Giancarlo Varanini is a former games Ryckert and current Communications Ryckert at Ryckert. Ryckert Ryckert Ryckert Ryckert Ryckert.
Hi, I work at Ubisoft. It might be a little weird for me to include their games on my list, so I won’t. But let it be known that The Division and Watch Dogs 2 provided some really memorable experiences this year. OK, with that out of the way, the rest of this year was pretty weird. There were so many awesome games, which is fantastic, but I just couldn’t keep up. As a result, my pile of shame is the worst it’s ever been, and while I expect to plow through a good chunk of it over the holidays, the timing of Giant Bomb’s awards means I don’t feel comfortable including some games that might otherwise have made my list--like Hitman, Stardew Valley, or Final Fantasy XV--had I been able to spend more time with them. Anyway, here’s a bunch of pictures of Dan Ryckert I definitely found on Google and absolutely did not have previously saved on my computer.
Brad Muir is the world's cheeriest human being who also works as a gameplay programmer at Valve. You may also remember him from his time at Double Fine, where he worked on games like Iron Brigade and Massive Chalice. Send him messages of positivity via Twitter.
Hey there Giant Bomb community! Long time no see! :D!
It’s been a strange year for me full of transitions. New job, new co-workers, new state, new weather! But I’ve almost completed my Total Dadsformation. It’s great and having a kid is basically the best! :D!
My gaming time has been cut down a lot this year. Mostly that’s a good thing but I feel like I missed out on a lot of the AAA releases. My list probably looks a bit odd but I think it accurately depicts where I’m at as a gamer right now.
I miss San Francisco a lot. And I miss that beautiful CBS Interactive office full of lovable idiots. Hopefully I can visit soon!
A lot of terrible things have happened this year, but I don’t want to throw another log on the “2016 sucks” fire. There were lots of excellent things that happened and it’s worth it to take the time to relish the positives that came out of 2016. Let’s focus on making 2017 the best it can be. I hope that you and your family are happy and healthy in the New Year!
Love,
Brad! :D!
Inside
Limbo was such an amazing game. Playing Inside feels like playing an incredibly polished sequel to Limbo--for a while. But then you get to the twist and it becomes an entirely different, even more disturbing beast. To say any more about it is probably saying too much. I know it’s pretty annoying to say that you just have to trust me and experience it for yourself, but you just have to trust me and experience it for yourself. :D!
Battlerite
Battlerite is like a bite-sized MOBA that’s just about fighting. I like fighting. I guess I like fighting? Sure. I like fighting. It’s OK to like fighting, right?
It’s cool to play something MOBA-esque that cuts out a lot of the down time and feels more streamlined. And it certainly fits a busy schedule a lot better than a MOBA that can go from 20-90 minutes!
Battlerite is played in 2v2 or 3v3 modes which I really appreciated. My old man brain isn’t quite fast enough to process a full 5v5 MOBA team fight so I really enjoyed these smaller scale engagements. I’m terrible at the __game but it’s great fun, especially when you have a partner! My brother carried me through a bunch of games and we had a blast. :D
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
Oh man, I can’t stop playing this game! It’s such a perfect small-to-mid-size PvP experience with a solid mobile port to boot. It’s great to be able to play a __game or two in bed on my phone. In my pajamas. Probably after cleaning up some poop.
Blizzard’s card design is getting tighter and they’re starting to take the long-term health of the game very seriously with set rotations and a Standard environment. And even though this year’s adventure release (One Night in Karazhan) was a bit weak I thought their two large expansions (Whispers of the Old Gods and Mean Streets of Gadgetzan) were really great. I think Hearthstone has earned a perennial slot on my list!
Firewatch
Firewatch is great. The writing, VO, ambience, and visuals are top notch. It’s awesome to play a game with a more mature theme and tone. The twine-like opening is incredibly brutal and sets up the game beautifully. I’m hoping that Firewatch has shown our AAA overlords that there’s a market out there for games that aren’t just male power fantasies!
Dota 2
Ok it might be a bit unfair to put this one on the list now that I’m at Valve, but I feel like Dotes can be gracefully grandfathered onto my list if you check out my previous top 10s. It’s been awesome meeting the team that’s produced this wonderful, weird game. They’re amazing! And seeing The International 6 from behind the scenes was super cool.
Dota 7.00 was just released and it’s shaking the game up more than ever. They’ve also just released the first post-Dota-1 hero (Monkey King!) and I’d be willing to guess there’s more where that came from. :D!
P.S. NO I DON’T ACTUALLY KNOW IF THEY ARE MAKING NEW HEROES FOR SURE AND PLEASE STOP ASKING ME ABOUT HALF LIFE 3 OK LOVE YOU. <3
Magic: The Gathering
Magic makes my list again with another great year. Magic Online was made a lot more accessible, allowing you to draft and play your games individually rather than all at once. It somewhat fits into my life again which is really cool. I think some designers at Wizards of the Coast are looking out for the Magic Dads out there! :D!
Their set releases have been on point with Oath of the Gatewatch, the two new Innistrad sets, and then Kaladesh in the fall. I even got to play in a couple of prerelease tournaments in meatspace with my brother at the super swanky Mox Boarding House. And even though it’s a bit far down the road I’m starting to get excited about teaching my son to play one day! :D!
XCOM 2
XCOM 2 is a rock solid follow-up to 2012’s XCOM reboot. I feel like they changed just enough to keep it fresh while maintaining the core that made the reboot so fantastic.
Not everything worked, of course. The new geoscape was a bit clunky and confusing. Cleaning out the “junk” from your giant floating fortress to build new facilities felt like a strange replacement for excavating underground in the original. But the new classes, abilities, weapons, and aliens were all great and led to some amazing emergent gameplay. Losing squad members still had that brutal sting, and soldiering on without them was difficult but incredibly rewarding.
Also that Jake Solomon is a handsome national treasure that should be preserved for years to come! :D!
Headlander
I’m super proud of Lee Petty and a bunch of my old bros at Double Fine for jamming out another absurdly original title. It was weird seeing this game linger in preproduction for years and years, only to end up leaving the company just as it was coming down the home stretch. Playing it after I had left was a reminder of how committed Double Fine is to originality.
Headlander is full of ridiculous writing, great VO, frantic laser battles, Metroidvania exploration, infinite puns, and spaceships that are shaped like dicks. That’s pretty much all I need for a great experience these days. :D
I’m really curious to see what Lee has in store for us next! Hopefully it involves things shaped like dicks!
Overwatch
Overwatch isn’t exactly what I thought it would be. It’s super similar to Team Fortress, and I was expecting and wanting it to be more similar to a MOBA. But once I got past my initial expectations and started playing the game that was there rather than the game I wanted it to be I started having a great time.
Just like most Blizzard games it’s super polished, nicely balanced, well supported, and designed for people to just have FUN. I think that a lot of PvP games tend to overlook that last one and focus too much on win rates and balance and tournaments and what-have-you. But looking at your PvP game through that casual-fun-lens is a great way to improve it for everyone.
Hitman
Man I love this series. I didn’t dedicate a lot of my time to the new episodic Hitman but I just love it and want to see it get more kudos. It’s kind of like that actor that’s been around forever and never won an award. And then the academy finds a way to reward that actor for their entire career, but they have to do it for a single movie that was maybe not even that great, but you know that they’re doing it because it’s making up for all of the years they got snubbed. Basically what I’m saying is that Hitman is the Leonardo Dicaprio of video games. I’m hoping to get back to it and play through the rest of it soon!
In case you missed it in in the Year Ahead BTS, the next Double XP Weekend hits at 12:00 UTC on the 17th of February!
Start preparing yourself for a weekend of skill training, monster slaying delight right now � gather mats and gear to make the most of the +100% XP boost on offer to RuneScape members.
Full details of Double XP Weekend are available on the website.
Game Jam | See Your Ideas Being Made
That�s right � while you guys are enjoying the XP mayhem, we�ll be live streaming a weekend-long RuneScape game jam.
As well as working on their own passion projects, our devs will also be picking up the very best of your ideas and building them before your very eyes.
If you�ve got a top-notch RuneScape content idea that you�d like to see made, please post on our forum or Reddit threads for your chance.
Are You Ready?
Start preparing now to make the most of Double XP, and keep an eye out for details of the live stream in the coming weeks.
Charles Webb is a Senior Writer at Hangar 13 on Mafia III. He’s spent the last ten years writing games and writing about them, and he’s doing what he can to make the industry he loves more inclusive and diverse. You can follow him on Twitter @TheCharlesWebb.
Not to get too autobiographical at the start, but 2016 was a challenging year to stick with any video games. Damn hard, point of fact. Between getting both a __game and a tiny, healthy new human into the world, actually sitting down to play video games in year of our lord Grodd 2016 has taken a backseat as life got in the way. It wasn’t often that I finished games and many of those were from the back catalog. Hell, some of the entries in my best of list only got a handful of hours of my time because oh god there are not enough hours.
Having said all that, this was a year of excellence across the medium--developers were willing to get weird with it, even across numbered entries of long-running franchises. Meanwhile, smaller releases continue to let their freak flags fly with narrative and mechanical excellence. I didn’t get to play some of the more ambitious games I wanted to dig into like Virginia, Firewatch, or Shenzhen I/O but you bet your butt I’m going to make time for them.
Stay weird with it, video games. I still love you.
Final Fantasy XV
Square Enix found a way to get me interested in JRPGs again: make it a fancy gentleman driving adventure with a cast of pretty goofballs just trying to get their bro to the altar.
I’m not actually that deep into Noctis’ little roadtrip--maybe four or five hours, in fact--and the whole thing could fall apart in the latter acts (which seems to be the case, from what I’m hearing). Frankly, I don’t care: there’s an audacity to starting your __game off with a Florence and the Machine cover of “Stand By Me” in a bros will be bros game that’s resolutely for everyone (explicitly its mission statement on startup). It’s a kitchen sink approach to game making that doesn’t seem afraid to poke at every little system the development team was interested in over the last decade or so of its development, and I can’t help but respect that.
Titanfall 2
The first Titanfall had my curiosity, but Titanfall 2 has my attention. The addition of a campaign was one of the big requests after the first game dropped, but for me, it was the deepening of the multiplayer systems and refined progression which are keeping me around for more hot robot-on-robot action.
It feels like a small evolution over what made the previous game very good, but the delightful chaos of the battlefield, but the stickiness of the combat, the array of equipment and weapons being thrown your way, and the sort of ruthless rhythm multiplayer matches can take on have built something which should last. It just feels good pulling the trigger in Titanfall 2, and I mean that in the broadest sense: this is a game which controls as tightly as one could hope, which offers the experience of constantly feeling like a badass a few minutes at a time (before someone else delivers the coup de grace while camouflaged). A lot of you folks are sleeping on it because it fell in “The Great Shooter Cut of 2016,” but I’d highly recommend that you get on it and play the third second-best multiplayer shooter of 2016.
Darkest Dungeon
I played the console port of Darkest Dungeon, which seems to have been the wrong move. Yet somehow, between the eye-murdering interface and seemingly haphazard button mapping, the just-one-more-room compulsion at the heart of Red Hook Studios’ dungeon crawler shines through.
This is a game which makes you feel powerful until you aren’t--you’ll be romping and stomping through the remains of a dank manor, your party killing Lovecraftian horrors like it’s their job (it is), when suddenly, one of them is stricken by a compulsion to self-harm. He won’t heal himself and now you’re one man down. And just like that, the dominos fall.
Darkest Dungeon’s pitch should be “masochism as management sim,” as you attempt to maintain the sanity of your band of treasure-hunting mercenaries while also trying to curb your own need to delve into just one more room. It goes bad for you more often than not, but Red Hook have created such an addictive set of systems that losing your entire party and returning to town empty-handed isn’t an obstacle--it’s a challenge to do it all over again.
Dark Souls III
Speaking of failing--a lot--I’m convinced I’ll never finish a Souls game. I typically brute force my way through many of its combat puzzles and I don’t think my brain is geared toward the kind of combat problem-solving at its heart. I am, frankly, no good at the damned series and should be ashamed.
So why have I dumped dozens of hours into banging my head against the brick wall that is Dark Souls III (and Bloodborne and DSII before it)? I’m increasingly convinced that the kinds of clockwork systems which make these games go appeal to me in the way that puzzle games do. And Dark Souls III refines so much of what was rough or needed work in Dark Souls II to make it accessible to a wider audience only just discovering the series. It’s still... inscrutable in a lot of ways, but inscrutable in a way that feels more deliberate than in entries past. I can’t articulate how all of the systems interplay or what most of the stats mean when building out and upgrading my character, but when I’m swinging my sword and dodging an enemy attack, the try and try again foundation of the latest entry slowly help me develop a muscle memory for its combat.
That’s the true virtue of the game: it works its way into your learning processes in such a fundamental way, that you don’t see it, making us all Daniel-san catching flies with chopsticks, but secretly letting us be badasses.
Street Fighter V
This is only on here because Tekken 7 isn’t out until next year.
I kid. Look, we all know the story of Street Fighter in 2016 is going to center on its rocky launch and awkward rollout of its features. What that obscures is another step in the (incremental) evolution of the most important fighting game series out there*. Street Fighter is keeping the scene alive in a way that other games can’t. And while I think Killer Instinct delivered on the season model in a way that has yet to be matched and Guilty Gear Xrd has created one of the deepest (possibly impenetrably so) systems among fighting games, Street Fighter remains the foundation.
It still feels good to pick up a controller and jump into a match as it ever did 20-odd years ago. Street Fighter V feels incredibly familiar while also layered with new and significant systems, making it feel ever-so-slightly different from even Super Street Fighter IV. What the season model will hopefully offer not only Capcom but the player base is a consistent platform to build and iterate upon where the audience can grow and evolve with each update (rather than gating players based on which copy of the game they picked up).
I’m not certain it’s the best fighting game of the year, but Street Fighter V is the one I’ve spent the most time thinking about and playing, for what it’s worth.
*That’s not Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection. Fight me.
Superhot
Superhot is one of the biggest surprises of 2016, the “time moves when you move” shooter a wonderful distillation of the concept of a “combat puzzle.” Each encounter in this paranoid little experience feels fraught with opportunity and peril. Do you risk snatching a stray pistol out of the air as a bullet is a hair’s breadth away from your face, or beat a strategic retreat toward one of the faceless, red dudes throwing a wild punch at your noggin?
I can think of few more satisfying moments this year in games than flinging a gun at a bullet only to watch both explode, so there’s that.
Hitman
Speaking of clockwork, Hitman revels in being a game where you can see the gears turning, and messing with them is like 75% of the fun. Hitman Absolution was the first stealth game I truly loved, and while the latest, unnumbered entry in the series loses some of the whackadoo charm of Absolution (no small town greasers or death in a cemetery), but it retains the series’ penchant for rewarding the player for trying new things as the silent but violent killer, Agent 47.
I adore this: more games should incentivize varied play styles and poking at the mechanics and the world in interesting ways. I respect the level of care developer IO Interactive has put into layering each of their locations with enough little prompts to engage the player who just wants to get the kill done as well as those who want to dig deeper to create a set of consequences which will draw out their targets and put them in their crosshairs.
Overwatch
Blizzard’s shooter might be the best game of the year and one of the more important shooters made in the last five. Nearly every piece I’ve seen about the game talking about it in any depth uses some variation of “bright” or “colorful” to describe Blizzard’s new erotic fanfiction platform, but the word that comes to mind when I play it is “joy.”
Each map and character is designed with such a deep level of personality that never feels focused grouped to death. On the flipside nearly every character feels designed to within an inch of their existence in order to exist as a viable combatant. There’s something to be said for a game which not only sparks the imaginations of its audience in such a profound way (I love--LOVE--the queer reading of some of the characters from some quarters) while also delivering a world-class shooter which will hopefully continue to build and iterate in the coming years.
(For the record, I main Hanzo.)
Doom
So, if Overwatch is the best shooter of the year, Doom is the one I think about the most.
Somehow distilling the brutal run and gun essence of the original into something which feels vital, new, and wonderfully misanthropic, Doom’s single-player campaign is an Iced Earth album cover brought to digital life. Doom feels perfect in a way that few games do, pushing you into a rhythm of move-kill-move, where ammo scarcity encourages you to try new weapons and enemy variety demands agility in tactics and approach.
It’s hard to overestimate the value of that: id made me care about Doom in a fundamental way this year that most shooters don’t elicit any year. Instead simply relying on nostalgia--or worse--attempting to deliver a game that feels like every other title on shelves, DOOM was able to tap into the frenetic experience of those original games while still feeling incredibly modern.
Thumper
Thumper is... what the hell, man? Much like it feels weird to be waxing poetic about a new Doom this year, to be as ecstatic as I am over a new rhythm game feels jarring. Which makes sense, given that Thumper is an appropriately jarring game. Seemingly taking its aesthetic from a screensaver of the damned, this arrhythmic “rhythm violence” game is so much more visceral than anything else in the genre.
Its music could more accurately be described as angry, twitchy soundscapes to grind your teeth to, its navigation and inputs a series of hard turns into corners and explosions, Thumper feels like it’s taken more from Wipeout than Rock Band. And it’s tough! Like Amplitude’s angry sibling, it relies on the usual timed button presses while throwing wild movement at the player, every curve feeling like a wicked betrayal and a near loss as you start building up momentum.
