Ben Grady's 'Games of 2014'

Welcome one and all to 'Ben Grady's Games of 2014', sponsored by YOU, the loyal fans. It's been a fun-filled, exciting year in gaming, so let's get down to it!

Alien: Isolation

I've only got as far as the medical bay section in which you first encounter the Alien, as I'm playing on Hard difficulty and thus gave up as is my perogative after around 5 attempts. I might revisit this game one day, at which point I'll update this article with a score, since this is technically a review-in-progress. It's really good so far!

The Sabouteur

Ok, so I'll admit Alien was the only new game I could afford to play in 2014, discounting Ground Zeroes since it wasn't really much of a game and I hated it anyway. The Saboteur is a game from 2009, developed by the long dead Pandemic games of Destroy all humans! and Mercenaries fame. It's basically Mercenaries but set in 1940s Paris, which makes it instantly more cool. It's more Noir than LA Noire ever was, and the fact that liberating areas of the map turns them from monotone to full colour means this game should be celebrated as a work of art. RIP Pandemic.

RAGE

What a load of trash. Just look at the protagonist...LOOK. 

Silent Hill 2

Best PS2 game I've ever played? If only I hadn't played The Simpsons: Hit & Run, things might have turned out differently. As it stands Silent Hill 2 is the second best PS2 game I've ever played, and much like Alien: Isolation, I'm only part-way through! 

Batman: Arkham Oranges 

So this game's pretty cool, after all, I do love the Arkham games. Everything is fairly decent about this game, and I don't feel it's worth some of the harsh criticism some gave it; the one factor I do hate about this game, however, is that there is clearly some sort of controller delay when fighting compared to the silky smooth Arkham Asylum/City. It ruins a lot of the fights and makes it near impossible to not die at least once on some of the later fights. So, maybe it did deserve that criticism after all. 

Vib-Ribbon

This game is so legit, as they say. I was surprised to find myself fairly hooked for the better part of a week on this game, attempting to improve myself rather than give up and blame the PS3's controller delay in PS1 mode. It's fascinating to see that people once paid $60 for a well-polished, perfectly sculpted experience with relatively very little content, whereas today it would likely stuggle to make an impact on mobiles for ¢99. 

Bioshock 2: Minerva's Den 

After an unfortunate crash last year, in which a whole FIVE MINUTES of my progress was lost, I neglected to return to Minerva's den until late this year. It's a great piece of DLC and reminded me of how excited I was to see the next iteration of the series, but I've also ran into a weird bug on PS3 that means it's impossible to buy the 'Insect swarm 3' as it causes a full-on crash resulting in a hard reset, and no Bioshock game is worth playing without the third tier of insect swarm, so that's that.

Final Fantasy VII

I bought this in the 20th anniversary sale on PSN because everyone goes on about how great it is. Yeah, it's pretty great for a JRPG (a genre I generally dislike beside Ni No Kuni, mainly due to the repetition involved), but I have no idea why people have been clamouring for a remake all this time, at the end of the day it's a game that's had its day and people love it for what it is. Square Enix would surely ruin it anyway, much like Konami did with the Silent Hill HD collection. 

So there you have it, another pointless blog announcing the games I played throughout this past year, hope it was worth your time. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to try and bag myself a 20th Anniversary PS4 to sell on and pay for my University fees. I'll probably keep it. Almost definitely.

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