Hi, Internet! A little late, I suppose, but here’s our 2014 denouement. We talk about what games we played most in 2014, and trail into several tangents. Fair warning: this one’s just above an hour and a half long. It’s longer than usual for us because we talk about many different games and topics instead of (mostly) sticking to one.
Direct download (ogg)
Direct download (mp3)
And as promised, here are the shitty graphics.
And the Ninja Blues Ninjustin 2014 Award goes to… This War Of Mine!
Note from Ninjustin: To some it might just feel like a war-themed typical survival game, but This War Of Mine really felt beautiful, melancholy, and impactful to me. When you play This War Of Mine, you’re not experiencing one of a few pre-written story arcs carved out by a team of writers. What happens before you is your story, full of characters that you’ve either directed or dealt with, and you suffer their grievances and celebrate their catharsis.
And the Ninja Blues Jarenth 2014 Award goes to… Divinity: Original Sin!
Jibe from Jarenth: I should probably play This War Of Mine sometime, huh?
In all seriousness: I don’t know if there’s anything left for me to say about Divinity: Original Sin. It’s great, and glorious, and amazing, and horrible, and broken, and dumb, and everything in-between. It took almost six months of my life to play through it, and they were simultaneously the best and worst months I’ve ever spent on a video game.
In lieu of adding something meaningful, then, I instead give you this: an origami dragon I folded in honour of Divinity: Original Sin’s final boss, the Void Dragon.
Basically a mirror image of the in-game original: blocky, overly angular, broken, and it took me way too long to finish it off.
Happy 2014, Divinity: Original Sin, you magnificent bastard of a game. Never come by my house again.
Think I’ll stick to smaller dragons next time around.
Yeah the term Roguelike is one of those instances where I kind of do object to people using it “wrong” but I have mostly given up on it.
I played a bunch of them in high school because they were a) free and b) tended to not require proper installation, so I could play them on the locked down school computers.
So to me roguelike is very much that turn based RPG, top down, character/sprite based dungeon crawl with a starvation mechanic, procedurally generated levels and permadeath.
I would actually consider Necrodancer as a roguelike over Spelunky. Necrodancer has a turn system, the turns are just affixed to the beats. Starvation, you have until the song runs out. And hardcore mode definitely includes permadeath.
That said, I accept that other people will continue to dilute the term roguelike and it seems like it pretty much will just be a game with permadeath and randomly generated levels. And you probably earn new items and stats or at least new characters on the way that persist between characters in a relatively controlled way.
Crud, I forgot to post this image in my Jibe somewhere.
Hey, slightly late to the party here, but I’m trying to direct download the mp3 and I’m just getting “Video can’t be played because the file is corrupt”. Could be a problem on my end but I haven’t been able to figure it out so far. Can’t rip it from from Youtube either because of the length. Sad face.