You're back I see: 2015 in review

General rules apply for my year in review process. I rate games as A, B, C or D. Note that none of these ratings are recommendations based around whether or not I thought the game was good. Not exactly. Rather, the ratings are recommendations as to whether or not I think you should try the game depending on your personal, subjective take on a given genre.

Also it is really worth noting that like ... Maybe one or four games on this list came out this year. This blog is about playing games that have gotten cheap, or that someone gifted me, or come out of a bundle. So the titles in here could be from as far back as 2008 or who even knows. Don't worry, just game.

A rated games are games I think supersede their genre and everyone should give a try if they think they could possibly like the game. If you totally hate platformers, of course, an A rating doesn't mean I think the game will overcome that. If you dislike them or usually find them samey, though, the A rating means I think you'll like this one or at least should give it a try.

It's a discussion more of what I think - based on you, the reader - might find fun. That's the biggest issue with reviewing in general, I think, since there's a thousand subjective factors in play. A rated games are the ones I think somewhat overcome the subjective, at least to some degree. That doesn't mean if you're hostile to the genre it is going to get past it, though.

B rated games are games I think are just good examples of their genre. If you tend to like such a genre, then you'll probably like a B rated game. So if you like shooters, and it is a B rated shooter, you should go check out the review and see if you're into it.

C rated games are, inversely, games that I think you need to like the genre or really want to play an example of the genre to need to play. C is about the point where I tend to start giving up on games midway through playing them, and generally don't think too highly of them. Sometimes I really like a C rated game, but sometimes they're scrapping right along just being trashed.

D rated games are games I would generally avoid. Very few games are truly so bad that you can't squeeze an hour of fun out of them, but some are, and some do. I'd avoid D rated games.

Roguelike fatigue: Dungeon of the Endless

The Endless line of products is sort of amusing to me in that it was the Steam Holiday Auctions that really shifted my focus onto them. I wanted to do one completed auction, just to get the achievement, but on the most part most games seemed like people were bidding on them with a day or two to "the sale" with an amount of gems worth more than their sale price.

I mean, just as an aside, but if you ever wanted to see that psychological issue f2p games exploit where the conversion of currency causes individuals to lose track of the value of a dollar, wow. Watching people spend $12 in gems on a game that is going to go on sale for $5 in less than 24 hours is impressive for seeing that particular mechanism in action. It wasn't like you couldn't just immediately sell the gems for $12, the market was the same number of mouse clicks away!

Anyway so the one game that did seem to be a reasonable price ... Wasn't this game. It was Endless Space: Emperor Edition, or Gold, or whatever which displayed the wrong item and with the DLC price included was a pretty reasonable amount. So I looked it up and realized they'd apparently made three games, sort of, in the shared universe. That's really cool, but apparently Dungeon and Space are the weaker titles to Legend...

But I ended up with this game, because it has some sort of weird arse coop set up and I think a friend bought it for me to play with them (I think?) while I got Space from the auction. I haven't even unpacked space yet, since its been wall to wall games this year, but I'll get around to it probably after I finish off Dungeon or more likely get sick of Dungeon.

Dungeon is especially interesting, though, because when you peel away the pixel graphics and the excellent audio you're left with the guts of several games connected to a roguelike skeleton. It is actually really weird, the game hybrids elements from tower defense to the point it almost feels like a Heroes of Might and Magic game, or a city builder, and there's some weird ideas I feel like came out of horror even.

If I was going to give it a genre, I'd peg it into "Roguelike flavored quasi-reverse tower defense" and then just keep talking because that tells you nothing...