Skip to main content

2019 Year in Review: Best Game, Worst Game, Most Surprising and Most Disappointing

It’s been about a year since I started blogging about games again.  The combination of goings on at work and a new year’s resolution led to this whole thing and frankly, I can’t believe I saw it through.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not stopping anytime soon, I’m just shocked I didn’t stop half way through.  I am excited for yet another year of gaming and I have tons of changes planned for next year.

Image result for 2019

With that said, its time for my inaugural end of year awards.  I have played and reviewed a lot of games this year and its time to go back and reflect.  For these completely fictional awards that I just made up in my head, I will be naming best game, worst game, biggest surprise, most disappointing, most potential for a series revival/sequel and most unique.  First, a reminder of my scores, from highest to lowest.

  1. Sonic Mania 9.25/10
  2. The Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon 9.25/10
  3. Vigilante 8 9/10
  4. All star Baseball 99 8.5/10
  5. Guilt Gear X2 8.25/10
  6. NHL Hitz 2003 8.25/10
  7. G.I. Joe: The Atlantis Factor 8/10
  8. Cosmic Star Heroine 8/10
  9. Horizon: Zero Dawn 8/10
  10. Lode Runner 3D 8/10
  11. Mega Man X5 8/10
  12. The Legend of Dragoon 7.5/10
  13. Warhawk 7.25/10
  14. Dark Cloud 7/10
  15. Battle Toads/Double Dragon 7/10
  16. The Magical Quest Staring Mickey Mouse 7/10
  17. Castlevania: Lament of Innocence 7/10
  18. NFL Gameday 98 7/10
  19. The Grandstream Saga 6.75/10
  20. Mega Man X: Command Mission 6.5/10
  21. Mega Man X6 6/10
  22. Dark Rift 6/10
  23. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles 6.5/10
  24. Mega Man Battle and Chase 5.5/10
  25. World Heroes II Jet 5/10
  26. Aero the Acrobat 5/10
  27. Shadow Madness 5/10
  28. Doom Troopers 5/10
  29. Quest 64 5/10
  30. Rad Racer II 4.5/10
  31. Primal Rage 4.25/10
  32. Joe And Mac 4/10
  33. StarFox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet 4/10
  34. Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 3/10
  35. Mickey Mousecapade 3/10
  36. Star Wars 2/10
  37. Days of Thunder 2/10
  38. Eye of the Beholder 2/10
  39. MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch 1/10
  40. Rise of the Robots .25/10
  41. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends 0/10

I should note this isn’t in exact order, I didn’t take the time to rank games with the same score.  There are also a few score adjustments that I wanted to make.  When I started this, I didn’t want to do any decimals, but its just too hard not to.  Castlevania:Lament of Innocence gets bumped up to a 7.5.  I would also bump Legend of Dragoon up to an even 8 and Grandstream up to an even 7.  Also, I would bump Star Fox Adventures up to a 5.  It’s just too well made even if it is painfully boring.

Anyway, now for the superlatives. For best game, it will come down to a tiebreaker.  Sonic Mania and Legend of the Mystical Ninja ended up with the same score, as both are excellent games.  At the end of the day, I am going to have to go with Sonic Mania.  LOTMN is fun, immersive and hilarious, but it has tons of technical flaws.  While I clearly don’t consider those as harshly as most critics (I’m a gamer, not a programmer), they can still serve as a tiebreaker.  It was a close race, but the Blue Blur edges out the competition for its re-imagining of classic levels, outstanding original content and on-point gameplay.

Image result for sonic mania

Worst game wasn’t even close.  The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle is atrocious, its a digital moose turd on top of a dead squirrel.  Believe me, that .25 that Rise of the Robots got is a huge difference.  That game is borderline playable, but Rocky and Bullwinkle is absolute garbage.  It might very well be the single worst game I’ve ever played.

Image result for Rocky and Bullwinkle NES

Biggest surprise was another tossup between Guilty Gear X2 and Lode Runner 3D.  In the end, I think I have to give it to GGx2.  I had no hope at all for a 3D update of an Apple II game being any good and I was very pleasantly surprised, but I was DREADING Guilty Gear as soon as I booted it up.  I almost turned off the game and just said “nope” after the opening cutscene.  Even gameplay-wise, I kind of new what to expect with Lode Runner.  I had no idea GGX2 would have such a deep fighting engine.

Image result for guilty gear x2

The biggest disappointment would probably be Brothers in Arms.  I’m a history buff, so it was cool to see some care taken to make the game as reality based as possible.  It had great reviews, so I was pretty hyped for it.  Unfortunately, it was so slow, plodding and ugly that I found it completely unplayable.  Call it “tactical” all you want.  It’s not tactical.  It’s. Just. Boring.  Who wants to sit around and wait.  To me, playing something like this is like staring out your window with a controller in your hand and pressing a button every time a person walks past.

Image result for brothers in arms road to hill 30

Well, that about does it for this year.  I can’t wait to get back at it and start reviewing more games in 2020.  But that isn’t all I am going to be doing.  I have big plans for next year, so I hope both of my readers keep checking back for updates!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 10s: Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven

When I first started writing about games, I was very hesitant to include PC titles at all. As I've said numerous times before, it's just not something I've ever really felt qualified to talk about. There are so many iconic PC games that were just blind spots for me as I never really actively sought them out. If it didn't come on a PC Gamer demo disc or I didn't hear about it through word of mouth, I didn't know about it. Does anyone else remember those PC Gamer demo discs? I had as much fun playing with the UI on them as I did any of the actual demos. Maybe if I spent less time clicking around the secret underground club and more on actually playing the games, I would have had more PC experience. Eh, I'm okay with the fact that while Fallout and Diablo weren't nearly as critical a part of my early gaming life as Coconut Monkey. Even when I did play and enjoy PC games, it was typically because I played the console versions first. Games like Doom, Command
Post a Comment
Read more

Terranigma

  As usual, it took way longer than it should have, but I did EVENTUALLY do exactly what I said I was going to. It's a year late, but I've finally made my way through the Quintet trilogy. Playing these three games became a stated goal of mine since I started podcasting last year. One of my earliest episodes covered Soul Blazer, the first title in the pseudo series. The second game, Illusion of Gaia, was also a landmark episode as it was the first one to include the intro song ("A Glass Half Full of Tears" by Aura Blaze, who's music you should check out here ). Both of them received pretty solid scores, though I didn't quite like the latter quite as much as a lot of people seem to. After all these years, I'm still surprised I never played these games when they came out. Both were definitely right up my alley and readily available to buy or even rent at my local video store, but I just never picked them up. It's a little more understandable that I had ne
Post a Comment
Read more

Lost Odyssey: Part 2

Last week, we started our look at Lost Odyssey, a title that seemed to break unwritten rules of gaming left and right. We have a traditional RPG, which is the brainchild of the creator of Final Fantasy, released for XBox, a console not known for the genre, at a time when said genre was at what felt like the absolute bottom of its popularity. We started with the story, characters and world, all of which I thought were really good to great. That's a great start for an RPG, where those aspects are very important. But all of that can be undone if the gameplay isn't up to par. It's critical in any generation, but this is an essential aspect to call out in 7th gen RPGs. There was a lot of experimentation going on in the genre at the time, a lot of which didn't yield positive results. I guess I get it, the genre wasn't doing well at the time and developers were trying to do anything they could to bring it back to relevance. Sometimes, that meant terrible gimmicks. Other ti
Post a Comment
Read more