With the halls decked, the sleigh bells ringing, and chestnuts purchased from the store pre-roasted, it’s a sure sign that the New Year is right around the corner, and that means only one thing: time to look back at 2011, warts and all. 2011 was a year of some huge releases, some fantastic indie darlings, and more corporate shenanigans than you can shake a stick at. It was also the year that gaming’s longest running joke came to an end. So, if you can tear yourself away from Duke Nukem Forever for a few moments, grab an egg nog, sit back, and let’s review the year that was…
THE BEST
Joel’s Best of the Year: Ghost Trick
I know some of you are probably howling right now, wondering how I could overlook the late-year deluge of big titles like Skyrim and Skyward Sword in favor of a little-known DS title from last February. Well, I haven’t actually played Skyward Sword yet, so you can take that into consideration. But beyond that: I really do think Ghost Trick was that good.
As I said in my reaction to it back in February, I picked up Ghost Trick with a complete misunderstanding of what I was getting into. Expecting a physics-based puzzler, I instead found a charming, engrossing mystery with a unique set of puzzle mechanics unlike anything I’d encountered before.
The puzzles of Ghost Trick are all elaborate, mind-tweaking affairs, centered on the player’s ability to manipulate simple objects to change the fate of the people around them. While some can get quite tricky, the game never really allows you to fail thanks to the player’s ability to travel briefly through time. On top of that, the designers took the rather ingenious step of actually creating some puzzles that can only be solved by failing first, thus giving the player some critical information they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
Most importantly, though Ghost Trick spins a fascinating story with plenty of twists and turns to keep you guessing until the very end. Add to that some stunningly detailed 2d artwork, and you’ve got my Best of the Year.
Jeff’s Best of the year: Your PC is your game console now. Bow before your new game console.
In each console cycle there comes a point where the PC hardware available not only outstrips the hardware under the hood of our beloved consoles (it actually does that pretty regularly), but the PC hardware becomes cheap enough that getting a PC that is twice as powerful as your console costs the same amount as buying the console itself. Toward the end of last year and the beginning of this one, we’ve reached that tipping point and gone headlong off the other end. PCs that run games at the graphic equivalent of XBox 360 games can be had for a reasonable price, and if you want to spend a little extra, you can add on video cards that can up the level of detail and visual fidelity far beyond what today’s consoles can offer. Add to this the fact that 360 controllers are compatible with PCs (they’re just USB), and the fact that almost every videocard nowadays has HDMI out, and you can treat your gaming PC like it’s a brand new console.
Given this fact, the game companies themselves are starting to pay more attention to the PC once again. Pretty much every major release that’s multi-platform has a PC port, usually with graphical upgrades that weren’t present in the console version. Put the PC and 360 versions of Skyrim side by side, and there’s no comparison. Same goes for Arkham City, as well as Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. I’m hoping this will signal a new trend of games being developed on PC, with higher quality assets, and then ported down to consoles, rather than the other way around. At least until the next generation of consoles comes around.
Last but definitely not least, the proliferation of indie games opens up the PC-as-console gamer to an even greater wealth of content – indie marketing has gone completely crazy, and almost every other day there’s a new indie bundle to be had, with multiple games going for a pittance. It could definitely be argued that these bundles aren’t doing as much for the indie devs as individual sales would, but in terms of word of mouth, they’re doing wonders. Games such as Really Big Sky and ARES wouldn’t have even been on my radar without promotions such as Steam’s indie bundles, or Desura’s “Indie Royale”. Having more games to play can never be a bad thing, and getting these indies exposure only gets me closer to the next great game they’re going to create.
Mike’s Best of the Year – Zelda: Skyward SwordEven though I still have not finished the game, Skyward Swordhas been the most enjoyable gaming experience I’ve had this year. Miyamoto always gets it just right when it comes to introducing new things, but keeping enough of the familiar around so that players aren’t completely lost.The controls take some getting used to, but with the inclusion of the Wii Motion+, wielding the sword actually feels right. Link actually mimics the sword motions you make on a nearly 1:1 basis. This however can get frustrating sometimes since certain types of enemies require a certain type of attack to kill, but when you do hit correctly it just feels so satisfying.Graphics are a welcome blend of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. I actually liked both styles, but like seeing Link as a young adult more-so than a child, but the faces remained just as expressive and the world is brilliantly colored. And lastly the music, as per Zelda standard, is amazing.
THE WORST
Mike’s Worst of the Year – 3DS Launch Botch“I stood in line at midnight and paid full price and all I got were a few lousy downloadable games for free” – I should have gotten a shirt with that on it. Nintendo has always been king when it comes to handhelds. Even when facing serious competition from the PSP, the DS just blew everyone away with its library, price, and functionality.The 3DS launched at a price point that was too high, without much in the way of titles, and at an odd time of the year. Truth be told it took the DS about a year to get some really good titles out there, so I may be eating my words, but not having something like Ocarina of Time ready on launch day was really a disappointment. The first really good title that wasn’t a remake, Mario 3D Land, didn’t hit until November, so if you didn’t want to shell out for Starfox 64 and Ocarina of Time again, there really hasn’t been much to play.I will give Nintendo some credit for dropping the price point to something more realistic, and at least giving early adopters something so it was slightly less of a slap in the face. And the system itself is nice, having 3D effects that don’t require glasses is key for any adaptation of the tech, and the improved Wi-Fi is also welcome for any players of Black & White.It’s possible that the 3DS will pick up steam next year, it almost has to with the Vita on the way, and with mounting competition from increasingly sophisticated smart-phones. Nintendo needs just a few more ‘hit’ titles to push the system forward, hopefully something good from the Phoenix Wright or Professor Layton series as well as an exclusive Pokemon title (Gray or Rupy/Sapphire Remakes) and the platform will start running on all cylinders.Let’s face it. With the advent of the “PC Tipping Point” that i mentioned above, publishers were eventually going to start paying more attention to my most beloved platform. That’s a great thing! Unfortunately, it also once again brings back the old chestnut that game companies love to rely on – that the PC, as a platform, is a “wretched hive of scum and villainy”, full of people who do nothing but steal games all day and all night. As such, they seem to have loaded up games with all kinds of fun DRM, from the tried-and-true SecuROM, to multitudes of “phone-home” methods that require your connection to always be on and phoning home to play the games you’ve already purchased. I’m not going to go into a mini-rant on DRM here, other than to re-iterate the fact that it’s not a great solution, and that people who are going to pirate the games still will, since cracks aren’t hard to come by. All this excessive DRM does is mess with people who legitimately bought the game.
Speaking of legitimately buying games, there seem to be more ways to do it online now than ever, with more popping up every day. Steam, Direct2drive, Origin, GamersGate, and Good Old Games are all vying for the digital distribution crown. Now normally i’d say that this is a good thing, and that consumers can only benefit from competition in the market, but in the PC market this can be a double-edged sword. Unfortunately, when certain companies (EA, i’m looking in your direction) decided to direct attention back to the PC game, they weren’t satisfied with using Steam as a distribution platform, no…they wanted to start their _own_ distribution service. So now, we have multitudes of online services such as Origin, Steam, Desura, and Impulse, all with their own client that has to stay loaded on our PC if we want to keep games from multiple services. In the interest of full disclosure, i’m 100% on the “Steam train”, but if I had my way (translation: this will never happen) online distributors would use a format of “universal online distribution keys” that would allow you to purchase a game on any given service and activate it on another. Of course with bandwidth costs and revenue sharing for companies such as they are, this would never happen in a million years. But a guy can dream, can’t he?`
Joel’s Worst of the Year: The 3DS Launch
There were a lot of pretty big balls dropped this year, from EA’s decision to create Origin, to Ubi’s creation of sixteen layers of crap between starting one of their games and playing it. But for me, the one that dropped the most loudly was Nintendo’s rather uninspired launch of the 3DS.
I have now owned three DS’s since they were first released, and second to my PC, it’s the system I far and away spend the most time on. I have lost count of how many DS games I own, and I have finished almost every single one of them. So when I heard about the 3DS, I was excited that there could be another portable wonder system coming my way. Unfortunately, at launch, I could not find a single compelling reason to pick one up. The game selection was incredibly limited (and not particularly appealing to me), the price was high, and the online portion seemed to be chock full of issues. It was tough, but I made the decision not to buy one. For many months, my decision seemed completely justified.
Now, long after launch, I finally see enough promise with the system to pick one up. Still, if it took this long for Nintendo to snag a dedicated DS’er like myself, that’s a sure sign that something went very wrong at launch.
THE _______
Jeff’s Most self-aware, gamiest game of the year: Saints Row The Third
In a year where you have new iterations of the latest “gritty, realistic military game #4″ hitting the shelves, as well as new competitors entering the fray in that genre, it’s hard to think that games have become anything but dour, ultra-realistic, ultra-nihilistic war simulators; games that eschew any type of lightheartedness in favor of gun-toting manly men screaming random military speak, and being “oscar mike” about just about everything. It was downright depressing. Even the games that were in a sci-fi setting were getting the same hyper-realistic treatment, and of course, were draped in buckets of dark grey and brown paint. Enter Saints Row: The Third. You’re still a gun toting manly-man, but as for the seriousness part….well, let’s just say that Saints Row doesn’t wear its’ seriousness on its’ arm. To say the game doesn’t follow the standard progression of its’ open-world brethren may be the understatement of the year. The game is roughly forty missions long, counting only the story missions. One of the very first missions in the game has you robbing a bank disguised with a bobble-headed version of your own face, you’re armed to the teeth with automatic weapons by mission two, and can call in airstrikes by mission five. This leaves you the rest of the game to gleefully cause chaos in the most over-the-top way possible, and not worry about the dour tropes hanging over other similar games in the genre.
Gaming just plain needs more of this. While games like Battlefield are lamenting man’s place in the world, and reciting battlefield poetry over the din of the latest human atrocity, Saints Row is screaming “OH HAY GUYS I’M A GAME! LOOK AT ME!”. While Call of Duty is committing terrorist acts on civilians just trying to get to work, Saints Row is flying down the street on a rocket-powered bike, and hitting pedestrians into walls with a baseball bat shaped like a phallus. I’m not saying that every game needs to adopt this lack of seriousness, just that every once in a while, games needn’t take themselves so seriously.
Joel’s Disturbing Trend of the Year: The Loss of Player Agency
While it is no secret that over the past decade, many designers have started leaning more and more towards the idea of games being “interactive movies,” it felt like this year saw this idea move to a new level. Almost all of the year’s biggest releases – Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3, for example – were full of some of the most amazing visuals ever produced in a video game. Watching the first demo of Battlefield 3 at PAX East in the Spring, you couldn’t help but get excited: the graphics were incredible, the sound was thumping and visceral, and amazing things like buildings collapsing were happening all around you. When the game finally came out, however, while all those things were still in place, you quickly realized that – as the player – you had very little to do with them.
Scripted events have been around since Half-Life, but over the years they have become more and more pervasive. Uncharted 3, another of this year’s big launches, has been roundly criticized for some having fantastic movie-like scenes that the player gets to… watch. Sure, it’s amazing when your character kicks in a door, flips three guys over a table, and disarms a bomb just in the nick of time. It’s less amazing when all you did to accomplish that was press “X.”
There is a rule in creative writing called “show, don’t tell.” As you might infer, it means that is better for a writer to paint a scene in which the reader can determine that a character is depressed about his love life based on their actions, rather than simply saying “Dave was depressed about his love life.” I believe that, for games, we need a corollary: “Play, don’t show.” If you’ve got the greatest action sequence in the world scripted out, but the player has no input about how it goes other than a random quick-time event, you are not taking advantage of your medium. Go make a movie if you want every moment scripted out, or embrace that you are making an interactive experience with a player and figure out how to involve them.
