Cultural Impact: Pokemon GO of course. You know why. 
Favorite Games: Although I mostly remember 2016 for a certain development in the real world that shall remain unnamed, I definitely enjoyed this year in gaming. To name just a few of my top favorites...
1. Pony Island
2. That Dragon, Cancer
3. Stardew Valley
4. The Last Guardian
5. Kentucky Route Zero (Act IV)
6. Inside
7. VA11-Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action
8. Overwatch
9. Uncharted 4: A Thief's End
10. Persona 5
11. Dark Souls III
12. One Night Stand
13. 1979 Revolution: Black Friday
While I think people already know the magic of many of these games, I do want to briefly highlight the top two, as too many people missed them.
Pony Island was mostly the creation of a 48-hour game jam. It's a puzzle meta-game disguised as a terrible ancient endless runner wherein your goal is to break out of the game and explore its internal programming system to unearth the mystery behind its designer. Definitely the funniest, least predictable, and most all-around punk rock game of the year.
Then there was That Dragon, Cancer, which is an autobiographical game created by Ryan and Amy Green about navigating their young son Joel's diagnosis with a rare form of childhood cancer that attacks the brain. It's not a "fun" game in general, to state the obvious, but there's such unusual depth of emotional honesty and love that pervades this whole adventure that it continues to stick with me to this day. Animation is minimal in the game, but it comes to life mainly through sound and through its occasional turn to expressive imagery that reflects the emotional and psychological lives of the Greens. It explores topics ranging from enduring one's normal routine when your world is upside down, questions of faith, and the ways in which joy and pain are often tied together in a bittersweet harmony with complete earnesty. This is not sadness porn. There's much more than just pain here. There's love and joy too intermingled with it. Carolyn Petit remarked that the game seems to convey, above all, the idea that love is its own gift. I agree with that sentiment.
I might also briefly mention The Last Guardian because I think it gets far too much flack. People's main point of dissent to this game seems to be that Trico does not always cooperate with the player and believe it a result of poor programming. I find something very different here. I find everything from Trico's natural movements to the way its relationship to the boy evolves over time strikingly believable and life-like and, within that understanding, would note that animals -- even trained pets -- have wills of their own and don't always do what you want them to on command. It was precisely because I came to believe that Trico could be a real animal that its bond with the boy felt like one of the most special and touching ones I'd gotten to experience in a game.
As you may be sensing by now, I often appreciate games that take more than a page or two from life. Doing so has a way of adding more layers of immersion and depth that make a gaming experience something more than the usual to me.
Worst Game: I'm once again including this category because I must take a moment to disparage Star Fox Zero: the only video game I have ever actually thrown away. Created to prove that the world definitely needed the dual screen excellence of the Game Pad, it proved just the opposite to me to a truly, truly agonizing extent. What might've otherwise been something of a much-needed return to form for the franchise became the biggest pain in the neck I've ever experienced while gaming. No literally, having to constantly bend and lift my head over and over and over and over and over and over and over...and over and over and over and over and over and you get the idea caused me such egregious neck pain that not only could I not complete a single playthrough, but I wound up angrily hurling my Game Pad across the room at one point before ejecting the game, breaking the game disc, and throwing it in the trash. That is all.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 14 December 2023
