Goddo Hando delivers a Reverse Hell Kick Granny Smacker to 2014
Yes, it’s now 2015–though I’m still writing 2014 on all my checks!!!–but how can anyone do a definitive Game of the Year award until the year is officially over? Until that big dang ball drops down in The Big Apple, the Big City, New York, New York baby! What if Valve decided to stealth release Half-Life 3 on 12/31 like Beyoncé in 2013 or Run the Jewels 2 this year? It would be everyone else with egg on their face and my face wouldn’t be covered in egg at all.
I tried to go back and find the tweet wherein I predicted 2014 would be The Worst Year, but all I could find were really good jokes about Pokémon and cellphones and unrequited yoga-friend seeking. Fitting that I started 2014 unable to find someone to do yoga with and end it unable to find someone with whom to hoop.
So I hid the prediction too well. Like any good prediction, it would have been forgotten if it hadn’t come true at no cost to my reputation, but if it did come true? Man, I’d be direct linking that piece of soothsaying ad nauseum (by the way, sources tell me that Half-Life 3 is going to be released on April 4, 2015).
Unfortunately, this prediction did come true and 2014 was the worst year since 2009 and I don’t even get to take credit for calling it. But I won’t bore you with My Bad Year. Instead, I want to award Clover Studio’s God Hand with the Steven Hansen’s Destructoid’s Game of the Year 2014 Award for Best Game of the Year from 2006 because 2014 kind of sucked.
Because Clover Studios and my chance at happiness are dead, I want to take a moment to look back at 2014 instead of shoulder clasping and hand shaking even older ghosts. My “Steven Hansen’s Destructoid’s GotY 2014” awards started out as (and continued to be) a joke, but ended up going to games I really did like last year (Invisible Inc, Samurai Gunn, Transistor, Kentucky Route Zero).
So 2014 wasn’t bereft of good times. Especially because I can play Bushido Blade in any year, except for when I time travel to years before it was made.
But if there was a trend I noticed in my writing on or about the marquee titles of 2014, it’s an almost comical nostalgia for 2006. For Clover (and that era Capcom), really. In one of the more personal, overwrought-titled things I wrote this year about San Francisco, punters getting kicked in the fucking face, and squeezing beauty out of money, I used Okami as the lead image.
My Halloween inspired take down of Resident Evil 5 (in honor of my friend Dale North, who also rightly thinks it bad) is a close look at how Capcom haphazardly aped–and broke–a finely designed game (Resident Evil 4) and got away with it because having fun in co-op is an easy way to ignore that a game is bad. The company was rewarded handsomely and we got Operation Raccoon City and Resident Evil 6 out of the deal. This is why we need to expect more.
I cited the Resident Evil 4–Okami–God Hand trifecta more directly in my post about how Shadow of Mordor should’ve been a dating sim. It’s there where I pinned down the underlying notion that was bothering me, a stale conservatism in big-budget design. I’m still baffled by the high praise Mordor received for tacking on one new system to a checklist of open-world action design. And misty-eyed over Chris Carter’s more muted, “s’alright, I guess.”
Maybe the climate for experimentation, exploration, and completely new mechanics/controls in big releases doesn’t exist anymore as budgets skyrocket and the prettier titles need to be, “like blank but blank” for marketability. Maybe it never did exist. Clover was shut down.
I don’t mean to be just sour. I want to credit Alien: Isolation, a more expensive game than the ones I gave funny awards to, though I still need to play it in full. Ubisoft made Valiant Hearts, smaller project that it is.
I want to hoot and holler my anticipation for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. It may not be wholly different, but this, at least, is an example of different enough and I’ll cling to it if I have to, if there’s no spiritual Zone of the Enders, a “something else” at the end of the tunnel. There’s the weird, at least. The idiosyncrasies that show a human made this. One lucky enough to be buoying his employer and, thus, given free rein to commission code and art assets for wolf puppies and proper rock climbing form and new ways to pop out of boxes and cool backwards elbow crawling.
Let’s celebrate The New in this third Year of Luigi, especially in the big-budget space, because that’s where moneyhats need direction, need to know we won’t settle. Cool folk will make turn-based stealth games and waifu bartending sims and warm magical realist adventure games regardless.
Recent, pre-2014 years have given me things like Tearaway, Gravity Rush, Portal, and Catherine. Just hoping that in 2015 Big Gaming gives me something else totally new to clutch and love fiercely like the mama bear I am.
