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My Top 5 furry games of 2015

Edited by GreenReaper as of 14:18
Your rating: None Average: 5 (3 votes)

It's time for the Ursa Majors again, and while I like to encourage each to put in their own nominations for the popular furry award, I have decided to share the ones I feel should be looked into as the best entries for the year in the game category and go over briefly why they should be there. Because, without a Pokémon game here, it's going to be a very interesting year.

Everyone else is putting up lists, and if anything it may help furries connect with games they may have not had a chance to play. For other games you can see the recommended list here. I guess I felt like a rebel this year, because four of the five games on my list are not on that one.

So without further ado, here are the five games I am nominating for the Ursa Majors this year, in no particular order. In order to qualify, I feel it should incorporate at least one main character that is anthropomorphic, or cover in some way a world that contains intellectual animals in some degree. You may laugh that I have to define that, but lets not forget what won in 2012 over Dust: An Elysian Tail.

Read Only Memories

Read Only Memories

My black horse candidate, as it were, this interactive narrative cyberpunk game takes place in the city of Neo San Francisco. It sets up the conflicts of the city into three major factions. The technological elite who create products to enhance life of humanity mostly with robotic Relationship and Organization Managers, the animal human hybrids, and those of a social movement called the "Human Revolution" who are protesting the advances in genetic modification and technologies.

While this game takes place in a future San Francisco it obviously takes cues from present day struggles and gives them different forms. The hybrids have been seen as stand ins for the GLBT community. The technology faction as the Silicon Valley elite, with ROMs being stand ins for smart phones. You can easily start to see that the inspirations for the conflicts are based on the premise of present ones from there.

The game has had some criticism from the public who dislike social progressive positive games and been given a label of "SJW". However, I think this more because "Feminist Frequency" decided to make a curator page and recommend it on Steam than anything the game did. Which is really too bad, because I don’t think the game pushes progressive ideals with as much blunt force as has been stated. I mean, it takes place in future San Francisco, which is already one of the most socially progressive cities in the United States. You should kind of know what you're getting into.

There is also a note of gender fluidity in the characters in the game, though the game isn't too in your face about these facts. The characters are more defined by their personality and hobbies than lingering on what the basis of their gender identity is. The game does allow you to choose your character's pronouns or even create your own! I can certainly appreciate the effort by the developer to incorporate such a customization into the lexicon of the text heavy game, even if I as a cisgender wouldn't be needing it myself.

Heck, think of all the fun you can have trying to find the most silly replacements for the pronouns to make the sentences hilarious to read. Hours of fun right there! Me? I would go with rufus/xavir/sass/porila, just to give myself a reading challenge and I'm a bit "old school house" with my pronouns. Certainly reading them over and over would really wear me down.

This game does have a lot to offer in the visual narrative gaming department with point and click elements, with interesting and engaging characters. The game does seem to focus a lot on the sentient ROM, named Turing, and the conflicts of the technological elite rather than the hybrids, which would of more interest to a furry player.

As a warning, it is a bit reading heavy, so if you don't like reading and are looking more for an action game, you may want to look elsewhere.

dʒrægɛn: A game about a Dragon

dʒrægɛn

I did a longer review of this game which can be found here.

This one is on the list because I had found the game charming enough to play through the whole thing. I also have it on the list because not a lot of people have played this. It has many things furries would enjoy; tongue in cheek humor, an artful aesthetic, and dragons.

Despite the game being on the shorter side, I enjoyed it enough that I took the time to do a completionist run of it. Some of the puzzles can get pretty head scratching and two in particular took me some good minutes. The rest of the game is not too tough on the difficulty curve. If you're not going for full completion you'd probably get through not problem.

But I found the journey fun, and knowing I'd be one of the very few to take it, in an era where most games have a mountain of people who have shared that experience, kind of gave me that old feeling of discovering something truly on my own.

Duck Game

Duck Game

Among all the intelligent and longer form titles this year, Duck Game is simple. Duck Game is clean. There's no large back story, no inquisitive complexity; it's just Duck Game.

This game is a four player party brawler game along the same idea as Super Smash Bros., if you turn up the percent starting damage to 300% with loads of items on high frequency. A one hit kill central. Essentially it is chaos unleashed, and is always good for a quick round of getting quacked up.

Sometimes after a long day of thinking, writing and problem solving, the best video game is the one that is just quick and mindless fun. And i's hard to stay mad when your friend who just beat you can only taunt you with sporadic quacks.

Armello

Armello

I did a long form review of this game back in its Early Access stages here.

This video game/board game hybrid has turned a lot of heads. Created by a small, independent studio in Australia, this game about four animal clans fighting to fill the spot of a corrupt and dying lion king has been given many Indie awards and is a highlight of how to do a crowdfunding campaign. Interestingly enough, it is the only game on my list that made it to the Ursa Major's recommended list.

The game is fun to play with friends and should honestly be a staple of furry online gaming. Games can get very intense and strategic, and if you get friends, instead of strangers, you can start to make deals with your fellow players to bring down the leader. The art and world are beautiful and the gameplay is complex yet easy to grasp as you play.

Its greatest strength is providing a quicker strategy experience than most hex based strategy games. One of its greatest flaws may be that the single player experience and even the multiplayer with strangers does come down to mostly an endeavor in luck, where the draw of the card and the roll of the dice determine more of the outcome than the social interaction between players, which could happen more if the players had better communication channels.

Undertale

Undertale

If you asked me what game would have taken the gaming award in the Ursa Majors back in September I would have said Armello. In fact if you asked me in September of 2014 which game I thought it would have been, again it would have been Armello. I mean just look at it. It's the game any furry fantasy fan would dream of!

Then Undertale released and proceeded to stamp upon that prediction with spiked boots, before lighting it on fire and kicking it down the mountainside. And the strange part is, I'm not even mad about it.

You've probably already heard a lot of praise to this game, so I will keep mine brief. All I will say is that it has won acclaim from many more well known, and cynical, game reviewers (okay, that may be a redundant phrase) such as TotalBiscuit and Yahtzee. The most negative thing I've heard about the game was from the PennyArcade guys, and they mostly admitted that it was probably because they were getting old more than anything the game did.

However, the impact it has made on the furry community has also been clear. There has been a lot of love shown toward some of the monsters in the game: from Torriel, colloquially known as "goat mom", to the dinosaur-creature scientist Alpys. All the characters you interact with are alive. They have to be for the game's underlying mechanic to work.

The game's mechanics combine JRPG elements with a bullet-hell combat engagement. But that dry statement isn't what makes Undertale special. No, what makes Undertale stand out is that it very much highlights a simple question as your human character wanders the world of monsters: What makes us human?

The answer to that, no matter the behaviors you exploit, is narrowed down into one simple word. The interesting thing is that that one word takes on very different meanings depending on the context of your playstyle. It is a game that will make you question everything you knew about video games and their relationship with the player.

It has generated a lot of fanfare and conversation around games, particularly around their ability to generate empathy. Which is refreshing after a whole era of people saying they can only generate sociopathy.

And that is why I think Undertale is going to easily upset my Armello prediction and win the Ursa Major in the gaming category for 2015.

Here's to 2016

Anthropomorphic games had a lot to offer in 2015. In a category where finding five contenders can be surprisingly difficult, this year there were many contenders who all had good qualities. This was in spite of having no real hard hitting anthro titles from Nintendo, which usually has at least has one to contribute.

That being said, please feel free to leave your comments on any of the games you felt are worth a nomination in 2015 below. Especially if I did not mention them here! I, and others, may even get to find a game I missed a chance to enjoy. Also I expect at least one Five Nights at Freddy's fan to flame me and curse my family's name for excluding them from this list.

For 2016 we have some games on the horizon that look good. Nintendo has the Pokémon Tekken game and Star Fox Zero coming out next year. But, like 2015, there is surely to be some surprising furry games ready to capture player's imaginations once again.

Comments

Your rating: None Average: 3 (1 vote)

I would have gone with Undertale too, if the main character was not human.

Your rating: None Average: 3 (1 vote)

In some playthroughs they act in a decidedly inhuman manner - does that count? :-)
Given the character list, one could be forgiven for thinking of it as a furry game.

Your rating: None Average: 5 (2 votes)

The character of "So Sorry" comes to mind as probably the most furry furry ever put into a video game.

Spoiler in link since they are a hidden character: http://undertale.wikia.com/wiki/So_Sorry

Your rating: None Average: 4.5 (2 votes)

"Exploding Kittens, the tabletop game which has the title of most backed and funded game in the history of crowdfunding website [...]" from a press release.

What do you say about this?

Fred Patten

Your rating: None Average: 5 (2 votes)

I actually played that card game at a New Year's party this/last year. Wasn't aware it released last year.

I don't know why, but the game reminded me of Old Maid with the discarding pairs and drawing from other player's hands mechanic. It's a bit more complicated with the bad card being drawn from the main deck instead of being in people's hands already, and drawing it is instant game over (if you have no diffuse). But one can see the deck as just a very large hand that you are forced to take one card out of.

On that note, though. If a kitten explodes but has shown no other signs of cognitive function, is it truly anthropomorphic?

Your rating: None Average: 3 (2 votes)

If a kitten explodes but has shown no other signs of cognitive function, is it truly anthropomorphic?

The answer to this question will reveal to you the deep dark truth behind universe, if you do not go mad from the revelation.

Your rating: None Average: 2 (4 votes)

All of you furry things must leave or die.

Your rating: None Average: 3 (2 votes)

Yep... so sick of them taking over everything and turning it to shit.
There’s already a special place in hell for them

Your rating: None Average: 1 (2 votes)

Didn't know furries were responsible for:

*Micro-transactions in full priced games
*Live Services models
*The Gaming Crash of the 1980s

#ThanksFurries

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

You got it wrong. Furries like to take credit for a lot of things.
I see what you did there.

Your rating: None Average: 5 (1 vote)

Okay, one, this is our furry site, so if we leave here, we'll just have to go to a non-furry site, so that probably won't help your apparent goal out, and, two, this article is from 2016, which is also when the last comment occurred, so ... we kind of already had left.

Your rating: None

A non-furry site... you’re scared of the real world aren’t you

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

LOL.. is Twatter all you've got?
Twatter != REAL WORLD

try{

}
catch{

}

finally{

}

Get the idea?

Your rating: None

Twatter is mainstream.
Also, Hamill (BTW, darling of Star Wars) and Cher are older generation folk who lived decades before Twatter.

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

Twatter is not real life, like BookFace it is a projection of false front. A façade

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Twatter and BookFace helped get anime voice actor Vic Magnogna fired from his job with #kickvic
= real world consequences

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

Yeah when the world is so utterly fucked up that bullshit posted online gets you fired. How awesome is that

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I know, it's horrific. It's also the real world. It's part of the natural order of things.

Maybe boys should run away and start a safe space for themselves.

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

For those of us who didn’t fall for the social media trap.. life is good.
For furries and others... not so much.

The age of attention seeking is truly with us

Your rating: None Average: 3 (1 vote)

what the hell are you people talking about

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

Talking about furfags like you who live in a Twitter reality

Your rating: None Average: 3 (2 votes)

I dunno, man. It's just a little surreal being one of those furries who consciously decided to "mainstream" himself, whatever the hell that even means anymore, and still being involved in the few remaining fringe forums online. Because they're basically the only place left on the internet where this shit even happens. You know, where any given post from several years ago gets bumped by some random asshole desperate for a place to put his emotional issues on display for some kind of audience.

What social media has in common with the real world is most of the time, that shit doesn't fly. If I had to guess I'd say he's bitter because no one on Facebook, Twitter, or IRL wasn't immediately repulsed by his schizophrenic ramblings and promptly hit that un-friend button, which admittedly was probably a shitty thing to do if these people had left the impression they were real friends.

Sometimes reading sites like Flayrah (or mainly just the comments) is like a flashback to FurNation in the late 90's with its massive, unwieldy MESSUGE BORED LMAAAOOO format. Crushingly heavy on text and dick all for content, but fascinating in the way the "art" created by prison inmates and mental asylum patients can be.

Your rating: None

That really did not answer Equivamp's question.

Like, at all.

Your rating: None Average: 5 (1 vote)

Did you seriously want me to try to attempt to make sense of that series of conniptions with the faintest hope of success?

Your rating: None

Well, I mean, now I have more questions!

Your rating: None Average: 5 (1 vote)

If Wolf-Bone wants to ramble about random shit that's okay. If random anons are just going to say "Twatter reality" and ramble about random shit, it's crossing a fucking line.

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

Crossing a line... Ah so you're triggered, you special snowflake you
Some interesting reading I had yesterday about your antics and flaws online hey. Will just leave the link here: https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/Equivamp

Your rating: None Average: 2 (1 vote)

Okay, I admit, I'm going to click out of morbid curiosity, but who in the actual fuck still considers ED.rs/.ca/.nk/.pluto/.DeltaQuadrant/whatever country/planet they've fucked off to this year relevant? The shit seems almost quaint now. I never even think of the damn site anymore until someone like you points out they're one of the five people left still paying attention to it. Damn it man, I used to find it entertaining, but at a certain point you just hit a wall and realize it's all the same shit. How does a person keep finding the same jokes funny?

Okay, admittedly, back then I wasn't getting any either :C

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

Apparently you are STILL not getting any... with all the time you have to spend shitposting here.

Your rating: None

Well yeah but, y'know, after the 5th child by the 3rd woman, you kinda feel like you've seen it all and heard it all. All the boobs and vaginas start to look the same, all the canned phrases start to sound the same. Again, sort of like browsing ED for a few days.

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

Wow.. what a loser...

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Are you okay?

Your rating: None

It was a dis. I don't have any kids and ain't exactly in a rush to. But come on it's the truth, you browse about a dozen ED pages and they're all the same.

Your rating: None

I am really relieved to hear you don't want kids. Society doesn't need any more of your kind! Good job.

Your rating: None Average: 5 (1 vote)

OH NO! MY DARKEST SECRET THAT NOBODY KNEW ABOUT

Your rating: None Average: 1 (2 votes)

No need to shout.. or is your monthly visitor causing you a lot of pain?
There is a cure for that you know? Its called... GETTING LAID.
Yes a real guy, not a toy of a stuffed wolf with plastic dong

Your rating: None

I'm assuming you're a gamer and that the person who started the comment 3.5 years after the story was relevant thread was also a gamer, and wanted to talk on this article because it was about games.

Yet, you haven't talked about gaming once, maybe one can say it's not your real passion, or other passions seem worth pursuing more than it in this case.

I mean, how can people call themselves "real gamers"(TM) if they're more worried about sassing furries than playing games?

Your rating: None

Assumption is the mother of all fuckups.
Call me the guy behind the Tetris Liloet Memorial Society

Your rating: None

Seriously, dude, 2004 called, they want their anti-furry lines back.

I mean, good job not dropping the "yiff in hell" thing, but otherwise, Jesus Christ, dude, get some new material.

Your rating: None

yiff in hell is a great song...
What a masterpiece..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UIkq1a3bps

Your rating: None Average: 5 (1 vote)

So what was your favorite game from 2015?

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

Pregnancy prevents periods, not the actual intercourse you imbecile. Get your sex ed from legit education and not your pastor. And no, what he gave you wasn't sex ed, and neither was what your teacher gave you. Otherwise they wouldn't be telling you to keep it secret. That's called rape.

Your rating: None Average: 2 (1 vote)

I think he's talking about - well, you know what, I'm not gonna have that conversation, you can find out some other time. but in the mean time I don't think making child rape jokes are necessary or even funny

Your rating: None Average: 2 (1 vote)

If someone's going to make a pretty blatant joke about women getting periods and it making them bitchy I don't give a fuck about common decency for that person because obviously, neither do they.

Your rating: None

Nicely butthurt I see Equivamp.
Don't worry.. message me your address and I'll send you a tissue for your issue

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How am I supposed to message you exactly?

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

Valid point... you're a furry.. in other words, not very bright

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Hmm, that does kinda make me realize in hindsight how weirdly fixated the other editors were on how often a then-14 year old was having sex. I mean it's not like they didn't know - and I could go on about that, I guess Wolf Bone has kinda opened the door on sharing weirdly personal info in this thread, but I don't really have the time

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or the experience :D

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2673898/Im-drinking-smoking-boy-Pregnan...

More real world scoop for ya.

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

yiff in hell, furfag...
Burn in 9000 degree flames..

Your rating: None

Why not make it...

OVER 9000!?

See, I can meme like it's 2004 as well.

Your rating: None

Amateur!
The song wasn't even around in 2004. Fuck you're a real furry aren't you?

Your rating: None

Kinda off-topic (as if we ever stay on-topic for more than five minutes here) but I just want to ask whoever's in charge of moderating, of all the comments you could delete, you delete the one where I confirm I actually don't have multiple kids with multiple women? But not the rape jokes, period jokes, shit about get you a real man. I'd love to know the rationalization for that.

Your rating: None

I think I might have actually hit the "mark as spam" button when I tried to reply to it from my phone? Because when I clicked what I thought was the reply button, and the webpage reloaded, the comment was just entirely gone. I just assumed I was crazy or you had it deleted yourself somehow but thinking on it I probably did something like that.

Your rating: None

yeah that actually makes more sense than my second guess, that it was the result of some kind of glitch like the time i couldn't reply to a specific comment because of some broken tag. nice to know the mark spam button can be weaponized so easily though. i guess just another bullet point on that massive list of legit reasons comments sections just aren't worth the trouble unless they're farmed out to FaceBook or another service (and maybe not even then).

Your rating: None

"Marked as spam" can easily be unmarked as spam. It's just a tool to have recognized contributors step in to help staff out. Deliberately misusing the ability is a great way to lose your contributor status (as the last person who did so found out). Conversely, contributors are trusted not to be posting spam, so don't trigger the automatic spam filters.

Your rating: None

Some contributors, though, remove tonnes of pharmaceutical, gambling, bitcoin and bus ride spam.

"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

And then we have people like you, that loves to make people unpersons.
1984 was a novel, bro... not an instruction manual

Your rating: None Average: 2 (1 vote)

It's funny you should say that because I think we, on what generally could be called the left/center ARE becoming a bit like The Party, except I'm finding myself agreeing with it because the right (and their inbred, socially retarded offspring on the alt-right) frankly make it necessary. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. They're terrified of losing their free speech, then they abuse hate speech to the point even people who would defend hate speech as free speech think it's not worth it anymore. They're terrified of losing their right to own and carry guns, then they commit mass-shootings, and those of us who would otherwise support the right to bear arms decide the need to protect the rest of us from the "lone-wolf" shooters outweighs their right to conceal-carry. They confuse alternative news for true news while calling mainstream media fake news and the rest of us decide we need a dictatorship of the facts because letting people believe whatever they want, which we'd otherwise support because we ourselves value freedom of thought and religion, have realized it's dangerous when it goes too far.

We're emerging as a new collective, and you WILL be assimilated. Resistance is MOST FUCKING FUTILE.

Your rating: None

lol... threats on the internet...
thanks for the laugh.
Furries never fail to disappoint. I can predict the behaviour because its always the same, every single time.
Must be hard to live the life of a triggered special snowflake milennial.

Your rating: None

It's not a threat, as in, I'm sitting here behind my computer threatening to kick your ass. You guys are a threat to the rest of society, and by extension, your own damn selves. And it's just the simple truth, you abuse your rights to hell and back in the name of proving The Man is coming for those rights and when it happens, you shout "told you so" while the rest of us stop caring about your rights because you're simply too fucking crazy to be trusted.

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

You couldn't kick anyone's ass... you're just another intellectual weakling, hanging out on a site about people who are into anthro smut, and probably worse I suspect.
I think furries, and the hangers-on, especially the SJWs and the special snowflakes like yourself, are the bigger concern

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

Sheesh, you sure do love talking about yourself in the 3rd person

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To be honest, I don't really see how that is a bullet point for anything at all. And outsourcing comments to Facebook is just...not a good idea. I mean, you can't even browse Facebook itself without wading through a mountain of spam. I can't imagine it wouldn't just be worse if we tried to implement it here. As it is, we don't deal with much spam actually showing up on the page, and what we do get is easily dealt with. I'm sure that's due to GreenReaper working his tail off (and yeah, norns have tails, I just checked).

Your rating: None

I was referring more to the bigger, more mainstream news sites. Flayrah is small enough and inconsequential enough that it can do what it wants and isn't really helping or harming too many things or people beyond itself. And as for FB as an alternative, I wasn't implying it was a good one. I was actually implying no comments section is better than their comments section. Though there's better alternative comments services I suppose.

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

Shame... furries... always mentioning how hard they work... as if any of this BS is actual work.
The laws of physics are indeed cast in stone :D

And yeah, praising their leader... furries do it, always, doesn't matter where in the world they are.
ALL HAIL, OUR LORD GREENREAPER... HE GIVETH US OUR LIFEBLOOD FORUM TO SHITPOST

Your rating: None

You can criticize the merits of a site all you want. I do it all the time. Including this one. But don't act like it isn't hard work to make a site that is both functional, easy to use, and isn't a complete eyesore. I wouldn't know the first thing about how to go about it and I strongly doubt you do either.

Your rating: None Average: 1 (1 vote)

Is that a challenge dear Wolf-phallus?

Your rating: None Average: 2 (1 vote)

You know what? SURE. Make one. I don't care what kind. Anything, if it means doing something better with your time than whatever it is you think you're accomplishing here.

Your rating: None

Who made you god of my time... and why should you be so concerned? Oh wait.. typical furry..

Your rating: None Average: 2 (2 votes)

I'm fucking Jesus. I AM Time. I run this bitch. But seriously, you invited the fucking challenge, when you said in Chapter 3 Verse 33, "And Just Nonsense doth sayeth, doth thou challenge I?" And yea, Jesus said "Sureth, I'll biteth", and so the gauntlet were throwed, and Just Nonsense did choke most chickenly. And all the angels did descend from Heaven and the chorus filled all the skies above all the lands, "BAWK! BAWK! BAWK!"

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