It's time once again to pay tribute to the greatest games of 2015. Before we get to that however, let's take a moment to point and laugh at some of the biggest turds that graced our various gaming machines this past year. Here are the three that I think frustrated me the most in 2015.

Journey of a Special Average Balloon

When buying a game for a mere ten cents in the Nintendo eShop, one must be prepared to lower one's expectations. Unfortunately, even with that in mind I did not lower mine nearly enough for Journey of a Special Average Balloon. It's not so much that the game is terrible rather that it's just bland and boring as hell. It feels like a game that was made by a student from a video game trade school. Everything is technically proficient, but it is completely and utterly lacking anything that might be considered fun. It's the video game equivelent of staring at a beige wall. You just kind of guide a balloon around a level and try not to be popped. That's about it.

While the game itself is completely bland and uninteresting, there is one interesting fact about it. Journey of a Special Average Balloon was a Kickstarter project that successfully hit it's goal of a whopping $367. There's no missing zeros. $367. There's no question extra money was not spent on it either. However, in a day where developers are getting tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars out of gamers via crowdfunding and often failing to deliver anything at all, TreeFall Studios asked for next to nothing, got it, and delivered. So hats off to TreeFall Studios for that.

Prune

About 7 years ago, an overweight gentleman with a beard and a fedora proudly wrote on his blog that any indie video game that has gradient backgrounds with the action taking place on black/silhoutted plane, you automatically have a good game. And if you add some laid back ambient music, then it's an instant classic and a must-buy. Indie developers shouted "hurrah," knowing that they'd never need to concern themselves with troubling things like art-styles again, so long as they followed this rule. And lo, each year we get a couple dozen games that fit this mold. And sometimes they even win Time Magazine's Game of the Year... like Prune did this year.

Prune follows all of that to a tee, and adds a fairly unique concept of encouraging players to grow a tree towards an area of sunlight so that it can sprout flowers. Players swipe across branches that grow in the wrong direction so that other branches can continue to grow in the right direction. Sounds simple. And it is. So much so that it almost makes you wonder why you're playing it. It's so easy it lacks any fun or challenge... for a while. Towards the end of the game, it starts to introduce some new gameplay ideas and goals. Problem is it never explains what you need to do. You just have to try to keep growing the damn tree until you manage to guess what the goal is. Basically the game goes from boring you to tears to being insanely frustrating. Either way playing the game will result in making you cry.

Dragon Fantasy: The Volumes of Westeria

And here we have yet another parody/tribute game for 8 and 16 bit RPGS. See they took the two most popular jRPGs of the era - Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy - and combined the names. Dragon Fantasy!!! Holy shit that's wacky!  The game is really a prime example of relying too much on the joke rather than trying anything new. It's an endless toil of puns, bad jokes, and archiac gameplay.  

At first, it didn't seem that bad. "Oh look he's giving me a sword and telling me it's dangerous to go alone. Ha ha!" "Oh look it's a vampire and they're calling it a Sangria Enthusiast. How droll." However, after 8 hours this stuff gets really old and without anything innovating from the gameplay it's just awful after a while. It's like marathoning the Police Academy movies. Kind of funny for an hour or so. After that, you just want someome to put you out of your misery. I walked away from this game, and consider it one of the smartest things I did in 2015.

Fantastic write up!

edgecrusher said:

Why do you waste your time with such blatantly obvious semen leavens?

All Police Academy movies should be replaced by endless loops of the Blue Oyster dance scene.