Zero Punctuation: Top Five Games of 2016

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mythgraven

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Did anyone else notice Yahtzee actually come very close to breaking character and laughing at the "chihuahua/spiral staircase" joke?
 

rgrekejin

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KissingSunlight said:
I liked Shitbulb. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't the greatest game. After all, you do play as a light bulb with shit on it. I am just a contrarian who like ambitious failures over bland, mediocre games.

Speaking of which, did anyone noticed that Overrated wasn't on any of the list? I'm sorry. I meant Overwatch wasn't mentioned in the video. I might be too harsh about the game, because I am not a fan of online shooters. They are just too repetitious, and filled with people who are too obsessed with the game to enjoy competing against.
Indeed, that was one of the first things I noticed, so much so that I went out and checked to make sure that I was remembering correctly and that Overwatch actually did come out this year, and not on December 29th 2015 or some damn thing. But no, solidly in mid-2016. I thought for sure Yahtzee would find a spot on some list or another for a game whose primary appeal is based on marketing hype rather than any actual substance, but then again, I'm also just a contrarian who enjoys the affirmation I get when other people see what I regard to be fairly obvious glaring flaws in inexplicably popular things, so I'm probably a biased source.
 

Noyemi-K

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LordTerminal, please calm down before you post, maybe it'll help you come somewhere close to actually making sense.
 

Erttheking

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LordTerminal said:
erttheking said:
LordTerminal said:
Just want to play shooters? You do know that one of the contenders for best Metroid game is Super Metroid right? And that it's not a first person shooter? Hell, the shift to FPS with Prime was a change that the fanbase DIDN'T like at first. It was only after it was revealed that the core of what made Metroid a good series was intact, with a whole new level of story added, that it became one of the more beloved entries in the franchise.
So basically you admit the franchise has an unpleasable
group of whiners then? You know what else had Metroid's core elements? A rare gem of an NES game called The Guardian Legend and it did everything the first Metroid did but better. Now why isn't that a long running franchise instead?

I've played Super Metroid and I honestly think most of its fame is based off of nostalgia anyways. Because I felt nothing for it.
Uh, I said that the game was considered to be one of the best of the franchise. So no. The fanbase was very much pleased. Fuck, it isn't hard to please Metroid fans, people adored AM2R and it was just an old school Metroid side scroller put together by fans. That's cool, but did The Guardian Legend innovate and improve on its mechanics like Metroid did?

Well good for you, your opinion isn't universal. I've talked to plenty of people who didn't play it when they young and thought that it had aged very well.
 

Nurb

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Dec 9, 2008
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Most people have already forgotten about Mankind Divided.
 

Onliuge

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Aug 9, 2012
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Nice list Yahtzee, can't wait for the, "Phew, coast is clear" gang of games to slide out of the AAA asshole.
 

darkrage6

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Igor-Rowan said:
I just discovered a few months ago that Devil's Third was a semi-Duke Nukem Forever, with a bit of Too Human sprinkled in. You got a team of former Tecmo people (Dead or Alive, Ninja Gaiden) that was initially a XB360 exclusive, then it was on all non-Nintendo platforms of last gen, then Satoru Iwata gave it the green light, mainly because there was nothing else online coming to the Wii U.

Then Nintendo of America desperately tried to keep that game from coming here, because they remembered Disaster: Day of Crisis, by getting rid of all of the announcements. But then they had to damage control the backlash of that when people got wind of that (whoa boy E3 2015 was quite the day). And the developer still went on to blame Nintendo for letting the reviews out before the sales (you know, like most companies are supposed to do).

I'm only saying this because this was the last time people will ever talk about that game.

Also, MP: Federation Force is worse than this? One of the few times I call bulsh*t on Yahtzee.
Devil's Third at least didn't piss all over a once great franchise. Speaking of which i'm really surprised Star Fox Zero was nowhere to be found on this list.
 

Elvis Starburst

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darkrage6 said:
Speaking of which i'm really surprised Star Fox Zero was nowhere to be found on this list.
Eh, the only thing Zero did that was really that bad was have a rather polarizing control scheme and the very boring Gyrowing. Besides that, the game was alright. Its average 7/10 score is what it deserves for the most part. It probably fell off Yahtzee's radar, or the games that were on the list were simply worse
 

josemlopes

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Homefront actually managed to patch itself out of shitville, its actually enjoyable now even if it doesnt break any new ground.

And I quite liked Quantum Break. Its very much like Alan Wake in that the characters and setup are interesting enough to make you play through the game, plus it has great production values in a more artistic mindset, so not exactly how cool the setpiece is but how gorgeus it looks.
 

Erttheking

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LordTerminal said:
erttheking said:
Uh, I said that the game was considered to be one of the best of the franchise. So no. The fanbase was very much pleased. Fuck, it isn't hard to please Metroid fans, people adored AM2R and it was just an old school Metroid side scroller put together by fans.
A pointless old school side scroller made only out of spite as well as a remake of a game that didn't need to be remade. Why couldn't these guys make an original IP instead of just some vanity project for Metroid fans?
I noticed you switched tactics the second it was made clear that the fans liked it, just insulting it and the creators because you had nothing else to fall back on (and yet for some reason people were still supposed to like FF) They made AM2R because they wanted to, that's all the motivation someone needs to do anything. They were fans of Metroid and wanted to remake 2, and as someone who played AM2R, they did a damn good job.
 

Blood Brain Barrier

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Doom? Is this 1993? Also, 2016 was awesome year and Yahtzee clearly didn't play the right games. Especially if Doom is #1 on his list.
 

JenSeven

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Oct 19, 2010
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Well, the main question on the 2017 body count is who do we have left?
Morgan Freeman, Ian McKellen, Michael Gambon, Sean Connery, Martin Sheen, Michael Caine and Donald Sutherland?

So in order of character that are well known from them.
God, Gandalf, Dumbledore, King Arthur, The President of the USA, Charlie Croker and Oddball.

Yeah, we're starting to run thin on famous old actors that are still alive.
 

The Dead Singer

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JenSeven said:
Well, the main question on the 2017 body count is who do we have left?
Morgan Freeman, Ian McKellen, Michael Gambon, Sean Connery, Martin Sheen, Michael Caine and Donald Sutherland?

So in order of character that are well known from them.
God, Gandalf, Dumbledore, King Arthur, The President of the USA, Charlie Croker and Oddball.

Yeah, we're starting to run thin on famous old actors that are still alive.
2016 killed: David Bowie, Pierre Boulez (Don't think anyone here has heard of him but he was an extremely important conductor and influenced a lot of people like Frank Zappa), Leonard Cohen, Prince, Lemmy Kilmister, etc


So up next we have: Bob Dylan (Gonna be the next one, I'm calling it), Iggy Pop, the remaining Beatles, the remaining Beach Boys, the guys from Black Sabbath, the guys from The Rolling Stones etc
 

Ambient_Malice

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josemlopes said:
Homefront actually managed to patch itself out of shitville, its actually enjoyable now even if it doesnt break any new ground.

And I quite liked Quantum Break. Its very much like Alan Wake in that the characters and setup are interesting enough to make you play through the game, plus it has great production values in a more artistic mindset, so not exactly how cool the setpiece is but how gorgeus it looks.
Both games began development in 2011, and like FFXV or Watch_Dogs, they ended up suffering from the inevitable lack of clear design direction that long development tends to bring.

Quantum Break is the love child of Max Payne and Alan Wake. It's a decent time-based shooter. To me, though, the use of 110 minutes of live action footage throughout the story felt more like a spiritual successor to Enter the Matrix than anything particularly good, bad, or innovative. The game's story is outstanding, though. And it's mechanically solid.

Homefront: The Revolution STARTED as a sequel to Homefront but two years into development they decided that they didn't like Homefront very much and instead rebooted the project using an "open world Half-Life" pitch. The end result is a game that was released unfinished, but is a genuinely good game after 8 months of patching. While it has almost peerless atmosphere -- walking around in the rain is the best experience since Perfect Dark's Chicago --, it suffers from a lack of innovation because over the course of 5 years, it lost any clear direction. It doesn't even have clear narrative direction. There are scattered bits and pieces of the original "back when this was actually related to the old Homefront game" narrative in the game. Newspaper clippings that are clearly from the original storyline, for example. A narrative designer was bought onto the project 6 months before release to try and improve things. Results were mixed. The DLC is much more clearheaded, though.

And speaking of 5 year development, Mankind Divided was also in development for five years, and it is genuinely bizarre to look at Homefront and Mankind Divided side by side. They have the same realtime Crysis-derived weapon modding system. They have the same vaulting system. They have the same style of running animation with deliberately heavy footsteps. They even share the same iconography of police oppression right down to 4-rotored scanner drones and passive-aggressive police manhandling people. Games that have long development periods tend to absorb undue outside influence because developers lose faith that their game will be "current" and "relevant" when it releases.
 

Johnny Novgorod

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LordTerminal said:
Puts Metroid in Worst instead of Star Fox and puts Color Splash in blandest. More proof that Yahtzee should be blacklisted from Nintendo because he doesn't know what he's talking about.
"I don't agree with this critic, he shouldn't be allowed to criticize"?

I played Color Splash and can tell you he clearly stopped at the goddamn first chapter and didn't even bother to play the whole way through or he'd know the writing from the older games is still in.
He streamed Color Splash some weeks ago on Twitch, he'd already beaten the game.

He clearly wants the company to only make what he wants.
You don't?
 

maximalist566

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Caramel Frappe said:
Not sure if I agree with your rule Yahtzee. I mean if that's the case, you can never nominate games in the future like Last of Us 2 because it's like the first game but probably better. While I understand where you're coming from, disqualifying Dark Souls III for that silly reason seems unjustifiable. I'm going to just pretend you listed DS3 as your 5th best game of 2016.
First, Yahtzee didn't like Last of Us. It wasn't even on the list in 2013. Second, Dark Souls 3 has less of an impact than 1/2. It doesn't innovate, the design is pretty lazy and leans dangerously close to fanfiction (and they would have gone there if they included Solaire). Why should From Software be awarded for doing thing they always do but slightly worse this time instead of S&S who copied the mechanics yet had to create the stuff from scratch? S&S is more noteworthy, even if DS3 is technically a better game in vacuum.
 

ToastyMozart

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erttheking said:
God what did they do to Paper Mario?
They applied the "New Super ____" formula that cuts out any story, characters, locational continuity, and discovery/backtracking to a series that is fundamentally reliant on those elements to work.
Because I guess they didn't have a local 5-year-old on hand to tell them that sucking out everything people liked from a series was a terrible fucking idea.
 

Elvis Starburst

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LordTerminal said:
Johnny Novgorod said:
He streamed Color Splash some weeks ago on Twitch, he'd already beaten the game.
You don't?
And yet he still badmouthed the writing as not being funny simply because of that one line after Bowser kidnaps the princess. No mention of the fight with the steak, no mention of the musical starring Birdo, nothing. There's a difference between hyperbole and flat out lying.
Humor is subjective, not objective. Someone could tell me a really stupid joke I'd find hilarious, or an equally stupid joke I don't find funny. He simply didn't find it funny. You did, he didn't. People experience things in life differently than you