Another year come and gone, and another year’s worth of games to love, games to hate, and games to make us scratch our heads and wonder who’s really running things at some of these companies. Sequels were spawned, new IPs introduced, and enough DLC to power a small nation was churned out on a daily basis. Now, as we get ready to see off the old year and usher in a new, it’s time for us at Spectacle Rock to look back at the months gone by and pick out our highlights and lowlights…

Best of the Year

Joel’s Pick: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor

There were, there is no question, quite a few good games this year. From smaller morsels of goodness like Shadow Complex to higher-profile titles like Beatles: Rock Band, there was a pretty steady flow of excellent gaming flowing down the pipeline.

In the midst of all of that, there was one game that really stuck out to me as hitting all the right notes. Devil Survivor was one of those games that I found myself actively making time to play; not just putting in the time during my daily commute, but sneaking the DS to bed at night, or any time I knew I’d have a few minutes of downtime. That right there is the sign of a sure-fire winner.

I won’t reiterate all that I enjoyed about SMT:DS, but I will simply say that it kept me engaged and entertained throughout its entire run, and that’s become more and more a rare thing these days. Here’s hoping that next year will hold a few wonderful surprises like this one!

Jeff’s Pick: Rail Shooters on the Wii

Way back in ancient times, when the Wii was first coming out, I remember hearing about the motion control, and seeing the trigger on the bottom of the controller instantly made me think “OMGRAILSHOOTERSWITHOUTANYACCESSORIESOMG”. Ask Joel. That’s exactly what I said.

That being said, the first couple years of the console’s life really didn’t deliver on that hope. Ghost Squad and Umbrella Chronicles were both really solid titles, but that was pretty much it in terms of outstanding games in the genre. This year, however, changed all that. We started off the year with House of the Dead: Overkill, which gave us a solid shooter done up in the trappings of old Grindhouse cinema, complete with cheesy dialog, crackling and popping video effects, and a plot so over the top that Tarantino himself would’ve called it ridiculous. Next came Dead Space: Extraction, which introduced some new controls to the genre, allowing the character free look in certain parts of the levels, while keeping with the story and horrific theme of its Survival Horror predecessor.

To round out the year, we got Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles, which gave us more of the great rail-shooter interpretations of the previous Resident Evil games. While the game didn’t have the replayability of RE:UC, it did still have a ton of unlockables and story items to find, as well as a main quest that lasted more than 8 hours. For a rail shooter, that’s an impressive feat.

Mike’s Pick: The Steam Platform

When steam first came out, I absolutely hated it: the lag, the resources it hogged, the fact that friends never worked, and any launches on the platform (see Half Life 2) were so utterly bogged down you couldn’t even play the game’s single player offline. Flash forward to 2009 – the library is no longer limited to just Valve games, or even just recent games, it goes all the way back to PC gaming’s origins with titles like Doom and Wolfenstien. Things download quickly and smoothly, and the client doesn’t bug or crash out if you look at it funny.

Steam has certainly come a long way from its god-awful introduction. Valve has managed to pitch great things like game bundles and 50%+ off sales to most developers (sans EA), and gamers just eat it up. I think my game library on steam has more than doubled this year with all the deals valve has been pumping out. Steam is the platform that PC gaming most desperately needs, one where any developer can put a game up with very little in start-up costs, and any game from even pre-1990 can be sold alongside a brand new release like Left4Dead 2.

For finally coming of age and truly being the ugly duckling that grew into a swan, Steam as a distribution platform is my pick for the best of this year. Now if only they could get a few other stubborn publishers to sign onto their game packs and weekend deals.

Fail of the Year

Joel’s Pick: Infinity Ward

Infinity Ward, creators of Modern Warfare 2, which you might have heard of, has managed to rocket to the top of this year’s failure list through their dynamic ability to both half-ass their design efforts while simultaneously being total pricks about it.

IW, which has its roots in PC gaming, hit a gold mine with MW1, and knew that the cash pile for MW2 could be even bigger. As such, they gave in to the allure of taking the easy way out and decided to completely turn their backs on the PC gamers who helped get them where they are today by creating a completely crippled product for them. PC gamers in general are used to being able to host their own games, create their own maps and mods, and have lots of control over their individual gameplay settings. In MW1, they had all of this. For MW2, however, Infinity Ward decided to design a console-centric game, and then to remove all of these features PC gamers have come to expect.

Now, I can completely understand the desire to save money, and consoles obviously are the bigger cash cow these days. That said, while I can forgive a company for screwing PC gamers for business reasons, I cannot forgive them raging assholes about it. Instead of simply fessing up that this was a money issue, IW took the bold position that people shouldn’t have control over any aspect of the game, because it should only be played exactly as IW intended. No mods, no custom maps, and no changing the resolution you play the game at. That’s right: IW made it so perfect that there’s absolutely no need for you to change anything.

To ignore the community that helped build you, and then to actively insult them with such ridiculous claims, is hubris of the highest degree, and I know it cost them at least one sale (mine). Sure, they still made a hojillion dollars, but that doesn’t make them any less jerks.

Jeff’s Pick: Brutal Legend

I really, really wanted to like this game, if for no other reason than I think Schafer’s previous work, Psychonauts, is one of the best games I’ve ever played. The writing was excellent, the gameplay was tight – it was a top to bottom enjoyable experience. Hence, from the moment I had heard that Tim Schafer was writing a game starring Jack Black, a man who most certainly would fit well into a Schafer-crafted universe, I was chomping at the bit to get my hands on this game. Unfortunately, the resulting product was a disappointment, with boring combat, an open-world system that requires you to criss-cross it to get to objectives, and a realtime strategy portion that seems to almost always come down to a battle of attrition with your attention.

Don’t get me wrong, the writing is still fantastic, and Black does a serviceable job. Point of fact is that the writing was the only thing that kept me playing the game as long as I did. Schafer’s humor and quick, witty banter make the game enjoyable enough that you’ll slog through the actual action just to get to the next cutscene, which is something I never thought I’d hear myself say. Eventually, though, the “throw your dudes at the other dudes until your dudes win” style of RTS gets too long and boring (and eventually brutally difficult) to bear, and I had to put the game down, to be relegated to the “play this again when there’s nothing else out” pile.

Mike’s Pick: Infinity Ward/Blizzard One-Two Combo

I don’t care how many copies of Modern Warfare 2 Infinity Ward sold, or how many copies of Starcraft II Blizzard will sell – you both earn a big fat fail stamp from me for your treatment of the PC crowd. I honestly can’t say which one makes me more angry, because they both tear at something that is part of the lifeblood of PC gaming as we know it.

Let’s start with Infinity Ward; many years ago a small studio named Infinity Ward made a World War II shooter called Call of Duty. Now there are a lot of WWII shooters out there, but this one distinguished itself by actually being good. PC gamers gobbled it up, and this enabled the small studio to grow and produce blockbusters like World at War and Call of Duty 4. Now, this is all fine and good, and developers should be encouraged to put games on many platforms so they can recoup as much money as possible and keep gamers from being locked out of something they really want to play. However, things took at turn to for the worse with the announcement that everything about Modern Warfare 2 was being stripped down to make the PC experience exactly like the console one.

No more dedicated servers means a lot of things: First off, it means the number of people in a server is limited and there are worse pings, second it means no one can make any sort of custom maps, skins, or other content, and lastly it means no mods. I seem to recall that a lot of the up-and-coming development houses, and the current reigning champions (Valve), started out as mod makers. Without mods, we wouldn’t have the entire Half Life series, no Counter-Strike, no Team Fortress, no Defense of the Ancients; the list goes on. So, shame on you Infinity Ward, don’t even bother making a Modern Warfare 3 port for the PC; we don’t want it.

A less grievous sin, but still very noteworthy is Blizzards decision to ax LAN support from Starcraft II. I think this decision is aimed at curbing pirates ability to play over LAN tunneling software like Hamachi, but people do still have LANs; they are not some long-forgotten relic of the pre-broadband era. If I’m sitting five feet from the person, why do I need to send packets out to their Battle.net servers then have them come back to the person sitting next to me? It just makes no sense, and the really evil thing I predict that Blizzard will do is roll Battle.net into World of Warcraft and have one “Blizzard Subscription;” then you would need to pay to play Starcraft II or Diablo III, games that up until this point have been free to play online. Shame on you Blizzard, you already have a mountain of cash, do you really need more $100 bills to light your cigars with?

_________ of The Year

Joel’s Pick: Friendship Test of the Year

When they first announced that New Super Mario Bros. Wii was going to have simultaneous multiplayer support, I was a little dubious. Sure, previous Marios could have two players, but never playing at the same time. To now say that four people could play at once? It seemed like madness, destined for failure.

Fortunately, I turned out to be completely wrong. As Jeff says, NSMBW’s multiplayer is madness in action, but there is something wonderfully satisfying about it at the same time. Perhaps it is when you and your friends work together to finally conquer a difficult level, or perhaps it is when you finally decide enough is enough and simply hurl someone out of your way to their death, but there are plenty of times that the game fills you with maniacal glee.

If you’ve got the time and ability this holiday season, take some time out with your friends to give NSMBW a spin; in between the slapping and insulting of mothers, you’ll be glad you did so.

Jeff’s Pick: Best reason to have an internet connection: DLC and Downloaded Games Pwn Retail

Brutal Legend wasn’t the only retail product that disappointed this year. However, in a year where full-blown, high-profile titles have disappointed, downloadable titles have shined. Developers have fully embraced the “small format” of XBLA and WiiWare, and have released some truly fun and inspired games. Microsoft’s “summer of arcade” once again spawned some great titles, with Trials HD and the excellent Shadow Complex. Games like Rock Band saw continued glory with new songs available every week, and independent studios released amazing original titles such as Gaijin Games’ Bit.Trip series, Ska Studios’ Dishwasher, and Amanita Designs’ Machinarium. I found most of these titles to actually be far more enjoyable than the actual full retail-box titles that came out this year.

Mike’s Pick: New IP Most Likely to See Many Sequels of the Year

Every once in a while someone in the gaming industry will experiment with actually creating a new IP rather that simply recycling a brand name, and, for all its flaws, Borderlands really hit one out of the park. The art and style were great, the quests were fun and interesting, and the game play was fun. It was something fresh and new on what is otherwise an old hat formula. The thing that really made it for Borderlands was the multiplayer; without three other people to traverse the dystopian trash-world with, the game likely would have fallen flat on its face.

Borderlands is not without its problems though: it fails to incorporate the most widely used PC platform, Steam, in lieu of Gamespy. Play can be clunky at times, and horribly unbalanced at worst. Despite the ability to pick skills from three separate trees, progression seems very arbitrarily based on your level – stray toward enemies even three levels above you and things get very difficult, if they are even or three below you things get extremely easy – there was very little middle ground. And while the characters of many of the story-line bosses were well designed, the actual fights themselves were all relatively easy and left much to be desired, especially the game’s ending boss.

Luckily, it turns out that the game provides enough entertainment to look past the glaring flaws and simply enjoy things for what they were – watching that first enemy lite on fire from SMG bullets just never seemed to get old. Due to its success both on PC and on consoles, it’s likely that Gearbox will churn out at least one sequel, if not two. Hopefully, in future installments they’ll be able to work on the whole “balance” thing while keeping the fun fresh.