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Best of the Rest: Dave's picks of 2013
Team Joystiq is barging into 2014 with a celebration of last year's best games. Keep reading throughout the week to see our assembly of ingenious indies and triple-A triumphs. Payday 2 We've all thought about stealing something at one time or another. We watch crime movies and Cops; we fantasize about what it'd be like to make off into the night with stacks of cash. Payday 2, for me, is that fantasy realized within the context of a continually surprising, highly replayable video game. It's not just one of my favorite games of 2013 – it's one of my favorite games ever.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2013: The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
Team Joystiq is barging into 2014 with a celebration of last year's best games. Keep reading throughout the week to see our assembly of ingenious indies and triple-A triumphs. As charming as it was, I thought The Wind Waker became a chore by the end. I never finished Twilight Princess. And for all of its brilliant swordplay and well-crafted dungeons, Skyward Sword was burdened by unnecessary and unentertaining filler. Imagine my surprise, then, when Nintendo gave us The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, one of the most effortless, weightless Zelda games in years. A Link Between Worlds manages to recapture the adventure of the original Zelda, which was content to drop players at an empty crossroads without a word, your only clue of what to do being a cave beckoning in the distance. At the same time, A Link Between Worlds succeeds in reinvigorating a well-trodden formula without alienating the players who already adore it. That's quite a trick.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2013: Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
Team Joystiq is barging into 2014 with a celebration of last year's best games. Keep reading throughout the week to see our assembly of ingenious indies and triple-A triumphs. At first glance, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons isn't a particularly novel game. It offers an emotional rollercoaster of an adventure without the need for actual dialog. Big deal, right? Journey was a clear favorite last year, Limbo before that, and both had some stylistic similarities. And yet, Brothers is a true rarity, as it places the gravity of its compact story right in your hands. Brothers places you at the feet of a journey in which two boys set out to retrieve a cure for their father's illness from a mystical tree. The game never bothers you with trivial details like names of the characters, the town, or just where the hell you're going the whole while. That information, often window dressing used to bring some sense of reality and purpose to any story, is discarded in favor of the game's stripped-down, puzzle-platformer design: See obstacle, get through it. More specifically, get through it together.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2013: Super Mario 3D World
Team Joystiq is barging into 2014 with a celebration of last year's best games. Keep reading throughout the week to see our assembly of ingenious indies and triple-A triumphs. Mario and his extended family has been our constant companion for quite some time now, and his adventures were starting to feel just a bit too ... familiar. There wasn't anything wrong with them, really, but they did lack that certain sparkle that made us fall for him all those years ago. We still loved him, of course, but we'd be lying if we said our eye hadn't started to wander. Then Super Mario 3D World came along to remind us that Mario is now, and forever shall be, our hero. Super Mario 3D World imbues the franchise with fresh energy, crafting ingenious, secret-stuffed levels and slathering them in a fresh coat of Wii U-colored pretty. New power-ups like the clone-producing cherry and the adorable-yet-incredibly-useful kitty suit provided new ways to explore while also reminding us that jumping, running and smacking into blocks is still an incredibly fun way to spend your time. Just making it to the flag at the end of a level (and getting the 10,000 point bonus for landing on the top, natch) is a pleasure, but snagging all the hidden green stars and the rubber stamp in the process is a joy.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2013: Tomb Raider
Team Joystiq is barging into 2014 with a celebration of last year's best games. Keep reading throughout the week to see our assembly of ingenious indies and triple-A triumphs. Lara Croft has now spent approximately half her life with Crystal Dynamics, but it was only In 2013 that their relationship truly bloomed. In the past, Tomb Raider games excelled through a zesty blend of platforming, exploration, and silly gunplay. As adventures to play and romp through, they were riveting, but ask what they were about beyond physical features and it'd be hard to come up with an answer. Tomb Raider was the series about the lady in the short shorts jumping through Incan booby traps, not tales about people changing and growing. They weren't human. In rebooting the series, Crystal Dynamics finally broke totally free of the mold defining what a Tomb Raider game could be. They made it a good story.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2013: Gone Home
Team Joystiq is barging into 2014 with a celebration of last year's best games. Keep reading throughout the week to see our assembly of ingenious indies and triple-A triumphs. Gone Home breaks gaming conventions to the point that critics (and some fans) hyperbolically question if it's even a video game, really. It's not narrative-driven – it is narrative. Much of the game plays out in the sparks of the player's synapses, filling in the story told by the notes that Kaitlin, our protagonist, finds scattered around her family's abandoned home. The notes come from her sister, Sam, in 1995 as she enrolls at a new school and meets the love of her young life. Each note is heartfelt and raw, as if ripped from the pages of a best friend's diary, and reading them becomes an almost-guilty obsession and the crux of the gameplay. Though we never play as Sam, she becomes the main character, and her tormented teenage life – complete with feminist rock, Street Fighter arcade cabinets and self-discovery – becomes the game's stage, though we never leave the walls of her deserted home.
Best of the Rest: Mike's picks of 2013
Team Joystiq is barging into 2014 with a celebration of last year's best games. Keep reading throughout the week to see our assembly of ingenious indies and triple-A triumphs. FIFA 14 Regardless of any indicator that 2013 was a "tune-up" year for EA Canada's ongoing soccer sim series, FIFA 14 arguably remains the best sports gaming has to offer for another year. Retaining the elements of unpredictability with the game's ball physic, introduced in FIFA 13, the developer improved teammate AI and slowed the game's pace to force more deliberate, tactical on-field play. The result couldn't be any clearer in the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game, which saw significant improvements graphically, particularly in the crowd's character models. While it may not be a top-ten game of the year, FIFA 14 was easily one of the most enjoyable.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2013: Device 6
Team Joystiq is barging into 2014 with a celebration of last year's best games. Keep reading throughout the week to see our assembly of ingenious indies and triple-A triumphs. Infused with a skewed 1960s spy-fiction flare, Device 6 intrigues as soon as the precisely styled opening credits slide across the screen. They shift aside to make way for a surreal mystery and an isolated protagonist, wandering through rooms and gardens that surprise, unsettle and connect in ways that don't quite make sense. Device 6 is a classic text adventure that augments its descriptions – and what you imagine from them – with creepy imagery and ingenious sound design. As a rickety radio plays in a distant room, hovering in your periphery like the buzz of an electrical cable overhead, Device 6 leads you up, down and through, implying tunnels and stairways in its twisting text. Every swipe is a step, and every literal turn of your tablet spirals you further into a test of cognition, orchestrated both by the game's designers and the rarely seen creators of your puppet's island prison.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2013: Saints Row 4
Team Joystiq is barging into 2014 with a celebration of last year's best games. Keep reading throughout the week to see our assembly of ingenious indies and triple-A triumphs. Saints Row 4 is a deceptively smart, dumb game. The developers at Volition Inc. have successfully mated the tightest gameplay in the Saints Row series to date with its most over-the-top weapons (including flight, telekinesis and other superpowers), most drawn out, ridiculous celebrity cameos, and some of the finest funny video game writing ever scribbled down. Granted, the game has its fair share of lowbrow poop jokes (not to mention weaponized sex toys), but at the same time it's apparent that the writers at Volition are some very clever people. Saints Row 4 rarely relies on memes or easy humor, and the surprisingly deep level of satire underlying the experience is simultaneously welcome and totally unnecessary to your enjoyment of the game.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2013: The Stanley Parable
Team Joystiq is barging into 2014 with a celebration of last year's best games. Keep reading throughout the week to see our assembly of ingenious indies and triple-A triumphs. If you could bring yourself to describe and spoil them, it would be much easier to write about the marvelous moments that make The Stanley Parable such a special piece of entertainment. These moments, some of which commandeer the game and some of which seem insignificant as they pass you by, shape the outcome of Stanley's story. Whether you decide to go along with the narrator's dialog, following his every command to the letter, or completely ignore him and forge your own path, or just stand still, The Stanley Parable has something to say about your decision.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2013: Fire Emblem: Awakening
Team Joystiq is barging into 2014 with a celebration of last year's best games. Keep reading throughout the week to see our assembly of ingenious indies and triple-A triumphs. The last time I fell so deeply in love with a strategy-RPG was with Shining Force on the Sega Genesis, so Fire Emblem: Awakening was one of this year's most pleasant surprises. It rekindled an addiction I'd long thought dead, and its deep mechanics kept me hooked through several playthroughs. Previously, the Fire Emblem games scared me away with their brutal permadeath mechanics; earlier series entries kill off major characters for good if they fall in battle, often leaving players with a gaping hole in their ranks if an enemy should land a lucky critical strike. Awakening allays these fears with its new "Casual" mode, which mercifully allows characters to retreat after being defeated, instead of croaking on the spot. Casual mode is a boon for fretful players (and obsessed micro-managers), and it allows both casual fans and hardcore veterans to customize their experience to a degree never before seen in the series. For instance, if you want to sample Fire Emblem's traditional high-stakes gameplay but don't want to risk losing several units during each battle, you may want to set the game's difficulty to Easy while opting out of Casual mode. During my second playthrough, I chose to play on "Hard Casual," a seemingly oxymoronic combination that provides a satisfying level of difficulty without the stomach-churning risk of permanent character loss. It proved to be an ideal solution for me, emphasizing everything I like about the genre while downplaying the elements I didn't especially enjoy.
Massively's Best of 2013 Awards
It's nearly the end of the year, a time for merriment, camaraderie, and cynical evaluation of all the MMO triumphs and tragedies that 2013 provided us. Today, Massively's staff honors the best of the best (and the worst of the worst) for the year 2013. Every writer was permitted a vote in each category with an anything-goes nomination process. No MMO, company, or headline was off the table, as long as it met the criteria. Can WildStar make it to three years in a row at the top of our "most anticipated" pile, or did its delay dampen our enthusiasm? Can SOE repeat its win for best studio? Which MMO is most likely to flop next year? And just what constituted the biggest MMO screw-up of the last 12 months? Enjoy our picks for the best MMOs, expansions, studios, stories, and innovations of 2013... and our most-anticipated for 2014 and beyond.
