PixlBit

I know that the PixlBit community is hitting F5 continuously with sweaty hands waiting for the site’s Game of the Year article. Well, it will be just a little longer, but while you wait, I figured I might as well blather on about my own thoughts on 2013.

I think you’ll get a kick out of the unique results of the site’s GOTY winners since they surprised most of us on staff. Even more shocoking to me is the fact that of our top-rated games, I didn’t vote for a single one of them. This in no way means that I disagree with our winners; it just means that I didn’t get to play most of them. Apparently I spent my time playing too many 3DS games and indie PC titles instead of what everyone else was playing. This is fantastic!

The fact that in an entire year I can spend tons of time playing games (many of which were amazing) and still not play many of the collective’s “best,” means there are too many good games out there. Yeah, there’s a lot of trash floating around, especially when you consider mobile devices and PC, but finding interesting and well-made pieces of entertainment wasn’t very difficult.

Since I’m a person who loves reading all sorts of “best of” lists to discover new things, I’m going to give you an informal list of my own. I will have a write-up or two as part of our main-page article, and I won’t discuss those games here. These are games that I either voted for on my PixlBit ballot, or almost did but couldn’t simply because we had limited votes. To me, these were great games that everyone should consider playing. You might hate every one of them, but hopefully if you’re on the fence I will sway you into giving them a shot. So, without further adieu, I give you my outlier games of the year.

Gone Home

This is definitely one of those games that got a ton of hype and not too many detractors when it was released. There were a few out there who weren’t enamored with it, but for the most part, everyone loved this story told through the exploration of a huge house. Honestly, I wish the game had gotten bashed a little more just to get some different perspectives out there, but that’s OK. I really enjoyed looking in every waste basket and drawer in the house to figure out what had been happening, and I loved feeling like absolutely anything could be the ultimate answer. Gone Home is definitely worth trying out if you’re interested in seeing some new concepts being used in video games.

Resogun

As a PS4 early adopter who fully expected to have some amount of regret about my purchase, I was very happy to have Resogun keep those guilty feelings at bay for quite a while. There was a lot of hype around Resogun prior to release, with many industry types saying it was possibly the best launch game on the system. For me, it definitely is. Even though I had/am having a ton of fun with Need for Speed Rivals and Battlefield 4, it’s Resogun that makes me feel like I’m playing a new console. This is all the more impressive since it’s a fairly simple arcade-style game, but its perfect mechanics and gorgeous looks make it feel like the nextest gen game I’ve played so far.

Super Hexagon

A real toughie for me when it came to casting my ballot for our top games, Super Hexagon ended up not getting my (or anyone else’s) vote. Even though I have no compunctions about voting for a simplistic, arcadey title, I just felt that my other choices floated a tad higher than this one. That said, I’ve been playing this game off and on for most of the year – something that isn’t true of any other game I considered voting for. After the game kicked me in the jimmy for about thirty minutes, I finally fell into a groove and was smitten. I’m still not all that great at it, but if I want a quick gaming fix before bed, I’ll boot it up and try to get past the 60 second mark. This has occasionally turned into an hour’s worth of attempts to break my record, responsible bed time be damned.  

Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl & Etrian Odyssey IV

I also debated a long time about which of these titles to make my “official” pick, and ended up picking Etrian Odyssey IV. It’s a close call since Untold uses the same engine with a different combat/party system, but I had to focus on the fact that IV brought a lot of great new concepts to the franchise and Untold is a beautifully freshened up re-release. Both games are fantastic, though, and I’ve spent much more time in Untold due to simple logistics of digital downloads, review schedules, etc. In fact, I’ve yet to finish either game, and have put in close to two hundred hours total. I’m plugging away at Untold to finish one of these as soon as possible, and after a hundred hours, it’s just as engaging as when I first booted it up.

Maybe none of these are a big surprise to you since I’ve gushed about these (and the couple that might make our front-page article) fairly often, but if you ignore me as much as possible you might not have considered them before. I think each of these games added a lot to the hobby we’re all so passionate about, and you should think about giving them a try if you can. The same can be said for the list PixlBit will release soon. There are some exceptionally unexpected choices in there, and all of us (including me) should take note and give some of them a shot when we can.