We also dig deep into the Apple vs. Epic courtroom saga, Humble Bundle walking back their slider removal, new games like Lost Judgement and Nintendo’s Game Builder Garage, E3 still being a thing that exists, Discord coming to Playstation, and of course we reminisce about the good old days of Giant Bomb after Brad, Vinny, and Alex all announced their departures. We close it all our with your questions about Pokémon, misleading adds and more.

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On this final day, we’re covering Best Performance and Best Surprise, as well as handing out the dreaded Most Disappointing and Worst Game medals. Let’s do it.

Best Performance: Melina Juergens as Senua (Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice)

The key element that turns a good performance into a great one is subtlety, and there has rarely been a more subtle, nuanced performance in games than Melina Juergens’ portrayal of Senua. Granted, some of that owes to the incredibly powerful technology Ninja Theory were working with; but it cannot be understated just how good Juergens is in her debut role. From slight, barely noticeable facial ticks, to manic, wild eyes and an agonized, desperate delivery of her lines, Juergens is legitimately wonderful, transitioning from vulnerable fear to furious frenzy with poise and tremendous grace. Senua doesn’t say all that much; yet Juergens manages to brilliantly communicate everything about her as she runs the gamut of emotions, from her most vulnerable, to her most unhinged, and finally to resolution.

Runners-up:

Hidenari Ugaki as Goro Majima (Yakuza 0)

Hidenari Ugaki has been voicing Goro Majima for over a decade now and it shows, the ease in which he inhabits the character is nothing short of masterful. Couple that with motion capture work that’s as vibrant as the voice behind everyone’s favorite cabaret club manager and you have one of the best performances of 2017.

Kyle McCarley as 9S (NieR: Automata)

Kyle McCarley’s performance in NieR begins as innocuous, then becomes manipulative, and then manic, decimated, furious, and emotionally dead. It’s a performance so nuanced and subtle that the meaning changes depending on whose perspective the player is in. 9S is a tortured, terrible being, and McCarley brings him to life with aplomb.

Most Disappointing: Destiny 2

The first Destiny, after some struggling, was able to right the ship and eventually made itself a real powerhouse. So when Destiny 2 was inevitably going to be released, we assumed the overall package would be akin to where Destiny 1 left off. Instead Destiny 2 made its own series of missteps and mistakes seemingly ignoring the lessons it should’ve learned. Your character no longer speaks, the characters that do are annoyingly comical, and everything feels like a hollow experience leading you down a path towards a lackluster end game experience. Nothing about Destiny 2 feels like a true sequel but instead like a half measure. Unwilling or unable to produce something that could propel Destiny into the stratosphere, Bungie and Activision went down the easier path and sold another disappointing loot shooter.

Runners-up:

Yooka-Laylee

Fans desperately wanted a predecessor to the well-loved Banjo-Kazooie games, and boy did we get it. Created by a handful of people who worked on the previous game, it built up hype only to let us down with poor controls, bland characters, and annoying-to-navigate worlds. As it turns out, this type of platformer did not age the away we all had hoped.

Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+

Playing the Binding of Isaac has always been an ordeal of trade-offs, and Afterbirth + was finally the straw that broke the camel’s back. With a rebalancing that makes the game more frustrating and just downright unfun to play, a slew of game breaking bugs, bad console ports, and a half-baked set of mod tools, it’s impossible to look at Afterbirth + as anything but the worst.

Worst Game: Outlast 2

Sure, Outlast 2 might not be a dollar-priced fidget spinner game on Steam, but it is still a representation of everything that constitutes lazy, hacky game design in the modern era. In what wound up being a truly tremendous year for the horror genre, with the likes of Resident Evil 7, Observer, and Detention all bringing the fire in unique and terrifying ways, Outlast 2 commits the biggest sin of them all – it’s boring, uninspired, and completely ineffective as a horror experience. Outlast 2 is an utter failure as far as being scary goes; its stitching so apparent that you can see every “scare” coming well before it happens, making the whole thing feel completely pointless. It doesn’t help that the spooks are so cliché either; everything happens exactly as you’d expect it to, with not a single idea that wasn’t worn thin in the early 2000’s. Sprinkle in enemy AI that’s so stupid that you can literally just walk past them most of the time, and lame, trite attempts to shock and provoke that prompt little more than an eye-roll, and you have a recipe for the worst game of 2017.

Runners-up:

WWE 2K18

WWE 2K18 feels totally lost and directionless. A cool suite of new character creation tools gets absolutely swallowed by a game that’s simply not fun to play. Thankfully, the monopoly this franchise holds on a profitable niche is slowly getting loosened with better games like Fire Pro World coming out.

Moero Chronicle

Look, I’m not a prude, quite the opposite in fact. But when a game is so overbearingly and annoyingly horny, someone has to take a stand. Moero Chronicles has no redeeming value, and its sexual content is trite and laughable. There are far better RPGs out there, and there are far better ways to ogle anime T&A. Love yourself and skip this.

Best Surprise: The Sexy Brutale

Like a storm in the night, The Sexy Brutale appeared from nowhere and blew us all away. Distilling the best elements of its inspirations to create a wholly unique experience, The Sexy Brutale marries a refined version of Majora Mask’s cyclical structure to a bizarre and compelling murder mystery, in which nothing is as it seems. As you attempt to solve the murders of each guest at the casino mansion, you observe, experiment, and retry until the cogs come apart and you can prevent the needless deaths. The engaging gameplay and strong sense of style makes The Sexy Brutale hard to put down, even if it is a short experience. That being said, short and sweet is better than long and bloated, and The Sexy Brutale strikes all the right chords without making a single misstep. That these high-level concepts could mesh so well to become such a singular indie game is impressive, and part of why The Sexy Brutale is the best surprise of 2017.

Runners-up:

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Nobody was entirely sure just what exactly Hellblade was going to be; but the safe and worrying assumption was that we’d be treated to a Heavenly Sword-esque game with a less than subtle or mishandled depiction of mental illness. That we instead got a sincere, well-handled narrative experience was nothing short of amazing.

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle

When most of the gaming world saw a Mario and Rabbids crossover game was on the horizon, many decried that this was a step too far in the crossover department. But when the game was shown at E3, those same people, ourselves included, changed their tune. Mario + Rabbids is a great strategy game with a cute sense of humor and fantastic music, and we’re all very glad we were wrong about the goofy Rabbids game.

The post Game of the Year Awards 2017: Day Four appeared first on Gamesline.

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Last night, Nicalis founder Tyrone Rodriguez tweeted an image from iTunes Connect stating that an iOS port of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth had been rejected on the grounds that it depicted “violence towards, or abuse of, children,” which apparently is a big no-no on the Apple App Store.

C’mon, wtf… Apple pic.twitter.com/aEygkjqH2b

— Tyrone Rodriguez (@tyronerodriguez) February 7, 2016

Although there hadn’t been any confirmed news about Rebirth coming to iOS, Rodriguez has been tweeting images of the game running on iPhones and iPads over the last couple weeks. Previously at Rebirth’s launch, creator Edmund McMillen mentioned an iOS port might be developed if “it’s not garbage,” but nothing else had been said about it since.

It’s a little disappointing that Isaac has been rejected for a port yet again, but it’s not necessarily surprising. After all, what would we as a society do if a violent game like Isaac got ported to iOS? The App Store is a clean and pure environment, totally free of bloody games like Bioshock or games that terrorize children like Telltale’s The Walking Dead– oh, wait. Never mind. Well, in the meantime, I guess I’ll just have to suck it up and play Isaac on my PC, my 3DS, my Wii U, or my PS4…is there no justice in the world?

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It’s hard to say what about Isaac appealed to me so much. Knowing me, the primary draw had to have been the sick concept and gruesome visual design – I distinctly remember being kinda grossed out when I played it for the first time, and that’s exactly what I wanted to happen. I was pleasantly surprised by the game’s ability to effectively convey things like severed body parts and mutilated horrors and whatever other vile elements Isaac spits up through such simple graphics. The soundtrack was a similar kind of pull – simple, yet incredibly effective.

“Simple yet effective” is a creed that applied to Issac’s gameplay too. Move ‘n shoot in four directions, collect items, die, rinse, repeat. It was and still is uncomplicated and severely addicting by virtue of how fast and easy to learn the whole thing is. But just because it’s easy to learn never meant Isaac was easy to master – even after all this time and all these iterations and all my achievements, I still think I’m a pretty poor player overall. The combination of brutal difficulty and fun gameplay leads to the worst case of “just one more run” syndrome ever devised.

“Yeah mom, I’ll be down in a minute; I have to kill mom in this game.”

Getting obsessed with Isaac in 2011 meant I was the perfect passenger on the hype train for the game’s first major expansion, Wrath of the Lamb, which unleashed itself in May of 2012. I remember sitting at my computer waiting for it to unlock at midnight, only to realize it wouldn’t be “released” until the next afternoon. Wrath of the Lamb was a big deal, both figuratively and literally – by more than doubling the amount of content in Isaac, it provided more gameplay to us players who had almost totally milked the base game dry.

With Wrath of the Lamb, the first bit of what I’ll refer to as “item craze” made itself apparent, which is to say that obsession of finding all the items in the game and seeing what kind of cool gameplay combos they made. For example, discovering the right combination of items for poison bomb tears, or how many different kinds of fly-based items you can stick on your character at once. Sure, that was in the original Isaac too, but Wrath brought enough new items to the table to actually make so many combos viable. It wasn’t perfect though; some items ended up being completely broken, and some combos cancelled other items out, but it was the “item craze” that really paved the way for Rebirth.

Let’s be honest…a red circle of death is pretty cool.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth came out almost a year ago today, but the lead-up lasted for around a year in itself. The crux of the hype came from better graphics, a non-Flash engine, a new soundtrack, and, of course, a ton of new items and enemies. It was hard to go for long without seeing some kind of tease from McMillen’s blog about some new item and how cool it looks when you’re using it with this other item. Almost every question he received wasn’t about whether the plot would change, or if there would be new gameplay modes, but rather “what does X do when you use it with Y?” or “will there be an item that lets you do Z?”

I was skeptical about Rebirth at first. Did Isaac really need another version? Thankfully, the answer was yes. Rebirth managed to put my fears to bed by improving on the original Isaac in pretty much every way, even if it didn’t bring a whole lot new to the gameplay table aside from some new challenges and the addition of a timer and better interface. As far as I’m concerned, Rebirth was the high-water mark for Isaac – which brings us to Afterbirth.

Rebirth was so good because it gave us this boss art.

In case you couldn’t guess, I preordered Afterbirth almost as soon as I could. Even though I still hadn’t unlocked everything there was to find in Rebirth, the promise of more content was all I needed. In retrospect, I probably should have been a little more discerning.

I never thought I’d say DLC could make a game worse, but in some places, Afterbirth actually detracts from the near-perfect experience of Rebirth. Unnecessary voice acting from the game’s narrator now accompanies every usable item, with delivery ranging from inoffensive to downright unintentionally hilarious (“TELEPILLZZZZZZ”). The soundtrack is now randomly supplemented with bizarre pseudo-metal butt-rock guitar riffs, and the boss music seems to have been replaced entirely. New “button rooms” require players to time their movements in order to press buttons to open doors, which really just feels like a shallow, challengeless addition to slow down attempted speed-runs. The new “Greed Mode” feels obtuse and unintuitive at first, which compromises the inherent simplicity at Isaac’s core. Bigger isn’t always better.

Good things about Afterbirth are, of course, the new bosses, items, and floor types, and the addition of a daily challenge run, which includes, of all things, a global leaderboard based on an almost incomprehensibly calculated score that has something to do with how fast you play, how many items you get, etc. It’s this daily challenge and score mode, also present in the main game, that really cinches Afterbirth as the final stage in Isaac’s long evolution, for better or worse.

Speaking of worse, “more trollfaces” was the last thing I wanted.

With Afterbirth, whatever story or plot was behind Isaac has officially been pushed to the wayside. Isaac has become totally enveloped in its own gameplay, developing a complete dependency on pushing players towards high scores and showing off whatever endless combination of items the game generates. This emphasis on gameplay was obviously always there, but the additions of Afterbirth bring it to its logical conclusion. It’s no longer the story of Isaac and his mother, it’s the story of Isaac and his high scores, Isaac and his speed runs, and Isaac and his Twitch emote.

And that’s the thing about Afterbirth – with all these new additions to an already near endless vein of content and the imposed sense of self-competitiveness Afterbirth brings to the forefront, Isaac is now more or less the perfect streaming game. It plays fast and has enough of an “oh, look at this!” factor in its near-infinite randomly generated content to keep fans of the game occupied and entertained watching it even when they aren’t playing it. Unless the next iteration of Isaac integrates a login for Twitch streaming, it couldn’t be any more perfect.

Thanks to TwitchCon, Isaac is now implicitly a part of this culture.

But even as a joke, I can’t really see Isaac getting another expansion, or at least one that’s justified. With the additions provided by Afterbirth, there’s nothing that could be added gameplay-wise that wouldn’t feel clunky or gimmicky, aside from possibly online multiplayer. After four years, Isaac has more or less hit a zenith and reached its most superior version; assuming you aren’t a die-hard fan of the original Isaac or think that Rebirth was perfectly fine like me.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s one last expansion to Isaac a year or so from now – it would be too hard to just give up on this indie cash cow. But until then, Afterbirth is what we’ve got, and is assumedly, the definitive and canon version of Isaac. So what this all boils down to, I’m not really sure, but I do know one thing: despite my criticisms, I’m too addicted to give up on the basement any time soon. Where Isaac goes from here is anyone’s guess, but I’ll be there waiting with my bible in hand.

The post The Evolution of Isaac appeared first on Gamesline.

After a blog update by creator Edmund McMillen confirmed the game for an Xbox One release, developer Nicalis tweeted a screenshot of the game in action on the 3DS, along with confirmation that it will also be coming to the Wii U. Although information that Rebirth would be released on these consoles has been circulating for a couple months, no date has been confirmed until now.

The wider release coincides with the upcoming launch of the DLC content Afterbirth, which according to another blog post, is meant to be released sometime this summer.

After a history of difficulty getting Isaac approved by Nintendo, it’s nice that the game is finally seeing a release on their consoles. At this point however, those of us with hundreds of hours logged in the game are probably content with the PC version.

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