The Last of Us isn’t perfect, but it’s one of the best ways we could have sent out the last generation of consoles. While they may not be down and out just yet, Naughty Dog’s latest is not only their finest offering to date, but is a showpiece of nearly everything this last generation has been capable of. (more…)
What’re you playing? Today, HippoChippies is your soapbox to tell the world what games you’ve been loving during the first half of 2013. Haven’t been playing anything new, or just want to use this chance to get some of your favorite older games out there? Not a problem. Guest Posts are some of my personal favorite posts every year, and I love seeing what all of you have been up to. Let’s kick it off with…
“2013 has had a great start so far with titles such as The Last of Us and Bioshock: Infinite. There are tons more where that came from as well. Most would argue that The Last of Us would be the number 1 choice. Not today. My favorite title of the year so far is Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Why? Animal Crossing is known for being a casual game where you live a normal life (with animals) trying to be someone and paying off a huge debt that is thrown onto you from the get go. New Leaf changed everything and put you in charge of a town that you move to and I must say it couldn’t have been done any better. Fans of the game will understand what I mean when I say that it may be my favorite Animal Crossing yet, because of the newfound leadership which comes with tons of new opportunities for you to pursue during gameplay.
I could talk about it all day but really the best way to understand my point of view is to just get out the ol’ Nintendo 3DS and play it yourself.
P.S. I have nothing against The Last of Us. I just have not been able to play even a single minute yet. Looking forward to it when I do. – Trevor Baldwin
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“I really liked Soul Sacrifice because it has this unique system of giving you super amazing power while stripping you of something vital. Like one of those abilities will use your brain to create this electric storm that does a ton of damage to enemies, but afterwards you don’t know what abilities you have in your slots. It’s a really neat system. Then there’s the upgradeable powers: you can fuse them to give you more uses, or combine them to create totally different powers. The whole game is awesome and if it wasn’t so repetitive and hard I’d probably play a lot more than I do.” – Michael Mays
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“My favorite game of the year so far has to be The Last of Us. Naughty Dog did a phenomenal job on the game with its storytelling and mechanics. The first 20 minutes of the game will have you so sad that you would probably wouldn’t want to play the game, but it’s the perfect setup for so much more. Naughty Dog took a risk in going the way they did with The Last of Us, but it has to be one of the greatest games they have made. During the game I noticed that there were some mechanics that had similarities to the Uncharted series, but with a fresh twist on it. Most people probably wouldn’t even notice that the combat and cover systems are pretty similar to each other, but that is to be expected from a game by the same company. Not to mention the game made you feel human, ever shot mattered, no health regen, and you had to be smart for most of the encounters you had. I could go into this game more but I don’t want to spoil anything for you, who should go get this game or at least rent it. I would play this game over and over again.” – Zack Dickerson
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“Before I begin, I would like to thank our gracious host both for inviting me to contribute and for allowing me to talk about a game that was not released in 2013. Yes, gamefans, I’m actually going to bring up one of last year’s gems and, very appropriately, it’s a little game called Yesterday.
Now this game had been sitting on my Steam wishlist since before it came out but I hadn’t thought I had the time to invest in it. As you can imagine, I was rather elated when I found that it was available for free download from the Google Play store right before the night I was going to get to spend in an airport terminal waiting to fly home from a business trip. I downloaded the game, started playing, and then felt it – that remorse for having waited so long to do this. It was a good, solid game. Great style, classic adventure gameplay, a good helping of wit, and an engrossing story. I’ll try not to ruin it if you haven’t played but I would like to leave you with an image that I hope inspires you to correct that soon: the image of a man with a shaggy beard sitting in a sparsely populated airport terminal at 3AM gleefully smiling at the plot unfolding before him while blissfully unaware that his headphone cable has just pulled out of his tablet and that those nearby are listening to discussions of homeless people being set on fire and are getting nervous at said bearded man’s recent chuckles.” – Shannon Nichols
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“To put it simply, BioShock Infinite is the best game in the series in terms of story. My brain is still recovering from the ending.” – Jonathan Vaughan
“Dragon’s Dogma is a pretty interesting game. It’s your token dark medieval setting and the story is pretty milk toast at best, but that’s not important. This game is stuffed to the gills with interesting locales, cool gear and badass monsters. The combat is a combination of Dark Souls, Skyrim and Shadow of the Colossus. If you wanna climb on top of a cyclops and stab him right in the eye, you can totes do it. Also its got a day/night system that makes staying out after dark feel really dangerous, even if you’re way stronger than any monster you’ll come across. And the graphics, oh Lord the graphics!” – Colton King
Once again, THANK YOU SO MUCH EVERYONE. It really means to a lot to me, thank you to everybody that participated. This is one of my favorite things to do on the site. We’ll have another one coming up at the end of the year, so everybody get those Game of the Year picks ready!
This year, I don’t have a clear game to champion as my game of the year yet. That isn’t to say I haven’t enjoyed anything- it’s quite the opposite- I’ve enjoyed a certain few games so much that I have yet to choose one above the others. I’ve got a pretty specific top three games that I keep flip-flopping between, but I enjoyed all of them so much it’s tough to choose a favorite. When you get down to my favorite three, you can basically put them in any order, they’re all that good. Last year I was able to hold Journey high and above everything (until The Walking Dead) with little competition to speak of. 2013 has been pretty great so far, with some surprises, disappointments, and a whole lot of incredible games. Here’s a rough estimate of my favorites of this year, and all of these can and will probably be changed before the end of 2013, who knows what could happen?. Let’s get started with… (more…)
June has been an embarrassment of riches for me. E3 happened (Yeah, that was less than a month ago) and was the most exciting E3 ever, and I’ve enjoyed just as many games this month than I have any other time this year. When I haven’t been obsessed with Animal Crossing, I’ve had the chance to pick up more than a few exceptional games in the past 30 days. The Last of Us was probably my most anticipated title I expected from 2013, and I’m supremely impressed with how it turned out. I can only hope the rest of the year remains as exciting.
My favorite Naughty Dog game by a longshot, The Last of Us finally proves to me what the company is capable of. The performances and storytelling all come together to create one of the most believable worlds this year, and the gameplay manages to hold up its end of the bargain as well. It’s a beautiful story well told, and is just as entertaining to play through as it is to watch.
The fourth game in the series doesn’t revolutionize the game by any means, but it does improve upon nearly every aspect of the formula. Nearly every day I’ve played in the past month I’ve been able to discover something new, and even now I’m stumbling into completely new avenues that I hadn’t touched before. This week, I’ve decided to completely redesign my house from the basement up. New stores continue to open, new villagers keep dropping by, and friends still have new stories to tell about what’s going on in their town. While it’s much of the same we’ve seen before, it’s a great foundation that I’m happy to keep coming back to again and again. And the hourly music makes me happy every time I turn the thing on.
This weird series has been one of the most interesting things to come out of 2013 so far. With dream-like logic and heaps of creativity, Kentucky Route Zero is consistently the most surprising game I enjoy returning to every few months. The strange world is so well crafted, the weirdness feels right at home. If the quality stays as high as it’s been with the first two episodes, Kentucky Route Zero will be one of the most easily recommendable hits of the year.
SpyParty (Open beta): SpyParty has been around for years, but this month is the first time it’s been available for purchase, so I’m cheating and putting it here. It is one of my favorite games of the year, and demands an incredible amount of patience, attention to detail, and a little luck. I can’t stop playing round after round.
Room of 1000 Snakes: There are no words. Click the link, spend your 90 seconds, enjoy your day.
New Super Luigi U: While it doesn’t have that new game smell, it’s an excuse to return to one of the Wii U’s best games, and plow through some pretty tough platforming.
(Also, if for some reason you haven’t played Hotline Miami, it just came out on Vita and PS3 this month. It was one of the best games of last year, and plays excellently with either new system. Get it now, ask questions later.)
– Zach
Image Sources: edge-online.com polygon.com rockpapershotgun.com
In case you haven’t heard by now, The Last of Us is pretty good.
Much praise has been heaped upon the Uncharted series over the years, and they’re respectable games for a number of reasons. The characters and set-pieces are best in class. They have some of the most beautiful animation and most lifelike environments in the business. They’re stunning to me in many ways, expect a pretty glaring one, the gameplay.
I’ve always enjoyed watching the Uncharted games, and I get a jolt of excitement whenever a cutscene triggers because I can almost be certain it’s going to be excellent to watch. The gunplay, however, consistently turns me off from wanting to play through them. I finished the three main entries in the series, and I was left with the same impression each time, “they could be so much better.”
The Last of Us is Naughty Dog’s evolution, and is that “better” game. For me, at least.
I was off to a rocky start with The Last of Us, but after a few hours in (about 4) and it won me over for good. After I’d gotten used to the rules of the fights, and the pacing began to pick up, it was hard to tear myself away from seeing what would come next. If you’re finding your interest on shaky footing, I have to recommend sticking with it.
The combat is totally revamped, doing away with hordes of a dozen machine-gun toting baddies. Here, a common scenario will involve you and three enemies trapped in an entire floor of a building together, playing a murderous game of hide and seek. Combat can and will turn into shooting at each other, but it still feels miles ahead of any sequence in Uncharted. Hiding just behind a bookcase and popping out to fire a single bullet is thrilling, and I enjoyed it far more than I ever expected to.
It feels true to the setting, and just feels better to play than anything Naughty Dog has made before. Dying wasn’t a cause for frustration, it was a chance that allowed me to come at a situation from a different angle, and enjoy experimenting with the ways I could succeed. The combat with the “infected” enemies was quite not as enjoyable, but led to some tense sequences that held up their parts when they needed to.
As I mentioned before, Naughty Dog’s narratives have always been top-notch, and they’ve done it once again in an expectedly excellent fashion. Main characters Joel and Ellie travel across post-apocalyptic America in order to…do something. To say too much more would be a disservice to everyone. The story isn’t about the destination anyway, it’s about the events that take place along the journey. The pair meet plenty of other survivors along the way, and by the end have gone through more than either of them ever wanted. The environmental storytelling is extremely well executed as well, some of the best story vignettes are told without anyone uttering a word, and are completely missable if you aren’t examining the environments. The dark tale ends on a near perfect note that I guarantee will spark debates for the foreseeable future.
This is the first game from Naughty Dog this generation I can recommend without adding “but…” at the end. It’s an excellent game worthy of being praised. It isn’t without it’s faults, however. I ran into multiple glitches, some with weird AI movements, and some distracting audio cues. The worst was when the sound cut out during an important cutscene, leaving me with no option but to turn the subtitles on and wait it out. Other than glitches, there are more than a few questionable design choices that present themselves as “puzzles”. The fourth time you grab the exact same wooden palette to use as a raft from point A to point B, let me know how exciting it is.
Even with a few complaints, it’s still my favorite big budget adventure this year, and is one of the most emotionally exhausting games I’ve played in a long time.
Between The Last of Us and BioShock Infinite, we’re able to send our current consoles off with a bang, and I couldn’t be happier.
hippochippies 
