I deliberately avoided this earlier this week, in spite of actually desperately wanting to get into work to get some stuff done, and my coworkers were quite grateful to hear that I stayed home, haha.

That's intriguing, and is a reading entirely different from my own. Strangely, I too was put off by the flirtatious banter, but nipped it in the bud through a handful of dialogue selections (I think). Maybe I'm mis-remembering, but that was how I recalled the game going down.

America done got Trumped.

That's a solid list of classics! I've been very slowly playing Tropical Freeze over the past year, and it is one of the best platformers I've ever encountered. In some ways, it feels like an evolution of the formula established by Super Mario World, in which the platforming environment, while linear unlike…

This never got old for me in Dark Souls 2. Made me laugh every time.

I've never had a game that I enjoyed exploiting quite as much as Dark Souls. The only other one that springs to mind is Adventure of Link, where you better believe I crouched in the corner for the final battle.

I've never been more jealous of Rip Van Winkle.

It's one of the reasons that I've come to love indie and Nintendo titles - rarely are these more than ten hours, and even the story-rich ones tend to top out (on the high end) at thirty.

It's somehow as fun to play as these videos make it look. I waited all year, but I'll be darned if it doesn't live up to the hype!

Geez, even as a guy with no background in visual design, I find that image staggeringly misguided.

I think that was a component of the big update they released this month, but I could be wrong.

I'm always excited to discuss the central mystery in Firewatch, and my opinion on it has evolved slightly over time. As someone who appreciated the mundane solution so much more than a more exciting resolution, I actually now find the mystery central to the arc of the game. It serves three purposes, I believe:

Uh oh, this sounds like my experience (except Bloodborne, as I lack a PS4). I was thinking about getting Dark Souls 3 after Christmas, but you saying what I was cautiously thinking only reduces my interest further.

Heck yeah. I saw it on the list of 2016 disappointments elsewhere at AVClub and I thought "wait, this was one of the few non-disappointments all year!"

It was a really fascinating little social experiment, and for that it should be praised. No, it didn't have complex game mechanics, but that's not ultimately where its success was. As you said, it brought a lot of people together, even people from very disparate backgrounds (class, age, race, gender), and made people…

I would disagree strongly (yet respectfully) with this argument. While the core narrative of Firewatch could be told in another medium - man leaves his life behind to attempt escapism and growth in the Wyoming wilderness - the details are where the game's medium becomes critical to its success. The introduction, and…

Reigns is so good! I came this close to avoiding my downfall once, if memory serves, but then the wheels came off as they are inclined to do.

Me too!

Pokemon Sun might edge its way up into my Top Three, but the competition from The Witness, Color Splash, and Firewatch is pretty steep. That said, the new Pokemon releases are impressive for their willingness to really try unique, new things after two decades of comparative stasis. Also, the plot is reasonably…

We've seen this a few times over the past two years or so, and 2017 is likely to continue the fascinating trend. I'm thinking, in particular, of Azure Striker Gunvolt continuing a Mega Man X style of game, Mighty Number 9 continuing Mega Man classic, and Yooka-Laylee picking up the slack for Banjo-Kazooie. Obviously,…