Tag: Tales from the Borderlands

The ten greatest video games I’ve played in 2015

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Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is the final entry in the “Kojima Saga” of Metal Gear Solid, and it is the best swan song I’ve ever heard of. Combining the stealth, action, and espionage we all know and love.
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Telltale has mastered storytelling, but it’s okay to have a silly game as well. Tales from the Borderlands had me coming back every few months for these one-liners, hectic situations and really cool gameplay that made me want to hang out with these people a lot more than I care to admit.
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Rocket League is just so goddamn fun. I’ve only spent about an hour or three with the game, and I recommend it to everyone I see who even has a vague interest in video games in general. You get the hectic nature of soccer and then turn it up to 11 with rocket-propelled cars to “kick” this humongous soccer ball. I love you, Rocket League.
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Destiny: The Taken King fixes a lot of the problems I had with Destiny proper. While this is considered an expansion of the main game, it’s actually so much more than that. If you buy it on disc, you get the base game and all the expansions for about $60. That’s insane. Not only that, the September update (2.0) proved that Bungie was ready to fix its big problem with the game: the story.
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Life is Strange is a game from the folks who brought you Remember Me, where you traversed around and messed with people’s memories, so it’s no surprise to me that Life is Strange’s base mechanics had you tasked with meddling with something else: time. This has become a popular thing as of late, but it really works in Life is Strange. Make a decision that you regret? Go back and fix it. This infinite loop of creating “your perfect playthrough” is part of what makes Life is Strange great in an era where choice-based games such as Tales from the Borderlands tell you to just deal with it. Speaking more to the story, bad stuff happens and our main character finds out she can rewind time. This isn’t all sunshine and roses, though. The game quickly turns into a whodunit, with questions, answers, and revelations that will shake you to your very core. It’s no secret I had problems with this game, but in the end, it all worked out.
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Until Dawn is a different type of choice-based game. Instead of being strictly point-and-click with a few QTEs and cutscenes, I can actually sit here and make an argument that Until Dawn is actually a movie, a horror movie in fact. You have complete control of who lives and who dies, and that fascinates me deeply, as someone interested in the choice genre, if that’s even a thing.
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Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a strange game. From the moment you start the story, you don’t know who you are, what you are doing there or even why anything matters. However, over the length of my playtime, I gradually started slowing down, taking in vistas, listening to radios, and bawling my eyes out. This game gave me a reason to care about these digital people, and I couldn’t have been more pleased.
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Her Story places you as the investigator in a cold case murder. As you progress in the game, you enter keywords into a computer and watch videos relating to that thing you just searched for. My god, everyone. If you play no other games this year, make an effort to play this one. It is so fantastic. Even in Batman, I’ve never felt so accomplished by figuring out the simple question of “Who committed this crime?”. Thank you, Sam Barlow & Viva Seifert.
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Lifeline is a text-based adventure game you can play on your phone. When you play Lifeline, it’s just like texting your friends, only this friend has crash landed on an unknown moon and you have to keep checking in with her every few minutes or hours, depending on the situation. The game is pretty simple at its core, but creates these complex thoughts that, even to this day, I’ve blown aback by. I never thought I’d care about text-based adventure games, but bring ’em on.
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The Witcher III: Wild Hunt is a deep and vast game. While I didn’t even Geralt’s voice acting, I still see myself playing Wild Hunt for many years to come. The combat is just so darn fluid, and fills me with a wanderlust that I haven’t really experienced since Fallout 3.
by Austin Belzer