Can we talk about hardware too?
Best console for me personally was the Switch, BOTW and Mario Odyssey were once in a generation games and playing Skyrim for the first time ever and being able to play it away from a monitor was incredible.
GTA5 on PS4 gave me hours of joy and having visited LA a few years after it was released, it felt surreal seeing how much effort went into creating that open world. Love or hate the story, I lost a ton of hours just messing about and soaking up the environments.
I loved and hated Red Dead 2 in equal measure, the controls needed tweaking but the environments were amazing. Dragon Quest XI was the best RPG I played.
Biggest disappointments:
Persona 5: A joyless pile of horse shit. I put hours into P4G on vita, but this instalment felt dead on arrival. After all the hype, I just didn’t care for it
MGS5: Should have called it a day after Peace Walker. Yet more open world jank. I don’t care if you like Joy Division.
Max Payne 3: Those Rockstar bros really lost the plot with this one. Gone was the noir and in was this day-glo ralph lauren stool of a game. The gunplay was good, but I really wish Sam Lake/Remedy had made this and not those faux-film directors. The fact the cutscenes were baked into the game destroyed any chance of a replay.
3DS hardware. The fact that the Lite cut into my hands and felt like the shittest handheld Nintendo had ever produced. The fact it was region locked. What a fucking dick move. Was it to shift more consoles and faceplates? The original DS had an incredible library that was accessible to all, the 3DS felt walled from day one. The wiiU was a failure but at least it felt comfortable to play. I absolutely hate the 3DS in hindsight and the Vita with all it’s Japanese fun (Dragons Crown/EDF/Everybodys Golf) completely demolished it yet did not win the fight.
The best games I played to completion this year were REmake on PS4 and NES Legend of Zelda. Those two games are almost spherical in that they are both perfect. The past ten years have given us shitty failing hardware, redundant online purchases and lost content. I despise everything about the industry and found further solace in emulation, older games and handhelds. The most exciting thing in gaming right now is FPGA
