We did a Game of The Year contest about 2 years ago, but it was a bit hard to manage and organize. That being said, I wanted to see what you all had in mind for game recommendations and memorable moments from this year.
So, discuss:
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What was the best platformer you played this year? Tell us about it! Is it on sale? What made it special?
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What was the absolute most pathetic corporate virtue signal this year? Was it the German soccer team's DIE display on it's aircraft? Was it when Epic removed police cars from Fortnite?
Platformers is kind of a boring genre that hasn't changed or improved much since the 90s (Commander Keen and Abuse FTW) .
I played Butcher this year. Got bored after 15 minutes. Also played Carrion. Looks nice and the tentacle blob gimmick is neat for about an hour. Then the constant backtracking bored the hell out of me and I quit. The one constant in gaming is that I hate Legend of Zelda with the glowing passion of a thousand suns for making that retarded asshole mechanic popular where you have to unlock abilities and backtrack through the whole game over and over again to go places that you passed a million times but couldn't enter because you lacked some McGuffin.
Soccer in Germany is a neverending stream of virtue signals. The most hilariously delicious one was when they covered their mouths to protest FIFA's "no politics" stance ... and then promptly lost and got eliminated in the first round. So much Schadenfreude.
Controversial opinion, but it doesn't need to. What could they actually change? Short of just adding a shit ton of more content, there isn't much other than simply making sure the movement is fluid. And "more" was already controversial when DK64 did it generations ago.
In fact, trying to chase "modern updates" are why the genre has been mostly dead since the 90s. Because they keep trying to fix what already worked for the audience who enjoyed it.
That's more of a Metroid/Castlevania thing. In fact, its the entire definition of the Metroidvania genre. Most Zelda games, at least in the 3D realm, only require major backtracking if you are after 100%, unless you count "this is obviously a later dungeon I can't open yet" as egregious.