>FF13: The first 2 hours

>The subtitle of this post should be: “or, Why I Didn’t Finish Heavy Rain.”

I didn’t finish Heavy Rain, nor am I sure I ever will. To be fair, though, it’s not entirely HR’s fault; I moved to Brooklyn last week, and even though we’ve been settled in for the better part of a week, I still haven’t really had that much free time. That said, the free time I did have was time I didn’t really feel like spending playing HR. HR kinda needs to be played in a long, uninterrupted stretch, or else it loses its rhythm, which is what happened to me. Also, it falls into the uncanny valley way too often, it needs an actual English-speaking voice cast, and the script very much needed to be touched up by an English-speaking writer. That’s really what hit the uncanny valley for me – not the graphics, but the stiff, stilted dialogue delivered by people who don’t quite know how to pronounce certain words. Also, it felt almost a little too derivative of “Se7en.”

Anyway. Final Fantasy 13 arrived in the mail yesterday, and God of War 3 will arrive next week, and so I’m not sure I’ll ever get around to finishing HR anytime soon.

As for FF13. I should probably start by saying that I’m not really all that familiar with the Final Fantasy series. I tried (and failed) to document my playtime with FF7 last year (1, 2, 3); I also downloaded FF8 from the Playstation Network, although I don’t think I’ve even installed it. And I played about an hour or two of FF3 (?) on the DS, and a little bit of FF7-Crisis Core on the PSP. But that’s really the extent of it.

I understand, though, that FF13 is somewhat of a radical departure from its previous versions, at least in terms of its combat system and how relentlessly linear it is. So there’s that.

Here’s what I can say about FF13, now that I’m a few hours in and the combat system is starting to get a bit more expansive:

1. It’s gorgeous. I’m playing the PS3 version, for whatever that’s worth.

2. People weren’t kidding around when they said it’s linear. It’s not just that you move in a straight line – it’s that the straight line you move along is very, very narrow. I can appreciate that this very conscious design choice might make the game a little less intimidating for the FF noob; but just because I’ve never really played a FF game doesn’t mean I’ve never played any game.

3. The combat system sounds a lot more complex than it actually is. At least at this stage.

4. Almost any Japanese-developed game has this weird idiosyncratic thing where every character has to be constantly voicing something, even if it’s just grunting. And almost every female character’s grunts and moans sound alarmingly sexual in nature, even if they aren’t at all sexual in context.

5. It is basically the polar opposite of Mass Effect 2, which I am holding up as the gold standard for Western RPGs. (Whether that’s true or not is not really the point; it’s an amazing game, and it’s still fresh in my mind.)

Most reviews have indicated that FF13 starts slow and doesn’t really get going until 12-15 hours in. Which is a lot of hours that I might not necessarily have before GOW3 arrives. But I must admit that I’m kinda enjoying it so far. I have almost zero idea what’s going on (and if I weren’t playing the game with subtitles, I’d have absolutely no idea what a “fal’Cie” or “l’Cie” is; at least I know how they’re spelled). But I’m intrigued. I think the last truly engrossing JRPG I played was Lost Odyssey; I’m hoping this will be somewhere near that ballpark.

>Bioshock 2 – final thoughts

>More apologies. I finished Bioshock 2 over the weekend and have been meaning to write a quick thing about it, but time has gotten away from me. But let’s be honest here – the game itself isn’t all that inspiring to write about.

It’s not necessarily a bad game; it’s just unnecessary. And yet, ironically enough, I would love to keep exploring the world of Rapture. My favorite moments in Bio2 – as they were in Bio1 – were the moments in between battles, when I could take in the architecture and explore all the nooks and crannies of such a meticulously designed world. Make no mistake – Bio2 may be uninspired as a game, but its vision of Rapture is just as sumptuous to take in as in the original.

Let’s just say this – Bio2 does work better as a game. The combat mechanics are a lot more solid and satisfying, and the clunkiness of the first game’s interface has been replaced by a much more efficient design. (And this must be said – it’s awfully nice to not have to hear “Welcome to the Circus of Values!” constantly, unceasingly.)

But there’s also a great deal of Bio2 that feels awfully contrived; the constant babysitting of Little Sisters (of which I struggled with at first and eventually got better at) is the worst offender, but pretty much all of the game’s forward momentum is clearly scripted and inelegantly presented. And I am really, really tired of the game’s strict adherence to plot development via tape recorder and offscreen narration; after a while I just tuned it out, and as a result I’m still not quite sure what the hell I was doing or why I was doing it. It feels lazy, and the voice acting and dialogue is too stylized to feel urgent. My own personal motivation for finishing the game at all was that in spite of all the aggravations that the game foisted upon me, I just wanted to see more of Rapture.

So let me say this, then. If there must be another Bioshock game, let it be something different. Get away from the Big Daddies and the Adam and the plasmids and the combat and all that shit. Give me more of Rapture. Give me characters that actually talk to me, face to face. I would ABSOLUTELY play a Bioshock Zero prequel if it meant seeing Rapture in its heyday, before all the badness happened. Fuck, let me play it as Andrew Ryan, SimCity style. I’ll even settle for a 3D point-and-click adventure game, if it came to that. I want to walk around and see shit that I’ve never seen before. Rapture is one of the most atmospheric worlds ever created – let me soak it in, rather than making me run through it and kill things for no apparent reason, other than that I have to.

At the end of the day, Rapture is the star of the show, and the fiction is what gives it weight. The combat is certainly OK, and I guess you need it in order to sell millions of copies, but it’s not nearly as interesting as the world itself. There are lots of stories that can be told in the city at the bottom of the sea; I would much rather see one of those, than having to go through the same motions as before.

>Relocation

>Apologies to the 2 or 3 of you who read this blog on a quasi-regular basis – I’m moving at the end of this month, so my game time has been minimal and my blog time even less than that.

I continue to trudge forth in Bioshock 2. I re-started that last level and had, for whatever reason, a much easier time defending my Little Sister, and now I’ve sorta gotten it; I know how to set up for ambushes, I’ve gotten better at using the right plasmids, etc. I’m still not sure I know who all these people are that keep talking to me, or why I’m doing what they tell me to do, and the only reason why I continue on is that I keep hearing that the end of the game is really, really good. So there’s that to look forward to.

Other than that, it will likely remain dark in this space until Heavy Rain comes out, which I’m ridiculously excited for.

Namaste.

>Bioshock 2: the first hour

>I don’t like going to bed angry, but that’s exactly what happened to me last night.

I was back in Rapture, you see. And even though I had been highly skeptical about Bioshock 2 and repeatedly questioned the necessity for its existence, I found myself as absorbed and invested in the new game as I had been in the original. The thing that I loved most about the first game – more than the story, more than the combat – was the atmosphere; I loved exploring every nook and cranny and the original game constantly rewarded such exploration with loot, backstory and, if nothing else, incredible tableaux. And the first hour of Bio2 felt much the same way – I was enthralled with the world, again, and running around and exploring was just as rewarding as it used to be.

But more than that, the game certainly felt better – the combat was more responsive, and the duel-wielding of plasmids and weapons makes perfect sense. OK, so the story is a little obtuse, and the storytelling method is so identical that it feels somewhat cheap, but that’s OK – the world of Rapture is still among the most vivid and unique as anything in the medium.

And then I got to the part of the game where you have to defend a Little Sister while she harvests ADAM, and I nearly threw my controller out the window.

Let me back up here a second. A lot of people gave the original Bioshock a lot of shit for taking strange liberties with the audience’s suspension of disbelief – i.e., the unprompted self-inflicted plasmid injection at the beginning of the game, the idea that year-old potato chips found in garbage cans actually increase your health, etc. – but I fell for it anyway. The most controversial element in the first game, though, was the way it handled death. If you died, you respawned at the nearest “Vita-Chamber”, and the world would be just as you left it.

In Bio2, death is handled somewhat differently, and it makes me want to kill it.

So here’s the scene. (I’m still at the very beginning of the game, so I’m not really spoiling anything.) I’ve adopted my very first Little Sister. In order for me to get to the next level in the game, I need to inject myself with a plasmid that will let me shoot fire out of my hands. And in order to get that plasmid, I need ADAM. And to get ADAM, I need to escort a Little Sister to a particular dead body and defend her against Rapture’s crazies. (In this particular case, I need to harvest ADAM from 2 dead bodies; I’m at the 2nd body.)

And now, I need to set traps, because we’re in the corner of a room and as soon as I set this little girl down, we’re going to get swarmed. So I set up all the traps I’ve collected over the last hour, replenish my ammo, and hack the nearest health-vending machine, and I set the girl down. The crazies come pouring in, and in spite of my traps I’m soon overwhelmed, and right before the girl is done harvesting, I die.

I respawn in the Vita-Chamber directly behind the girl. And now, I’m in a bit of a pickle – all the ammo I used in my last fight is gone, all my traps are gone, the health machine is toast, the sentry bot I hacked is destroyed, I have no plasmid energy or medical packs, I have no money because I spent it all replenishing my ammo before I died, and – to top it all off – as soon as I recover what I can and get set to defend the girl again, I notice that the girl has to start harvesting from scratch. Harvesting appears to take between 1-2 minutes; there’s no way I’ll have enough ammo, let alone anything else that might help. So I die, again. And again, and again, until I can loot enough from the accumulating corpses to put up a halfway decent fight, although it won’t nearly be enough.

I spent close to 45 minutes trying to get past this fucking area last night, and never even got close to succeeding. And furthermore, I didn’t think to save before that section started, because I didn’t think I’d be getting my ass kicked so thoroughly this early into the game, so I’m probably going to have to replay the entire level again in order to be properly equipped.

And that fucking SUCKS.

>Mass Effect 2: the binge

>I technically finished Mass Effect 2 late last night, but was unhappy with the ending. So I went back and re-did the end sequence, and then went the other way on the very last choice, and now I’m agonizing over whether or not I should’ve made the choice I happened to make.

Anyway. I put 38 hours into my first playthrough, managed to get up to level 30, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen about as much as I could see (given my character’s parameters). I’m trying to figure out what to do for my second playthrough; do I want to import my dark side character from ME1? Do I want to re-use my fully-leveled light side ME2 character and play dark? Or do I start completely from scratch? Consider this: I’ve put almost 100 hours into the Mass effect franchise and I still haven’t used an assault rifle.

You know what – I’m not in any shape to write a coherent review. I seriously binged over the last 3 days, and I’m a little Mass Fatigued.

Here’s all you need to know about how I feel about it – I’m going to fire it up again anyway.

>Mass Effect 2: the first 5 hours

>Let me say, right up front: I will do my absolute hardest to avoid spoilers. But let me also say that I’m almost positive that anyone who’s reading this is either (a) a family member or (b) someone who’s already playing the game themselves. If you fall into neither category, consider yourself warned.

And in any event, what I want to write about isn’t really about the story, but rather the nuts and bolts of the gameplay. So let me get this out of the way: the opening 10 minutes of the game are as exciting, breathtaking and flat-out jaw-dropping as anything I’ve ever seen. And because the first game is now so fresh in my mind (having raced through it over the weekend), it was really easy for me to hit the ground running; the universe of the game isn’t as intimidating as it might have been, and I feel like I understand my player’s circumstances and the major players quite well. I’m not at all sure how someone who never played the first one would fare here.

But this is not what I want to talk about.

I also don’t necessarily want to talk about the graphics, and the combat, and the sound, and the voice acting, and the mini-games, and the differences between the first game and the sequel. I mean, I do want to talk about it, or at least acknowledge it. Suffice it to say, everything that was good about the first game is 100x better in the second game, and everything that sucked is gone. And if nothing else, it’s probably the best looking game on the 360 right now; I’m having trouble coming up with something that looks better. But again, that’s not what I want to talk about right now.

This is what I want to talk about: Mass Effect 2 is not an RPG. It is, rather, a role-playing game.

I had attempted, a long time ago, to articulate this distinction. I had just finished my first playthrough of Mass Effect 1, as a matter of fact, and was having trouble getting into Eternal Sonata.

I like Eternal Sonata, but I’m having a hard time really getting into it, and I think part of that is because Mass Effect was still running through my bloodstream. But more to the point – I don’t really understand where the RPG is in Eternal Sonata, and to extrapolate that even further, I’m not sure there’s a lot of RPG in most games that call themselves RPGs.

Unless I’m incredibly misguided, RPG stands for “role playing game”, and I deem that to mean that my player character is something I have an incredible amount of control over – not just in terms of managing stats and armaments, but what they actually do. The problem is that the vast majority of RPGs that I’ve played really just have you managing stats and armaments – you’re still doing what the game tells you to do, and your basic choice comes down to using magic or using swords.

And this is why Mass Effect 2 feels like such a revelation. There’s no loot in the game. In the first Mass Effect, the inventory management system was a total mess; in ME2, there is almost no inventory to manage at all. You have a few guns, and you upgrade them not by leveling up and getting an arbitrary number added to their stats but by mining for supplies on uncharted worlds. There’s no XP, either – at least, not in the traditional sense. You gain XP by completing missions, rather than by killing things. Which, when you think about it, makes the concept of “gaining experience” something literal.

This is important, I think. Look, I’m all for loot and inventory management and stat bonuses – that stuff is fun when it’s done right, and picking up cool stuff is a pleasing reward, and this is why Borderlands was so successful for me even though there was absolutely no narrative to speak of. But it’s also incredibly artificial, and it takes you out of the moment. The only time you need to look at a menu screen in Mass Effect 2 is if you want to save your game, or to look at your available missions in order to figure out what to do next. (You can still customize your character’s armor and weaponry, should you so choose, and you do that while you’re on your ship, in between missions. It’s all about context.)

Not to make this analogy again, but ME2 feels a lot like GTA in space. There is a central mission path, which takes you all over the place, but you are free to pursue whatever else strikes your fancy whenever you like. The difference is that your character in GTA has a pre-scripted personality; you can do whatever you want, but ultimately you’re really just guiding your dude from point A to point B. Your character in ME2, on the other hand, is very much whoever you want it to be, and the game goes out of its way to make that actually mean something. As in previous Bioware RPGs, you are an active participant in conversations, and ME2’s new “interrupt” feature makes this experience feel even more visceral. You feel more connected to the people you interact with.

It’s this sense of immersion that impresses me the most about ME2. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game’s story, but I’m already heavily invested in my adventure. I truly feel like the commander of a kick-ass, state of the art spaceship. And at this point, I could care less about inventory screens; I just want to go back to it and explore.

>Weekend Recap: preparing for ME2

>Not much to report this weekend, but here’s what’s what:

1. Finally finished my 3rd playthrough of Mass Effect 1, and picked up the Achievement for hitting Level 60. That’s all I wanted to accomplish – hit level 60, and make sure that I could import my character into ME2 with all the stuff I wanted to be in place. (Which is somewhat ridiculous – my first playthrough was all light-side, my second playthrough was deliberately dark-side, which meant that my bases should have been covered. But I guess I wanted whatever perk there may be in hitting Level 60 with a light-side run.) I’m very glad I did so; I feel very much caught up on the story, which is as excellent as I remembered, and now my anticipation level for ME2 is off the friggin’ charts; you don’t need to hear about it. Very tempted to take some sick days in the immediate future.

2. Dabbled a tiny bit in Dark Void, which is, for lack of a better word, janky as all hell. It doles out Achievements like crazy, though, perhaps as an incentive to continue slogging through it. That being said, I will probably just send it back to Gamefly tomorrow morning; ME2 will take up all my available time anyway, and I don’t feel like I need the Achievements that badly. (I hit 50K; that’s enough.)

And so what did you play this weekend?

>Darksiders / Bayonetta

>Finished Darksiders this weekend, and after that I played as much Bayonetta as I could, before it started driving me completely insane – this was right at the beginning of Chapter 5. And then I gave Brutal Legend one more chance, and crammed in a bit more Mass Effect (1).

But first things first. Darksiders is, for lack of a better word, solid. (Which is ironic, considering the constant screen tearing.) It’s got a simple but effective combat system, some interesting and challenging puzzles, a wide variety of environments to explore, and a story that was just engaging enough to keep me motivated through the end, with one of the best set-ups for a sequel I’ve ever seen.

That said, it’s so derivative that it borders on litigious – as you’ve no doubt heard by now if you’ve been paying any attention to its reviews, it’s basically the dark Zelda game that Nintendo will never make, with the Portal gun thrown in, for some reason. So it feels somewhat uninspired – it has a great story set-up, but it doesn’t really do anything special with it. I said before that there are a wide variety of environments, but they’re not really particularly interesting; there’s a lot of dead space to cover in between combat arenas and puzzles, which gets tedious. (You do eventually get a horse, but it can only be ridden in certain areas, and you don’t get it until you’re already at least halfway through the game.)

Still, it’s certainly worth a rental; if it’s derivative, at least it’s stealing from the right places.

Bayonetta, on the other hand, is pure, distilled lunacy. Picture Devil May Cry as a perpetually horny, unintentionally racist teenage boy that’s taken 3 tabs of LSD followed by 20 cans of Red Bull and you begin to approach Bayonetta’s plane of existence. Unfortunately, I don’t do drugs anymore, and I’m not very good at games like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden, so after getting my ass handed to me repeatedly at the beginning of Chapter 5, I came to the realization that no amount of curiosity as to what could possibly happen next was going to outweigh the frustration of not being able to kill whatever the hell was trying to kill me. I’m not entirely sure how what I’d already seen could possibly be topped, even though I’ve been assured that each chapter gets even more insane. Oh well; my loss.

I had lent Brutal Legend to a friend of mine, but his 360 died shortly thereafter and so I got it back. I’d been meaning to give it another shot; I felt terrible that I couldn’t get into it, as if it were somehow my fault, and being that the game is so short I figured I might as well try to get through it. But you know what? It’s not my fault. I hate the Stage Battles. I hated them when I was first learning how to play them, and I hate them now, long after I’d forgotten what the hell I was supposed to be doing. Everything else about that game is fantastic – even the side missions, as repetitive as they are, are fun enough. But GODDAMN I hate the Stage Battles. They are totally unintuitive; the controls are absolute garbage; I get no feedback as to how I’m doing or why I won or lost. I’m so bummed.

And so, then, I’m trying to finish my third playthrough of Mass Effect before ME2 shows up next week. I don’t know that I’ll ever get up to Level 50, as I’m still 80,000 XP short, but that’s not really the point; I just want to make sure that I can start my first playthrough of ME2 with the right story elements in place.

>The 2010 Lust List

>2009 may have been so-so, but 2010 is going to be balls-out AMAZING. In order to help me keep track of all the craziness, here’s a quick list of what I’m looking forward to.

Bold = must-have
Italics = curious / definite rental
Normal = possible rental

JANUARY

  • Darksiders (360)
  • Bayonetta (360)
  • Matt Hazard: Blood Bath & Beyond (PS3)
  • Serious Sam HD (360)
  • Dark Void (360)
  • Mass Effect 2 (360)

FEBRUARY

  • Heavy Rain (PS3)
  • Blur (360)
  • Aliens v. Predator (360)
  • Gran Turismo 5 (PS3)
  • White Knight Chronicles (PS3)
  • Bioshock 2 (360)
  • Dante’s Inferno (360)
  • Splinter Cell Conviction (360)
  • Lost Planet 2 (360)
  • Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing (360)
  • Dead to Rights Retribution (360)

MARCH

  • Final Fantasy XIII (360/PS3)
  • God Of War 3 (PS3)
  • Just Cause 2 (360)
  • Ninety-Nine Nights 2 (360)

After that, release dates get hazy, but:

  • Red Dead Redemption
  • Split Second
  • Mafia 2
  • Blur
  • Max Payne 3
  • Alan Wake
  • Alpha Protocol
  • Super Mario Galaxy 2
  • Fallout: New Vegas
  • APB
  • Crackdown 2
  • Batman:AA 2
  • Singularity
  • Dead Rising 2
  • Yakuza 3

2010 looks amazing. And expensive.

Games of the Decade

It’s year-end recap season, obviously, and even if the decade isn’t technically over until next year, these are certainly the end of the 00s, which means it’s decade recap season as well. (In case you’re curious, here are my decade recaps of music and books.)

It occurs to me that my personal decade recap of videogames is, in part, a eulogy. I can call up any album I’ve ever owned on my iPod, and I’m already well on my way towards acquiring a similarly era-spanning library on my Kindle, but I’m not entirely sure I could play Crazy Taxi on my HDTV without having to run out and buy an appropriate set of cables; hell, ever since I got the original Xbox back in 2002, my Dreamcast has been sitting in a box in a closet, and right now I’m not sure that I even have my original Xbox anymore. And, of course, whenever I play a PS1 title on my PS3, it takes me a little while to get used to how fuzzy and low-res everything is. When I played Final Fantasy VII earlier this year, I had a very difficult time believing that this was (at the time) the most beautiful game ever made.

The point is, with a shortage of cabinet space and in the absence of backwards compatibility (and/or pirating/hacking), a lot of my favorite games in the first half of the 00s are games that I’m probably never going to be able to play again – and even if I could, I’m not entirely sure that I’d want to. Let’s take FF7 as an example again – I never played it when it originally came out, so I have no original glow of memory to compare it to. But even by today’s JRPG standards – a genre that is incredibly reluctant to evolve in any truly significant way – it’s a bit antiquated. Sure, you can still play it, but it’s missing features that I’ve grown accustomed to. Similarly, an FPS like Quake 2 – one of my personal favorites, a game that I’ve played through numerous times – just feels dated now. Graphics have changed, sure, but so too has storytelling.

Which is a long way of saying that a 10-year recap of videogaming, especially considering the technological advances of this particular decade, is somewhat problematic. Videogames, as a medium (dare I call it an art form?), have evolved almost to the point of being unrecognizable. I now take 1080p, wireless controllers and online voice chat for granted, and I’m more or less ready for digital distribution to be my primary method of acquisition – hell, I’ve already been doing that with Steam on my PC for years. And these are all things that never would have occurred to me 10 years ago as being necessary.

That being said, there’s a nice symmetry for me here. While I was rabid about videogames when I was a little kid (the Atari 2600 era), I wasn’t really agog until my friend bought a PS1 in 1998, with which we played Oddworld and Crash Bandicoot almost every single night. And I didn’t own my own console until December 1999, when my then-girlfriend bought me a Dreamcast as a birthday present. So in many ways, the last 10 years have been all I’ve ever had to go on.

So: please pardon any obvious gaps in the ensuing post. I’m doing my best with what I have.

CONSOLE OF THE DECADE. This is undoubtedly the PS2, and here comes the first aforementioned obvious gap – I never owned one. I loved my Dreamcast fiercely, which took me through the first few years, and when the opportunity arose (on 9/11/2002, as a matter of fact) I opted for the Xbox, specifically because of Munch’s Oddysee. (Really.) But I’m not an idiot. The PS2 still sells upwards of 100K units a month these days, and I’m not above admitting that I’ve considered getting one just so that I could play all the great PS2 games that I missed – FF10, FF12, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, etc. (The recent release of the God of War Collection, however, has sated that need for the time being.)

BEST STORY. I should probably mention here that these categories and their respective winners are of my own personal choosing; I’d originally intended this post to be a larger, collaborative effort between me and some friends, but for whatever reason that kinda fell apart. That being said, there was a considerable amount of debate over certain categories, this being one of them. Fellow SFTC scribe Gred felt that this was Half-Life 2’s category, and I can certainly agree that Valve’s approach to storytelling has always been unique and innovative. That being said, I’ve played all of the Half-Life saga multiple times, from the original game and its expansion packs up through HL2 Episode 2, and I’m not sure I’d ever really be able to articulate what’s going on beyond the basic Humans v. Combine conflict. Ultimately, for me, this category falls between two distinct titles, and I’m giving it to Grand Theft Auto 4. Niko’s story is by turns tragic, hilarious, nihilistic and redemptive, and it features some of the best dialogue and voice acting the medium has ever seen. For once in a GTA game, the story was every bit as impressive as the technology.

FAVORITE “WOW” MOMENT. I could easily write a 1000-word post on this category alone; there’s almost too many to choose from. To be honest, though, a lot of those “wow” moments stem from graphical showcases – pretty much all of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Bioshock and Uncharted 2 would fall into that category. Certainly almost every car crash in every Burnout game has generated an audible “wow”, as well as the first few times I played with Half-Life 2’s gravity gun – and then, similarly, the first few times I played with the Portal gun. There was a part of me that was tempted to give this to GTA3 – not because of any particular bit of mayhem I had caused, but rather that I was able to find a quiet seaside cliff and watch the sun rise over the ocean, and that it was beautiful to see and hear. But there’s really no question that this particular moment goes to the plot twist reveal in Knights of the Old Republic, which is the only time that I’ve ever literally dropped the controller from my hands and had my jaw drop involuntarily. I still get chills when I think about how that went down. I had played as a light-side Jedi the entire time, and I’d really gotten absorbed in the story and the characters, and when it was revealed who I actually was…. wow.

MOST OVERLOOKED/UNDERRATED GAME. It’s funny; when I was putting this post together, this was one of the first categories I came up with, and Voodoo Vince was going to be my winner. It may have been just a shallow platformer, but it had a great visual style and one of the best soundtracks I’d ever heard. But then I remembered Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, and it occurred to me that I can’t logically award this category to the first game that pops into my head. (And while I love it dearly, I never considered Beyond Good & Evil for this category – it was overlooked and underplayed, but it was also (and still is) a critical darling, which O:SW never was.) O:SW was a truly unique first-person shooter in so many ways – the live ammo concept was brilliant, and it took full advantage of the Old West setting. But it also had a great story, a quirky (if somewhat juvenile) sense of humor, and utterly fantastic production values from top to bottom… and almost nobody bought it. It more or less sunk Oddworld Inhabitants as a game developer, and it made EA pretty wary of original IP for a few years.

MOST UBIQUITOUS FEATURE THAT HAS GROWN TIRESOME: Take your pick from the following:

  • celebrity voice acting
  • Nolan North (great voice actor, but he’s in friggin’ everything)
  • light bloom
  • cloth physics
  • “open world sandbox”
  • amnesia in JRPGs
  • post-apocalyptic wastelands
  • game titles with colons
  • zombies
  • Nazis
  • the Unreal engine
  • Quick-Time Events
  • expensive, oversized peripherals with limited usage (i.e., plastic instruments, everything that isn’t the standard Wii remote)

The one that’s starting to grate on me the most, though, is the overuse of moral choices. It was genuinely interesting in KOTOR, but now it feels a bit almost like a cop-out on the part of the developers, freeing them up from having the responsibility to tell an actual story – and considering that most games have dumb stories to begin with, it feels even more lazy. I’m all for branching paths, customization and games that change based on the decisions you make, but more often than not these moral choices are really just “be nice” or “be a jerk”, and then you turn slightly more blue or red, and maybe you’ll get a few new powers, and then at the end you’ll see a slightly different cutscene. I’d like to see games in general improve their storytelling, since it almost always feels like an afterthought, and they can start by having some balls and committing to a plot.

BEST YEAR. This has to go to 2007, doesn’t it? Consider: Mass Effect, Bioshock, Portal (and the Orange Box), Call of Duty 4, Super Mario Galaxy, Halo 3. And that was all more or less in the second half of the year. That’s INSANE. 2008 is pretty close, and 2010 looks to be pretty amazing as well, but those 6 games I listed above alone put 2007 over the edge; I’m sure there’s at least 10 more hidden gems that I’m not recalling.

BEST GAME I NEVER ACTUALLY FINISHED. I first played Grand Theft Auto 3 on my PC; then I bought it as part of the Double Pack for my original Xbox; and then, during a lull, I played it again on my 360 just to see if there was any discernible difference in graphical fidelity. I’ve probably spent more cumulative time with GTA3 than any other game this decade (and if not, it’s certainly pretty close). And yet, after how many hours (probably 150 or so), I’ve still never seen the ending. And I’m probably never going to – as fond as I am of that game, the controls are beyond archaic, now, and the punishment for failing a mission is too severe.

BEST FRANCHISE. Certainly there’s a number of big-name nominees for this – Halo, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Solid, Call of Duty, Gears of War (and some personal favorites like Burnout and Uncharted) – but none of them had the seismic impact that Grand Theft Auto did. GTA changed everything. It might not have invented the concept of non-linear gameplay, but it certainly made it the most fun, and it easily reached the biggest audience. It fundamentally changed not only how we played games, but our expectations of what a game was capable of doing. I’m going to quote Caro here, from our behind-the-scenes discussions – this was actually from her “Biggest ‘Wow’ Moment”:

I’m not sure anything compares to the moment I first took control in GTA3. My jaw literally dropped in amazement. I couldn’t believe it. Never before and never since have I been so aware of experiencing something that was going to change games–and, to some extent, our wider culture–forever. After spending my whole life in games whose environments were ripped from science fiction and fantasy, here was a world that bore a dark resemblance to my own, a grimy, dirty city that really felt alive. Music played on the radio. Rain fell from the sky. I could run over old ladies walking down the street. It was exhilarating. It was extraordinary. It was as if it was something I had always craved, without realizing it.

And now, my FAVORITE GAMES OF THE DECADE, in chronological order.

But first, some HONORABLE MENTIONS:

  • Batman: Arkham Asylum. My #2 game of 2009, and one that I can’t wait to play again.
  • Crackdown. Orbs, how I love thee.
  • Mass Effect. Maybe it wasn’t the true KOTOR sequel I was hoping for, but it was a fully realized sci-fi epic which lived up to its ambitions, elevators be damned.
  • Mercenaries 2. Of all the GTA clones, this was the best, and it did a lot of things better than GTA itself did.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4. In spite of how completely in(s)ane the story is, the gameplay is legitimately thrilling.
  • No One Lives Forever. It’s a shame this never saw a console port; more people might have played it. This game oozed style and was genuinely funny.
  • Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Yeah, the combat sucks. But everything else about it is glorious.
  • Psychonauts. I don’t even mind the Meat Circus, to be honest.
  • Skies of Arcadia. Still my favorite JRPG.
  • Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. This was the best of the original Xbox games, with graphics that are still jaw-dropping.
  • SSX 3. The best snowboarding game ever made, for whatever that might be worth (probably not much), but an exhilarating experience all the same.
  • Super Mario Galaxy. I haven’t finished it, but I can’t deny that it’s an incredible experience.


Rayman 2, Dreamcast, 2000. According to Wikipedia, this came out in the Spring of 2000, which means its eligible. I’m going to call it – this is my favorite 3D platformer of all time. It was genuinely charming, which is all the more impressive considering the game featured a lead character with no limbs and a language that was entirely gibberish. It had a save-the-world story but it was told with genuine pathos, and the world you were saving was filled with lush detail and was absolutely joyous to behold. It was easy to pick up, it never got frustrating, and it was expertly paced. Even now, all these years later, I can’t help but smile whenever I think about it… and I get genuinely bummed out when I see what’s become of the franchise. (Not that Raving Rabbids isn’t fun, or whatever, but, I mean… come on.)

Knights of the Old Republic, Xbox, 2003. I’ve already spoken of its plot twist, but the game underneath it is not too shabby, either; this was not only the best Star Wars property since the original trilogy, but it’s one of the best RPGs ever made. It took the concept of a “role playing game” quite literally, which is partly why the aforementioned plot twist hit me so hard – I was thoroughly involved in my character’s development from the get-go, and I never saw it coming. Every character in the game is richly drawn and expertly acted; the worlds you explore are rich with detail. You feel invested. I’m having a hard time remembering just how the combat worked, but it worked well enough that I didn’t ever have a problem with it (unlike, say, Dragon Age). Yeah, the frame rate bogged down every so often, and you couldn’t really look up; but that was besides the point; for 40 hours, I was a Jedi.

Burnout 3, Xbox, 2004. As far as I’m concerned, Burnout 3 changed the driving genre forever. It was faster than anything I’d ever seen; hell, it was the most spectacular game I’d ever seen. It took the main obstacle from other driving games – crashing – and made it an explosive, interactive, integral part of the experience. And the fact that it could be played online… I’ve still never played as much of a game online as I did with Burnout 3.

World of Warcraft, PC, 2004. I wasn’t originally going to include WoW; I’m a little ashamed of it. I lost more hours of my life to WoW than I care to admit; I took sick days from work, I missed band rehearsals, I stopped hanging out with my wife. And I never even hit 60! Let’s move on.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Xbox, 2005. I’ve written too much about GTA in this post alone, so I’ll keep this brief. Each entry in the GTA franchise has been a landmark experience, and what’s truly remarkable is that even though they’re all similarly designed, each one has a unique and distinct personality. If I had to pick one, though, I’d pick San Andreas, which was so stuffed with things to do that they actually scaled back for GTA4.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Xbox 360, 2006. I’m not entirely sure how much time I spent playing GTA3, but my save file for Oblivion tells me I spent 110 hours with it; I got every Achievement for it and played all the DLC for it. And I still have quests I never finished!

Portal, PC/360, 2007. I wish I had graduated from high school in 2007, just so that I could have used “The cake is a lie” as a yearbook quote. Anyway, I don’t know what to say about Portal that hasn’t been said a hundred times better by a hundred different writers. There was something truly special about this game, and I think that’s why it keeps getting talked about; nobody had ever seen anything like it, and we’re all still waiting to see anything approach it. It took enormous risks in its narrative, and yet it seems so effortless because of how hilarious it is. It slowly taught you how to play it, and then it threw everything out the window and tried to kill you. I can’t possibly imagine what Valve must be going through as it develops the sequel (and you are developing a sequel, right, Valve?); I have absolutely no idea how it can be topped or improved upon.

Bioshock, Xbox 360, 2007. Certainly one of the most atmospheric games I’ve ever played; the graphics and art design are certainly top-notch but it’s the sound design that really puts this one over the top. “Would you kindly” never quite got the same traction that “The cake is a lie” did, but it certainly resonates deeply with those who were taken by surprise. And count me as one of the many whose belief was firmly suspended for the entire ride; after I finished the game I read a number of articles by smart writers who ripped the game apart for certain plot holes and contrivances. Maybe I’m dumb. But I fell for this game, hard.

Rock Band 2, Xbox 360, 2008. As a musician, I’ve always been a little skeptical about music games; as a NYC resident, storage space is at a premium, and I can’t necessarily justify having plastic instruments lying around my apartment. But as a human being, there are few greater thrills than feeling like you’re playing your favorite song with your best friends. There’s a reason why cover bands still get paid these days; people like hearing their favorite songs. Similarly, there’s a reason why an evite with “Rock Band?” as a subject will get immediate affirmative responses.

Uncharted 2, PS3, 2009. My #1 game of the year, but also just a staggering achievement from top to bottom. If I had known back in 2000 that games could eventually look and play like this, I’m not entirely sure I know how I would have managed to cope with all the bullshit I’d have to play in the interim.