In The Year 2013, There Are Still Video Games

2012 had a ton of video games in it. In a vague order, here are handful of games from (or played in) 2013 that really stuck with me. If you haven’t played Journey, Walking Dead, or Hotline Miami, you should! Journey and Hotline Miami are both short little things that won’t take up too much time and deliver strong experiences. Journey at the high end with upliftingness and positivity. HLM showing how dark and grimy and gross a game can be. Taken together, they kind of hit two opposing endpoints of the emotional spectrum.

  • Journey
  • The Walking Dead
  • Hotline Miami
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown
  • FTL
  • 999
  • Fez
  • Planetside 2

Over my Christmas holiday break, I got more work in on my Dungeon Keeper riff and made a tiny, tiny competitive game prototype called either Ships or Fluid depending on what name I remember to call it. There will be more progress on those. More of the missing Flash animations will go up. I’ll look into adding YouTube versions of those (would anyone find this useful?) to go alongside the Flash versions. Ascend will get finished and someone will get to play it.

Video gaa-aaames

So sometimes I have opinions about video games and then those opinions are later altered through new information. Something along those lines has happened with the new Syndicate game Starbreeze is working on. For those who don’t know, they are making an FPS that seems generally inspired by that ancient DOS game Syndicate. I was pretty bummed initially, because I figured it would be Deus Ex being made by a different company. But then this new trailer was released that seems to show a way more responsive version of Deus Ex. Having played a bit of DX:HR recently, I find myself pretty excited to play a jackbooted future-thug bad guy counterpart to DX:HR’s not-asking-for-this heroic protagonist. I enjoyed being the cyber-good guy, but both facets of the corporation-controlled dystopia spacefuture are interesting to delve. So now I am kind of excited about it and mad at myself. Same thing happened with that new XCOM game they’re making.

Further reporting on Giant Bomb makes it sound like the thug/player character/agent Miles Kilo will eventually break free of company control and stare at his hands in a very dramatic way while the crushing weight of his crimes washes over him before he sets out to take down the corporation – from the inside! – but that is somewhat expected, I guess. Expected but disappointing. The original Syndicate’s end goal of worldwide corporate domination might be a hard sell to people who do not think that darkly of the future. Who knows, though, people love the fuck out of all that zombie stuff.