As I was archiving my old Tumblr posts and building this site out, I knew the first major posts would be my 2018 Game of the Year stuff. In the past, I’ve been pretty…unstructured…with this. Some years have been a themed list, sometimes a ranked list of 10-20 games, and I think Hearthstone has been on my best/favorite game of the year list every year since it was in beta. This year I decided to be a little more rigid in my final Games of the Year list, but to explain how I got to that final list.
This year started like most years, with my review of Wikipedia’s list of video games released in this year. It’s a step that helps me remember what came out early in the year, but also a step that loses some relevance as games move more and more towards “games as a service” models. The previously mentioned Hearthstone officially released in 2014 and has seen major updates every year since; Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6 Siege released in late 2015 to a collective shrug but has become an eSports staple, favorite of streamers and stream watchers, and a game I finally picked up in late 2018 thanks to its continued post-launch support. Combine this with Early Access titles, open betas that run for months or longer and developers’ ability and willingness to update titles after launch, and release dates mean less and less every passing year. Still, I put my first draft together of everything that released in 2018 that I played or had a passing interest in. Then came the first cuts.
I also decided this year that I’d stick to a Top 10 format for my final “Favorite Games of 2018” list, which meant my original list of 30+ titles would need to be trimmed. I started by trying to identify the games that HAD to make the final cut…and had eliminated roughly a quarter of what I needed to in order to get to my top 10. So I made a fresh start and came up with the first list I’m publishing at the end of this post, the games I eliminated on some kind of technicality. A few are re-releases or remasters of games that still stand the test of time since their original launch, some are still in Early Access or some kind of beta state and thus not officially released, but most simply fit into the category of “Didn’t Play or Didn’t Play Enough.”
I’ve written before about subscribing to a modified version of Wolpaw’s Law that essentially says you don’t need to finish a game to know it’s bad, and at some point, no late game turn, twist, or improvement can redeem what came before. A lot of the games on this list fit a kind of Inverse Wolpaw’s Law: I haven’t played enough to say they’re good games, but I’ve played enough to say they aren’t bad. For some, they’re titles I’ve yet to play but the critical consensus means I at least want to play them for myself - either to see if they’re as good as advertised or to experience first hand challenging or unexpected design decisions or narrative beats.
Here’s where we get to the punchline - in order to keep this whole endeavor shorter (pause for laughing to subside), I’m limiting each of my three Games of the Year lists in some way. The list below is segregated by technicality, and I’m allowing myself one and only one sentence of description for each category and one sentence per game if warranted. The next list, my honorable mentions, were the final few cuts from my ultimate Favorite Games of 2018 list, and they’ll each get no more than three sentences per game. The final list’s limit is in its containment to 10 items, and I’m writing as little or as much about each as I damn well please.
So, that’s how we got here. And below, the games that I disqualified from my Favorite Games of 2018:
The Remasters
Captain Toad Treasure Tracker (Nintendo Switch)
Burnout Paradise Remastered (Multiplatform)
Not Actually Released
Magic: The Gathering Arena (PC) - This may be the game that succesfully translates paper Magic into a digital format and gets me to play regularly, thanks in part to the syncronization of paper and digital card release schedules.
Didn’t Play/Didn’t Play Enough
Artifact (PC) - The digital CCG based on DOTA 2 has enough going for it that I want to play more in 2019 but a late 2018 release and unsettled economy around it means I couldn’t make the case for it seeing the bigger lists.
Mario Tennis Aces (Nintendo Switch)
Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire (PC)
Vampyre (Multi)
Moss (PSVR)
Astro Bot Rescue Mission (PSVR) - Astro Bot and Moss are among the best PSVR has to offer, and it’s to my detriment I haven’t made enough time for either of them.
Sea of Thieves (XBox One) - I enjoy a lot about this pirate simulator, but I don’t have the group of friends playing to make hanging out in this world and crewing a large ship possible, much less enjoyable.
Ashen (Multi)
Hades (PC)
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden (Multi) - Ashen, Hades, and Mutant Year Zero just released too late in the year to give them serious consideration; I expect I’ll love Mutant Year Zero and Hades while Ashen is a complete toss-up but I’m willing to give it a try.
Dragon Quest XI (Multi) - I’ve played about a dizen hours of this JRPG, but it’s a JRPG-ass JRPG which means I’ve barely scratched the surface and need to find another 90 hours or so to make a dent in the game.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (Multi) - I loved last year’s AC: Origins and this has been called “More-igins,” but the story and place didn’t grab me as other games released, so it’s on the backburner.
God of War (PS4) - A late entry that I had zero interest in playing until a sale on Amazon knocked the price down to roughly half off. It’s already won The Game Awards’ GAme of the Year and I expect it to garner more, similar accolades, so I think I owe it to myself to try it out.
And there you have it, with me only breaking my own rule once. Next up: the final cuts from my list of ten, aka The Honorable Mentions