The Big Gaming in the 2010s Discussion Thread (the 2010s-Defining Game currently being discussed)

Whisky would make Paper Mario more interesting

I'm on board the Epic Mickey disappointment train. After about 2 hours I stopped. I'd love to explore the Disney history, and maybe would give it another go without a huge backlog, but the platforming is so out-of-whack it's infuriating. Yeah, I would like a word with NGamer there. Still better review-logic than Total! magazine though...

If I was going to attempt to think my own thoughts... maybe Yooka-Laylee was a bit disappointing in that it didn't learn from the past as much as I would have liked - there was some shitty-boss-shit in there for sure. I never want to play a purple-coloured haunted forest level in a 3D platformer again (*checks a Hat in Time, Super Lucky's Tale*) FUCK

FOOOOOOOOOL

Yooka-Laylee wasn't as amazing as I expected it to be, but I still thought that it was a very worthwhile effort that delivered on exactly what it promised. I share your feeling that it "didn't learn from the past as much as I would have liked", though. 

~

I've thought of a game that might have actually been more disappointing than Disney Epic Mickey:



Legends stand alone. The effort was there with Epic Mickey, Shenmue 3, Sticker Star and Yooka-Laylee, but this took the piss. Everybody about it gives off a very strong suspicion that this was rattled together in well under a year to plug a gap in Nintendo's Christmas 2015 Wii U line-up, and then sent out that December, well before it was actually finished in development. Mario Tennis had been an excellent series in the past, a highlight on N64, GameCube, Game Boy Colour and Game Boy Advance (maybe not quite so much 3DS). But Ultra Smash was so utterly lacking in the series' imagination, creativity, variety and game modes. Mechanically (as in, when you're hitting the ball back and forth), it's all right fun. But absolutely everything else around it massively underwhelmed me. 

This came out on either the same day or same week as Animal Crossing amiibo Festival. That was the straw that broke the camel's back - I was finished with the Wii U as my 'main' console, and I'd bought a PS4 by the end of the month.

Ouch!  What a one-two punch that would have been. I didn't play Ultra Smash, but you know, I might have shortlisted the 3DS game.  It's the same thing as Sticker Star really: Mario Tennis had, as you said, been a very strong series up to that point.  Open on the other hand felt light on content and generally 'phoned in, and started a decline which the series has never really recovered from.  Even if Ultra Smash was the nadir, Open was the beginning of the Dark Ages of Mario Tennis for me, and therefore in retrospect was really quite disappointing in context as well as in its own right.

Wasn't the 3DS Mario Golf also light on content, or put some behind DLC? Good shout though - the Mario sports titles were must-buys back in the day. Is the Switch Mario Tennis much better than the Wii-U one? Not heard much about it.

I started to type up one of those ‘Let’s Talk Bollocks’ 3DS reviews for Mario Tennis Open a while back, but I lost interest. That’s because it’s not that interesting of a game. Apart from it’s impressive-at-the-time online modes, I agree that Open is lighter on content than the ones before it. It doesn’t really do anything to take the series forward either. At least I got a good week’s worth of solid play out of Open though. You can experience everything Ultra Smash has to offer in well under an hour.

Bare in mind, 2015 saw Nintendo release Chibi-Robo Zip Lash, Mario Party 10, CodeName S.T.E.A.M., Happy Home Designer, Tri Force Heroes, Devil’s Third and a whole load of other half-arsed games without much of a purpose. Ultra Smash/amiibo Festival was not so much a one-two punch as a knockout blow.

I thought Mario Tennis Aces was a return to old form, although the unbalanced Adventure mode and some rubbish court design (remember the pirate ship one with the mast slap-bang in the middle?) stopped if from being as good as Tennis 64 or Power Tennis.

I thought Codename S.T.E.A.M. was a decent wee game & from the good chunk of what me, Andy and Jay have played Tri force heroes is great fun!

Aye, Triforce Heroes has been a good laugh from what we've played, but I think it'd really suffer playing it with randoms and certainly wouldn't work playing it solo, so I can appreciate why it wouldn't be something for everyone to enjoy.

Dead Island

Who remembers this incredible trailer? I was excited for this back in 2011 - a time before the world had grown sick of zombie games. It looked like we were getting a story-driven action game which might just be peppered with moments shown in the trailer.

I'm not certain this is true, but I have a feeling a separate company devised the trailer because in reality Dead Island was a run of the mill open world action game which tested little more than your patience for fetch quests and increasingly ludicrous zombies. You see, one of the eye-catching things about that trailer for me was the fact that the zombies didn't feature your Left 4 Dead Boomers, Jockeys or Smokers - they were just zombies. I hoped we might have a game here which didn't rely on weird mutant zombies and was instead more like a sane Dead Rising.

Dead Island started really promising, a well-made opening cut scene showing the epicentre of the outbreak on the luxury island resort your're stuck on. You're character emerges from their room the next day still hung over, and those first few zombies you encounter are treated seriously. I can still remember the what it was like scavenging for that first weapon. But before long the regular zombies are jokes and you'd rather the remaining human characters were dead too because, my God, they suck!

The game has its memorable moments from time to time but blows its load far too quickly. It suffers from a chronic case of ludonarrative dissonance whereby the plot hammers you over the head with diatribe about how scary everything is, while you're simultaneously cleaning house without a second thought. There's none of the silly flair and winking to the camera of Dead Rising here, it's just one long zombie moan the whole way down.

Things get shaken up before long with special infected straight out of Left 4 Dead and it becomes increasingly difficult to buy into any of what the game is selling. Dead Island isn't a bad game. It was a looker for its time and I'm sure many were happy enough with its gameplay loop. I seem to remember that the combat in the game was reasonable, but that sense of vulnerability one had at the start of the game was as fleeting as a Mayfly in June. In the end, Dead Island never lived up to its opening pitch and became the last game I bought near launch for quite some time.

To be fair I remember watching the trailer for the first time and going, 'oh that's compensating for something'.

gjones wrote:

Wasn't the 3DS Mario Golf also light on content, or put some behind DLC? Good shout though - the Mario sports titles were must-buys back in the day. Is the Switch Mario Tennis much better than the Wii-U one? Not heard much about it.

Yes it was - guttingly so. I wouldn't say that Aces is the return to form Cappa says it is - it's on the right path, no doubt it beat the Wii U game, but Tennis and Power Tennis were both really good and Aces is just nowhere near the same level. The Adventure Mode, the game's big draw, being bobbins didn't help. Maybe I just need to play it more with real people.

As for 2015, while Cappa might be being harsh on TFH and CNS, it was not a great year. Splatoon was arguably the only other real gem, although it also had Woolly World and XCX which I still have a soft spot for. If we were doing a 'worst year of the decade' discussion, 2015 would take it for me.

I'd never seen that Dead Island trailer before. That was brilliant! I got all excited for it, nine years later. But then I read the rest of your post. 

I was maybe harsh on Tri Force Heroes, as I played it only by myself, and I'm not a fan of 2D Zelda anyway. I'm not the best person to comment on it, to be fair. CodeName S.T.E.A.M. can bugger off though. It's deservedly in the bargain bin next to Guitar Hero rip-offs on Wii that couldn't use any instruments. Too difficult, and it looked and played S.H.I.T.E.

Yeah I remember playing a demo of Code Name STEAM at the time and it was rock hard. It felt like I was playing it wrong because a demo shouldn't be THAT hard. The visuals were a pile of arse but I liked the actual concept - like baby X-COM.

Dead Island could have been alright in co-op, but I decided to play it solo for some reason and ended up having a pretty miserable time, especially by the end of the game. Dying Light is the superior game, through and through.

Let’s start a new conversation. What was your most pleasant surprise in gaming during the 2010s? Something that exceeded your expectations, caught you off guard in a happy way, whatever. It can be an announcement, a game/console that surpassed your expectations, additional content, whatever you can think of.

I remember going to my pal’s house for a few cans and to watch some football. Some “Super Sunday", Burnley Vs. Stoke, nil-nil keech, nothing important. At half time, they asked if I’d want a game of Rocket League on PS4 – apparently it was amazing “car football”. I hadn’t heard of it before, and it had a rubbish name. It didn’t really appeal; when I think “car football”, I think about that rank-rotten mini game in Street Racer on the Mega Drive. I’d have been happier at the time sticking on Pro Evo 3 or Bust-A-Move 2, like we always did. But I listened to them and gave it a go.

I think I voted Rocket League as my seventh favourite game of the decade earlier in this thread. Not bad for something I hadn’t heard of before release, had no expectations of, and reminded of a pishy sidegame from Street Racer on the Mega Drive. To say I was ‘pleasantly surprised’ is an understatement.

Grand choice of discussion topic! And Rocket League's a grand choice of game. I possibly found it even more surprising than you did: I haven't liked a football game since ISS 98, and haven't liked a racing game without Mario in since F-Zero GX (and that's iffy - too hard for me really). That I got on with it was surprising: that my family also got on with it, delightful.

I'm not sure my top surprise wouldn't be how well I got along with the Ace Attorney games, you know. I got into them off the back of everyone telling me they weren't what I thought they were and Jay's DS vote thread, and went in with zero expectations. Y'all know the rest of that particular story. The only other game that had a similar story (no expectations but loved it) was Celeste, but it did have a Nintendo Life 10/10. I just thought I'd find it less splendid than most others, due to my general apathy to 2D platformers at the time. That couldn't have been more wrong. There's also Ghost Trick: having not played the AA games at the time I probably didn't have many expectations, but I can't really remember what I thought about the game before I got it.

So my love-in with the Ace Attorney series wins, but I managed to cram in a reference to Celeste as well. It's all good.

The obvious answer would be Dark Souls. I spent a lot of time thinking that people were trying to crack over some unfair difficulty, so gave it a wide birth, but I jumped in with DS2 and I'm very glad I did.

After that: "Earthbound/Earthbound Origins will be able to purchase... now"

Wow, Street Racer takes me back. I used to enjoy the arena battles on that, back on the PS1 - but then I also couldn't get enough of Fighting Force so my taste was questionable in 1996.

For me, probably something I expected to be derivative that actually saw me put at least 50 hours into was Just Cause 2. The story was largely irrelevant and the overworld was unnecessarily vast, but there were two obscenely addictive draws to Just Cause 2: the hookshot thing that lets you traverse the world, and the endless petrol tankers that needed to be destroyed. Turning up to a new village with a minigun and re-enacting Arnie in Predator as he mows down the jungle is as wonderful as you'd imagine. I recall Just Cause never being a critical darling and often ignored as a crap GTA with a gimmick - which it could be argued it is - but the sheer number of things to blow up and the tools available actually being fun to use, made this a game I'd play every evening. I didn't even do the story missions. Literally just went around blowing up enemy facilities and ticking off digital checklists. But it was highly addictive and a lot more fun than the way Assassin's Creed did "ticking off boxes".

That has to be Witcher 3 for me. I put off playing it for so long purely because I thought the combat looked shit compared to things like Dark souls and MH, the story and characters gripped me way more than I thought it would and the combat actually done some interesting things. If I ever had a greatest of all time list this would likely be in the top 25.

I think Monster Hunter World might fall into this bracket for me. I was initially a wee bit dubious about the game around its time of reveal, but upon actually getting to play it, it was a brilliant refresh of some admittedly clunky combat systems.

Most disappointing: Skyward Sword probably. Wasn't the Zelda game I wanted. Nor did I enjoy it that much regardless.

Most pleasant surprise: Tougher one. Maybe Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Was very close to dropping it early on, but then the combat clicked and I could enjoy everything about the game. There's also Virtue's Last Reward, which I picked up out of a whim and ended up loving it. Rocket League was a surprise for me too - wasn't fussed about getting into it for ages, but I find it pretty addictive now.

Kriken wrote:

Most disappointing: Skyward Sword probably. Wasn't the Zelda game I wanted. Nor did I enjoy it that much regardless.

(OrangeRakoon signal lights up)

Nah I know what you mean. Even though I still thought it was a good game (and the motion control was the best example of it I've played), it wasn't really what I wanted from Zelda. Give me my properly connected overworld gosh darn it.

It's okay, you're allowed to be disappointed with, same as people can be disappointed with BOTW. You just can't call either of them bad!

I will accept this.

Let’s start a new conversation. What game did you spend the most time playing in the 2010s? Also, was it time well spent?

While I spent a lot of hours on individual FIFA games on Xbox 360 and on Pokemon Go, Animal Crossing: New Leaf is surely my most played game of the 2010s. I’m looking at my 3DS Activity Log and I’m seeing that I spent 242 hours playing it. That’s the length of a tutorial in a JRPG, true, but that’s a huge gaming undertaking for me. Although that time was mostly to check in to my village for twenty minutes on the odd day, I was obsessed with New Leaf during it’s first year out. Today, I’d say that it’s been usurped by New Horizons, but it’s still a special kind of game that’s firmly in my personal Favourite Games Ever list.