It's a place all right.

December 31, 2016 (Originally posted on Blogger)

Games I Beat In 2016, But Ranked

This won't be too long a list. But why not, I guess. Since doing a "top 10" wouldn't really work with me, given my current rate of beating games as well as how I've played very few of anything that actually released in 2016, here's just them sorted in a way I like, I guess. I figured out how to make a numbered list reversed just for this. Also if the list appears in non-reversed order, maybe use something that's not Internet Explorer or Edge, according to the website. It's supposed to be a countdown, best at the bottom, like that kinda yogurt thing if you're into that. I'm not really. But still.


  1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
    I admit, I have a somewhat morbid(?) curiosity for the Call of Duty series. It's kinda like playing a movie, but not in the Uncharted sense that people seem to love. At some point I might wanna go back to when "it was good", as in 1 and 2 and all. Not Modern Warfare 1 and 2, but actual Call of Duty 1 and 2. They get cheap on Steam. Anyway having pretty much gone through the first two in this Modern Warfare series, here's the one that wraps it up. Yeah, it's confusing at parts while still somehow being linear but also it's just like suddenly the one bad guy is just doing everything and I mean EVERYTHING like he has clones or teleports or something and it's all just for bad guy reasons I guess and yeah. It also has one of those "controversial missions" but you don't murder innocents in this one. Instead you're the innocents that get murdered. It's honestly pretty par for the course.
  2. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
    I like this one much more than any of Modern Warfare and even Black Ops, which I still would put above any of Modern Warfare. If Infinite Warfare gets super cheap maybe I'll look at it but on Steam that doesn't happen soon enough. However with the way it's been doing, maybe it'll be sooner than usual? Anyway, about Advanced Warfare, it has a bit more on the story, though it kinda still becomes bad guy does bad guy things at the end, but you get to see more of the development, kinda. Also there's cool powers from your super suit and around the halfway point you get a grappling hook which should have been there earlier because it adds a bit more needed verticality and scope to the battlefield. I know the series has been stepping way too into the future lately so much it became Mass Effect Lite, but some neat things show up. Signs of them showing a bit more respect to the mode most people ignore now anyway.
  3. Spec Ops: The Line
    And then here's an anti-war game, following two... not-entirely-anti-war games(?), pretty complex when you get into it. There's that ONE moment that everyone talks about, yes it drives home the point, and yes you have to do it to continue the story in the game, and it all gets worse for everyone from there. Not in a gameplay perspective, though, gameplay is generally the same throughout, but the setup and story show some serious damage to the characters as it progresses. Orders to your team become more a lot of swearing and yelling as it goes on. Initially marketed as a generic third-person shooter, possibly why it didn't do as well as it should have, this definitely goes further than that, and it's one heck of a ride. Of course there's multiplayer which might defy the whole message but I didn't touch that.
  4. Grow Home
    Ubisoft being nice enough to let an indie department of theirs come out with a little experimental game and not have to tie UPlay to it either (if you don't get it on UPlay of course). A cute blocky robot with physics has to physics its way around a world of stylistically polygonal plants and animals. It's not too long, but it's a nice ride, but also heck on the trigger fingers as you climb up and around.
  5. The Magic Circle
    A bit of an obscure one, this is a story about development hell. It's pretty relevant given the sorts of things that happen in the industry, and more so now with the advent of Early Access that opens it up more to the public. Essentially you're some kind of beta tester who gets into the unfinished world of a masterpiece in the making, finding strange holes and parts of the world which don't totally match up. It gets crazier from there. The core mechanic is that you can reprogram anything under your control to get to places or accomplish tasks, so it's also a puzzle game.
  6. Grow Up
    Essentially a good sequel to Grow Home. Thankfully this one also lacked the weird arbitrary UPlay requirement. There's a whole spherical planet to explore, "challenges" which consist of just hitting all of the checkpoints in a time limit, and overall more ways to get around. The parachute and glider are now just powers instead of consumable plants, and other boosts come from finding plants and replicating them to get extra height or distance. Thankfully also much easier on the trigger fingers.
  7. Fallout 4
    If I spent a whole lot of time on this, it has to be good enough for me to go through with it, so this is getting the number one spot for this year. As a whole, it's pretty all right, lots of exploration and, well, things to do. While arguably not as "Fallout-y" as other games, it's all right on its own, though, yeah, there's ups and downs to it. I already reviewed this one, though, so check that for my full thoughts. And there's also one about the DLC, too.
Also as a side note I did complete the Pokédex in Pokémon X this year, but I beat the game itself long before then, so that's why it's not on here.

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