The 20 games you shouldn't miss in 2014

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All of the videos are muted and I don’t understand?!

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Yeah, me too.

I loved Monument Valley, short as it was, just bought the expansion.

Super Time Force, I was really looking forward to, but when it did come out I didn’t get on with it at all. I should give it another go, I think.

Broken Age, I just thought was too easy. And it’s only half a game.

I’ve also been playing FTL badly on my iThing this year quite a lot.

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I love lists like these because they remind me that I play too much Heartstone.

Time to go shopping!

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Card City Nights - http://store.steampowered.com/app/271820/

Single player CCG adventure game (no crappy in-app purchases…you unlock card packs by playing the game).

Death Skid Marks - http://store.steampowered.com/app/326150/

Rogue-lite meets car combat + trashy ultraviolent aesthetic

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Monument Valley is one of those games that I had to have for both my iPhone and my Nexus 7. Well made game.

I love Broken Age, but the documentary by 2 Player Productions is incredible - in fact, if that was all I’d gotten from the Kickstarter and the game had imploded, it still would have been money well spent.

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Is it just me or are all of the videos in this story silent?

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My Top 5:

1.- Faster Than Light Extended Edition
2.- Shadowrun Dragon Fall & Shadowrun Returns
3.- The Banner Saga
4.- Galactic Civilizations III
5.- Gods Will Be Watching <- I’m a masochist.

Card City Nights is awesome, I wish it had an expansion!

I am a big fan of point and click adventure games and I strongly dislike Kentucky Route Zero. I regret spending money on it. The frequently ridiculous dialogue annoys me, the aimless driving around annoys me, the unnecessary vagueness annoys me… It’s not a game for everyone, that’s for sure.

My favourite game of 2014 is Transistor. It is a gorgeous, challenging, engrossing game. The soundtrack is incredible as well.

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You gotta go into KRZ with the right expectations, for sure. It’s not really a point-and-click adventure in the traditional sense. It’s literary and poetic in a way that you don’t often see in games. To be honest I admired it more than I liked it, but now the more I think about it, the more I want to play it through again… hmmmmm

Really hard for me to like Broken Age.

It was quadruple funded, delivered over a year late, and still only half a game. It was easy, and honestly as the act two shapes up looks like it’s really a third of a game. The next act was due out in June, (six months after act one), and now it looks like it’s going to be 1Q2015, so half a year to a year late.

The other game they have that I took an interest in was Spacebase DF9. Funded that one through kickstarter.

They just walked away from it. Just literally walked away from it. Quit.

Now I’ve funded Massive Chalice, which no doubt is going to pay for part of Broken Age. It’s also a kickstarter game.

And they’ve had to lay off staff because of some “unnamed project” getting cancelled on them.

I know DoubleFine and Tim Schaefer are supposed to be “cool”, but they’ve been a massive let down and an example of how kickstarting game projects is a bad idea. It seems like they’re in a horrific death spiral.

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[quote=“Lion, post:14, topic:48690”]
they’ve been a massive let down and an example of how kickstarting game
projects is a bad idea. It seems like they’re in a horrific death spiral.[/quote]

I backed “Elite: Dangerous” and they delivered, so not all game kickstarters end in horrible disasters.

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Juegos Rancheros may be the best name for anything I’ve heard this year.

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And I backed Dreamfall Chapters, which was released when promised.

Well, true, not all of them are disasters.

But after Double Fine’s steps, I’m a lot more cautious about games on kickstarters.

Double Fine was supposed to be the chosen people. The best of the best in game dev. If they can’t be trusted, who can?

Actually, having read a little of the Psychonauts development history, the Double Fine Kickstarter struck me as a pretty iffy proposition from the get-go. (I think http://v2.razputin.net/index.html@page=razputin%2Ffeatures%2Ftimwords.html is the link I’m looking for.) I hear Brutal Legend didn’t fare much better. At this point I’m kind of skeptical they’ll even get Grim Fandango out in reasonable time, if they’re behind it. So it goes.

I was about to back Thimbleweed Park, but apparently that Kickstarter ended five days ago. Oops.

I know since Spacebase it’s been the hip thing to hate Double Fine, but be reasonable here.

Yes, BA got a megaton of cash, but part of the pitch was - if they’d get more, they’d scale the game up. They were originally only wanting $300K for the game (the documentary would get the rest) which would be on a level approaching a flash game. Since they made all the cash, we ended up with a fully fledged game on PC, Linux, Mac, iOS & Android.

Plus, as the documentary has shown, game development isn’t a quick & straightforward process, especially with a team of only a dozen or so. I’m not sure if you were a backer, but the whole process has been charted by 2 Player Productions and honestly, it’s been an eye opener into the world of development.

Anyway, yes, I get where you’re coming from if you did purchase Spacebase, although in equal fairness, an indie dev - even a larger one like DF - can’t support a money loser for long.