On paper this might be a good year, but for me personally the first cracks in the dome above the gaming world had started to show. 2014 was decent for WiiU, but by 2015 is was clear where this was headed. The 3DS at this point had also run through most of its fuel and other consoles and PC games were getting more and more complicated and ever longer while also began to feel a bit 'same-y'. This is why I never tried any of the big games in the poll for example, even though I could have liked say The Witcher 3 if I had the motivation. Besides that my bigger personal interests had been increasingly moving away to another hobby outside of gaming for a few years now. Still though, from the poll I played Super Mario Maker and from the 'other' list I played Cities Skylines, Zelda Triforce Heroes and Rise of the Tomb Raider. I've also seen a lot of Fallout 4, because my mother, a big fan of that series played all the way through it on the big living room tv.
To get it out of the way; Zelda Triforce Heroes, is terrible. Absolute evidence that such style just doesn't work for a Zelda game. At all. The best thing about it was keeping the ball up in the multiplayer lobby room. If it wasn't for the preview of "Zelda U" we had already seen at this point, my faith in the Zelda franchise would have plummeted then and there like it had years earlier for some other franchises. Rise of the Tomb Raider was a great follow-up to the first game of this reboot series, I like this trilogy very much, it did what the first game did great and provided more of it. Super Mario Maker was the most logical game that could ever have come to WiiU. I think it should have been a launch title, because it proved the usefulness of the touch screen tablet. It was quite fun to play, and the editor was intuitive. I uploaded quite a bunch of, if I might say so myself, quite decent levels. In the beginning I noticed they would get plenty of plays, but after a while this would get less and less. As the player base seemed to die off, I lost interest because what is the incentive then to keep making levels? I know this is a problem Nintendo could never have avoided, but it impacted my view of the game.
Cities Skylines I was excited for, and it usurped the entirety of the (modern-day) city-building genre. It is indeed a good game, and I ended up playing it quite a lot. However as always I wanted way more, or rather other things from it. The continuing problem with city builders in general is that they are always geared towards building 'American style' cities, probably because creating a game that functions like that is easier to program (even if the developer and publisher of this is Scandinavian). With this I mean, that cities always end up block-based, car-based with big streets and wider avenues, and buildings are individual units with a certain function. But that's not how it works in for example Europe, where cities are old, have grown organically over centuries, have compact city centers mostly only accessible by pedestrians and trams, have an extreme variety of building shapes as they are crammed in every available spot, don't have a dedicated function so there is always mixed use, everything could be anything and are always built wall-to-wall. Now, this game did however introduce a great new way to organically draw roads and other networks, but the buildings would still be static, singular and square. So it was on to mods and custom assets in the hope I could make something 'European'. This however still didn't really satisfy, as it becomes ever more complicated and time-consuming, compromising intuitiveness and well, my computer's CPU. Because of this I began to turn away from this game again without ever creating something to my satisfactory, with the realisation that older games that are simpler by necessity like SimCity 3000 and 4 are actually better in building whatever you want because with those it's easier to let your imagination run free.
Besides these I also played Zelda Majora's Mask 3D, Resident Evil Revelations 2, a bit of Wolfenstein The Old Blood and Prison Architect. Now, Majora's Mask is obviously far and away the best game out of those I played this year, but because it's a remake I won't count it. Still, this particular one among the 3D Zelda remakes and remasters is the weakest, because it makes stuff worse than they were in the original. The bosses are the obvious culprit, piece by piece worse than what they were on N64, but also the save system. While it is convenient you could now save like any other game, it takes away the fact that 'saving' was actually a gameplay element in the original and it as such hurts the immersion. The notebook is also somehow less useful and clear than it was originally. It looks great though, and some add-ons like the fishing hole are welcome. Prison Architect was fun, but limited. Lastly I didn't like Resident Evil Revelations 2, and thought it was way inferior to its excellent predecessor. I was bummed (and puzzled) it didn't come to 3DS, and I decided to get a Vita instead just for that game to at least keep it a handheld experience as that felt like the right thing to do. I was disappointed in Vita as a device itself, but the game didn't look as good as the first game did on 3DS, supposedly 'inferior hardware', either and the levels and story weren't nearly as compelling.
All in all, there's not really any competition this year, as all games besides Majora's Mask, which is disqualified, Tomb Raider and Cities Skylines were either short-lived, mediocre or worse. Tomb Raider is a sequel however, and that doesn't really have much impact if it's also a lot like its predecessor. Impact Cities Skylines at least did have. My vote is Other, with Cities Skylines.
