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Best of the Rest: Danny'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. Dragon's Crown Dragon's Crown is the best thing to happen to the beat-'em-up genre since Castle Crashers. Taking its inspiration from Capcom's Dungeons & Dragons games, Dragon's Crown forges its own identity with satisfying combat, a lengthy quest, and a bottomless well of character customization options. The sheer amount of loot players accrue in Dragon's Crown keeps the experience fresh and compelling even after you've hacked your way through hundreds of owlbears. The game offers a broad selection of playable characters, all of which play very differently and require varying degrees of expertise to master. Online multiplayer is a joy as a result, mixing the game's varied cast for some gloriously chaotic battles. It's worth noting that Dragon's Crown has seen a number of significant improvements since its initial release, as patches have consistently addressed player feedback while adding major gameplay features. The newest patch, for instance, gives hardcore players the option of skipping the game's introductory chapters, making character leveling more efficient than ever before. Oh, and it also adds a 10,000-floor dungeon. If you love beat-'em-ups, Dragon's Crown will keep you satisfied for months.
Bubsy 3D tribute is this week's best weird 15 minutes
The abstract, retro-inspired minds of Arcane Kids crafted a suitably bizarre, beautifully bad tribute to Bubsy 3D this week, and you can play it in your browser right now. While it ostensibly resembles the 1996 PlayStaton game, Arcane Kids' version takes you on an unwieldy tour of the real-life ongoing James Turrell Retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In contrast to the PlayStation game's abysmal take on 3D, the LACMA exhibition is a celebration of the artist's vision of light and space. Once you're done with the tour, however, things start to get really weird. We're talking the last episode of The Prisoner weird, complete with an unerring propensity of skeletons and an overriding sense of dread. While the controls and presentation mirror the terribleness that was Bubsy 3D, Arcane Kids' game is an aptly bizarre mixture of nostalgia and artistic thinking, and easily the best weird 15 minutes of the week. Strangely, it made me want to return to 2D SNES-generation game Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, which I was young and stupid enough to think was pretty good when I played it. Yesterday.
