Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
1. EYE: Divine Cybermancy - PC
2. Legend of Grimrock - PC
3. Legend of Grimrock 2 - PC
4. Shovel Knight - Wii U
5. Yakuza: Like a Dragon - PS4
6. Yoshi's Island - SNES
7. Vectorman 2 - Genesis
8. Super Mario Sunshine - GC
9. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest - GC
10. Bomberman '93 - TG-16
11. Cannon Fodder - PC
12. Panzer Dragoon II Zwei - Saturn
13. Dragonborne - Game Boy
14. Rock n' Roll Racing - PC
15. The Lost Vikings - PC
16. Blackthorne - PC
17. Contra III: The Alien Wars - SNES
18. Bravely Default II - Switch
19. Axelay - SNES
20. Ryse: Son of Rome - XBOne
21. Killer Instinct (2013) - XBOne
22. Heretic Kingdoms: The Inquisition - PC
23. Thief: The Dark Project - PC
24. Killer Instinct - XBOne
25. Killer instinct 2 - XBOne
26. Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth - PC
27. Thief 2: The Metal Age - PC
28. Wing Commander II - PC
29. Wing Commander III - PC
30. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV - Switch
31. Shadow Man Remastered - PC
32. Wing Commander: Privateer - PC
33. Salt and Sanctuary - Switch
34. The Elder Scrolls: Arena - PC
35. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall - PC
Remember when I said Arena was mostly an exercise in seeing where things began? Well Daggerfall lets you see the link between Arena and Morrowind in terms of gameplay but is one of the biggest piles of jank I have ever seen. Never have I seen a game that reaches so far and falls so short. The best thing I can say is development of Daggerfall gave Bethesda the experience to pull back and pull off Morrowind.
Daggerfall is set in the Iliac Bay region; the southern part of High Rock and the northern part of Hammerfell. You are an agent of the Emperor sent to investigate why the former king of the kingdom of Daggerfall is haunting the area. Through your investigate you discover that there are several different factions in Iliac Bay that are vying for power. The three prominent kingdoms of Daggerfall, Wayrest, and Sentinal, as well as the orcs of Orsinium trying to form their own country, the necromancer lord the King of Worms, and a mysterious Underking. Once you've done all the main quests that introduce these factions the game suddenly decides 'oh, by the way, there's a magical artifact that will animate a weapon that will allow one faction to gain power and you get to decide who gets it". Future games end up going with "all the endings happened because the weapon was so powerful it broke time" and allows them to clean up the fact that the game was far too big.
While Arena was mostly D&D influenced from a character mechanics standpoint, Daggerfall introduces the "learn by doing" skill system. Your class will have three primary skills, three major skills, and five minor skills. You level up every time you have gained 15 points of skill ups, but it only considers your three primary, the top two major skills, and the top minor skill. Upon leveling you will gain between 3-6 attribute points to allocate to your skills. So you don't have to do the "build your character to maximize attribute gains" thing; that's just save scumming on level up. One thing available in Daggerfall is that classes, in additions to stats and skills, can take advantages and disadvantages. Each of these have an associated point cost, but you don't need to make it even out. If you lean in one direction or the other it increases or decreases the rate of skill gain for your class. So with careful planning you can be immune to all magical effects and damage, heal in real time, and still increase skills as fast as possible, for very minor penalties due to developer oversights. One minor thing to point out is skills only rank up when you rest, so if you don't do so (and fast travel counts as resting) you will feel like you're not progressing.
The skill list has the standard various weapon types, magic types, running, jumping, swimming, mercantile, sneak, lockpick, but it also has a swathe of language skills. These give you a chance upon encountering an enemy of the type for the enemy to be non-hostile. This ends up being very underwhelming and hard to level up outside of training. I recommend you skip these, and it's obvious why they were dropped going forward.
The game has the same sort of combat as Arena; you hold right click and swing in various ways to execute various moves, each of which impacts your chance to hit and damage (increasing one decreases the other). New to the game is that the engine supports room over room. They went hog-wild with this, with tons of ramps for the dungeons to go up and down and be built like pretzels. This usually leads to you not being aware that there's an enemy there until you can't move through it and have taken some damage. And there's elevators, which are buggy as shit and you'll fall through, and the levitate spell, which is buggy as shit and half the time won't let you ascend/descend unless you also move forward or backwards. And there's water, which is buggy as shit as you basically can easily get stuck in it until you find the magical incantation that gets the game to recognize you're trying to get out.
I want to draw special attention to the pretzel rooms. The dungeons are built out of blocks that are placed on a horizontal plane, with each block having two fixed connections in each cardinal direction. Each of these blocks is horribly convoluted, leading to dungeons that are an utter pain to map out. There's a lot of verticality just for the sake of verticality. After your first couple dungeons you quickly learn that you want to avoid doing dungeons outside of what is required by the plot.
Speaking of the plot, there's a lot of frustration there. While the first couple of breadcrumbs are handed to you, it's not obvious that you need to be leveled up a bit to even pick them up. And some of the plot requires you to talk to NPCs unprompted long after you've gotten used to them sending you letters first. And one series requires you to keep dungeon diving to an NPC with no shortcut. You will grow to hate it.
Unlike Arena, here the entire game can actually be walked across from town to town. The entire area is almost twice the size of Great Britain, and 99% of it is unnecessary. There are very few non-random quests outside the main plot. There are a variety of factions to join with benefits, but the quests for them are all entirely random to just get you some reputation with them to rank up. Most of the faction benefits that aren't spell related aren't really worth the time; at least the spell stuff lets you break the game by exploiting scaling.
The game is just a series of "we wanted to do bigger and more" without them really having the ability to execute and without considering whether it was worthwhile. There's a reason that future games shifted to procedural generation to quickly get a broad strokes and then hand placing all the actual content that players would interact with. Content that isn't rewarding is content that isn't worth having.
Frankly, I ended up having less fun with Daggerfall than I did with Arena; while Arena was pretty primitive it at least all worked fairly well, whereas Daggerfall feels like they did the bare minimum of "it compiled" testing, leaving to a janky mess with a moment to moment gameplay being less interesting. The best part is how much more focus we see on them trying to make the world more living and breathing which would pay off much more in future games.