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After more than ten years devoted to video games and the people who make them, Joystiq is closing its doors. We won't be reporting on the best games of 2015, so join us for one last hurrah as the Joystiq family reveals their Games of a Lifetime.
It was too good to be real, and it still is. But the job isn't what I'm going to miss the most. Honestly, I could do without another 2:00AM review embargo for the rest of my life. What I will miss are the people I work with every day. I've met some amazing human beings over the last eight and a half years, but it is the Joystiq crew as it was in 2014 that has earned my undying love. I've always striven to do the best work I can, but work isn't what defines me. These wonderful people define me, and that's what tears me apart. A job I can lose, but how do you say goodbye to a piece of yourself?
With that in mind, maybe you'll understand why I've chosen the games I have. I've certainly spent plenty of alone time with some incredible games, but the ones that stand out in my memory are the ones that I've shared with others. I wish I could say that Joystiq isn't really closing down, that we've all just stepped into some ethereal version of Ludwig's San Francisco apartment for a TowerFall break. Like the schmaltzy ending to your favorite sitcom, we revel in victory and agonize in defeat. We clink glasses, punch thighs, pump fists. Before long, the credits roll and the sounds of our revelry grow quieter until everything finally fades to black. The show is over, there will never be another episode, but in your mind's eye we've never stopped. We'll carry on playing TowerFall forever (or Mario Kart, or Smash Bros, or...).
I'd like to imagine that's what really happened, and so I will.
After more than ten years devoted to video games and the people who make them, Joystiq is closing its doors. We won't be reporting on the best games of 2015, so join us for one last hurrah as the Joystiq family reveals their Games of a Lifetime.
In my recent Joystiq Presents episode I talked about the profound impact the strategy guide of Chrono Trigger had on my love of games. Being able to finally play the game, just thinking of the first time I had that chance, still gets me a little choked up.
It still stands as my favorite game of all time. I've played it a countless amount of times on so many platforms. It has wonderful characters, a story about fighting fate and shaping the world. I don't know if was supposed to be so "heady," but I think of it that way. It was meaningful, it showed the consequences of action, it had a talking Frog and a badass Robot.
To me, Chrono Trigger is perfect.
After more than ten years devoted to video games and the people who make them, Joystiq is closing its doors. We won't be reporting on the best games of 2015, so join us for one last hurrah as the Joystiq family reveals their Games of a Lifetime.
I love games.
I want to see games continue to evolve, change and grow. I want my enthusiasm for them to never die, for my joy and sense of camaraderie in my fellow gamers to always persist. And so, at a time when it would be very easy to be jaded, we've decided to instead continue talking about why we love games. These are my picks for games of a lifetime.
After more than ten years devoted to video games and the people who make them, Joystiq is closing its doors. We won't be reporting on the best games of 2015, so join us for one last hurrah as the Joystiq family reveals their Games of a Lifetime.
I'm not a marathon video game player – for me, binging on or tirelessly replaying masterpieces downplays the great moments within, tainting them with an undeserved state of blandness. And yet, there is something about Super Mario World's construct that is immune to my fickle play style. Though I've been hurling Luigi down pits since I was old enough to earn player 2 privileges, Super Mario World is a ceaseless joy to return to, even if an encore ensues moments after besting Bowser with a few well-aimed Mechakoopas.
I'm inclined to most romps through the Mushroom Kingdom, but Super Mario World's memorable level design, subtle secrecy and introduction of the greatest power-up of all time elevate it above every other Mario Bros outing. Above all else, it's the king of fun within my gaming career – there is not a moment coded into that rackety cartridge that isn't bliss to play, even when a pack of Rip Van Fish inspire a spike of stress with their chase. Super Mario World was, is and probably always will be my hometown in the world of video games, and I look forward to reveling in nostalgia as I shove a pack of kids into their lava-filled demise during future homecomings.
By itself, this one new element isn't enough to elevate Dying Light above the hordes of similarly themed games, but if the developer could seamlessly attach parkour to some of the better ideas found in Dead Island while polishing that game's poor design decisions, Dying Light has a lot of potential.
Dying Light never fully lives up to this potential, but in the attempt, Techland offers an impressive twist on both first-person action games and life among the walking dead.
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After more than ten years devoted to video games and the people who make them, Joystiq is closing its doors. We won't be reporting on the best games of 2015, so join us for one last hurrah as the Joystiq family reveals their Games of a Lifetime.
Grandma can beat you at Tetris.
This was a foundation of my childhood and an irrefutable truth as I was growing up. Grandma would sit in her office, in front of a bulky 90s-era television, NES plugged in, and she would dominate level after level of rapidly falling tetrominos. My cousins and I would try to do the same and always end up supremely behind her high scores, but always ready to try just one more round. To this day, I'm still ready.
Here's to you, Grandma, my own Original Gamer, and here's to Tetris, my Original Game.
After more than ten years devoted to video games and the people who make them, Joystiq is closing its doors. We won't be reporting on the best games of 2015, so join us for one last hurrah as the Joystiq family reveals their Games of a Lifetime.
Can you imagine the "Teens React to BBC Micro" video? With its properly floppy disks and its DOS-like start screen, that big beige box of the '80s was how my gaming life began. I could pick so many games I played on that machine, most of which no-one's heard of, but they'd all be inferior to Repton. The pseudo top-down, pseudo side-scrolling puzzler had its own space-time rules, According to Repton, a reptile in a yellow t-shirt can walk through the same square of dust that can support a whopping great boulder, or dozens of whopping great boulders at that. It didn't really make sense, but the cleverness of its puzzling design was undoubted. The very best levels required a chess-like effort of planning ahead, shifting specific boulders, clearing dust and freeing spirit sprites in the right order so you could grab every last one of the golden diamond jewels. I absolutely loved Repton and its inventive sequels; Repton 2 was an interconnected world of sub-levels, while other games even explored the future and Wild West. Without the BBC Micro and Repton in particular, I just wouldn't be where I am today.
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Listen to other Joystiq Presents episodes.
Stiq Figures, January 19 - 25: All-time favorite game edition
by Thomas Schulenberg
@T_Schulenberg
(20 hours ago)
I'd love to hear your reasoning, but don't worry about justifying your selection to any of us – this is all about the game you love or enjoy the most, even if it's an unconventional choice. For one last time, lure me (and hopefully others) to games I normally wouldn't try by using Stiq Figures as a platform to broadcast passion for your favorite games.
Thank you for stopping by to share your thoughts with us for all these months, and before you do it again, be sure to check this week's Japanese hardware sales after the break!
This is our final week to say goodbye. We have nothing but thanks and praise for our readers, even the trolls. We have a lot of memories we've shared over the years. And we know that you guys have lots of memories of the site that you've been reading for the past several years.
But as Freddy Mercury said, the show must go on. So jump on past the break one last time to hear all about the other top MMO stories of the week.
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Has there ever been a time when the word "remastered" was so prolific in the conversation, outside of the George Lucas household? Gaming was so incessantly nostalgic in 2014, you'd think it was closing after ten years.
In just the last year we've seen polished-up re-releases for Saints Row 4, Resident Evil, The Last of Us, Grand Theft Auto 5, Halo 1-4, Fable, Diablo 3, Kingdom Hearts 2, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light, Indigo Prophecy, Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2, and many, many more. And don't forget, glossy PS4 and Xbox One encores for Dark Souls 2, Borderlands 2 and The Pre-Sequel are on their way in the next few months.
Whether you like it or not - and I'm aware plenty do and plenty don't - gaming is still knee-deep in Remaster country. With the saying "When in Rome HD" in mind, I asked some of the Joystiq staff to tell me what games they'd most like to see remastered, however unlikely those remasters may be. Sure enough, most of them delved into the realm of pure fantasy.
In just the last year we've seen polished-up re-releases for Saints Row 4, Resident Evil, The Last of Us, Grand Theft Auto 5, Halo 1-4, Fable, Diablo 3, Kingdom Hearts 2, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light, Indigo Prophecy, Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2, and many, many more. And don't forget, glossy PS4 and Xbox One encores for Dark Souls 2, Borderlands 2 and The Pre-Sequel are on their way in the next few months.
Whether you like it or not - and I'm aware plenty do and plenty don't - gaming is still knee-deep in Remaster country. With the saying "When in Rome HD" in mind, I asked some of the Joystiq staff to tell me what games they'd most like to see remastered, however unlikely those remasters may be. Sure enough, most of them delved into the realm of pure fantasy.
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Super Joystiq Podcast 128: Reviews, New Nintendo 3DS, Majora's Mask 3D
Latest episode: Friday, January 16th, 2015
