And so we close the book on one of the darkest years in gaming.

Seriously, 2015 was easily one of the worst years for gaming. Holy shit. There was almost nothing but garbage and trash being released. And I can’t believe I played some of it. I need to take a shower after swimming in all this filth. Worst year ever award goes to 2015. I don’t know if it’s the actual worst year ever but it may as well be. In fact, let’s make this nice and official:

Worst Year Ever Award

Winner: 2015
Daz right. You think I’m fuckin’ around? Naw nigga. I’m making this shit mad official.

Dishonorable Mention: 1929

Biggest Fuckup Award

Winner: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Jesus fucking christ. Even after all this time I’m still mind boggled by how good Ground Zeroes was and how bad Phantom Pain was. I CANNOT. BELIEVE. How badly you have to fuck up to have a demo as good as Ground Zeroes and then come out with the shit that is Phantom Pain. It’s actually crazy. Seriously, that mission in Ground Zeroes. Just wow. That base was so well made, it was so pretty, the rain was so nice, it had so many great little things and details. That level was closer to what MGS should be. It had no open world bullshit. It wasn’t huge, but it was dense with cool shit and ended up better for it.

ALL THEY HAD TO DO in Phantom Pain was have it be more missions like the one in Ground Zeroes. Don’t even bother with an open world. Just have each act of the game be a small, dense, self-contained level just like Ground Zeroes. Don’t even waste time and resources on the pointless fucking bullshit. I think that might be why Ground Zeroes turned out so good. They had a dedicated team of people working exclusively on that one small area. All those resources working on a small thing. But that’s the thing. Phantom Pain didn’t HAVE to be as huge as it was. It shouldn’t have been as huge as it was. If you think about it, previous Metal Gears were very short games. MGS4 only had like, what, 5 gameplay acts? And they were really short. At least two of them were tiny short. The rest were like a couple hours long. That’s very similar to the Ground Zeroes mission. You could’ve made a bunch of gameplay areas like that one, make each one be a separate act, and make the game short like MGS4. It would’ve been better, and it would’ve been the same as previous MGS games. Don’t make games huge just for the sake of it. Focus on quality.

Hell, even the story was a fuckup of unreal proportions, and it’s crazy how big of a deception Ground Zeroes is, story-wise. The story felt REALLY good at that point, you really felt like it was setting up to something great. The way that demo is directed in a cinematic/story sense made me really look forward to the story in PP. You have NO IDEA the absolute fucking bullshit awaiting you in Phantom Pain based on what you see in Ground Zeroes. It’s the ultimate honey trap. The opening cinematic with Skull Face going up to the prison camp in the rain, I feel is really good, and the nikola and bart song that plays throughout I also thought was cool in a direction and cinematic sense. Then then that beginning where Big Boss scales up the cliffside and you prepare to infiltrate the base in the cover of the darkness and the rain is epic as shit. All of that, and the tidbits you get from the casette tapes, with Skull Face torturing Paz and Chico, and the problems they’re having with the EPA and their nuclear capabilities… it all makes you feel like it’s setting the stage for something great, and important. Far from the complete, absolute fucking horse shit that it ended up being.

Biggest Fucking Douchebag Award

Winner: Natsume
Natsume was already a shit tier garbage company with no quality control that was famous for having typos and grammatical errors practically every other sentence in every game it localized. But this past year they absolutely took the cake in terms of sheer douchebaggery by taking control of the Harvest Moon name, a series which they never made, only localized to english (and badly at that). Marvelous, the actual developer, is forced to use a completely new name for the series in the west, Story of Seasons. Meanwhile, the douchebags at Natsume take this opportunity to develop their own shitty fucking imitation using the old Harvest Moon name, in order to sell to people too naive to do the research and who still think that Harvest Moon is the name of the series they’ve played up to now. Notice how they didn’t release their cheap imitation in Japan. Because they know they can’t get away with that shit over there. Nobody would buy it. So fuck you, Natsume. And to the rest of you, you should already know this, but just in case, consider this your final warning: do NOT buy any new games with the Harvest Moon name. The real one is called Story of Seasons.

Biggest Fucking Joke Award

Winner: Nintendo
I feel like this happens every time I do these awards. But every time I look at Nintendo I can’t help but think “The the FUCK…are YOU… DOING.” Seriously, what the fuck is the New 3DS? Does that shit have even ONE GAME other than Xenoblade? What the fuck. And even if you take it as just another model of the 3DS, the amount that they update and churn out new consoles is obscene. I even heard that they’re already going to release their next major console in 2016. What in the actual fuck. Is that even true? Nothing would surprise me from them anymore. We barely got any use out of the Wii U (which I would never have fucking bought if not for Bayonetta 2… their one good decision, I’ll give them that) and now it’s done? Assholes. Well I’m not buying their new god damn fucking bullshit unless it has some kind of earth shattering exclusive, like a new Trauma Center, which is never going to happen, so fuck them. But seriously though. The amount of updates and new models these guys churn out is ridiculous, and even after all these updates and improvements the new 3DS is STILL shitty. Can you believe that? The Vita came out fucking 5 years ago and it’s still a SIGNIFICANTLY better machine. Pathetic.

Good Game But Slightly Missed The Mark Award

Winner: tie between Bloodborne and Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls
This award is for games that I feel were pretty good, but nevertheless couldn’t quite live up to the lofty expectations set by their respective series. Bloodborne is probably my least favorite Souls game because of a few reasons like lack of weapon choices (there’s only 1 greatsword, only 1 axe, only 1 scythe, and only about 12 weapons total), armor (more like clothes, the game doesn’t really have armor) that hardly makes a difference aside from pure aesthetics, stats and level ups feeling less important and good (due to the extremely low strength and dexterity requirements for weapons compared to previous games, the removal of equipment burden, sorceries and miracles, the game is missing that element of looking forward to the next level up in Souls games). They watered down the RPG elements, but the combat is practically the same as the previous games and not improved enough for it to stand on its legs as an action game. But despite all this Bloodborne is still a good game.

Same deal with Ultra Despair Girls. The overall plot was not up to the level of the other two games, there were a lot of missed opportunities for some really epic shit that could’ve been done (mainly in the way of giving more screen time and plot importance to Danganronpa 2 characters), and the switch in gameplay to a third person survival shooter did nothing for the game as it was still extremely basic and even clunky. Despite this, the beautiful art, highly interesting characters, excellent dialogue, humor, charm, and love of the series is still present here and I still liked this game better than most other stuff.

Biggest Disappointment Award

Winner: Shin Megami Tensei Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker
Holy shit. I still get pissed off just THINKING about this fucking trash. This is slightly different from Phantom Pain because with that, I had some inkling that it would suck because of the open world bullshit. With Record Breaker I never fucking saw it coming. First of all I LOVE Devil Survivor 2. Both of them, even. I’ve said this before but I’ve always thought that Devil Survivor 1 had the best plot but Devil Survivor 2 had the best characters, and I always daydream about a Devil Survivor that could have the best of both worlds. But that’s neither here nor there. Second of all, they did the same thing as this for Devil Survivor 1: an updated rerelease with continued story, and that came out GREAT. So I never, ever expected Record Breaker to suck as bad as it did.

Now, the original game, aka part 1, is still just as good as it always was. But holy shit the part 2 they made is SO FUCKING BAD. In the Devil Survivor 1 remake, they tailor made the continued story to which storyline path or ending you chose in the original, and it was amazing. In Record Breaker the lazy fucking douchebags decide to just fucking retcon whatever it is that you did in the original and then just give you a recap in the new one being like “Yeah, none of that actually happened. Here’s what REALLY happened.” Then they give the characters amnesia about what happened before, and make up a bullshit fucking excuse to say that nothing you did in the original story mattered because reasons. Uuuughhhhh. YOU. FUCKING. MORONS. How DARE they ruin my Devil Survivor 2. WORST disappointment 2015.

Game of the Year Award

Winner: Dark Souls II Scholar of the First Sin
That’s fucking right. This year was so booty that the game of the year is an updated rerelease of an older game. In all seriousness though this game is legitimately great. I can say without a doubt that Scholar was the best game I played this year. Free. Straight up. Hands down. No questions asked. This game right here is the best.

And there you have it. Not many awards this year but hey, it’s the same amount as last year so you can’t complain. You know that’s how we do it. We keep the bar reeeeeal low here at Scathing Accuracy. Anyway, as shitty as 2015 was, at the very least we can sleep soundly knowing that 2016 cannot possibly be as bad as this. In fact, 2016 is actually looking kind of tite. I might even talk about some of the things to look forward to later if people are interested. I’ll think about it.