Wes’ Nine Best Games of 2018 (Probably) — GOTYE of the Year Edition

Almost absolutely! Maybe

I’ve spent the majority of the last half of the year putting posts together to give games away to you, the Destructoid readers. At the surface level, it seems easy to quantify the amount of time I put into it: I write a post, schedule it, and — ta-da — job done! But really, so much more goes into it: I put out feelers to game and PR companies trying to set these up, come to terms, gather resources for the posts, organize my key lists, make the posts, babysit the posts, draw winners, track winners down, send prizes — you might actually be shocked at how incredibly time-consuming it is to give away free games.

Between my job here at Dtoid, my day job, my band, my festival, and all the other odds and ends ebbing and flowing with life, I have basically no time to actually play any games, myself. I work for a prominent gaming company, yet don’t get to really spend any time playing games. Isn’t it ironic? Don’t ya think?

This is definitely compounded by you lot gushing about the newest games every time I open up Qtoid, sharing your joy and love for the medium while I’m stuck standing in line for another police lineup or some other rot that gets in the way of me sitting on my lazy ass playing PlayStation. It makes me sad.

It also makes me jealous. So jealous, in fact, that I refuse to sit around while the rest of the staff and active bloggers on the site talk about their favorite games — I’m going to talk about their favorite games, too! I haven’t actually played any of these games, which is what makes my list the GOTYE of GOTYE lists. So, back by sheer boredom and no apparent reason, I’m reviving a blog I did exactly once and bringing you Wes’ Nine Best Games of 2018 (Probably) — GOTYE of the Year Edition!

Honorable Mentions

Since I played the following games, I can’t, in good conscience, rank them on my list. They’re definitely worth mentioning for posterity’s sake, though.

Spider-Man

Do you think Nolan North is pissed that there was a snarky, glib character and he wasn’t asked to voice him? This game is fantastic (minus the MJ parts).

9.5/10

God of War

This was originally part of the actual list, but since it takes me three fucking weeks to write 500 words, I found myself with a bit of time after Spidey and started this up. This is essentially Resident Evil 5 in Middle-earth. Why doesn’t anybody realize this?

8/10

Metal Gear Survive

I made it about eight hours into this strange hodgepodge of a game. Part Metal Gear and part survival horror, this game is all crap. It’s a janky piece of shit, and I somehow liked it (before selling it back to GameStop for about $2 more than I bought it for from Amazon).

4/10

Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition

What do you get when you take the simple Musou gameplay of infinitely hitting the same combo to clear waves of enemies and add in the lore-heavy world of Zelda to make everything more melodramatic and complicated? A game I could play for about three hours before getting really confused while also not having a ton of fun.

6/10

Red Faction Guerrilla: Re-Mars-Tered Edition

Easily one of my favorite games from the last generation, but this remaster loses a whole two points for that horrible pun alone.

7/10

Minus the games I reviewed for Dtoid, these are literally all of the games I played released in 2018. Now, onto the main event!

Wes’ Nine Best Games of 2018 (Probably)

9. Celeste

This is definitely one of the most talked-about games that I haven’t played! Celeste takes the difficulty and challenge of the platform-happy 16-bit era and turns the whole concept on its head. By taking old-school challenge and remixin–

Shit, wait, wrong picture. Ok, here.

Ok, like I was saying. The 2D platformer genre had a resurgence in 2018, and Celeste really led the p–

Oh, god damn it. Ok, let’s get this right.

Alright, so Celeste is a game that mixes retro aesthetics wit–

Fuck, this isn’t right either. Uh…is this?

Is anyone else sick of every indie game being a retro-style metroidvania?

7.5/10

8. Octopath Traveler

There aren’t many games based on the Jewish faith, so Square Enix really took a leap by developing a classic sprite-based RPG based on the eight holy nights of Hanukkah. I didn’t play it, but I’m pretty sure that’s the whole deal, here. Each character gets their own night of the celebration: The bard sings “Maoz Tzur” on night one, the monk collects the gelt from the monastery coffers on night four, and the smith crafts the dreidel on night seven — all culminating in each of the Eight Candles of Samekh lighting up to clear the path to the game’s final boss: A ham sandwich.

Good on Square Enix for being so inclusive and respectful of other cultures.

8/10 (naturally)

7. Forza Horizon 4

I’ve never been much of a gearhead, but man I hear the amount of car porn shoved into this game would bring Paul Walker back from the dead for F9st and Fu9iou9. I literally don’t know a single person who owns an Xbox One, let alone anyone who’s played this game, so I can only assume it’s awesome. It really, really takes a special kind of person to appreciate the gleam of the distant horizon reflecting off the hood of a 2018 Chevy Ford. Or something. All’s I know is that for $5.99 real-life money you can finally own the car of your dreams. In digital form. But only if you’re one of the twelve Xbox One owners.

7.5/10

6. Monster Hunter: World

I once spent about four hours just chatting with Occams while watching him play this game over PS4 Shareplay, which absolutely counts as having played the game. Except not really. He ran around and killed sentient beings in order to harvest their organs to make increasingly garish armor in his quest to make a bunch of feral cats bow to his every whim. Such dominion over the animal world is only seen in The Bible and Sea World, so how could I possibly neglect including this game on the list? Cabela’s Mega Animal Murder Simulator 2018.5 has some serious competition on its hands for the title of, “Game that Made Me Feel Most Like Shit for Killing Living, Breathing Creatures of the Year.” The ball’s in your court, Cabela’s.

7.69/10

5. The Messenger

If you play one game that starts out as a classic 16-bit ninja action platformer and then turns into a sci-fi space opera of the 32-bit age where things aren’t as they seem as you platform your way through hoards of alien mobs in order to deliver a sacred scroll to your ancient order of Japanese martial artists in a desperate attempt to salvage your culture and way of life in the light of the changing world around you, then play this one. I didn’t, but you should. Not since Paperboy has a messenger been so deserving of being shot.

Seriously, that little shit on the bicycle deserved everything he got thrown at him.

Five Alive/10

4. Soulcalibur VI

I, a respected gaemz jernalst, have decided to devote my career to giving away games and covering fast food companies’ desperate attempts to appeal to the gaming community. You can imagine my elation, then, when KFC Canada directly tweeted Destructoid a challenge in the form of Soulcalibur VI‘s creation mode. I haven’t played this game, but nothing gets me harder than a rampant abuse of widely-available media to advertise a company that specializes not in single servings of fried poultry, but literal fucking buckets of it.

Lee Greenwood is rolling in his grave with all the god-blessing of the USA I’m currently doing.

11 (herbs and spices)/10

3. Fallout 76

As a petty and vindictive individual, I have to take extra care not to appear petty or vindictive. Which is why I’m the kind of person who’d rather have something bad happen to someone else rather than something good happen to their self. This is 100% why Fallout 76 is so high on my list. I haven’t played it because I respect time as the only commodity which I cannot replace, but you’d better believe I’m riding the wave of Schadenfreude like a surfer in a tsunami. It’s got everything a degenerate piece of shit like me could want. There’s a complete and total lack of project synergy and focus, data breaches wherein users’ data was exposed in support tickets, outright lies as to what was included with purchase — if something could have gone hilariously and catastrophically wrong, it did both in spades with this game.

I’d rather see a trainwreck than a safe, orderly commute. And holy shit, the entire railway collapsed with this one. Well done, Bethesda.

0.76/10

2. Red Dead Redemption 2

Ok, so I’m cheating on this one. The night after Thanksgiving a friend invited some people over. She had just bought Red Dead Redemption 2 and had it spinning when we got there. We watched her play as we chatted for about fifteen minutes, then she passed the controller around so we could all see what it was like. I played for approximately eight minutes before getting bored and turning it off. In that eight minutes, I wandered around aimlessly in this gorgeous, mostly-barren countryside looking for literally anything to do. I proceeded to die twice thanks to bandits totally wrecking my shit, once due to a bear attack, and once due to a weird animation causing me to stumble down a hill for no reason other than Rockstar decided there needed to be more accidental deaths by means of standing too close to the side of a hill.

My roommate’s dog died that night. I’m not saying these incidents are related, but you’ve got to admit that it’s very suspicious.

While I did technically play this one, I kinda wish I hadn’t. At least she gave me some really amazing coffee liquor.

Dismissive Wank Motion/10

Before I reveal this year’s probable top game, let’s pour one out for all the games I couldn’t even bother to make fun of. Shadow of the Tomb Raider finally decided to release on both consoles at the same time, and judging by the buzz I’m not the only person who doesn’t care enough to talk about it. Remember how Far Cry 5 caused this big stir by teasing something slightly interesting in all of its pre-reveal info before surprising no one and just being a mostly-competent open world shooter? Yeah, that was fun. And damn, Sea of Thieves came out this year? That game came and went faster than my dad circa 1986. At least he had the courtesy to send a birthday card that one time.

Wes’ 2018 GOTYE of the Year Edition Winner:

1. NieR: Automata

According to Wikipedia, this game actually came out at the beginning of 2017. But man, the damn thing won’t go away. It received an Xbox One port in June of this year, and will be receiving its very own GOTYE of the Year Edition nearly two years after its initial release. The main character, SexBot20k, even made a guest appearance in another game on this esteemed list, Soulcalibur VI. That’s definite GOTYE material. I think. It’s now seen a release in each of the last two years, and one the next, and I still haven’t bothered to play it. But apart from its fantastic word of mouth, its critical acclaim, and its general incredible reputation amongst gamers, there’s one real reason I’m giving this game this year’s top mention:

God damn, you guys are perverts.

I don’t call this game Gotta Fuck that Robot for no reason — literally every conversation I have about this game devolves into a sweaty, frothy display of lust and desire that would make Hellraiser look like a Disney movie (one of the good ones, not the racist ones). I’ve seen less thirst from someone lost in the Sahara. Charlie Sheen doesn’t get this horny, and he once fucked the speaker at a McDonald’s drive-thru menu because the voice coming out of it sounded vaguely sexy in that cracked, raspy smoker kind of way. If you do a Google image search for “2B” right now, the first 4.13 million results are erotic drawings of the sexy robo-lady in sexy robo-lady poses, situations, and predicaments — and that’s even after Tumblr stopped allowing users to post erotic drawings of sexy robo-ladies.

While the game may be great from a technical or narrative perspective, I’m far more interested in the cultural zeitgeist that it has become. Gamers of all races, orientations, creeds, backgrounds, and proclivities put aside their myriad differences and came together, all in the name of desperately trying to have sex with this machine.

And if that isn’t what gaming is all about, then I no longer want to be a gamer.