Games I beat in 2015 and my Game of the Year

Sun 27 Dec 2015, 00:00

I'm pretty sure I won't beat anymore games until next year, so I think I can do this now. I had one more in me: Lego Star Wars completed at December 31st.

2015 was a great year in gaming for me. I did very little speedrunning and focused most of my game time on playing games I hadn't beaten before.

The syntax for this year is:

Title (Platform)

Some words that I wrote about the game when I finished it, usually on my phone in a quick and dirty matter

On some games I will provide a comment written now, at the end of 2015/in retrospect, where I see fit.


Alright, let's get started.

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker (Wii U)

Very cute game with nice and appealing graphics and awesome sound effects. It's just such a fun idea. Gonna remember this game for a long long time, it might define the Wii U for me.

I have actually not played this game since I beat it, except I did try it for a few minutes on a new display. But whenever I think of fun and cute, I think of this game. This game is gosh darn cute and fun and really defines the Wii U for me. I've been thinking about popping it in and playing some of it lately.

Bioshock Infinite (PC)

Fun gameplay, good story. Very interesting ending. Very good graphics, they're colorful and nice.

Haven't touched the game since I beat it, except for some PC benchmarking. I still think fondly of it though.

Half life (PC)

Very sloppy controls, weird ending. It's a classic though.

Half Life Blue Shift (Dreamcast)

Short but fun, good story and setting. Dreamcast version adds some charm.

PC Version is better.

GTA V (PC)

Such an amazing game. I considered it GOTY 2013 and might be GOTY 2015 too if that can count. PC version improves load times a lot and the visuals too. First person mode is great for shooting. Playing through again made me appreciate the story more.

I still love this game to death. Rockstar, please, release single player DLC. I will pre-order it immediately. During the year I also got it for Xbox One and played it through there and it was fine, but I would prefer PC version.

Bayonetta 2 (Wii U)

Very fun game, hard to stop once you get going. A bit short and because everyone who sees me play this thinks I am a pervert, I can't give it 5/5. Battle music is also bad, but you don't really think about it since you are focused on the really really fun combat.

Haven't touched the game since I beat it.

Michael Jackson Moonwalker (Genesis)

Genuinely fun game. A bit frustrating at times due to re-checking doors and such. Last battle (space shooter) not fun. Catchy music. Favorite genesis game as of now.

I ended up doing some speedruns of it for a while... was fun

Zelda wind Waker (HD) (Wii U)

Fun game once you get going. A bit boring level design, Wind Temple and Earth Temple were more of a drag than fun for example. Beautiful graphics and sound. Fun to mess around and discover stuff. HD version better because of swift sail and easier/shorter triforce collecting.

Haven't touched since I beat it. I have fond memories of it though, kinda wanna raise it to a 5/5 just based of memory

Destiny (X360/Xbox One/PS4)

Unexpectedly fun. Got it for $5 for X360 and had tons of fun with it. The gameplay is really fun, it's like a combination of Halo, Call of Duty and a MMO. I didn't care about the story. X360 version is really ugly and laggy but the gameplay made up for it. XO version fixes all the problems.

I got The Taken King Legendary Edition (basically the game + all DLC as of now) for my PS4 on Black Friday, and I still love this game. I hate the voice acting and the missions are incredibly repetitive. Sparrow Racing League is very fun and is nice to play when you don't wanna shoot stuff. Gameplay is super top notch though, it's really fun and hard to stop playing once you get going. They also changed now so you can basically just level up and get stuff by just playing the game - they reward people actually playing the game

Halo 1 (MCC on Xbox One)

Frustrating non-linear level design. Decent gameplay. No special feels.

Halo 2 (MCC on Xbox One)

Bit more linear level design. Still no great gameplay. No special feels.

Haven't touched this or Halo 1 since I beat them

Diablo 3 + RoS (Xbox One)

Short, fun gameplay. Good to play while watching TV.

Played it again a couple weeks ago and it was fine but I got bored quickly. If I had a TV Show to binge and my TV in my field of view for my PC monitors I might play it more

Banjo Kazooie (Rare Replay, Xbox One)

Played the Rare Replay version. 100%'ed. Pretty much great all around. Going around collecting stuff I had collected, and the final boss fight did not amuse me.

Haven't touched Rare Replay since. It's a fine compilation but, honestly, I don't care much for the games on it except this one

Yoshi Wooly World (Wii U)

A bit too childish with the music, I'm probably too old for this game. Some levels fun, most meh, some frustrating. Cool graphics.

I have no plans of ever playing this again, maybe I'll look back on it someday but right now I'm still glad it's over

F-ZERO (SNES/SFC)

Lovely little game. Easy to play, hard to master. Very good music, some of my favorites. Probably top 5 SNES game for me.

I pop in this game occasionally and I listen to it's soundtrack all the time. Sadly the soundtrack rip I have has some artifacts in it so I need to get a new rip

Prison Architect (PC)

Terrific game and as of version 1.0 they added a campaign to it which was terrific, albeit short (only 5 missions and the last one is basically same as sandbox mode). The story was great though and did get to me. The game does have some bugs though so I cant give it 5.

I actually wrote an entire post on this game after I beat it, but I haven't touched the game since

Super Mario 3d World (Wii U)

Another well made 3d Mario. Really solid title for the Wii U. I enjoyed collecting the green stars alot. Last couple of Bowser levels were probably the worst part of the game, they just have effects and you just wanna be over with them. Rest of the game is top notch though.

Haven't touched since I beat it

Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zeroes (Xbox One)

Got it through Xbox Live Games with Gold. First MGS I've "played" seriously. It got me wanting the real game!

I want to replay this again since I beat the real game as I would probably appreciate it more. Considering getting it on PS4 so I can do that save file transfer for some bonus stuff, but that's probably a waste of money. I have no idea why I put played in quotations, I'm guessing it's because I have tried MGS on PS1 and stuff, but never really played them

GTA San Andreas (Xbox 360 remaster)

Great game but this port is awful, its laggy and prone to crashing and also has bugs in it (like the dance timing being off). The achievements were easy to get an uncreative. Some things are better/more streamlined in this version though.

Also got this on PS4 since they released the PS2 version there with Trophy support, and recorded myself getting the platinum trophy in it (the achievements and trophies are the same, except they removed pimping missions from the PS4 (and possibly PS3) version)

Halo 5 (Xbox One)

Haha, I didn't notice until now when I was looking through my bookshelf of games and I noticed I didn't have an entry for this game. The tweet that I made when I finished it sums it up though. I actually did enjoy the multiplayer quite a bit when I played it (mostly FFA), might go back to it some time soon. The campaign was as I said though, very uninspiring.

Journey (PS4)

I heard so much things about this game and that it's amazing and such, so PSN had it on sale and I bought it. And yeah it's a weird game. Once I started I couldn't stop, even though I was thinking about more fun games to play. Towards the end it really felt like I was pushing myself to get to the end, which was a part of the journey. I heard this game is worth replaying though so I might try it again.

Haven't touched it since I wrote that

Fallout 4 (PC)

Was pretty fun in the beginning, but got tired pretty quick of it (after 20 hours). Then I just rushed through the story. The story was very cliche. Good gameplay, but plagued with bugs (unexpected huh). Diamond City Radio is one of the best features of any video game ever made.

I went back and played it a little but ehh, pretty sick of it. Might do another playthrough someday, with another character build

Undertale (PC)

So GameFAQs had their poll about the best game ever, and for some reason Undertale kept climbing to the top. It beat Mario 64 among other games. At the same time a ton of people I follow on Twitter (mostly speedrunners) were saying that this game is amazing. So I bought it on Steam, and played it. And beat it. The music is fantastic. The fighting mechanic is awesome and very fun. I loved the skeleton bros. I did not understand the story (I skipped through most of the dialog, like I do in most games, so that might be why).

The first hour of the game was very fun but then it got very boring and I just wanted to be over with it. I got the neutral ending, where the final boss was a really grotesque biological thing (I don't wanna spoil anything) and that part just felt ridiculous. Up til that point I really enjoyed the originality of the game but that boss made me just shake my head. It was not because it was hard (I beat it first try). There was also some other weird stuff at the end like the game just quitting all of a sudden and it messing with your save file which was just weird. Crazy indie devs.

But no the game is not better than SM64, far from it. Until that last boss I might've considered it better than Melee though. If the game was linear with less decisions and more fighting and no ridiculous boss battle, I would have enjoyed it alot more.

It won the game of the year poll on GameFAQs. There is no way in hell that it actually is though. I don't wanna play this game again.

Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain (PS4)

This was a very long game. I have roughly 45 hours played of it and its not even 50% completion. This game is genius in many ways. The characters are great. The story is weird but I could still enjoy the dramatic scenes. The gameplay is also so fun. You can either just be really stealthy and take your time (I did this more in the begining), or you can be pretty speedy and obvious. Both are fun either way. I also liked the humor aspects of the game, such as balloon extracting soldiers and animals. Some parts of the game very really dark and bloody so having some fun and quirkiness on the side is a good way to balance it. I liked the characters. Quiet was very special. She was at first to me creepy and just weird (I was close to killing her) but after a while when some of the mysteries were explained I liked her alot more and was a bit sad at the end. The graphics in this game was great too, I played on PS4 and it was 60 fps and I can’t recall any laggy spots. The colors were nice and vibrant (despite being a pretty dark game often taking place at night).

I could complain about the length of the game, it took me 45 hours and I wanted to play other games. But now that I finished it, I wish it was longer.

Then there is the slow endgame, which at first I hated. Up to episode 31 you basically just do mission after mission to progress. But Kojima left at one point so Konami scrapped together some older missions on harder difficulty, which I didn’t do because you could also just do side ops and basically free roam until you unlocked the next story mission, which at first I didn’t like but in retrospect I never hated it either. In a way it’s kind of similar to GTA SA where the game is very mission based right up until the end, where you need to take over gang territories in order to unlock the final mission.

As I said the story was really weird and apart from the parts about Quiet, I didn’t really care about it, until I read this Kotaku article which put it in plain and simple English.

So yes, a great game, but make sure you don’t have a busy schedule. I think I wanna play it again now that I know the story, but I'm gonna take a long break from it before that.

I unlocked that character again thanks to the latest patch.

LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga (PC)

Alright I didn't expect to have so much fun with this game that I ended up beating it 2 days after Steam had it on sale.

This game was really enjoyable to play after having seen the original trilogy. I decided to not watch the prequels and instead play them in this game, and then watch those parts in the actual movie.

It uses the original Star Wars soundtrack as the background music and that is just fantastic.

The puzzles are great, the cutscenes are great, the humor is great, the controls are great. They can get a bit wonky sometimes if there are alot of characters around you as 1 button does mulitple things, but that wasn't a problem most of the time.

I did experience some bugs with the game, probably because I played on PC. The game crashed during the last mission for example (which I didn't mind because that mission was really fun and short), and the framerate would sometimes go down to like 11, 24, 31 and such (this is the first game where I've seen Nvidia GSYNC make a crazy difference, the game teared ALOT without it.) Also didn't support 144 Hz, it did 85 Hz at most. I'm pretty sure playing this game on the Xbox 360 would be flawless though.

Honorary Mentions

These are games that I did play this year but did not beat, or could not beat. In no particular order.

Splatoon

This game was very disappointing to me. I enjoyed the public test fires, and I pre-ordered the game, hyped it up like hell, and played it, but then... I didn't. I got very tired of it very fast. I haven't touched the single player yet, so maybe I'll get to that someday. Now I'm afraid to even try the multiplayer again as people are probably gonna be way better than me (I think that's why I enjoyed the public test fires, everyone was bad)

Super Mario Maker

I play this atleast once a week and just check out if anyone played our courses and try to brainstorm some new levels. It's simply just fun to play if you wanna play a video game and don't know what to play. It's kind of GOTY-worthy but at the same time I don't really consider it a game.

Cities Skylines

Played 15 hours of it the first week it was out, but then I haven't touched it. It's probably my favorite city building game.

Ocarina of Time Beta Quest

Aha, you didn't see this coming did you? Technically it's not a game, it's a mod, but damn it's alot of fun. It was the main reason why I bought a Everdrive 64 - so I could play this on a real N64 with good controls. I play this weekly and just input some random filename and just mess around in it, trying to get stuff. I also use this tool to make it more of a puzzle. I love it. I've been meaning to join some bingo race of it but haven't done so yet.

Rocket League

Played it 2 hours, then never touched it again. Did not get into it. I think it's a cool concept though.

The Witcher 3

I started playing this again and now that I have developed patience from playing MGSV, I actually kinda enjoy it, the little I've played. Maybe you'll read about it next year.

Mario Kart 8

Gave this GOTY last year and I probably would give it GOTY this year too, except it didn't come out this year. The second DLC pack did though and that was hella fun. I always enjoy it when I pop this game in and play it. I also tried doing some speedruns of it, but that wasn't that exciting. Without a doubt the best game on the Wii U._

Super Smash Bros for Wii U

I enjoy Melee more. A lot more. Sm4sh just feels wonky. I did buy Ryu and other characters though. Maybe I'll buy Bayonetta too when she is out.

My Game of the Year 2015

If you count GTA V (PC), it's that.
If you don't count that I guess Destiny doesn't count either, so it's Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain in that case.

Thank you for reading.