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.

Running and Shooting

There has been a lot of negative talk about the Resident Evil 5 demo lately and more specifically its control scheme. I’m curious about this because as far as I can tell the controls are identical to the masterpiece that is Resident Evil 4. My memory is a little shoddy since I haven’t touched RE4 in over three years, but nothing seems to have changed. For some reason though, I’m in the same boat as everyone else. The controls feel clumsy and slow. What has changed? We all loved RE4 and showered it with game of the year praise in 2005 despite it coming out in January. The following are a few thoughts I’ve read and concocted that seem plausible.


One idea is the demos choice of level design. Everywhere in the short demo was a small shantytown style area cramped with small alleys. That coupled with the fact that there are now two players (I played co-op though the other character is still there AI controlled if you don’t) only added to the cramped feel. This amplified the control problems for several reasons. In RE4 there was almost always a place to retreat too. Since you cannot shoot and move at the same time it was crucial for you to get away and give yourself time to peck away at the slow moving zombies. Now the zombies aren’t nearly as slow, they take several bullets to go down, headshots seem harder to pull off than in RE4, and the ammo is back to being as scarce as it was in all RE’s prior to four. All of this combine with the annoyance of moving around a small crowded environment became quite frustrating very quickly.

Another interesting idea I heard is that the game is fighting with itself. It wants to be an action game in the realm of Dead Space, but its control scheme is still tied back to the series original roots. The entire horror genre has more or less become more scary action title and less get under your skin survival over the last few years, so this is an understandable theory. The problem is RE4 started that entire movement, in large part by changing its control scheme to the same setup RE5 now uses.

The more I think about it the more I think the controls are just not as tight as they were in RE4. Setting up a zombie to do a melee move is a lot more difficult. Before a quick slice of your knife stunned them followed by a tap of A. It’s the same in five, but every zombie I tried it on stepped back as they got sliced making the melee prompt flash for only a split second. When I tried to run forward to get back into range usually the zombie would have already recovered. Aiming your gun also seems a lot slower, even with the speed turned up to the max. Headshots, as mentioned earlier, are also much harder to pull off because of this and the zombies increased speed and agility. Overall, the controls just feel a lot more sluggish than I remember from RE4.

Who knows though, maybe gamers as a whole have just gotten used to different control schemes over the last four years, and what worked in 2005 simply doesn’t in 2009. I might have to dig RE4 out of my parents’ house and give it another go to find out. Or maybe the level design idea plays a huge role and won’t matter as much in the full game. It’s entirely possible Capcom just picked a bad level to showcase their game. I’m still going to give the game a try, but the demo has definitely seemed to have only lowered opinion of an immensely anticipated game.

Game of the Year... a day late

Well seeing as it’s the first of the year I probably shouldn’t wait any longer to do my game of the year post. That’s game of last year technically, but I imagine you all figured that out. When deciding my game this year I thought about what I most appreciated in a game. As I said in my first post, I realized this year just how much a strong narrative meant to me. In retrospect this makes sense when I think of my top games of all time. Not many games from the pre-32 bit era make my list. Games that do make the list are games like Shadow of the Colossus, Shenmue 2, and the Prince of Persia trilogy of last generation. As you can see, these games simply weren’t possible until later in the 32 bit era.

I know there were some games with intelligent and interesting stories before the big 3D boom, but these were almost exclusively RPGs. I never played RPGs when I was younger do to the turn based combat. I found it boring or something and I generally kept away from them aside from the few real time combat gems until a couple of years ago (I can’t wait to try out the Chrono Trigger remake because of this).
Anyways, before I go on I should note that I have not yet played Mirror’s Edge, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Dead Space, or Little Big Planet. I was out of the country from early October until late November so I’ve been trying to catch up as best I can. Picked a terrible time to leave the country, huh? Ah well, at least I got to go to TGS. ;) I did manage to play 63 major games this year and of those I finished 52 or so. 5 I deemed unfinishable because of how they work. Geometry Wars 2 for example is one of those 5. However, of those 52 games only about half came out this year.


While thinking of contenders for game of the year I considered two main things. First was time spent playing a game, several journalists and bloggers I respect seem to go with how addicted to a game they were as their measuring stick. The other was how emotionally moved I was by a game. This led to two very different games. Super Smash Brothers Brawl because I played this game with my roommates and friends for upwards of 5 hours a night for a good two months before we got sick of it. That may have been a slight exaggeration, but just about every night from when Brawl came out until sometime after finals week we were on there. The other game I chose was Metal Gear Solid 4. After getting about 4 hours into it I basically could not stop playing until I saw the conclusion. After every cut scene, boss fight, or weird transitionary tool used to merge the two I was just left impressed. I didn’t fully agree with all the ending cut scene choices, but I was overall floored by this game.


So now since I have to pick one of these two for game for the year. Based on what I said in the first paragraph the choice was obvious. Despite all the fun I had bashing my friends into oblivion in SSBB, the thing that draws me into games the most isn’t just the pure fun they bring me. Metal Gear Solid 4 may not have brought me as many hours of joy as Smash did, but during those fifteen somewhat hours I could not have been more attached to everything the game presented. MGS4 was hands down my game of the year.

Strange that my two favorite games last year were on the two consoles who combined still only get a fraction of the time from me that my 360 does.