Entertainment I've Consumed for the Better in 2015: Games

Okay, you've waited long enough. "Games, Zach!!!! I'm a nerd, feed me!!!" you've probably cried during my discussion about music and movies. "I need to eat games,,, to live!!" Well. Here's this year's top five in no particular order. But you'll kinda get the idea of which one I liked most.

Majora's Mask 3D

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I want you to think back to that one time that you had to put butter in a hot pan. We've all done it, each with our own reasons that brought us there. For some of us it was a choice that we willingly made, we chose to put the butter in the pan. For others it was a matter of life and death—putting the butter in the hot pan was our way of paving a greasy path to avoid starvation. But everyone, for good or bad, has put butter into a hot pan, and we all know what happens when we do that: it dances its mesmerizingly tragic dance. We watch it slide hither and tither as its congealed fats and salts and... yellow stuffs begin to shimmer and seep. Like the forlorn song of a dying swan, the butter's beautiful dance precedes only one outcome: its eventual death.

Playing Majora's Mask 3D for the 3DS was a lot like this, for me, personally. A very beautiful stick of butter that I watched melt for like the 10 hours I sunk in, and then.. it was gone. With nothing to sauté in the hot butter juice, I ended up not finishing the game. It was far and away one of the prettiest games I played all year (any game that's effectively able to dazzle me with its use of purple is game of the year material), but playing a game I'd already played plenty of times as a middle schooler was not necessarily high on my gaming priorities for this year. Majora is a fave of mine, doing things no other Zelda does (like spitting in your face), so maybe in 2016 I'll be able to justify it.


Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Q: snake, what is best in life?
SNAKE: it's dogs, dogs are.
SNAKE: dogs.

Phantom Pain is one of the few games in the last few years that I've actively thought about when I wasn't playing it (2015 gave me a couple of games that did that, incidentally). Sitting in my car on a break from work or spacing out on the couch, I would often find myself thinking of different ways to successfully invade enemy territories, or figure out ways to trap would-be comrades. With the level of detail and interactive design (and one of the most complicated-yet-totally-works-after-you-play-it-enough control setups ever), there's really no limit to what you're capable of doing. One time I air-lifted a car into an assault chopper with a weird balloon. One time I made my horse defecate on a road, which caused a jeep full of missile-toting jerks to slide and crash into a wall. One time I told my dog to run up to this dude and electrocute him with this rad electric knife. One time I threw a grenade from an impossible angle and had my sniper-buddy shoot the thing into a tent filled with bad men. I painted my helicopter purple. I listened to "Take On Me" while I jumped out of a careening jeep with four C-4 packs strapped to the front of it as it entered an enemy prison where a group of guys were mobilizing to look for me because one of their snipers had seen me and told someone and promptly fell asleep right after because of a choice sleeping dart I shot into his shoulder and they were offended and ready to kill me but before they knew it I had already won.........

It's the perfection of the series, in my totally correct opinion, and it's great because p much anyone can play if they want to but have never played the previous games. "5" is a pretty intimidating number to feel like you're coming in on, but the game certainly won't punish you for it at all. If you want to know more, there's no end to your growing cassette tape collection (the game takes place in 1984, even though some of the tech is years beyond our own) that allows you to catch up on any details you might wanna know more about. Or any music from the 80's you might have missed out on.

But more than that, it's just a fun game to play. With no set-in-stone ways to go about the missions, you can decide to play differently each time (and benefit from doing that, as enemies will learn your patterns), maybe blowing everything up, or sneaking in and out without leaving a trace behind. This and Undertale are tied for my Games of 2015, as both covered an incredible spectrum of what the Video Game has become and what it's capable of. I highly recommend it.


Undertale

[turns away from this image] oh, hi
[turns back to this image] oh, yes

I bet you weren't expecting to hear about this game for the umpteenth time, huh. Well. Look at my blog title....... (ump.... teen..th) haha, jokes on you. I'll be brief because I like the game too much to ruin it for possible converts and you might also be sick of hearing/seeing so much about it on the internet due to its overnight success and larrrrggeee fandom.

It's my favorite game of 2015 and is currently at the top of my list, "Favorite Games of Zach Mendelson's Puny Life". It's a real list, and it is hidden in my heart, where it shall remain until the sun blows up and brings us our Final Peace.

Undertale is a game that watches you play it and will let you know frequently that it knows what/why you're doing whatever it is. I sincerely believe that this is the largest step we've taken towards treating the medium of "games" as "art", an age-old discussion that I'm quite frankly sick of because of what so many people will claim is art, or rather settle for, in order to justify something they feel otherwise embarrassed about with people unfamiliar/uninterested with the medium. Games have a hellllll of a long way to go before we can start really thinking of the entire medium that way, but there are a handful of games I'd argue that have taken these revolutionary steps towards whatever That is.

Undertale is one of them. And you should play it. If anything I've said has interested you, please let me know! I have a couple copies of the game I've purchased for evangelistic purposes and would love to just straight up give it to you, so long as you promise to play it honestly to the end.


Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

i can't really explain it. just watch this and you'll get the idea.

Monster Hunter 4 was the other game I fantasized most about this year (the first chunk of it, at least). Apparently set in some other dimension in the future where society has collapsed and we've reverted back to hunter-gatherer stuff, you take the role of a hunter (or gatherer! there's lots of that) who wants to get to the bottom of this weird thing that's ......

Okay the story's great but that's not what's cool about MonHun. It's the game. The game is... it's really cool. Imagine a game where you hunt gigantic dinosaurs and you look for tell-tale clues to lead you to them on these big maps and when you find them you have to basically figure out how you're going to kill this thing that's like 20 times bigger than you and dead-set on eating you alive. The delight from the game comes from planning the Hunt. You spend most of your time organizing and crafting items, weapons, and armor from different creatures you've hunted or from the resources you've gathered in the field. That gigantic tooth on that One Thing makes for a reallllly cool lance, for example. Or the shell from that gigantic beetle that basically impaled you 100 times makes for a really cool helmet/breastplate combo. Every item matters in this game, and learning how to best use them is part of the experience. Now imagine doing all this with a friend. Or two. Or three!! (wowwww) The joy of the multiplayer hunting is what kept me going for a majority of my play-through.

But what's most fun is the battling itself. No two Big Things are the same, and all of the monsters fight very differently from one another. One of them is blind, using sound to both sense where you are and attack. Another is a weird shark frog..... it's weird. And then there's more traditional enemies like Big Frickin Dragons, who take to the skies and dive-bomb you with flames and big sharp teeth and stuff.

It's loads of fun. It's portable, and it's usually on sale. Check it out if you have a 3DS. Or don't. You have the choice to do the wrong thing.


Splatoon

once more into the fray,
into the last good fight you'll ever know,
to live and die in this ink,
to live and die in this ink.

And here's the best multiplayer game of 2015, and, possibly, ever. With a metric ton of charm and a world literally oozing with creativity, this is probably Nintendo's greatest IP since Mario (shots intentionally fired). Basically: it's squid-kids with super-soakers trying to lay down as much colorful ink on the map within a time limit to secure victory. There are many more game modes too, some of which debuted months after the game's launch for free (a very clever way to keep people interested/playing), including an explosive capture the flag, king of the hill, and... like, imagine king of the hill but the hill moves and you have to take it to the opposite team's base........ hard to explain, but that one's the best by far. [clenches fist and stares at the rainmaker...]

Light on story, heavy on fun gameplay (as Nintendo is known to do), Splatoon is far and away one of the most enjoyable, frenetic multiplayer experiences you'll ever have. With its only flaw being the lack of local multiplayer (unless you've got a bunch of Wii U's and TV's lying around....), you'll be hard-pressed to find anything else to fault it with. Simple in its execution, expansive in its playability, unforgettable to those who pick it up.

Stay fresh.

~ ~ ~

Honorable Mentions (there's a lot here, basically because i'm an awful hikikomori [sly smile] nerd):

Persona 4 Golden - i want to finish this game soooo badly. but. it's a jrpg. and i've got like 6 different jrpgs on my plate right now. i'm 7/10's of the way through, i promise. just... give me.... more time.....!!
Trails in the Sky - i couldn't finish in time for 2016, so i'm planning on merging a review of it with SC for next year's list. i loooove the localization though--probably the best thing about it.
Witcher 3 - my open-world game of the year... if my harddrive hadn't wiped my 40 hours of progress. maybe i'll get around to it again... or watch a friend or my children play it when i'm like 78 and have time.
Pokemon Trading Card Game - has the potential be the best rpg in the world.
Monument Valley - best mobile phone game i've ever ever played. highly recommend. v short.
Fallout 4 - it was great for the first 6 hours when i was terrified of everything, and then i got better weapons, and... it got really boring.
Yo-kai Watch - a very good game! i enjoyed it more than i've enjoyed the last few pokemon games, but... it was too short, and pretty light on rpg mechanics, so i wouldn't mind playing a more complicated version of it some time in the future.
Story of Seasons - this is only here because i spent the most time behind MGSV playing this (roughly 50 hours) and i'm scared of what will happen if/when i load it up again... farming simulators have always been a sort of stumbling block for me.
Xenoblade Chronicles X - if i had more time this probably would have been up there.
Danganronpa - the best M-Rated Phoenix Wright game i've ever played