Obligatory Game of the Year Post

So it’s been almost exactly a year since I started this blog. I started it on New Year’s Eve 2008 with a post about why I read game blogs, but being the end of the year it only made sense to follow it up with a Game of the Year post. Anyway, here’s one for this year with hopefully many more to come. Maybe next year I'll have some readers.

I find it amusing that of the 70 or so games I played this year and the 63 I played last year, only 17 were on the PS3 (and half of them were small downloadable games), yet my favorite game in ’08 and ’09 were both on the PS3. Of course part of that is because I play all my multi-platform releases on the 360, but it’s still interesting that I only use my PS3 every month or two and am almost always impressed with what’s on there. Sony definitely has gone all out with first and second party development this year. Except for Killzone 2, that was an overrated piece of crap.

Moving along, you can probably already guess my game of the year. What’s the one PS3 game that everyone’s been raving about since its release two months ago? Better yet, what's that a picture of at the top of this post? Why Uncharted 2, of course! It has already been said all over the internet why this game is so great, so I won’t add fuel to the fire. I will say this however, I knew it was my game of the year by about the half way mark and it just got better from there. I don’t think any game has ever resonated with me that strongly and immediately. If you haven’t played it yet, then go buy a PS3, or use your friends, or send yours to be repaired, Slevin!

Looking back on the year, there were a lot of great games, but picking Uncharted 2 wasn’t a difficult decision to make. Assassin’s Creed 2 would probably be my next runner up, but it had too many problems early on to be GOTY material. Does anyone else think “goatee” when they see that acronym? No? Ok, well the only other games I’d consider would be Flower and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Flower was an incredible game that showed the world what games could be, or it would have if any non gamers played it. Hell, I don’t even think many gamers played it. I loved it, it was short and sweet and I still go back and play a level or two sometimes when I’m bored. In fact, I might even say Flower trumps Assassin’s Creed 2 for the number two spot. Not really sure, ranking these things is kind of dumb anyway. I think I’m digressing, where were we? Oh right, Batman was good, but it got too repetitive by the end. I think I did the Bane style dodge and batarang boss fight four times by the end and the combat was awesome, but it was a little too simple. However, like I said in a possibly confusing manner after I played it, the stealth sections were awesome and just got better as more abilities became available.

So there you have it, the Noise Tanks: Official Game of the Year goes to Uncharted 2. Unless Slevin or Squash make a GOTY post, but that’s about as likely as Naughty Dog putting my commendation on the back of the Uncharted 2 Greatest Hits box. See yah guys next year.

Opinions over Time: Assassin's Creed 2 (Final Thoughts)

It’s rare for me to feel sad at the end of a game because I want more. I think even most good games wear out their welcome by offering tens of hours of gameplay. Every now and then however I’ll be watching the credits roll and be thinking how I want more. Of course nowadays there is downloadable content, so I’ll have more to do in Assassin’s Creed 2 within the month I believe.

As I’m sure you’ve surmised already using your incredible deductive reasoning, I’ve finally beaten Assassin’s Creed 2. The reason it took me so long is because I think I was actually trying to savor it. Each time I’d play I would spend hours wandering around the world working on various tasks. I’m not even sure I was working towards any specific goal a decent chunk of the time. Simply put, the world Ubisoft crafted for Assassin’s Creed 2 is remarkable. Venice specifically is the coolest virtual town I’ve ever been to.

The strange thing is I thought the story of the game was pretty weak, the gameplay and controls had a few glaring problems, and yet it was hands down one of my favorite games of the year. Didn’t beat Uncharted 2 for my love though, maybe next time. I should probably clarify what I mean by the story being weak. I thought the whole revenge and redemption thing was fine, if not a little hard to keep tabs on, but the future science fiction aspect of this series is starting to piss me off. In both games it is so vague that I almost don’t see the point in including it at all. This time you only even see the “real world” for maybe 20 minutes of game time, but the ending practically invalidates Ezio’s entire story. And if one more game ends with a cliffhanger that won’t be resolved for at least 2 years I’m going to stab something. It’ll probably just be a tomato or something, but it’s going to be brutal.

Now that you’ve read two paragraphs praising AC2 and another hating on it, let me try to explain why I liked it so much. As games tend to be more and more sandbox style with emergent narrative techniques being employed, the worlds we play them in have to be immersive, believable and most of all interesting to interact in. That’s what makes games with insipid storylines like Crackdown so freaking awesome. Assassin’s Creed 2’s story wasn’t as bad or as pointless as Crackdown’s, in fact if you ignore the science fiction it was pretty good, but if I had nothing but the world and guards to mess around with I’d still probably have fun for more hours than I’d care to admit. That's what I loved about it, if they can nail down some of their storytelling techniques for the third we'll have something truly special.

Check it out if you’re on the fence; just remember the first three or four hours are pretty dry. You must endure, it's worth it!

Legendarily Brütal

I, like every other self respecting gamer, played Psychonauts and like most of the fifteen people that played it, I loved it. I have to admit it was my first Tim Schafer game. As I’ve said in the past I’ve always been more of a console gamer so I missed all the old Lucas Arts point and click games. Though as you probably guessed from the title, this post is going to be about Tim Schafer and Double Fine’s newest game, Brütal Legend.

I’m not a huge fan of metal music, but I was still excited about this game solely because it was the next thing out of Double Fine. Sadly, I’m not so sure it lived up to Psychonauts previous greatness. The game is by no means bad, but the entire thing just feels unfinished. Well, maybe unpolished is a better word. The game is definitely complete, but there are tons of little instances of shoddy craftsmanship that I would never have expected after playing the highly polished Psychonauts. For example, often times a line of dialogue that was triggered by some in game event would get cut off by the start of a cutscene or a load zone. These situations weren’t caused by me completing the games tasks faster than the developers thought I would. Sometimes the dialogue would continue for another twenty or thirty seconds if I knew ahead of time to wait and let it finish. In one instance the Guardian of Metal was saying his goodbye quip as the game played the animation of my character exiting his lair and even then he was cut off. That means someone recorded a line that was longer than the non-interactive sequence it was intended to be played over.

This might not sound like a big deal and I guess it isn’t, but the game is full of little problems like that and it started to get to me. These guys are known for their stories and characters as much as they are for their gameplay and level design. How can you appreciate the story if important pieces are constantly being cut off?

I also ran into a decent amount of glitches, including one where my car did a U turn in mid air and then landed sideways in an impossible to drive out of location. The game must have realized its error because my car spontaneously exploded fifteen seconds later, either that or the thing I was running from finally caught up.

As far as gameplay goes, it’s actually a pretty cool and rather unique set up they created. It’s an action game that slowly turns into a simple RTS where you control what I would call a hero class while still building and managing an army. It works fairly well, but the controls for getting your army to do anything but gang up in one spot is pretty cumbersome. Also, the game goes from being painfully easy to quite difficult right before the last three RTS battles. I actually enjoyed the difficulty spike, but it was unexpected and I think probably the cause of a somewhat defensive blog post by Tim Schafer.

Luckily all the humor of a Tim Schafer game is there and amplified significantly by Jack Black and some excellent facial animations. It’s not often a game causes me to laugh out loud and this one did on multiple occasions.

Overall the game isn’t bad; it’s just not up to the caliber I’d expect from Double Fine. A few more months probably would have done the game a world of good, but after reading their post mortem I can understand a bit better why the game ended up how it did. What happened was a shame, but I guess it gives me a wonderful excuse to blame all of Brütal Legend's shortcomings on Activision, so let’s do that.

Opinions over Time: Modern Warfare 2 (Final Thoughts)

Well I finished Modern Warfare 2 a week or two ago, but never wrote up my final impressions. That was largely due to the fact that writing three articles about a six hour game is a bad idea. That and everyone and their grandmother had already bought MW2 by that point anyway. If you must know, MW2 was an intense, almost over the top romp through an interesting yet incoherent war. It did all the cool first person tricks MW1 did, but better. Still, the whole thing felt lacking in the impactful department. Aside from the “No Russian” level, nothing in the game really resonated with me about the horrors of war. MW1 did that fairly regularly, while still maintaining a healthy dose of epic.

Opinions over Time doesn’t work for this game though because it’s too short. I mean I guess you could say at first I didn’t like how much of a cluster fuck the first level was, then I was impressed by some of the themes Infinity Ward dealt with, but ended up enjoying the game solely for its presentation and overall epicness. As you can see that’s not really worth three articles. I just summed it up pretty comprehensively in one sentence. It might be considered a run-on by elementary school teacher standards, but I think my point still stands.

What we ended up with was a middle post almost exclusively about the “No Russian” level and a final thoughts post about how redundant this whole exercise has been. I don’t think the whole feature is totally worthless, but upon further reflection most games don’t result in a huge range of opinions. Generally I find games to be either consistent in their quality, or they start off slow and end up great. The latter type leads to at two articles I suppose, but not really three.

Well whatever, I’ll finish up the Assassin’s Creed 2 final impressions once I finally finish that game and hold off on trying this feature again until I play either a really lengthy game like FFXIII or maybe if one just screams out to me as being well suited to the format. Or maybe I’ll just call it a failed experiment and cut my losses. See yah next time!

Stop While You're Ahead

Anyone who reads this blog regularly could probably guess I’m a huge fan of the Prince of Persia series, then again, you two probably already knew that before I started this blog. I think I've written more articles about the last game than any other game on here. So naturally when Ubisoft announces something outrageous like the next PoP game being a continuation of the Sands of Time trilogy, instead of the story they ended with a cliffhanger less than a year ago, I’m going to rant about it.

A small part of me is excited if only because the characters from the Sands of Time trilogy are awesome and I’ve spent so many hours in that universe, but the rest of me knows that story is over. Ubisoft pushed their luck by giving Sands of Time a sequel when it was clearly a standalone story and somehow managed to tie it all together beautifully by the end of the third game. I sincerely doubt they’ll be able to pull off a fourth game with the same kind of grace and care that they gave Two Thrones. Hell, they almost killed all hope for the trilogy when they made the prince “dark” and angry in Warrior Within.

Then there’s the fact that this game is slated for May of 2010, that means that it has either been in development alongside the last PoP, or it is going to have less than an 18 month dev cycle. I know the two Sands of Time sequels were both made in a year, but they had all the assets from the previous games and didn’t alter an enormous amount of the core gameplay. This game however is probably not going to use a lot of last year’s game seeing as it was cel shaded and significantly different from the other universe.

The last thing that really makes me nervous is May is the same month that the Sands of Time movie is coming out. Based on the trailer, the movie seems to take bits from the entire trilogy, but will mainly focus on the story on the first game. Jordan Mechner wrote it, so it’s probably not that bad, but we’re still talking about a game movie here. What I don’t want to hear is this new game is going to be a movie tie-in because that would just be ridiculous. How could they possibly make a game that is based on a movie that is based on three other games and expect it to be better or even equivalent to the originals? The reason the movies story was changed so much (I imagine) is because games don’t translate directly to movies very well. The same is true the other way, so doing both is probably a recipe for disaster.

I’m always hopeful and I guess I’ll have a better grasp for what is coming once they release a trailer on the 12th.