Rome Total War.

Correct on all three.

That must be a game based on Journey to the West, as Trip stands for Tripitaka and is combined with a monkey. Which one though? I go with Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

Yes!

Great game. I like others in this franchise as well, but this’ll be the only one in my list this year.

Awesome. 46 and 41 were total gambles.

Correct.

I never played the original Resident Evil back then it first release, as in the 90s I didn't play on console. So my first exposure was the rerelease on Wii. And I liked it. I wasn't repelled by the old control scheme as many others were. And I played Resident Evil 4 beforehand (which was the reason I tried my hands on the original in the first place), so it wasn't that I didn't knew how the controls could be made better. But Resident Evil excels in another area: atmosphere. The atmosphere of the creepy villa and then the lab. The game always keeps you on your toes, although it has way less enemies than later entries. Every time you start to feel secure, because you start to amass ammunition, know how to kill the Zombies or find your way around the villa, the game adds a spin to keep you unsettled. And that makes it so great and keeps the game in my TOP 50, although yes the controls and visuals are dated.

The game is a mix of a shooter, but with fixed camera angles which certainly makes shooting a bit cumbersome, survival horror and light puzzles. You find your way through the villa and lab, searching for keys or items that help you progress and slowly uncover the truth about what happened here. The game keeps your resources as healing and ammunition sparse, so it often is a prudent tactic just to run through a room with an enemy instead of wasting bullets.

From this game spawned a whole big franchise, with many games, movies and recently a rumoured netflix-series. This success started here, despite controls, despite all it's shortcoming, because it does so well on the creepiness, on the unsettling feelings, on the jump-scares (who doesn't remember the zombie dogs). So it deserves it's place on my list. The game itself became countless rereleases, most recently on Switch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw3i5jQ4NR8

#37

Grandia II (PC)

Change From Last Year: NEW

Grandia II is another game that had been sitting in my Steam library for a long time before I finally found the time to actually play it earlier this year, and although I did expect to like it as the first game is genuinely among my favourite JRPGs ever it turned out to be even better than I had hoped. From the genuinely interesting and well-written characters and the story with a surprising amount of depth to the excellent soundtrack composed by Noriyuki Iwadare and great battle system that other games in the genre should take note of, Grandia II is a genuinely wonderful game that I wish I had experienced years ago.

The only real shortcomings or issues the game has are the naturally dated graphics by today's standards, which is no real issue for me personally, and the somewhat clumsy and often amateurish voice acting, though that is still a pretty big improvement over the original game's voice acting. Neither issue bothered me too much, as both are to be expected from a game from around the turn of the millennium. These negligible issues aside, Grandia II is an excellent game that I will likely be replaying in the future.

Ah, Grandia. My friend played it back then on Dreamcast, and I thought it looked interesting. I should take the chance, that I can play it now with the HD-release on Switch, but my backlog is already big. I'll consider it.

I do recommend the game. It took me a long time to get to the game exactly because of my backlog, but I'm very happy I finally did get to it.