Horror Gaming 2014: The Highs and Abysmal Lows of the Eighth Console Generation’s First Year
2014 was a year of unbridled anticipation and excitement as we stared googly-eyed into the future of what this next console generation would bring and if this new generation would change how games were played. As of yet, we have not seen a major change to gaming in its form but have been content with the slight aesthetic changes provided thus far as developers have just begun digging into what this new generation of hardware can accomplish.
The year trickled into existence with next-gen titles lurking into the market at a rate of one per month, forcing hungry gamers to turn to disappointments like Thief to fill the void until something good hit the streets.
2014 has been repeatedly referred to as one of the worst years in gaming with gamers pointing a twisted, tobacco-stained finger directly at the spring and summer months that gave fans very few releases, and the games that mercifully quelled our collective boredom were downright terrible.
It all started with Watchdogs. The game that was supposed to showcase the raw firepower of the next-gen systems suffered from a graphical setting at 920p, a painfully generic story, and all around uninspired gameplay. It set the perfect tone for what was about to be the most boring summer in recent memory. Thank god for baseball.
Summer saw the release of two games for horror fans, Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls Ultimate Evil Edition, a game I gave the lowest score I have ever given a game, and Metro Redux, a game so generic and bad I never even bothered finishing it. I pride myself on never trading in video games, but both titles found their way back to EB Games (Canada’s GameStop) as a precautionary measure as I feared that my copy of The Last of Us would somehow turn into the Duck Dynasty game simply by being near them.
Speaking of The Last of Us, it was the only bright spot in the arid summer months. This is representative of just how bad the summer was. The best game that came out for several months was a reissue of a game that came out just a few years prior.
But for how bad the summer months were, gaming turned a corner in the fall with the horror title The Evil Within, and then on November 18th gaming exploded with more great games than we could play. This was the day that saw the release of both Far Cry 4 and Dragon Age Inquisition.
But none of the games mentioned were able to crack the top or bottom spots of this list.
Worst Game of the Year
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
This game can be perfectly described by a quote from baseball announcer Rex Hudler, “If you want to point the finger at who’s to blame for this disaster, you’re going to need both hands.” This game was an all-around clusterfuck. Shadow of Mordor was essentially a half-assed Assassin’s Creed rip-off. Aside from being completely unoriginal, its traversal system was completely counter-intuitive, as the main character would constantly get confused as to where to jump. It’s liking watching a deficient clone of Assassin’s Creed walk into a wall over and over again. The whole thing was painful to watch.
But the biggest problem with this waste of space was that the game was straight up broken. A few hours in and I noticed that certain button combinations did not work. A quick Facebook poll of friends revealed that many people were having issues with the dodge button not working, making the ogre’s handful of overwhelming battles nearly impossible to complete. But it gets worse.
The game is heavily based on defeating enemies and interrogating them to find the locations of their war chiefs. This would have been fine, but the interrogation button combination completely stopped working.
These problems extended into combat rolls and special attacks as the buttons needed to be mashed several times to get them to work causing you to take excessive damage or roll out of combat only to roll right back in.
Due to the bugs found in Shadow of Mordor, I was unable to finish the game that in actuality wasn’t even close to worth finishing. My final score for this game, zero out of five.
Best Press Conference of the Year
Microsoft – E3
I am a PlayStation fanboy, I have exclusively played PlayStation consoles since I left PC gaming and bought a PS2. That being said, Sony completely got their asses handed to them on the convention circuit this year.
Microsoft’s success this summer boils down to one thing: Indie’s don’t move consoles. While Sony was bringing out every indie developer they could find to stare at the ground and shamble through a speech about how they are just some small studio with a small game, Microsoft understood what a press conference is all about: a constant stream of triple-A titles.
Press conferences are a homerun derby; if it doesn’t leave the park, it’s not good enough. Microsoft understood this concept and came out swinging with triple-A title after triple-A title. Contrast this with Sony, who dedicated a very large amount of time to smaller games.
Triple-A’s are what moves consoles, and Microsoft came hard and heavy with big games. And nowhere was that more prevalent than E3. The Witcher 3, Assassin’s Creed, Halo, Tomb Raider, and Call of Duty all made appearances on the Microsoft stage with a few short minutes dedicated to indies. Microsoft completely blew the crowd away at E3 this year, with PS4 fanboys like me considering picking up an Xbox One just to play Sunset Overdrive.
Whenever I have an hour and a half to kill, I always throw on this press conference. Couple Microsoft showcasing their large triple-A lineup with the Christmas price drop, and the Xbox One outselling PS4 in December was something I saw coming since the fall.
Best Horror Game of the Year
P.T.
One true gem shone brighter than any other this year in the purebred horror category. P.T. (short for playable teaser) was a complete axe to the brain found smack in the middle of a lackluster Sony press conference.
The game is based on walking through the same stretch of hallway over and over again, each time to solve a new puzzle under new and even more terrifying circumstances. This was the true art film of horror gaming.
The horror was a porn star orgasm of awesome; it utilized very few monsters but still managed to be 2014’s most genuinely terrifying game with ghosts, hanging coffins and an aborted fetus for good measure, and it accomplished this with a level brilliance only observed by British soccer announcers.
But why this is the game of the year is how it brought the community together. When news broke that the game’s end reveals that it is a just a teaser for the new Silent Hill game, being helmed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, the whole PlayStation community came together across every gaming forum our bloodshot eyes could find in a desperate mad dash to solve the game’s brutal final puzzle.
Best Game of 2014
Wolfenstein: The New Order
I closed my review of this game saying, “2014, we have our first game of the year candidate,” and nothing came close to touching Wolfenstein: The New Order for the rest of 2014.
It was a gleefully violent and wonderfully gory quest of savagery as you battled against the scum of the Earth, Nazis, and their B-movie staple, super Nazi death machines. The whole thing was a glorious send-up to the exploitation genre. Coupled with cut scenes so cinematic it resembled the work of Scorsese.
Its merging of fun gameplay, abundant violence, great performances, and graphics so lavish they were almost blinding rocketed Wolfenstein: The New Order far ahead of anything that came out this past year.
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