Which game scored top Marx?
You thought Steven Hansen’s Destructoid’s 2014 GOTY awards were done at three, come sambuca con la mosca? That we want health, happiness, and prosperity, rather than four (death)? We’re up all night to get unlucky my friends. And to drink a bottle of Chartreuse so that our New Year’s Eve vomit looks like Ecto Cooler Hi-C and the Streets of San Francisco run green with ghost spume.
I believe it was communist philosophers Groucho Marx and John Lennon who said, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” and that’s, like, so true! A distanced citizenry treated as targets (consumers) versus an engaged citizenry treated as co-conspirators and friendos can lead to anti-consumer practices. That’s why the open nature of crowd funding and early access development has been big this year, as invested fans have helped bear titles that did not need mass market appeal. Sometimes you can use a little help from your friendos, because we’re all in this together, man.
Invisible Inc. is das kapital example of Early Access success and the winner of the Steven Hansen’s Destructoid’s 2014 GOTY award for Best evidence that we should go full communism. It is, by a wide margin, the game I have played most this year, and it’s not even “finished.” And, hey, maybe it sits on the wrong side of its tekno-Cold War-era aesthetic (the English-speaking side), but that angular 2D art and XCOM-like turn-based stealth are fresher than you might think given I just used a 20-year-old game as a reference point. Seriously, though. Turn-based stealth. It’s amazing.
Honorable mentions
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (?): I can never remember what this game is called. I had “Armored Warfare” at first, but I don’t think that’s right. And yet, these games make those capitalist bucks, playing on jingoistic paranoia and military fetishization that dress enchanting feedback loops, rewiring your brain to think ReagThatch were good and some Mountain Dew would look good in your newborn’s bottle. Maybe if Spacey had a MMF threesome we could overlook that — perhaps in favor of the plastic-producing Skylanders or Disney Infinity — but here we are, hoorah.
Wolfenstein: New Order: Whoa, this flippin’ “Nazi party” over here, they’re some bad dudes! Definitely not any party I would want to be a part of, imo. Probably wouldn’t be any Ecto Cooler there. If there’s any argument for communism, well, look at the alternative. If these Nazis won the second Great War instead of the Communists, we’d be stuck in some militarized police state with government sanctioned killer robots, like in Wolfenstein.
The Last of Us: Remastered: Nine $1 pieces of “special executions” DLC. Execution animations should be a government promised and regulated utility like electricity, the Internet, and a healthy supply of Dario Argento movies.
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Steven Hansen’s Destructoid’s GOTY 2014: Best willful misspelling in a title
Steven Hansen’s Destructoid’s GOTY 2014: Best musical
Steven Hansen’s Destructoid’s GOTY 2014: Best interpretive representation of Jeff Goldblum
