As the wheezing beast that is 2013 enters its final weeks of life, we’ve come roaring back from hiatus with our Top 5 protagonists who went villain for the sequel, a little bit of talk about new releases (including the somewhat surprising Gran Turismo 6), and a very special musical performance by The Raccoon that he swore to kill us over if we ever let it see the light of day. Then we talk about what you were planning to play over Thanksgiving (or comparable holiday), sure.
Question of the Week
What’s your pick for worst game of 2013?
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The worst game hands down goes to Ride To Hell: Retribution, I haven’t even played it but I know how shitty it looks and plays just by seeing videos of it on youtube. It’s funny how the two franchises Deep Silver bought from THQ did better critically than their own titles.
Oh man, I lost my fucking shit over that raccoon segment.
I feel like choosing Ride to Hell is like picking on the special needs kid.
CoD: Ghosts. Hur hur hur
But really, I nominate Deadpool, not because of the conventianal meaning of “worst game” but mostly “mostly disappointing”. All the marketing indicated that the game was gonna be one the funniest things ever released, but it turns out that the funny parts were far and in between and the game was riddled with horrible gameplay scenarios and game breaking glitches. 🙁
The most annoying part of all this is that the game was made by High Moon Studios who made the excellent Transformers games. What happened?!
What happened is Activision fired half the studio halfway through development.
What?! That wasn’t in the news!
Oh man I’m extremely devastated now..
On the subject of online petitions, the problem with Nintendo is that their consoles are region locked. Localization wouldn’t be so much of a problem for the niche audience if Nintendo weren’t actively preventing them from playing games that are exclusive to Japan.
I’m fluent in Japanese, but I’ll never be able to play a Japanese 3DS game (without spending hundreds of dollars to import a second 3DS) because Nintendo likes to pretend it’s still the nineties, and now they’re telling me to go screw myself.
That’s a problem.
Btw, we’re still waiting for Shin Megami Tensei 4 to be released for Aus/NZ region systems. I’m guessing it never will.
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Arbitrary business decisions such as this are why Nintendo is becoming less and less relevant.
All good points I hadn’t considered.
ALL HAIL MERIGROCK:
http://merigrock.wikia.com/wiki/Merigrock_Wiki
What hath Wikia wrought????
The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct
Seems as if most people had forgotten this game existed… Probably because Activision made it’s darnest to make a quick buck with it while also avoiding press coverage as much as they could, because they knew how much the game sucked.
Well I didn’t forget. From the moment the very first footage was released, this game looked like absolute garbage, with graphics looking worse than PS2 games, rancid animations, and absolutely nothing that set it apart from shooters or zombie games that had came before it. It was clear this game was going to be awful from the get go… and it was. Streams and let’s plays cemented this by showing how even the potentially cool ideas of the game were just lazily executed.
Bioshock Infinite.
Not a bad game by any means, it just had all the set pieces of greatness and didn’t quite know what to do with it beside making a generic vaguely Japanese-stylistic shooter with it that tried to use concepts that went way over their heads.
Haven’t really played anything that was outright bad. Volgarr’s worth a mention too. I love difficult games, but fuck that one. It has all the difficulty of an overly long QTE.
Welcome back, Wikiparaz and Co.
You’ve been missed…
…Wow, dat Racoon song.
AC3
Ugh. I was having a fine time listening to the show until you decided to randomly pile a bunch of hate on libertarians and objectivists. Thanks :/
It’s certainly not a bad game, I’ve reccomended it to other friends, but as far as what game gave me the most negative feelings, it’d have to be DmC. I love the series, and really technical action games in general, and I had specific issues with a lot of gameplay and mechanic related things. I don’t like it nearly as much as 3&4’s combat, but I had my fun. What I got sick was people who wanted to defend the game constantly telling me that only real difference is just the aesthetic, and then the fans who had the same issues as me were acting as if the game was trash, which it clearly isn’t.
After eventually beating the game on Dante Must Die (very very hard mode), I was pretty dissatisfied and couldn’t shake the gross feeling I had from all the frustrating ideas and people behind it, I just had a bad taste in my mouth and ultimately gave the game to my friend, hoping that he could enjoy it more than I do.
Man I can nominate good games but not bad games, I guess doing your mom reader (*snap*). It was fast, the controls felt lumpy and funny, and the climax was terrible and uninteresting. It made me hate hate! multiplayer, from now on only single player.
i completely disagree.
Oh come on, he obviously has a good point!
Not since the birth of the Norwegian King of Names have I felt so much delight. Thank you Chris, for being so unkempt that a raccoon would take up residence under your bed. Those breaks are the delicious topping on the Vidjagame Apocalypse ziggy piggy.
As for worst game, and if mobile counts, I’m lumping in the Injustice mobile game AND the 2 Skylander mobile games. (Though, I think the Skylander games may be 2012.) Console, it would be most of the Games with Gold offers. Just not fun, or engaging. And I’m someone who 100%ed Yaris.
I’ve never been a fan of the racoon but that song segment was fantastic.
Watch Dogs.
Simply the most unplayable game in 2013.
True and Last Guardian
This is unlikely to be an answer which most people will have any connection to, but for me FIFA Soccer 14 was the worst game of the year simply because it completely turned me off of the FIFA franchise. I’d played every FIFA game since 2009 and when I played 14 I was so utterly disappointed and upset with how bad the game was that I sold my copy of FIFA 13 to Amazon and refused to continue playing it.
The game actually regressed in quality from the previous year and was virtually unplayable. I took the time to make an actual list of the problems with the game which included descriptions, but I’ll save the space in this comment by just going through a very short list below:
The AI was still as stupid as it was in FIFA 13, the new momentum/weight of players made the gameplay awfully sluggish, players completely lost their first touch ability, the passing system was still broking, at the release of the game scoring headers was extremely easy and became the only reliable method of scoring, and skill moves became even more easily abused.
I was so upset I hit the submit comment button before I was finished making my comment…
As a massive fan of soccer it’s really disappointing and frustrating when you are effectively locked into a single option with regards to your choice of games. Pro Evolution Soccer is no longer a viable competitor for FIFA and as such EA Sports has simply refused to make any progress with the franchise over its yearly iterations.
MERLENDERL, in the same game. What could be be-zzzzz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC-HBQbeLgU
While Reggie is certainly right that 100,000 signitures doesn’t mean 100,000 sales, but I absolutely think Operation Rainfall had an impact on bringing those games to the West. The idea of a company like Nintendo localizing 3 Japanese RPGs, new IPs, years after their Japanese releases, for the Wii in 2012 and 2013, at which point the system was basically dead… I don’t think they would’ve done that without the massive amount of people calling for it. The European localizers specifically cited Op Rainfall with the Last Story/Pandora’s Tower localization announcements, as well. In my opinion, Op Rainfall is how you do online petitioning correctly.
NBA Live 14, EA takes 3 years to make a basketball game and the game ends up so bad that they have to write an apology letter which promises to fix the game through patches. The gameplay is bad enough with lag between player action/game reaction and God awful AI. But man the graphics and animations are PS2 level. The comparison shots of players in NBA2K14 makes the huge gap even more laughable. 2K actually put effort into reworking their current gen versions for next gen and the difference is clear with that game looking fantastic and smooth animations. NBA Live 14 on the other hand looks like a game that started on last gen hardware and was shoved onto next gen.
The whole game just seems like something EA had to get out the door because they could not have another year where the game didn’t come out. I think the worst thing you can say about the game is that it would of been better for EA if the game didn’t come out because what they put out was such a broken mess.
Oh yeah def NBA Live 14, ouch that game was just ouch.
I think the worst game was also one of my favorites and that sucks. Battlefield 4 has moment of amazing game play and then hours of frustration. They have done more patches than a quilt and i still have not been able to play any of the china rising expansion. This was the one game I was excited to play on my PS4 and now I am wishing I would have bought Ghosts, at least it probably works most of the time. The newest patch has even made the game worse than before.
The raccoon song was awesome and it is always good to hear Anne on the podcast. Keep up the amazing work you guys!!
This episode is funny as hell. I’d like to propose a monthly podcast, “The Dildo Factory with Mike Grimm”. In it, he rants about cars, topical doofuses, and stupid wikia fan shit.
Worst of 2013? Metal Gear Rising Revengence! Don’t think I didn’t notice that this is a 3rd person version of Fruit Ninja, Mr. Kojima. It should be called Metal Gear Fruit Ninja when your hero is less macho than Otacon. All the eye patches & bar codes don’t change the fact that Raiden is wearing high heels. I am Reverend Strack and I approve of this message.
I think it came out this year, so I’ll say it: MONACO. To be honest I had confused this game with Paper’s Please because I thought Derrick on the Mega 64 podcast mentioned the name of this game and stated that it was the game that Paper’s Please is only to find out it was a top down crime/heist game. Thankfully I had bought the game at a deep discount on Steam, but I honestly have to say that it failed to really impress me. the controls to me were just downright awful and it was hard to keep track of my-self when playing with another player. I just don’t like it at all and it just was not all that fun to be honest. Don’t think I’ll ever boot it up again.
I am alive guys, something that’s not well known from dying from laughter, I’ve respawned. Worst game, really, nope I don’t have one of those although maybe I could say A. Grid 2 was disappointing because Grid 1 was so good but to say that it was really bad sounds like someone who really hasn’t played it (for more than a few hours). Did you quit in the beginning because all the cars handled so bad, the beginning cars are all muscle drift cars. You gain grip and balanced cars later on when you progress your career. They fixed the online annoyance of trolls or really aggressive players messing things up by implementing a status system (you’ll see players who have red ! or not at the lobby), they have weekly challenges which you can competitively compete against your friends (tied with an app you can access on a tablet to see or set stats/rivals) and random strangers via leaderboards/ghosts, and there’s a few DLC tracks that are really cool that they added in (Spa and Bathurst). I’d say GRID 2 was disappointing but it seems like there’s this general notion from the gaming community that after hearing word of mouth pushed this one into the garbage can. Whatever, I play Forza, NFS, they all have their perks.
*Apps I grabbed on my smartphone that turned into F2P paywall grinds.
Mike Grimm is the funniest guy on the planet.