Grobbelboy

This will be FOTY, no doubt about it. Absolutely glorious.

GAMEPLAY FOOTAGE

Lol @ all these wild theories and weird assumptions about Edge not giving high marks to Ubisoft’s recent output, when each of those numbers is accompanied by some actual text that explains clearly and in great detail exactly why they didn’t rate the game any higher.

A game offering you lots of options isn't necessarily a systemic game. Stealth, hacking and dialogue are all just straightforward options that the developer designed beforehand. In a systemic game mechanics intertwine and feed off on each other, potentially causing situations that the developer never intended. "Combat" is a very broad term, a game with combat can very well be a systemic game. Halo's qualities stem almost entirely from its intertwining systems.

Surprised that there was no mention of Halo. The way AI, physics and environment work together in that was nothing short of revolutionary.

I love how insanely ambitious Perfect Dark was. It had genuinely novel features and ideas that would be heavily marketed nowadays, but were just buried somewhere in the game without any fanfare. I loved the insane amount of settings in the combat simulator. There was one where the game would go into slow motion whenever you got near an enemy. Had the best of times fighting against a bunch of Perfect Sims with my brother this way. Or playing against each other with a team of bots on each side that you could give assignments, which provided endless scenarios (sending off a couple to kill the other, putting others stationary at specific choke-points, a few following you around in defensive mode, etc). A lot of the weapons and their secondary functions were extremely inventive too. The Dragon that you could drop as a booby trap, the Avenger that recognizes threats (like those booby traps), the laptop gun you could deploy as a sentry gun, shooting through walls with the heat-seeking Farsight, the rocket launcher with rockets you could guide, etc. Counter-op is a mode that I don't think I have ever seen in another game since. One player doing the missions and the other as a much weaker enemy, but constantly respawning inside a different body. The stealth mission on the airport where Joanna couldn't fire a weapon without failing the mission immediately was completely unplayable in this mode, but you had the option to do it anyway. A testament to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach of the game. GoldenEye is the better game overall, the level designs in that (both in single- and multiplayer) still are some of the best ever in any FPS. But Perfect Dark is a close second.

Yes please!

Lol. 2016 and 2017 are probably the best years in gaming ever.

Playing the devil’s advocate here, but what's so wrong with that exactly? When you buy a pack of milk you also get to drink it once etc. There’s loads of games with microtransactions for one-time-use items that don’t receive any criticism.

Deus Ex is absolutely fantastic, one of my favorites of this generation.

I like the temporary snow in GTA Online during the holidays.

I also went to Essen for the first time this year (about a two hour drive from my place in The Netherlands). I mainly wanted to get Lisboa, which seems a bit difficult to obtain otherwise. I've only played it to completion two times now, but I think I can already put it somewhere in my top 3 of favorite board games of all time. Such a wonderfully designed game with a fantastic theme and full of brilliantly intricate, interlocking mechanics. The interaction with the fantastic multi-layered player boards is such a pleasure (tucking the Noble and Treasury cards underneath and placing the rubble cubes on them etc). It's one of those rare games that I immediately want to play again, even after a session of almost three hours. Will definitely get more of Vital Lacerda's work in the future. Also got Pandemic Legacy S2, Indian Summer and a couple of older games for good prices. The big difference with something like Gamescom is that here you don't have to stand in line for 4 hours to play something and at the end of the day you actually go home with a pile of brand new games in the trunk of your car. It's great to have the ability to talk to designers and let them teach you the rules too. Will definitely go again next year.

That's because throughout the years those scores have proven to be correct (to me) about 9 out of 10 times (Beatles Rock Band should have scored much better than a 7 though). I don't really care for a collective opinion. I'm not interested in IMDb or Metacritic scores for the same reason.

There's no fundamental difference between Edge or forum members talking you out of a purchase, is there? I don't really have or want to spend the time trying out games I'm not really sure about, especially with a backlog full of games I most certainly do want to play. Edge has always been a reliable source for gaming opinions to me, more so than the general consensus of the forum.

Those are disappointing scores for Assassin's Creed, Wolfenstein and Gran Turismo. Ah well, that means more time to dive into my stupendous backlog.