have done Last of Us, Ellen.


4. The "Just the Tip" award for "Best Value" goes to....

Dragon's Crown

Proof that simple still works. This game doesn't have CGI out the asshole. This game doesn't bring a load of complex mechanics to the table. Just straight up side scrolling brawly fun with fantastic art direction, fast paced combat, ratcheting difficulty, and loot gathering.

I was really excited for this game and it absolutely delivered on all fronts. The only real complaint is that it somewhat lacks a narrative, but that's really not what you are getting a game like this for. Its shows hands down that all the shiny AAA budgets and graphics doesn't exactly make a game great. But awesome game play always does.

3. The Consistently On Time Chinese Food Delivery guy Honorable mention goes to....

Tales of Xillia (PS3)

There were a lot of options to go for with the honorable mention, because there were a lot of really good games this past year. Saint's Row IV was a front runner here because it was just ridiculous.  Atelier Ayesha just because of the number of hours I dumped into it. Disgaea D2 for bringing back a group of characters I loved. Hitman: Absloution for polishing up the last true stealth game I've had in years.

But I have to give it to Tales of Xillia because the Tales of franchise is just always a beacon of excellence in the active battle JRPG genre. Great characters, good storyline, fun combat, and typically pretty good voice acting. Yeah its probably a pretty generic pick, but if you play any Tales game you can clearly see what I am talking about. Here's to the Symphonia HD Collection next year. 

2. The Ariel Castro Stay at home Dinner Date award for "Worst Game of the Year" goes to.....

Mugen Souls (PS3)

Dead Space 3's Co-op and micropayments made a strong case for worst of the year. Walking Dead: Survival Instinct's generic and bad game play really did too. But I had Mugen Souls locked in as my worst of the year back in May, and I'm happy to say that it hasn't budged.

Creepily oversexualized young characters, terrible soundtrack, choppy and broken animations, excessive text exposition, overly complicated battle system, overly complicated menu system, generic character creation, incredibly weak story, disgustingly cutesy j-pop sequences, constant ongoing fight animations, and the list goes on. It's absolutely remarkable just how badly this game managed to fuck up at almost every given area. I bought the game at discounted price, and I even regret that.

But whats worst of all is it had one decent idea for the character interaction animations that actually could have been put into better NIS America games, and they didn't even do that. Mugen Souls was just flat out terrible and a complete waste of my time and money.

1. The Johnny Malloy's 2 dollar Long Island Award for "Best game of the year" goes to...

The Last of Us (PS3) AND Grand Theft Auto V 

I really tossed back and forth here because both of these games were nothing short of incredible. And for a long time, it seemed like nothing could top The Last of Us. Sure, at times it felt like it was just a cut out of Uncharted but the added stealth elements with the dark atmosphere, the Cordyceps monsters, and a very well acted and likable cast made The Last of Us and absolutely fantastic experience and one of my must plays for the year. Ellen Page was pissing about how the Ellie character looked like her, and maybe she's right to be upset, because Last of Us was way better than her game.

But then Grand Theft Auto V came along. It's sales numbers alone tell the story, nearly smashing any single day record set before it. After taking a massive break in the development from previous game, GTA:V addressed nearly every complaint I had. Better combat, brighter colors, much less depressing story, more arcadey driving. But most of all, I fucking LOVED this cast of characters. I want Trevor Phillips as my life coach. But more so than that, the game was just a blast to play. I managed to rip through it twice in back to back playthroughs, and had a significant amount of fun playing the online mode.

While I can't consider either game perfect, these two come really, REALLY close. Since they were both so great and I felt I copped out last year with Silent Hill 2, they co-win my game of the year.

Maybe I've lost a bit of steam overtime, and the hit count as been dropping. But if I'm still playing games, I'm still gonna have stuff to say about them. See you in 2014.

Beyond: Two Souls (PS3): My Sad Haunted Life Simulator 2013

It's easy to get taken in by some shiny graphics. I mean ultimately, that's really what the game industry has been pushing for the past twenty years or so. And no game truly tried to sell the point that you only need graphics to sell a game as much as Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain did. While the game was severely lacking in actual gameplay elements and just gave us quick time events, the story was still pretty good (although heart wrenchingly depressing). But now Quantic Dream has upped their game by making their graphics even shinier, and brought in actual actors to play their parts in....

BEYOND: TWO SOULS(PS3)

The tale of Beyond: Two Souls follows tale of lonely girl Jodie Holmes (Ellen Page), as we go through her life. Since the moment she was born, Jodie has been linked to some form of supernatural entity who she refers to as Aiden. We jump around in the story from various points of Jodie's life from her troubled upbringing, her troubled childhood, her troubled teen years, and her troubled young adulthood.

The jist, without spoiling too much, is that her adoptive foster family leaves her at a military research facility under the care of Nathan Dawkins (Willem Dafoe) and Cole Freeman (Kadeem Hardison) who make her live in a bit of a sheltered off life as they monitor Jodie and her connection with Aiden, and attempt to teach her how to control him. As she adapts to this lifestyle, she is eventually drafted into the CIA.

After being abandoned by her foster parents, Jodie is actually has a pretty
affectionate upbringing, its just incredibly sheltered.

Its hard to explain the story any further because they way the story is present and you jump around the timeline, different points of the plot are given away at different times. And since this game's whole bread and butter is based around the story, giving you a detailed synopsis would really defeat the entire purpose.

Now I should probably stress right off the bat, that if you are picking this game up you should probably alter your expectations for the game. If you have never played Heavy Rain or even Indigo Prophecy then you are in for a real change of pace. During the course of this review I will probably refer to this as a game, but that's probably not wholly accurate. Quanitc Dream's big focus has always been to produce "interactive storytelling experiences."

Willem Dafoe: For when monster design isn't quite scary enough.

Unfortunately, therein lies the inherent problem because that's an awfully flowery term to use instead of game, which by definition is an interactive storytelling experience. The original Mario has like zero correlating text and no cutscenes, and that still weaves a tale you control the narrative. Now, in Quantic Dream's defense they do paint a hell of a picture. Heavy Rain through all its depressive scenes was still a very gripping story, and their technical demo for KARA had more compelling story in just 7 minutes than some movies do.

The problem is the Playstation 3 is a GAME console and when I use a game console, I use it to PLAY GAMES. And on this front this is pretty much where Beyond: Two Souls falters and falters hard. Heavy Rain was a game that suffered from some of the worst movement controls I've played in a game, and all of the actions that take place happen with quick time events or extended button presses or controller waggles. The bar was set incredible low for their sequel.

The game cleverly fools you into thinking this might have some stealth opps involved. 

But when you set the bar incredibly low, you don't have to jump all that high to get over it. The most recent E3 trailer teased that there would be some war situations and some stealthing involved in the game to bring up the pace and tone somewhat. And while this does in fact happen in the game? The overall control scheme doesn't really change that much. There have been some minor improvements but ultimately they just put quicktime events in a fancy new dress.

Movement controls have been simplified the the normal 3rd person movement we've all come to know. Why this wasn't used in Heavy Rain was fuckin' beyond me. When we get into the action sequences in Beyond:Two Souls we don't have the "Press X to Jason" prompts. Rather, when a combat sequence is taking place, the animation will drop to a super slow motion scene where you have to see which way Jodie is moving, and you need to press the analog stick in the corresponding direction. If you are successful she will land her punch or dodge a blow, if you miss she takes a bit of a beating.

My first playthrough, Jodie took a bit of a beating till I understood the controls.

This is generally how a majority of the action takes place and like previously stated, there are quick time events and controller waggles mixed in. For the most part, it works, but there are always a handful of awkward animations taking place where you have to really stop and guess if its meant to be one way or another. There were a number of times I kept getting it wrong, but it never really impeded my progress.

The other big control aspect in this game is one of the buttons allows you to switch to and control the entity following Jodie, Aiden. When cruising as Aiden you will usually find little indicators that allow you move objects or destroy things. When enemies are afoot you can use Aiden to strangle them or possess them to infiltrate areas. The problem with these sequences is the controls to fly Aiden around are kind of wonky, and your freedom to attack is somewhat limited. Anytime there are enemies around your options are pretty linear and when playing as Aiden, Jodie will often coach you along. 

As Aiden, you usually will just knock shit over. But there are segments where you can
possess and ghost strangle people. You just don't often get to chose which you do.

There is also a "multiplayer" mode that I use as loosely as I use the term "game" in this sense. Basically, it allows a 2nd controller to control Aiden, but since you can only use one character at a time, there really is no reason for it. You can easily switch to Aiden and then hand off the controller for the exact same effect. There is no point to it being there, and really it just takes away the fun half of the game and leaves one player being a very sad Ellen Page for like 10 hours. Nope.

And as far as game play goes, that really is pretty much all there is to it. There are a handful of sequences that will require you to do a bit of stealthing and sneaking while using Aiden to dispatch enemies, but it doesn't happen nearly enough for it to feel enough like an actual narrative based action game.

No, we are here because we want to watch a really, really, really long movie. So the question I suppose is: Did I like it? Well, its hard to say. Graphically, It might be one of the most impressive games I've seen. Like If I considered something like Uncharted or The Last of Us to have some pretty top notch motion capture, then Beyond: Two Souls is definitely a step above that. All of the notable actors in this game are nearly picture perfect digital images of themselves, and because the majority of them are legitimate actors I feel the delivery of the lines were a cut above. Definitely better performed than Heavy Rain was.

I love watching Mo-cap footage side by side with the finished product.

But what I'm not sure I care for is the way the story jumps around the timeline. To use a literary example, Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley delivers the story in what feels like two different story lines, where the big twist/climax appears where the stories timelines begin to intersect at a central point and fill in the gaps of each other's story.

This is kind of like how the Beyond story plays out. You find yourself constantly shifting between child Jodie and young adult Jodie. The constant jumps in timeline will often leave you thinking: "wait, what the fuck happened now?" and sometimes it can be exhausting to keep up with.

But nothing in this game is more exhausting than the relentlessly depressive tone. Literally NOTHING good happens to this chick. Any brief bit of happiness is overclouded by some kind of tragic event, or some haunting of her past, or some current haunting. Now granted, The game delivers a number of options for you on how you want to play things, but unlike Heavy Rain I don't think they appear to deviate how the story shakes out for the most part.

Ellen Page: Mall Goth Teen Angst edition.

There is an fairly early scene where Jodie goes to a birthday party and it turns into this uncomfortably heart wrenching disaster, and you are basically prompted with two solutions: Leave humiliated or commit unbridled vengeance. After (painfully) playing this scene two different ways, the game pretty much proceeded in the same fashion afterwards. Granted, one of the options was a billion times more satisfying to play out.

Through out all the scenes you have multiple ways to play out the conversations, so I guess there is a bit of replay value, and you basically get to choose your ending in the final scenes so I suppose there is reason to play more than once. Then again, you can easily jump to that scene and just pick the other options too.

Full Disclosure: I actually missed this option the first time because I was too busy
oggling digital Ellen Page in her shimmery red dress. DON'T JUDGE ME.

I find myself in the same position I was in for Heavy Rain. Did I enjoy my experience? I think I did. Do I think you should play it? Yeah, I'd say its worth your time. Is it worth 60 dollars? Ehhhhhrrrrnnnggg.... No.. it really isn't.

See Quantic Dream, here's where you have it backwards: You have some of the impressive graphics and some pretty good story writers, but the reviews to your game are mixed. You know who's game isn't getting reviews like that? Naughty Dog, because they take the good story writing and impressive motion capture, and slap that into a GAME. Into a game that is great and possibly game of the year, no less.

You however, after filming several hours of cinematic realized the player actually has to do something for it to count as a game. So the token effort is appreciated, but it really falls short. Beyond: Two Souls weaves a very interesting and engaging tale, and I will say there are marked improvements over the previous games. But it's too long to keep rewatching like a favorite movie, and there's too little interaction to keep the replay value high.

It is absolutely worth a sit through, but I couldn't blame you if passed on buying it.

A digital crying Willem Dafoe might be the most terrifying monster in a video game, ever.