PixlBit

That's a lot of dead legionaires in that New Vegas picture you took! I'll never forget how fun it was to sneak into Ceasars camp and blast his head into giblets.

This is more of a looking forward to 2015 question, but for backlog games instead of new games, although it's still relevant to the 2014 concept you're going for.

Talk about your backlogs, give an inventory on what they're looking like at this point and how likely you are to play a lot of those backlogged games in 2015.

I only played 5 or less new games that came out during 2014, most of my year was spent playing games from 2012 and 2013. Julian said recently that he whipped the 360 out again and shelved the ps4 for a little bit. Theres no better time to take a look back at the 360 andd PS3 and get games for them. They each have huge libraries and the games are all easy to find and super cheap anymore, so I'm playing lots of catch up lately.

You had me at "fowl play", Jamie.

That amon amarth song is pretty great, Blake. I ended up staying in for new years eve/day, I mostly played dragon age origins and listened to The Sword.

Great work guys, maybe the best episode of the year. Definitely best outtake of the year.

Far and away my favorite soundtrack of the generation was Fallout 3, and it's not even a close race. Well, Mass Effect is in the ballpark at least. Despite a long list of problems I have with the game it still ended up being one of my favorite games of the whole generation, like top five even. And the biggest single reason is the atmosphere and feelings I get once I'm immersed into the game. No other game soundtrack of the generation pulled me into its game more than the Fallout 3 soundtrack.

You pretty much covered all the big ones I wanted to mention, so now I'll shotgun you a list of links I wanted to add to your mentions. I think you'll all appreciate these as well.

Two Worlds Theme Song - An epic female fronted gothic metal song at the title screen of game? Yes please.

Halo 3 ODST title screen - Mostly Halo still, but more melancholy, and with a dash of smoky jazzy noir thrown in.

Spelunky (Temple theme #1) - One of the more upbeat Spelunky tunes. When you arrive at the Temple and this song plays it lets you know things are getting awfully real at a fast pace.

Minecraft "Sweden" - I love the whole soundtrack and I think this may have been the first song I heard when I sat down to play the game for the first time. I fell in love with Minecraft within 30 seconds of playing, and the soundtrack was one of the reasons.

Electronic Superjoy "OCP" - Michael Todd not only designed the game but did the whole soundtrack himself as well. Fun bubble gum house music to go along with a bright flashy super difficult platformer.

Star Ocean The Last Hope "Blood on the keys" - rockin song to go along with a battle system I really enjoyed.

Silent Hill Homecoming "Homecoming" - I didn't love this game that much, but the soundtrack is outstanding and I always enjoyed it when I sat down to play.

Silent Hill Homecoming "One More Soul To The Call" - The Homecoming ost is so damn good it gets two songs mentioned here.

Deadly Premonition " The Woods & The Goddess" -  Such a ridiculous and silly game has never had such a beautiful title screen.

Lastly I wanted to mention two licensed songs to add to your mentions. I loved how the game Risen had Nightwish on the ost with the song "Poet & the Pendulum". And I loved how Prey used BOC's song "Don't Fear The Reaper" at the very beginning as you get abducted by aliens at the bar. Great atmosphere. I'll never forget the beginning of Prey because of that.  

Thanks, Happy Holidays Matt!

You should grab the GOTY edition of Dishonored. It's genuinely a fantastic game. It brought that whole genre foward and modernized it in a variety of ways, almost all of which were successful and made for a super interesting game. Great level design, lots of systems to interact with, lots of player agency. And lamps powered by whale oil, it had those. 5 stars just for that alone 

I'm glad you liked Thief too Nicole 

Last year Bethesda said that Dishonored 2 was in development, so if they really rush it (which I hope they won't), maybe it could come late 2015? My bet is that it'll be out sometime 2016. At any rate I bet we could see something from it at E3 this year which could be neat.

I'm not actually sure what I want from Dishonored 2, but I'm pretty open minded. As long as they have good level design, multiple ways to solve main missions, and lots of fun skills/powers to mess around with like last time I'll be excited.

Thieves Guild quests in Skyrim were definitley better than in Oblivion, and Thief is better than both of them combined, but what I meant by the statement was that playing Thief is like the Thieves Guild because you're a thief and not an assassin or a warrior. You can still kill people in Thief if you really work at it, but it's not fun, and I don't think it's meant to be fun. Garrette is super fragile, he only has a blunt club and a bow, and in most cases getting spotted and chased down by guards will get you dead. It's fundamentally different than Dishonored in that way because you won't be getting into fast paced sword fights, summoning rat swarms to devour people, or sneaking up to stab them in the back. Thief is all about stealing and stealth.

Definitely play the original Thief, I think you'll find stuff to appreciate in there. That review you linked was a pretty good one, if a bit nit picky. He made a lot of valid points about the design of encounters and how it's not a huge departure for CoD mission design, but he kind of got to the point where he was nit picking every aspect to death. If we want to we can dissect every good game out there to the point where it feels like a terrible game with a million flaws. Because every game does have plenty of flaws. I can tear Half Life 2, Bioshock Infinite, Dark Souls, and Portal to pieces for all the design flaws and failures they have, but I don't usually enjoy doing that. I enjoy those games a lot and I like to have a more positive slant to reviews.

One of the things that would color my review would be the fact that I always skip a few CoD games since they're so similar. The last one I played was MW3, and it sounds like he's played them all. If I played all of them I'd probably be a little burnt out, and less forgiving to the game.

At any rate I full heartedly agree with him that it's obvious that Activision is trying to get creative with CoD finally and that's a good thing. And like with all the other games the multiplayer is certainly where the mechanics are going to shine. The campaign simply takes you on a tightly scripted story driven adventure with missions designed to emphasize certain mechanics and gameplay variances from level to level, and in the case of Advanced Warfare the adventure they've constructed this time around is really fun and I can tell they took their time with it. They told a story they wanted to tell, built levels they wanted to build, and took you on a pretty satisfying rollercoaster.

Thanks Joe! I like finding piano or classical guitar versions of the more melodic metal songs, and even 8-bit versions of that kind of stuff. There's so many people on youtube doing 8-Bit metal stuff it's ridiculous.

The new CoD is really enjoyable. Over the years things got really stale and I always felt slow and limited. Anytime you simply came across a building you knew it was going to be a pain to navigate. You saw a ladder or a staircase and said, "I've done this a million times and its always sucked." In the new game you can double jump to the top of the building in a heartbeat, or jump up into the air and dash forward through a window, etc. If you're in that building and somebody tosses a grenade you can dash right out a window and get out of there like a bandit lol. Staircases are mostly around just for show now, and you have very few things slowing down the pace of combat and the agency of the player.

Modern shooters are going backwards in time and becoming more like the fast gamey PC shooters of yore, and it's a pretty fun trend so far.