Ricardo’s 2016 Game of the Year Awards, Day 5

This is it! The big day! The entire world has been waiting for this! Ok, that’s not even remotely true, but I’m going to continue pretending like it is. You’ve seen the nominees, you’ve read my brief spotlights of them, and now you’re going to learn which one was my GOTY 2016. Prepare yourself.


And the winner is…

Ricardo’s 2016 Game of the Year Awards, Day 4

We are close, so very close to the end. Today is the fourth day of GOTY Week, and that means the reveal of the final three nominees before tomorrow’s GOTY award.


And today’s nominees are…

Ratchet and Clank

If you don’t smile a single time while playing Ratchet and Clank, then dare I say you are dead inside. This remake of the PS2 original is an absolute delight to play and has some of the most hilarious weapons you’ll find in a video game, including one that turn enemies into sheep, another that cause impromptu dance parties to break out, and the trash-talking killer robot named Mr. Zurkon. With a visual style that might best be described as Pixar-esque and a classic story of misfits out to save the galaxy, Ratchet and Clank is the sort of game that reminds you why you love playing video games.

Watch Dogs

In Watch Dogs the city of Chicago is your tool to hunt down and extract vengeance of on those connected to the death of Aiden Pierce’s niece, or to just mess around with if you want to cause some chaos. With all of the city’s infrastructure and services running on a single operating system, as well as the prevalence of smart phones and other hackable devices, Watch Dogs offers a variety of ways to interact with your surroundings and tackle missions. Clearing out enemies or ditching pursuers without firing a shot is an undeniably gratifying experience, and the novelty of controlling the city never got old during my time with Watch Dogs.

Tomb Raider

Rebooting the long running series, Tomb Raider tells a new origin story for one of gaming’s most iconic characters. Lara Croft begins her story as a history nerd that has been shipwrecked on a mysterious island, but through many trials and tribulations she is steadily transformed into a hardened survivor who is just as versed in firefights and traversal as she is in historical knowledge. Tomb Raider delivers a promising new beginning for the series and works very well for people like me who are only just now jumping into the Tomb Raider games.

Ricardo’s 2016 Game of the Year Awards, Day 3

The third day of GOTY Week is here, and with it come the latest three nominees. Only two more days until my GOTY 2016 is announced.


And today’s nominees are…

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

Shropshire County is an idyllic part of rural England in the 1980s, except for the fact that everyone has gone missing. Exploring the countryside, you encounter strange manifestations of events immediately before and during whatever caused everyone to disappear, and as you walk around it’s up to you to find them and interpret what it all means. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture wasn’t the first game of its genre that I played last year, but it was the first one to nail the experience and keep me hooked from beginning to end.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

What’s better than being an assassin? Being an assassin who’s also a pirate, that’s what. Black Flag lets you fulfill your high-seas fantasies of being the greatest pirate in the West Indies, while also telling the story of Edward Kenway, a pirate who rises above himself to join the Assassins in their never-ending struggle against the Templars. Keeping the modern-day story arc to a minimum, Black Flag focuses on what the Assassin’s Creed games have done best and brings back a lot of the fun that had been missing in some of its predecessors.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

Representing the Call of Duty series on this list, Advanced Warfare is the overall strongest of the three Call of Duty games I played last year. Jumping about 40 years into the future, Advanced Warfare shakes up the Call of Duty formula with the addition of exosuits, advanced drones, and a host of other futuristic technologies, but at the same time keeps to series’ hallmarks of fast and precise gameplay, fun missions, and the wanton disregard for bodycounts and collateral damage. Add to this a strong performance by Kevin Spacey, and you’ve got yet another reason why Call of Duty remains one of the biggest brands in gaming.

Ricardo’s 2016 Game of the Year Awards, Day 2

We continue today with another three nominees in my 2016 GOTY award. The next two days will also feature three nominees each, and then on Friday I’ll make the big reveal.

And today’s nominees are…

Destiny

Having left Halo behind, the creative minds at Bungie gave us Destiny, an online FPS MMO (ok, Destiny might not actually be a MMO, but that’s how I think of it). You play as a Guardian—a resurrected person who is tasked with protecting the last remnants of humanity against the alien forces that have taken over our solar system. Bungie’s hallmarks of fun, solid gameplay are on full display in Destiny, and the ability to play with friends only sweetens the deal.

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

Nathan Drake’s final outing brings together everything that is great about the Uncharted games and delivers a satisfying conclusion to his storyline. This final globetrotting adventure demonstrates yet again why developer Naughty Dog is one of the best in the business, with a masterclass performance at nearly every level. A small but excellent multiplayer suite rounds out the package of Uncharted 4, and even if you’ve never played an Uncharted game before it’s an easy recommendation.

Infamous: Second Son

After years of dodging spoilers, I finally played Infamous: Second Son and experienced the next game in the series which allows you to be either a superhero or a superjerk. Set in Seattle, Second Son tells the story of Delsin Rowe, a troubled young man who can absorb the abilities of other superpowered individuals and it’s up to you to decide whether to be selfish or selfless with them. Good or evil, Second Son is fun game to play, and the new powers, as well as the expertly crafted setting, give Second Son a distinct feel from the first two games in the series.

Ricardo’s 2016 Game of the Year Awards, Day 1

I played a fair number of video games last year, and now that we’re in the second week of the New Year I think it’s time to reveal my Game of the Year (GOTY) for 2016. Game developers, journalists, and players all over the world have been waiting with baited breath for an insignificant online writer with effectively no social media following to announce his pick for 2016’s GOTY, and the wait will soon be over. This whole week I have dedicated to my GOTY award, so let’s get the hype train started.

But first, a few notes about the rules for my GOTY, as they are a little different from what you’ll find in most other places. The first rule is that for a game to be considered for the GOTY I must have played the game for the first time in 2016. That might sound straightforward at first, but keep in mind that I’m perpetually late when it comes to playing games, so that means we have nominees from several different years going head-to-head in the competition. The second rule is that I must have played a substantial amount of a game and/or completed it for it to be considered for the GOTY. If you’ve been reading my game commentaries from last year you know that some games I only put a few hours into, while others got in-depth playthroughs. Games like Overwatch, Driveclub, and Star Wars: Battlefront, which I only messed around with for a little while, did not make the cut, and honestly it would be really unfair if any of them won the GOTY award. At the same time, a game that’s inherently short can make the list, but only if I finish it.

Originally I was going to have a list of 10 nominees, but as I looked at the games I had played last year and thought about each of them I was having such a hard time picking only 10 that I increased the number of nominees to 12, but even then it was still an arduous process. While there were games that clearly were not GOTY material, there were plenty that, even if they wouldn’t win the GOTY, had a strong case for being on the list of nominees. To keep things fair, I took the time to reread some of my writings and I rewatched my gameplay footage from the games under consideration. After a lot of deliberation, and some agonizing decisions, the final list of 12 nominees is ready. For the first four days of this week I will highlight three games each day that are nominated for the GOTY, and on Friday I will make the big reveal.


And today’s nominees are…

Batman: Arkham Knight

The fourth and final game in the Arkham series brings Batman back for one long, final night of battling crime in Gotham City. Scarecrow, aided by the mysterious Arkham Knight, has Gotham under siege and it’s up to Batman and his allies to retake the city. The signature Arkham gameplay and storytelling the series has been known for, combined an impressive open world Gotham City, make for a powerful conclusion to the Arkham series.

Borderlands 2

The lone PS3/Xbox 360 game on this year’s list shows that a last-generation game can still stand with its contemporary brethren. Bullets, explosions, and jokes litter every last inch of Borderlands 2, and an addictive loot cycle continually supplies you with new gear to up your arsenal. Complimenting the nuttiness of the gameplay are a cast of absurd and memorable characters whose humor is perfectly fitting for the world they inhabit, with the standout being Handsome Jack—one of the best video game villains in recent memory.

The Order: 1886

An alternate history Victorian London is the backdrop for a tale of Arthurian knights protecting humanity from the beasts of lore. The Order: 1886 created a stunningly realized universe through its graphics and world design, and told a good story of both heroics and intrigue. Gameplay issues (or as some would say, a lack of gameplay) hold it back from reaching its fullest potential, but The Order: 1886 did so much right that I can’t help but love it in spite of its flaws.

Writing in 2016: A Short Retrospective History

El Progreso Del Peregrino translates to “the pilgrim’s progress,” and last year the pilgrim certainly made a lot of progress in his trek across the land of writing. Many, many hours were spent at the keyboard writing, editing, deleting, rewriting, and publishing—all for the sake of practicing and refining the craft, as wells as building both confidence in my skills and a portfolio that speaks for itself. If you read the posts from Tuesday and Wednesday you already know the stats from last year, and yesterday I tossed out a list of some of my more notable work from 2016, but today I thought I’d take the time to do a short retrospective on the year in writing—chronicling the major writing events of the year and giving a small bit of context to some of the work I did. Let’s start at the beginning, and move forward one step at a time.

2016 began with a continuation of the work I was doing at the end of 2015, namely the continued publishing of travelogue posts from the 2015 journey across Europe. It wouldn’t be until January 20th that I completed this task, but even then Europe 2015 wasn’t quite done at that point. There were still all the side stories from that trip I wanted to publish and these would take a few more weeks to work my way through.

The transition away from Europe 2015 and on to other things finally came on February 10th. I had initially considered taking a break from writing and not publishing anything for awhile, but I knew that if I stopped writing there was the very real chance that I’d lose all momentum and not return to it, so I committed myself to just keep going. There wasn’t any real plan for what to write about—I just needed to write about something. Life stories and current events are comparatively easy places to mine for content, so I began there with a post about my experience leading up to seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens and went from there. In the weeks that followed I slowly expanded my sphere of writing to include my thoughts on various topics, and I also announced the start of the 2016 Writing Project (a project that that’s still ongoing, by the way).

March saw the publishing of a number of writing pieces that would become foundational for some of the work I would be doing for the rest of the year. On the 8th I published a writing piece on cinematic video game trailers, which was the first post of the year in which I tried to discuss a particular aspect of gaming. Soon afterwards came the first installment of my Borderlands 2 commentary. This was my first time writing about a game as I played it, and would be the predecessor to my Late to the Party series. March 18th saw me dipping my toes into the ugly world of politics with a post on Donald Trump. I didn’t particularly want to write it, but the ascendency of Donald Trump had become too big of an issue for me to ignore, and writing about Trump helped prepare me for the other political writings I would do later in the year. Towards the end of March I also published my sole instructional post of the year, on wood photo transfers, thus fulfilling my teaching quota for 2016.

The coming of Spring heralds an explosion of life in the world, and in my writing career it saw the birth of Late to the Party, which would become a flagship writing series on this blog and continue all the way to the end of the year. It all began with my commentary on Call of Duty: Ghosts, and when Season 1 of Late to the Party came to a conclusion the series had racked up a total of 22 entries. Believe me when I say I didn’t know at the time that it would become as big of deal as it ended up being.

By the start of May I had settled into a regular routine and by then I felt like I had my writing rhythm down. I was publishing Monday through Friday, with four days per week being short posts about whatever was on my mind, and then one longer writing piece per week, which normally fell on Friday. From thereafter writing was both easy and hard. It was easy in the sense that I had a schedule so I knew what I needed to do each week, but it was hard in that I was holding myself to five posts per week, so I was constantly searching for and thinking up new ideas on things to write about. In the Spring and early Summer timespan I think the most notable event was the long overdue completion of a writing piece I had started years earlier on a game called Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. I chose to have it be the 300th post to this blog, and it stands to this day as the greatest instance of resurrecting a formerly dead piece of work in my writing career.

Things were chugging along at a decent clip in the summer of 2016, until the end of June when my housing problems began. All the stress and turmoil surrounding those days nearly derailed the writing progress I was making that year, but I kept myself to my schedule, if only just barely. I did, however, relax the expectations a bit in terms of the volume of words published, and if you look you’ll see there are few posts from that time with more than just a few hundred words. All through the month of July and into August I kept myself writing, even if I wasn’t producing as much as I would have liked.

In my mind August 12th marks the unofficial return to normalcy on this blog, as I published the first entry of Late to the Party since the housing troubles had begun. I was settled into my new home and ready to resume writing as usual. It didn’t take long for me to get back into the groove and for the next three months the stream of writing flowed at a steady pace. During that time I cranked out quite a few editions of Late to the Party, published both the Activation series and the Memorable Places series, and the blog got assaulted by an onslaught of spam bot visitors that continues to this day.

November brought with it two major events that influenced the direction of my writings for the remainder of the year. The first one was my finding employment, which considerably reduced the amount of time I had to dedicate to writing, and the second was the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. With my job making me put in long hours and draining me both physically and mentally, writing got a lot harder and forced me to indefinitely postpone some of the writing projects I had in mind. Thankfully, Season 1 of Late to the Party was nearly done at that point, and I would finish the year with the final entry squeaking across the finish line on December 30th. The election of Donald Trump, though it caused great consternation amongst a lot of my friends, in a strange way was a good thing for my writings in that it led to the production of two of my best political writing pieces of the year—my two Election Aftermath posts. Trump’s election also made me realize that I would be continuing to write about politics in 2017, even if it was something I only did once every few months. I had waded into the pool, and although I wasn’t yet strong enough to swim out to the deep end, I wasn’t getting out of the pool any time soon either.

2016’s writing closed out with me keeping to the schedule and ending the year with over 154k words published. It was a long and at times bumpy ride, but through all the toil and tribulation it also was the year that I proved to myself that I could produce a large body of work over an extended period. Never again can I believe the lie that I’m not able to do this. The year speaks for itself, and years from now I think I’ll look back on 2016 as a major turning point in my writing career.

Featured Posts of 2016

2016 was my most prolific year yet for writing. I wasn’t consistent for the entire year, but I did generate 270 posts—a massive increase over 2015’s total of 67. The downside to producing a large number of writing pieces is that the more notable ones can get lost in the sea of content I’ve created, but for today’s retrospective piece I’ve ventured out into that very sea and brought back a few posts that stood out to me as I was examining what I wrote last year. The selection process for this turned out to be harder than expected, both because of the vast choice of nominees, and because when you write this much you can start having a hard time remembering all the things you published in a given year. In the selection process I also slammed my head on the keyboard several times as I discovered yet more typos in my writings. Before getting to the list I’ll admit there’s a fair amount of overlap with the material you can find in the Suggested Readings gadget on the right side of this blog (below the Blog Archive gadget) and a few of the entries are cop-outs in the sense that they are actually links to a series of posts, rather than individual ones, but please just bear with me on this one and just roll with it. Anyways, without further ado, here are my selections for the Featured Posts of 2016. Clicking the title of each entry will take you to it.

Istanbul: Metropolis
The was the first post of the year, and a very long one too. At the time I was still working on getting all of my travelogue posts from the 2015 Europe journey typed up and published, and the completion of this post meant I was now on the final third of them. Like all the other travelogue posts, it is written in the very dry style of my travel journal, so it may not be all that interesting to read unless you really want to know every detail of what I did in Istanbul.

Side Stories 2015
After finishing the travelogue posts from Europe 2015, I published a series of brief posts on various experiences I had while overseas.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens
This post gets highlighted not because of its actual content, but because it marks an important point where this blog transitioned from journaling the 2015 Europe trip to it’s current form where I write about things on my mind. If you do choose to read it, what you’ll get is the story of the time leading up to when I finally saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

PSX 2015
The tale of my first, and only, gaming convention attendance.

Wood Photo Transfers
I seem to produce one of these instructional writing pieces per year, and this is 2016’s edition. Some of you may have seen the wood photo transfers that I’ve made in the past, and this is process I used to create them.

Donald Trump
I don’t normally write much about politics, but there was simply no avoiding writing something about Donald Trump. Keep in mind this post was published in March, while the primary season was still ongoing and Trump had not yet secured the Republican nomination.

Borderlands 2
Before there was Late to the Party, I did two posts on game called Borderlands 2, which served almost like a prologue to the work I would do later in the year with Late to the Party. The post I’m linking to here is the second of the two, but it includes a link the first one in the top paragraph if you want to read both.

Cinematic Video Game Trailers
What do I know about the art and science of video game trailers? Practically nothing, but that’s not going to stop me from pretending like I know what I’m talking about when I highlight four of my favorite cinematic video game trailers.

Game of Thrones, Season 6, Episode 1
I watched an episode of Game of Thrones. From Season 6. Without watching any of the other episodes before it. There’s no way this can go wrong.

Four Years
A short retrospective history of my first four years of writing online.

Uncharted 4 - The Grand Finale
My thoughts on one of the best games of 2016, which was also the only game that I bought at launch last year.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
This post on a game from the PS3/Xbox 360 generation represents the greatest resurrection in my writing career to date. For years it languished in the Blog Graveyard, but last year I finally got my act together and finished it.

Photo Print
I’ve been taking photos for years and had never gotten one of my photos printed, up until this point.

Activation Series
An intentionally vague introduction to some of the characters of the 2016 Writing Project.

Memorable Places Series
I found myself thinking back to memorable places I had visited in Europe in 2015, and made a series out of it. If my travelogue posts are too long or too boring, this can be thought of as a highly condensed summary of places I visited. It doesn’t cover every town or location, but it does hit the big ones.

We Are Pigeons
The story of where my profile photo comes from.

Election Aftermath, Part 1 & Part 2
A two-part series on the aftermath of the US presidential election. The first part details my experience on the day after the election, and the second parts gives some of my thoughts on the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

Pockets Full of Soup
I took a stab at pretending I was a guest on a podcast that I regularly listen to. Obviously it’s not the same as being on the actual show, but it allowed me to tell the story of someone I’m thankful for.

Any of the editions of Season 1 of Late to the Party
I tried, I really did, to pick just one of these to highlight, but I simply couldn’t. For those that don’t know, Late to the Party is my series of commentaries on video games I’ve played recently.

The 12 Longest Posts of 2016

After gathering the data for yesterday’s post on the total published word count for 2016, I took the time to see which posts of mine from last year were the longest. Quantity does not necessarily equal quality, but longer writing pieces are certainly something to commemorate, assuming actual effort was put into them and they’re not just full of fluff (I like to think my work as fluff-free, but I’ll let the reader decide that). After a bit of research, I compiled a list of the top twelve longest posts from last year, and I’ve detailed my findings below. Not surprisingly, the list is dominated by the tail end of my Europe 2015 travelogue posts and the Late to the Party series. The list is shown here in order from smallest to largest, and includes the date of the posts, the titles, and the word counts. Interestingly enough, the longest post of the year was also the first one of year.

5/20/16 / Late to the Party - Watch Dogs / 2,039 words
3/25/16 / Wood Photo Transfers / 2,041 words
5/27/16 / Uncharted 4 - The Grand Finale / 2,057 words
12/916 / Late to the Party - Tomb Raider / 2,314 words
4/15/16 / Late to the Party - Halo 5 / 2,726 words
1/19/16 / Barcelona: Finale / 2,728 words
10/21/16 / Late to the Party - Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst / 2,729 words
10/7/16 / Late to the Party - Infamous: Second Son / 2,746 words
8/19/16 / Late to the Party - The Division / 2,874 words
9/16/16 / Late to the Party - Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag / 3,027 words
8/12/16 / Late to the Party - Batman: Arkham Knight / 3,187 words
1/3/16 / Istanbul: Metropolis / 3,477 words

2016 Total Word Count

This is it—the reveal of the grand total of words I published in the calendar year 2016. The day after I published my final post of the year I sat down and added up the word counts of each post from last year and now I’m ready to share the number with you. To be clear, I’m only counting the words from the actual bodies of each writing piece and not the words in the titles (if I did that the total would be a little higher). Take a seat and hold on to something, for the total count is…

154,458!

Now it’s become a tradition to include a gif with any word count announcement, and I’m not one to break with a good tradition. Today’s gif is one that will be recognizable to anyone who, like me, grew up watching Godzilla movies. Behold, the Godzilla Dance!

154,458 words, spaced out over 270 posts. Not too shabby if I do say so myself. True, there are lots of people out there who publish exceedingly greater volumes of work than I do, but today is not the day for playing the comparison game. No, today is a day to commemorate what’s been achieved.

Happy New Year 2017!

Yesterday the calendar rolled over and we all bid farewell to 2016 and welcomed in 2017. One year is done and in the books, while another awaits us, full of possibilities. I personally spent much of this past weekend slaving away for my job, but I also got a little bit of thinking and writing in, and I wanted to share with you what I’ve got in mind for much of this month.

The time of year around late December and early January is a great time for both retrospection and anticipation, and I’ve decided to do exactly that for the next three to four weeks. Granted, I missed the late December window due to various life circumstances, and it really would have been better to start writing and publishing these pieces two weeks ago, but on the other hand doing these writing pieces now does keep with the general theme of tardiness that pervades this website. What you can expect are some short to mid-length writing pieces looking back at the work I did in 2016, followed by a small number of writing pieces detailing some of the ideas I have for work to do in 2017. Among other things, I’ll announce the total word count from 2016, highlight some of my favorite writing pieces from last years, spend a whole week on my Game of the Year pick, and do a retrospective series on Season 1 of Late to the Party. Along the way I may intersperse a few posts related to other things (for example, I might do one more political post on Inauguration Day) but they will be few and far between during this period.

Thanks for joining me during my journey through the world of writing in 2016. Hopefully many more adventures await us in 2017.