The Game Critique

Well, PopMatters put up their list of top 20 games of 2011. I was a proud participant in their first ever end of year list for games. Back in December G. Christopher Williams put out an email that we were doing this and despite it only coming out recently all the decisions and blurb writing was completed obstinately before the new year. It was done by having all of us listing our favorite games of the year in order and our editor did some voodoo math to come out with this list. First thing I said out loud upon seeing it: “This list makes no f-ing sense.” Yep, self censor and everything.

For reference here’s the list:

20. Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars
19. Dead Island
18. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
17. Battlefield 3
16. Mortal Kombat
15. Shadows of the Damned
14. Gears of War 3
13. Deus Ex: Human Revolution
12. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception
11. Batman: Arkham City
10. Fate of the World
09. Assassin’s Creed Revelations
08. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
07. Dragon Age 2
06. Inside a Star-filled Sky
05. Dead Space 2
04. L.A. Noire
03. Catherine
02. Portal 2
01. Bastion

Again, I say, this list makes no f-ing sense. It doesn’t look like any other lists out there, but that’s not what bugs me. Nor is it that a number of these games wouldn’t be anywhere near my top games of 2011 list. Or the order of certain games. I can totally understand Dragon Age 2 over Skyrim, especially knowing who works at the Moving Pixels blog. I can also get past the fact that Driver: San Francisco was completely overlooked. After all I hadn’t gone on my promoting spree across 4 different sites yet. No, I don’t really have an issue with the list, it’s just really really weird. Logic doesn’t seem to enter into the equation and I end up thinking more about how on earth this came together rather than feeling any unique voice to the site and the culture it embodies.

That’s not entirely true of course. Like I mentioned before the Dragon Age 2 above Skyrim speaks volumes on our priorities. That both blurbs were written by Mattie Brice just adds to it. Catherine coming in third also says something, what I’m not sure. Portal 2 and Bastion are both rather conventional picks for top honors, because they totally deserve them, so it’s what comes after that speaks to our collective tastes. Honestly, a big shocker to me was Fate of the World coming in at #10. It deserves to be there, but I don’t know anyone other than Jorge Albor and myself who have actually played it. Either a small group put it extra high or a lot of people just haven’t mentioned it.

I think what throws this off, is not the unconventional picks for top honor, nor certain absentees that have been noted in the comments. They explained why they weren’t there in the podcast about this list (no one on staff had played them yet.) It’s the rhetorical order of them. Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars coming in at #20 makes sense in looking it over, doubly so for the average reader. It’s an indie game they’ve never heard of at the very bottom of the list. No one is going to complain. It’s conventional to squeeze something in at the bottom. Dead Island speaks to what we as a staff thought of it, not that great, but solid enough. Then you smack the reader with Skyward Sword at #18. Ok, even fanboys have to admit there has been backlash against the game recently. Any fanboy complaints will take that into account in their screeds. But the reader is reeling at the surprise of seeing it so low on the list. Then Battlefield 3 comes in, followed by Mortal Kombat and Shadows of the Damned. Were these three games on anyone’s talking list for GotY. Then we go back to conventions, strong AAA end of year releases not quite as good as their predecessors. The logic behind them where they are makes sense. It’s understandable. Then a minor quibble with Batman. You can see how maybe this group didn’t think it was the bees knees like other sites did. But it’s ahead of other action games, it’s still in relation to other games that are comparable and it makes sense. Then you throw Fate of the World in their face, a game I can guarantee they’ve never heard of. It’s in the top 10 what the hell. Above all these other critically acclaimed games that I have heard of. This threw me through a loop because I didn’t know any of my fellow writers even knew of it. The Critical-Distance editors sure didn’t. The Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, generally considered the worst in the series. It could be accepted an understood in relation to other titles if they weren’t still reeling from Fate of the World. Oh Skyrim, thank you Skyrim familiar territory…Dragon Age 2 what the hell!!! Again an argument I think could have been made and understood if not agreed with were it not for the reeling still going on.

Inside the Star-filled Sky…ok I think you’ve broken our dear reader. He wont make much fuss, but it’s getting a little awkward with him just sitting there. What makes it doubly weird, it’s only the third indie game on the list. Were it more populated with smaller, flash, downloadables etc one could understand the mindset of the people behind it. They like indies over the AAA cheeseburgers. The reader puts himself in a different mindset expecting something else. They expect artsy fartsy stuff they’ve never heard of, but now might try. Instead they’re in a AAA mindset with levels of story being their driving factor as evidenced by Dragon Age 2 over Skyrim, but wait Mortal Kombat is in there and Battlefield three. Ok he’s drooling now. Dead Space 2.

Once said reader has stopped hopping up and down to a chorus of “that came out last year?” It’s another head-scratcher as it was forgotten and to be this high doesn’t meld with the lists narrative from previous Action titles that came before. Then L.A. Noire, which works on a list where story is king, but such a list this is not. Catherine, while it says a lot coming from the top on down, is dumbfounding coming in the other direction. It’s not just that the list doesn’t conform to other people’s opinion, it’s that it doesn’t seem to conform to an internal logic of priorities of the people making said list. (I stop here because Portal 2 and Bastion make all kinds of sense, though it’s a little late for the reader’s faculties.) Artistic statements mixed with story priority games, next to message games, next to riproaring B movie action games, world building and character building all in the top 10.

Said reader was me when I first read this list. Some choices were baffling all on their own, but it’s the lack of any internal logic to what the staff prioritized as personal preferences in picking particularly pleasant play proceedings to present to the petulant people. Hence what I meant when I said it made no f-ing sense. Of course the blurbs don’t really help in this regard as they only explain what we liked about the game and not in how it relates to the rest of the list. I don’t think we could have done that anyway, because this isn’t anyone’s list really. Maybe that makes for a better site to see such diversity.

Of course, what I’m really saying is I would love to see the math that lead to this. There has got to be an interesting story or two in there. I meant to ask back in December, but then the Critical-Distance projects took over so that idea got pushed aside. Take a gander at what we had to say about each game. I had the privilege of making my case for Fate of the World and Portal 2. Oh yeah, and Mike Schiller wrote one hell of an intro to the whole thing.

Before I get to my top 5 games I want to give out some honorable mentions to games I played some of, but not enough for me to feel comfortable honoring in my official list. These are games that I either only played the demo to or just didn’t get far enough to pass full judgment on, but in either case impressed me enough to warrant a mention.

First is Avadon: The Black Fortress. This is a massive cRPG based in old school isometric design with deep characters and lore that feels relevant to the story to are taking part in. I only played the demo, but I still put almost a dozen hours into the game and never reached the end of the demo. I can’t imagine how much more there is to this game, but I bought it and will be finding out. Everything about it looks dated and indie, but that’s because the game put the effort into what counted, the story, the interface, the characters and the feel. This is the successor to the Baldur’s Gate style of RPG that the big guys have left behind.

Next, Outland, a metroidvania style game with Ikaruga inspired color-switching mechanics combined with a tribal African aesthetic. It’s a beautiful and original looking game with simple tried and true mechanics, but unlike Castlevania games, it’s sprawl doesn’t get out of hand and back tracking is kept to a minimum when it comes to the story. The bosses are interesting and kept as unique challenges throughout the game. Again, a game I’ve put at least 10 hours into and have barely gotten anywhere.

Thirdly, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. I got this game for Christmas that I hadn’t heard anything about it until very recently when it started showing up in awards and end of year lists. I’ve only had the time for the opening, but so far it looks like an innovative and well-constructed adventure game. It already has me hooked with an intriguing mystery and bizarre style all its own.

With that said, let’s get into my top 5.

5

The Stanley Parable, a Half-Life 2 mod that I’ve played probably a dozen times by now. It’s simple choose your own adventure style of game taking place in a 3d environment with a narrator very aware of what is going on. Depending on how well you follow instructions is how meta the narrator gets. It is an allegory on the nature of video game storytelling that plays out with you rather than in spite of you.

4

Driver: San Francisco was a game that was overlooked at every turn and had no right to be. Part of the problem has to be with how it was shown to us at E3. In short bursts it seems like an insane idea and cool for a few seconds, but incredibly stupid afterwards. And it is, but the shift mechanic is a slow burn. Showing off what can be done isn’t the same as experiencing it. After a while you begin to process what can be done with the concept and what happens as a consequence. It becomes part strategy, part world building and part psychological drama. This magical realism the world is imbued with doesn’t only explain gaming conventions, but makes them apart of the story.

3

Fate of the World is what I wished more games could be. Explaining a difficult world through deceptively simple mechanics. It makes me think of The Wire in that the game is about systems and what those systems mean to the world. How the different elements interact and the complicated concepts affect everything else. I tried to explain it and made it sounds awful. That’s because I’m not sure it is a came that can be explained, it is a game that must be experienced to be understood. Did it teach me specific things about the world? Some. Did it teach me why things don’t always work? Yes. Did it teach me that when push comes to shove I will make some choices I find despicable by themselves? Absolutely. That alone is what great art does.

2

Bastion is the indie darling of the year, but unlike previous year’s indie darlings this one doesn’t go for obscuring it’s story or what it is about. That is right front and center. The world has ended in the Calamity and the Narrator is explaining the story as you play it out. You find your way to the Bastion and do the only thing you can, rebuild. The music highlights the thematic journey and gives a spiritual resonance as well as old west tang. It is a fantasy western from top to bottom. It’s part of an increasingly large cadre of games that is melding the verbs you perform in game to what the story is trying to convey. Now go build the wall up on the hill.

1

Portal 2 is on paper a game that has no right to exist. Portal the first was as perfect as a video game can be and really left no loose ends that needed tying up. But trust in Valve we did and what we got a spectacular game that push the boundaries of the first in ways we didn’t expect. It increased the size of the world and the length of the game, but more importantly it increased the thematic scope of the game. Where other sequels feel empty with their extra space filled by the same amount of ideas as the first, Portal 2 fills that space with expanded themes derived from the first by go far more in depth and cover a wider range of details.

I didn’t know what game was going to be my favorite until I sat down to think about it. In fact it came to me while recording the end of year Critical Distance Confab. I realized while examining the game and thinking what that experience was that it couldn’t be anything else by my Game of the Year. Realizing what Valve had given us made me tear up. This hasn’t been a great year for me or really for most people. And in all that I had the good fortune to play what will be remembered one of the greatest games of all time. It is excellent in every regard and personally hits the mark when it comes to my personal biases with regards to themes and storytelling. I said it before, but I’ll say it again here because I don’t get to say it often. Thank you Valve.

And so ends the third full year of me trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing. Thank you for whatever readership I’ve garnered in that time and for continue to stick around. In looking over my work here at The Game Critique I find that I did indeed write more this year than last (33 posts to last year’s 24) and that much of my writing hasn’t happened here. Most of the posts here at my blog are External Sources to my work elsewhere and this is by no means a bad thing. In fact I’m grateful to Ian, Patricia, and Christopher for giving me the opportunity to write for them.

While I started writing for PopMatters’ Moving Pixels blog only in December on a biweekly schedule, and consequently only got a single post published before the winter break, I think it’s a great post highlighting Desert Bus for Hope charity drive, an event I was hooked on for a whole week. In companion to my Moving Pixel’s piece I created a video gallery on this blog to highlight some of the best and most entertaining moments of the whole event.

I started much earlier with Nightmare Mode. Thankfully they let me write whatever I want there and have a great editorials staff willing to talk at great length to make sure your piece is the best it can be. My first post was a repost of my Enslaved piece, the first post of the year, but with editorial oversight, so this is the version you should read. I followed that up with a Ninja Theory companion essay on Heavenly Sword. Then a piece on the Atmosphere of Limbo and Another World that got a big enough response to warrant an in depth reply and further critical discourse in the comments. (Again, the Nightmare Mode repost has editorial oversight and is the better version.) After that began the series of posts on racing games. It has been a bit difficult to get on a weekly Thursday schedule going (a self-imposed schedule), but I am getting better and hopefully I can stick to it in the new year.

At Gameranx, I did a number of top X lists and while not too notable in themselves, I like to think that they are part of an effort to elevate the concept of the top X list itself. Additionally I wrote a feature on what Action/Adventure games are and it lead me to a new area of theoretical thinking. I breach the topic here. I say breach because the response was such that is going to take several more posts in the new year to iron out all the thoughts on game genres.

With all these posts elsewhere, I’ve take a page out of Jorge and Scott of Experience Points’ book by writing up a short companion piece to my posts that appear elsewhere. This has a double benefit of letting the essay be a better more focused work by allowing extra tidbits.

Once again I tried to start up my Indie Game Spotlight series, but could only manage two posts. I was driven to write about The Stanley Parable by its exploration of storytelling, a favorite theme of mine. The other Indie Game Spotlight I wrote was on p0nd, a game I finally got around to writing about. I want to keep up with this series as I had many more minor games I wanted to write a couple hundred words on, but I seem incapable.

Another running theme this year is my focus on books towards gaming as a whole. I reviewed Jane McGonigol’s Reality is Broken and Aaron Dignan’s Game Frame. Neither of which I particularly liked. But I also read A Reader’s Manifesto and how pertinent it was to the modern state of game reviews and cultural ideology toward them.

Massive critical response take downs were other theme. While I could consider my Limbo response a part of that, I’m talking about the link by line take down of arguments I not only disagree with, but also are flat out wrong. These arguments have factual difficulties and problems with the very concepts they were trying to deal with. This is the second time I pulled apart one of DanC’s piece A Blunt Critique of Game Criticism. At 15 pages not many people got all the way through it, but I’m proud of the achievement. I do wish that I didn’t have to so harsh with DanC every single time, because he is an excellent thinker. Incidentally he has invited me out for a drink should we ever meet in person. The other huge take down I have much less qualms about given the original post. I would have ignored had it appeared on writer’s own blog and not Edge. The title of my response says it all: Better the World Think You a Fool than to Open Your Mouth and Prove It Right.

Overall this year was the not the best. In fact were it not for the changes in the last several weeks I would have considered this one of the worst years I’ve ever had the misfortune of living through. Just a constant personal misery and doubt pervaded nearly the whole first half of the year, culminating in August in my Existential Critical Crisis. Writing that was more cathartic that I could have ever suspected as it acting as a way to expel all the horrendous bile that has built up on my soul. And thanks to that post, almost as a karmic response, I was offered a staff position on Moving Pixels and Nightmare Mode both. So in the end things worked out pretty well for me.

This year was one of disappointment for me on the whole. For most of the year I was sidetracked by other mediums and a lot of real life problems got in the way. Then I lost my entire site for a day and while I had a backup of the text I lost all the pictures. This was a massive loss. My posts use images not only as breaks, but rhetorically to make points or enhance the writing. I lost screen captures and pictures of tweets now long lost to the archives of twitter. And then there is the matter of my PAX East photo trip. I have all the pictures, but the hassle of putting them all back in. Not just that post, but also the rest of them. It is a level of aggravation I’m not sure I want to contend with. Though in the end, while I may not have a job at the moment, I feel I have direction and responsibility enough to keep moving forward. I’ve got a theory series in the works and a huge stack of games to play through. I’m not at a loss of things to write bout and not at a loss of platforms to write them on. In fact I’ve been thinking on starting another blog or tumblr for my thoughts on the other media I consume: movies, TV, comic books. I’m leaving things open this time around and see where 2012 will go one day at a time.

Oh and I finally stopped cataloging The Ebert Response this year and as if by magic, they stopped being written.

So, I’m leaving this to last possible moment this year…again. But I have a better excuse than last time of not being able to decide. This time it’s because my time has been filled with other projects, the most notable, or at least the one that has been revealed was the rebirth of the Critical Distance podcast.

Suffice to say I also haven’t played all that many games from this year. I missed out on most if not all of the major releases and most of the secondary releases. This is all depending on your deification of AAA release and AA or A release. I also had a bit of trouble deciding on which game I thought was the best. There was no supreme standout like ’08 or at least a powerful shortlist like in ’09. As I said on the CDC podcast, this year seemed to be a bunch of lackluster releases. All had great promise and all seemed to trip over themselves in some way or another. Even those that some have said didn’t, I haven’t got around to playing yet. I’m still waiting for a laptop with a dedicated graphics card so I can play the Mass Effects and Metro 2033. Bayonetta, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Red Dead are all sitting in my play next pile having got them over the Christmas break.

It’s not surprising since I was broke for a good amount of the year and spent 3 full months getting reading for and taking a language class to graduate. Now it just sounds like I’m making excuses, let’s get on with it. There won’t be a long set up and handing out of awards, but before I announce my game of the year I’d like to get talk about my honorable mention.

Honorable Mention

Minecraft was the breakout hit of the year, literally coming out of nowhere to being a million dollar seller. The fact that or most of the year it was is alpha is absolutely incredible. The creative force behind the game comes from the player almost if not more so than the creator. Both the creative and the survival aspects of the game create a special sort of game that creates a unique and personal experience for every individual. There are many things about the game that subvert many of the notions of modern AAA gaming. There is no instruction manual requiring you either to figure it out before night falls or search the internet for only the most basic of facts about what can and needs to be done. There is no real goal once you create a basic shelter; you make your own fun. It’s the digital equivalent of going to the park. There are monkey bars, there are slides, there are swings, but the fun you get out of it is only what you put into it.

Before the October 31st update, I created two worlds and spent most of my time in large dungeons/cave complexes I found. In the second world I found a mountain and started to dig a D&D style dungeon before digging straight down and hit a large cave complex. I spent days exploring and ended up getting lost in circles and then three dimensional figure eights. I went further into the system where figure eights blended with more figure eights. Eventually I hit bedrock in several locations. I nicknamed it Barad dur. I didn’t even get to finish exploring it. I failed at building a bridge across a lake of lava.

I built another world after the October 31st update to see the new biomes and other features Notch had coded into the game. Unfortunately for all the universal praise I could give the game’s design, creation and otherwise soul it came with a memory leak. A basic, 16 bit game after a few minutes eventually monopolizes over half of my computer’s processor and third of my ram, over a full gig. I can play only with every other nonessential program turned off and few of the essential programs and only for a limited amount of time before the frame rate makes it unplayable. I wish I could still play the game and maybe it will be fixed by some update in the future. I hope so, because I’d like to continue extending my Barad dur and build my great wall. Because of this major technical hiccup I can’t really rate the game. Without this issue, it would have been my runner up, or maybe even my game of the year.

Runner-Up

Heavy Rain was and is a game plagued with problems and issues. The walking is stilted, the story is full of holes, actions scenes come and go that make little or no sense, characters are stupid and the dialogue wasn’t written or translated by a native English speaker. I think the game is great despite it’s flaws. For all that it does bad, it creates a world and sinks you into it. All modern AAA talk about immersion, Heavy Rain succeeds by having a story and set pieces that are quiet. Explosions and gunfights are not the word here, in fact when these things happen it breaks the immersion somewhat. The best scenes are those that allow quiet contemplation about what you are making these characters do.

The third trial is the most talked about scene in the game, so I’m sure no one minds if I go on about it as well. I cannot tell you the tension this scene filled me with. I can’t think of any movie or book made me feel so terrified or shaking by watching a man sitting in a chair. That’s really all you are looking at while you manage his breathing. Just so the screen will stop it’s slight shaking. If you succeed you are give a clean opportunity to cut off your own finger. The fact that the game sets this up, so you would okay with it, but became complicit. Yes, Metal Gear Solid 3 broke this ground, but that’s all it did. It broke the ground and it took a lot of people off their guard. The impact of the scene was inherited not really because of the story or action, but its impact is from the realization the game is making you pull the trigger. It crosses that line from QTE to moment, by virtue it was a basic mechanic of the game you spent hours mastering. In Heavy Rain, it is the same mechanic used for a large variety of actions. With this setup context is everything. The abstract and representational nature of the mechanics amplified the context and the actions we were taking.

The game also had something almost no other game had, which I was grateful for: quiet and slow moments. Many have unrightfully called the beginning boring. It was slow, that is not the same as boring. Modern gaming has set us up with certain expectations and when a game defies even one of them, every claims it is bad this or that without even looking at what the game was doing. Heavy Rain was giving us contrast. Action heavy scenes only have meaning if they can be contrasted with slower scenes of quiet intensity. For all the details that were Heavy Rain’s failing, its structure, something I’ve been harping on nearly all year, is excellent. It’s pacing is right on point to tell the story it was trying to tell and matched mechanics to suit it. Everything flowed together and builds a solid super structure on which they could hang the dressings. Pity they chose moth eaten rags, nearly pretty and shiny rags, but rags nonetheless.

It’s the complicity that I loved in Heavy Rain more than anything else. It create a situation where failure wasn’t the end all be all. Every ending was legitimate, from the saccharine sweet to the soul crushingly depraved and everything in between. It really was a what-if mystery. Maybe not so much with whodunit, if you were paying attention (I wasn’t paying close attention), but rather in what will happen next. It is a roller coaster, but not the Michael Bay type and thank goodness for that.

Game of the Year

Neptune’s Pride is an online real time strategy game that takes about a month to complete. It is slow moving RTS, with ships taking hours if not days to travel between stars. It’s rather bare bones with only you only able to upgrade the three attributes of a star: economy, industry and science. The first gives you more money in the daily pay out; the second gives you more ships per day and science, which makes research towards tech, go faster. Combat automatically happens and can be calculated ahead of time. There are no random chances to any part of this game. I’d call it the chess of RTS, but you aren’t given full or perfect information. You can only see the space with scanning range of your stars. You can contact the other players and can trade with them. This is where the game takes itself to the next level.

This is a game where you can lose friends or come to hate strangers. The game becomes more an exercise in trust and betrayal than it is strategy. You can get through the early game with strategy alone, maybe, but if you haven’t set something up, something in the wings you will be destroyed. I lost a game today, because I didn’t foster any sort of relationships with my neighbors and went first in everything to 5th place behind two opponents who had been put under AI for inactivity. No video game makes you so nervous to be away from your computer. No game so simple or basic pulls you win and gets you so invested in your empire’s survival.

The ludodecahedron set up a few games in the summer to duke it out. No game caused so much battling on twitter or googlewave as the virtual fighting we did in Neptune’s Pride. Only a rule system as deep as Neptune’s Pride with the added benefit of human cunning mix to create a truly personal and memorable experience. I mastered the strategy, but my undoing is when it comes to betrayal. When it’s time to invade my neighbor, I set up too late. On the other hand I have come in first in two games, with tactics I could regale you with like the master generals.

Neptune’s Pride, a game with real people pit against real people, with no flash or complexity is my game of the year.

It’s been a little over two years since I started The Game Critique. In the past year I wrote fewer posts than before, (only 24 this year) but they definitely have gone up in quality and length. Looking at the posts that I have planned and those that are half finished I find that I may be entering a phase of long form essays. I think and hope I finally may have found my niche and expertise in the critical community that I’ve long been searching in the dark for.

This year was also the year I finally graduated college. I have my BA in English from Boston University. I’ve also found that I enjoy reading massive amounts of games criticism almost as much if not more than playing games sometimes or writing about them. Thankfully this is a useful skill at Critical Distance where I’ve taken on a larger role as the year progressed. In the beginning, March as it were, I was just filling in for Ben as he gallivanted around GDC. It has now turned into a monthly thing. And as of two days ago I restarted the CDC podcast, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time and turns out only took about a week to set up and complete. Both are efforts I will continue in the coming year if Ben will still have me. (It was a long 4 and half hours long.)

In looking back over the last year I realized I only wrote about three games specifically. ‘Where is the Last Third of Brutal Legend?‘ was the first game essay I wrote this year. In the post I challenged classics professor Roger Travis to tell me where I’m wrong in comparing Brutal Legend to the Greek epic. He did so in the comments and I’m grateful for it. Later in the year I managed to write a trio of posts on inFamous and its missed opportunities with each post focusing on different elements of the game. Something I should do with more games in the future.

An ongoing theme in my writing about games this year in the need for structure in games, or rather a need for solid structure in games. I feel too many games drop the ball on something so basic for reasons, I really don’t know what the reasons are. Storytelling structure, which by the way is different from plot structure, is something we have mastered a long time ago and continue to innovate to push it forward, while always adhering to the basics in other media. I sometimes feel the basics are ignored or unknown in the games industry.

You could say this all ties into the Games as Art debate and whether or not they’ve reached that level. Thanks to Roger Ebert a lot of you did and I took it upon myself, I still don’t know why, to catalog these responses and because some people cannot let go, am still cataloging responses. As trite as it is to hate the topic and cry out in exasperation every time someone brings it up, we should know well enough to only use that response with someone who legitimately should know better. A game journalist, a game critic, an industry insider, developer or publisher. To a vast majority of people this was a watershed moment. This was the first time anyone had ever had the idea proposed to them. The reason the topic keeps getting brought up, is because someone will come along, ignorant of all the conversation before hand and say, “well what about this?” We should not go “uugggghhhh,” throw up our hands and condemn them. We will have this debate again, and we should be as calm and reasonable as we were with Ebert. Or at the very least point them to my post. There’s enough reading material there to keep them quiet.

This year was the inaugural PAX East. I was there and have the photos the prove it. It was definitely the post with the most title changes ever, as I had to fix the number every time I did some edits in the text. I have no idea if I’ll go to the next one. If enough of the people I know end up going to be worth the trip, then I’ll be there.

Another debate that came up that more people are sick of than aren’t is the one about CLINK HOCKING’s term ludonarrative dissonance. I’ve already written my defense of the term. I also went ahead and wrote a full post response to one of the comments in said posts. Gears of War deserves the term and it deserved a full post unto itself.

Tom Bissell wrote probably one of the most important pieces of game criticism of the year and not just it came in the form of a hardcover book. It has exceptional writing, but I felt that it lacked focus in making its arguments to any particular audience. It seems to be a 101 of game criticism and yet sometimes doesn’t even go that far. But as Kirk Hamilton said on the podcast, “sometimes beautiful writing is enough.”

I wrote a great response to a piece of criticism regarding Final Fantasy VIII, that I managed to expand into a piece on what exactly criticism is and how many people’s narrow thinking of it is wrong.

I end this look back at some of my better work on the post I was most afraid to publish and which ended up being one of the pieces I’m glad I did. Critical Distance back in its birth was a bit of a wild west as everyone tried to figure out how to fulfill its purpose, once we figured out what its purpose was. Eventually we got the weekly roundups and they became longer and more in depth. But it seems few were aware of how this mystical process of choosing the best writing of the week was done. I’m glad I could shed some light on it. It’s even spawned a larger discussion near the end of the year in relation to game writing. A discussion we are only seeing the beginning of.

What do I have in store for next year? Well for starters I have an entire word document filled with post concepts, a few outlines and one post that is three pages long and isn’t even a quarter finished. A lot of these are posts that should have gone up this year, but I spent most of the summer studying for the last language class I needed to graduate and then the mad search for a job that I’m qualified for that no longer seems to exist. On the bright side I got a contract writing gig at Gameranx writing the news. That starts early next year. I hope to get Indie Game Spotlight back up, but if there is one thing I’ve learned I should make less promises when it comes to my writing. I don’t seem very good at keeping them.

So what is my game of the year? Well unlike the last two years when I asked myself that question, there was a clear winner. In 2007 it was Portal and in ’08 it was Metal Gear Solid 4. There were plenty of other good games out those years, but those two to me were just obvious. This year has no such easy stand out, hence the lateness of this post. Just to be clear, I have not played everything that came out, not even all the better than decent AAA titles, so this really is a personal pick. But even so, among the games I played I haven’t decided which is the best at the time of writing this post. I’m hoping that getting my thoughts down and explaining why I thought each game was so great that I’ll be able to choose. I was able to narrow it down to 5 finalists, and I am a shameless showman if nothing else, so in true award show style here are the nominees:

Brutal Legend

I wanted this game ever since I first heard about it, when I was looking up what Tim Shafer’s next game was going to be. When I heard the concept all I could think to say was: ROCK ON! There has been a lot of criticism directed at the game, though to be fair it would be better directed at the marketing. Despite that and a few control issues the game is awesome. Of course I am a metal head so that may explain some part of my excitement and love for this game. I love driving around looking at the scenery and listening to the music. You can feel the creativity just ooze from the title. Everything about the game is epic and the Tim Shafer humor doesn’t hurt it either. No game since the original God of War has me leaping up in victory like a Viking warrior. Any game with that can do that purely by its pathos is a winner in my book.

Dragon Age: Origins

I’ve been called biased towards this title, because of my ungodly love for Baldur’s Gate, but honestly I wasn’t expecting the second coming with this title. I think I kept my expectations well within reason for Dragon Age. I knew it was going to be another generic fantasy setting and the plot was going to involve saving the world from some evil demonic creatures. But in a way that’s good, because it means they could really nail the details without having to explain the elves, dwarves and the rest from scratch. I haven’t finished the game. It’s long and I haven’t had the time needed for it, but from what I have played of it Dragon Age has some of the greatest storytelling of any game I’ve played. It sucks you into a world and I think may be the first game where I decided roleplaying was a higher priority than making sure I chose an optimal dialogue option or armor. In fact I got rid of armor that hindered my enjoyment of playing my character.

Flower

Sublime is a word that gets thrown around a lot when talking about Flower. But more than anything else, something I had forgotten until I booted it up the other day, it’s a peaceful game. The lovely serenity that permeates the entire experience also sinks into you while playing. It’s an effort of simplicity with controls that even my dad could figure out on the modern Dualshock. The metanarrative of naturalism and dreams somehow meld into the nature of the game and are a reminder of our own dreams and desires.  It also represents the concept that maybe we all need to slow down a little. It’s one of the few games that just make me feel peaceful. The game may be short and can be beaten in three hours or so, but if you did, you’ve missed the point.

Small Worlds

Never heard of it, check it out. It’s a game that will take you at most 20 minutes to play, but after I finished it I immediately refreshed and played again. I hesitated putting it among my best games of the year, because it was a quick flash game for a competition and debated whether or not its seemingly insubstantiality made it worthy of being a contender. Then I remember that a game is a game and it came out between Jan 1st and Dec 31st of this year. The fact that it makes me question myself given its humble origins and that it made my top 5 says something about the game. Two weeks after playing it, I went and played it again. There’s barely a narrative and no characters, yet somehow it elated me, confused me, cooed me and chilled me to the bone. From the basic idea of exploration came a game that said more than any number of space marines could hope to say.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Again I have to warn all about my potential bias towards this title. I loved the first one and love pulp adventure. I’ve taken classes on the genres and have studied the style. So my love of Uncharted 2 is no mystery. It puts you into the shoes of an adventurer in the vein of Indiana Jones and Flash Gordon on a quest of riches, greed, villainy and the extra-natural. The action set pieces are wonderful and the scope of the game so grand you can’t help but feel like you are on a wild ride. And despite what anyone says, it is well written and well voice acted. Yes it’s not Shakespeare, Faulkner or The Godfather, but then it’s not trying to be. It’s about sending you on an adventure and having a rip-roaring time along the way.

And the winner is:

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Dragon Age: Origins

A year and a fortnight ago I started this site from the idea that I wanted to critique games, as one would do to a book or movie, looking at what they mean. It is hard to believe that it has been a full year. In that time I’ve learned about the larger spheres of critical communities: the brainysphere, the iris network, the border house and their overlaps. I like to think I’ve made some friends in that time and haven’t totally ticked anyone off with my constant need to argue and debate.

I’ve learned more about the nature of criticism from these astute people, many of them amateurs, than I have from my entire schooling. So to all the people to the right in the ludodidecahedron, this is my thanks to you. For teaching me and putting up with me.

I’ve just gone back over the last year and what has happened on this blog, a lot of it connected to what happened in the critical circles and the gaming culture at large. I don’t know if it is coincidence or not, but I’ve actually played less games this year, the first year I began critiquing them in any ordered manner, than in the previous years. And most of the games I’ve played were not from this year, but what I did do I have to say I am really proud of.

I know anything I could say about the nature of my being a critic I already covered earlier this year. So I wont go into any manifesto talk, but rather talk about some of my better writing this year.

In looking back over my game essays I realized more ink was spilled over Prince of Persia than any other game. A game I ostensibly disliked and felt insulted by, you can read here. My other game essays this year that I am proud of were on Beyond Good & Evil, again can be read here and a post on Flower with it’s twin linked in the post.

Of course I also wrote about the goings on around gaming sphere, throwing my two cents in where I thought necessary. Like on the Citizen Kane issue that erupted into a meme almost overnight. I asked where all the war games were and wrote an epic length response to Danc’s three false constraints. (I swear I’ll figure out that IP issue.)

While QWERTY may be dead, he did leave a legacy. Ok, not so much a legacy, more of a lot of WTF moments. But he had at least one or two good posts. And I always give credit where credit is due. Originally it was supposed to be a weekly feature on the blog, something to anchor it to some sort of schedule. Several months after QWERTY’s demise I started the Indie Game Spotlight. Though it has been sporadic for now, at least it has been more favorably received.

Despite some horrendous setbacks and some annoying setbacks I think I didn’t do too badly for an inaugural year. In looking over my categories, and this has more to do on my end that yours, while most are self explanatory others need clarification. Game Essays, Critical Responses, External Sources are self-explanatory. Recent Posts is the way my system orders the posts correctly on the front page. I got knocked a few times for posts labeled under Thoughts being not as well thought out or being wastes of time. In part I think that’s because of their schizophrenic nature. Some are just meandering thoughts about games in general that came to mind and I wrote down, while others are full fledged essays. In the New Year I am going to fix that. Thoughts will be the quick posts dashed off, while those that are more essay like, not tied to a specific title will be under a new category. I’m thinking of calling it Game Issues.

Finally there is my writing itself. While improving quality is a forever ongoing process that can be seen even over this blogs short existence, content is another matter. As of the time of writing this in 2009 I’ve posted only 43 times. With more time on my hands and presumably more disposable income I will try to write more on games, especially more game essays. Also, while there is nothing wrong with looking back and critiquing old titles, I will try and stay more in the current conversation. I will also try to keep to the plan in the new year of getting Indie Game Spotlight to be a weekly feature. It will be better for the blog and me as a gamer. And I’ve been telling a lot of people of a series of posts on the issue of formalism in gaming; I will try and keep to that as well.

In short, great year mostly spent on the old stuff. A good first year, but hopefully more content and better content in the next year and the next decade. Speaking of which, I’m putting off my decade list until the decade is actually over and I’ve gotten the chance to play some of the contenders I’ve missed. Next post will be my Game of the Year and then I’ll take off a week to actually game.

Well with Christmas over and the after holiday sales taken advantage of and since everyone else has done their part, I figured I’d give my thoughts on the 2008 year end in gaming. (Spoilers.)

I start with the easy one, my game of the year. The easy part was to write about, not choose. I personally haven’t played every game this year worth playing. Not even close to it. But based on my personal experience of what I have played, I have to say my pick is Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

I am a very big fan of the series, I wouldn’t say fanatic, but I still go back and play the original Metal Gear Solid from time to time. At the time of its release I was super excited. I popped that baby in and was off to the races. I plowed through the first two chapter of the game without too much mental fatigue and was eager to keep going. Then the third chapter hit. I beat it with the same excitement, but after I beat Raging Raven, one of the most difficult boss fight of the year by virtue of having no rations left, and the very long cut scene after it I went to bed having spent most of the evening and night getting there. It took me around two weeks to get the energy to go back. It is an exhausting game. When I finally did sit back back down to it I found myself faced with a 20 minute cut scene before I could move on. The game experience is like a diesel engine. Very long and hard to start up, but once it get going it grabs you and can go one for a long time. I finished the game in three extended play sessions really. At the time I was disappointed in its end. And several of its twists. Big Boss being kept alive in a hermetically sealed bag as a computer security measure. Awesome. The twist being pulled on you and finding out no, that’s a lie and that was Solidus. No, not cool.

However, now that I look back on the whole experience, I come away with a little smile on my face. I don’t think after three games of setup, combined with the amount of hype Kojima Productions put into it, that anything produced could have lived up to it. Metal Gear Solid 4 came as close as humanly possible. I remember the boss fights, Raging Raving, Crying Wolf, Laughing Octopus, the Vamp showdown (once killed him 45 times in one continue), and the final beatdown with Liquid Ocelot. I remember the closure give to the characters. Since the first game I wanted to know what was up with Meryl and this game gave me just the right amount. Jack and Rose had the right amount of angst to them, but I appear to be one of the few North Americans not to find Raiden annoying. At the time I thought Vamp’s excuse for being immortal was cheep, but now on reflection, the answer was well set up and there really was no other conceivable explanation. Even just crawling around the active battlefield of the second chapter was amazingly satisfying, killing a soldier that got too close and no one noticing, because everyone was shooting. Not to mention that the game has what I consider the second best chase sequence in gaming.

Even its ending with Snake not dying after the huge hype that he would die is growing on me and my only residual complaint of the game. The more I think about it, the more I revere the game. Every game I can think of worth talking about either comes out to acclaim or disappointment and then comes with a certain amount of backlash to counter the initial point. Eventually it settles down to apporximately where it should be or keep going with the cycle. Metal Gear Solid 4, came out with acclaim, received a large amount of backlash, some of which I agreed with. But on further reflection and the benefit of distance I can call it my pick for Game of the Year. I am going to remember it for years to come as a total package, a genuinely impactful and emotional experience only amplified, not diminished by the fact we’ve been invested in these characters for so long.The original Metal Gear Solid came away with 8s and was considered an amazing achievement, but lacking on elements, like playtime or challenge. Now its considered once of the best games of all time. The readers of IGN put it in the top 10.

Which brings me to my next point. What does that really mean? Everyone is giving out their game of the year picks or their top 10s. The Brainy Gamer did an entire three part podcast with a whos who of critiquers on that subject. Spike TV held a special, yet tawdry, award show on it, but what does it really all mean. Anyone can have their opinion. Certain sites have greater validity, because of recognition and a group of people who devote themselves to the process be involved rather than a individual. Now without getting into any discussion of ideas of integrity of such sites, I’ll leave that for the symposium, what we need is a centralized award organization. Movies have the Oscars, TV has the Emmys and stage theater has the Tonys. The closest video games have are the Spike TV awards or Game Developer’s choice awards. I’m not saying we need it right now, but really a cohesive organization of appreciation of the best art that our medium has to offer could only be beneficial. It took the various award ceremonies time to get where they right now, so there is no hurry. Just something to think about along these lines: the Oscars don’t nominated until late January and voting doesn’t close till mid February and that is for movies that are only a few hours in length not 10+ like video games and yet our awards are due two weeks after big games are still getting released.

I started late, but this is my last post of the year. I’ll start next year with the first video game critical essay for the site. I said before we can’t just talk about writing critical essays or whatever you want to call them, we need to actually write them. Best way to find out what works and what doesn’t is to get ones hands dirty.

Well everyone else is doing their end of the year round up, and I thought I’d join the fun. Of course I haven’t been around for a major part of the year, hell I don’t think I’ve had an active posting site for a week, but I have been around for the last year and instead of giving my best 10 or whatever else, I’d like to state a few predictions I’ve repeatedly made to anyone who would listen (I’ll do this here come next year) and see how I fared. I think you can guess by the title. I’m only going to do the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

Firstly, Too Human. We were shown demos and stage presentations of the game last E3, the 2007 one. After much delay it got released this year. When the presentation was showed I noticed to things. That I could barely tell what was going on the screen and that the movement and animations were severely choppy. Then I heard how everyone after that was so excited by what they were seeing. I was asking myself, “were we seeing the same game?” People explained that yes it was a preview build and there would be time to fix the code, yada yada yada. I still called it a pile of junk and a few other things, but I decided to keep this site family friendly. Come its release and I think I can safely say I called it. It may not have been for the problems I witnessed, but it failed just the same.

Next, Spore. Will Wright’s life simulator, his magnum opus. Patiently everyone waited for years to get a hold of it. And when it came out, the gaming community spoke a resounding meh. I said meh whenever I saw it. Three separate E3s and numerous other coverages. I recognized this wasn’t my game, but I’m wary of any game that if you bought it a week later than someone else could have their entire planet colonized. Also I felt the game was very disjointed as a whole. We were shown the creature phase and the space phase and didn’t seem like the same game. People said I just didn’t get it. Then they got their hands on it and realized neither did they.

Alone in the Dark. I was excited for this game. Not entirely true; I was excited by what this game could be if the developers decided to wipe their fingerprints off the game. Then I was excited when they were releasing a fixed version of the game for the PS3. Then I played the demo and I was reminded of the saying “polishing cr** just gives you shiny cr**.” It did indeed do everything it meant to do, but it didn’t fix the main problem, the story. A survival horror game needs a character they can sympathize with and story that seems real enough they can be scared of it. The game fails on both those counts.

So far I’ve called everything bad in my predictions. There is a connection between how I predict a game and what they show. Every time I see a game and find it lackluster or say that it’s going to be bad there is a common thread, in how it’s hyped. At first I thought the developers didn’t know how to hype their game properly, because there were plenty of times I just didn’t care in what they were showing. Then I realized that each time these previews were bad and then these games were bad was because they were showing off the best features of the game.Contrast this with how God of War was hyped. If I remember they said, “you are Kratos and you will go through numerous levels killing mythical Greek monsters before challenging and killing the god of war.” One sentence and you’ve given me plot, conflict, character and gameplay. That is how you do it right. for an example from this year, Fallout 3 was focused mainly on the Vats system that they added. Of course they also showed off the wasteland and the character of the game.

Yes, your fire in Alone in the Dark looks great, but what’s going on. Ok, you turn into a were-hog, but tell me about running fast instead. In the Too Human demonstration on both G4 and Gamespot the times they showed the screen were few and are between. I never saw any preview gameplay movies for it either. They are trying to hype a product, so they show off its best bits, but you may want to rethink your game if this is the best you have to offer.

On the flip side, however, is a game like Far Cry2. “See how great our fire physics are. If you have on bullet you can start a brush fire to take out your enemies.” Ok, but why should I care. In fact didn’t care until I read Ben Abraham’s account of it and brought the idea that it’s the Heart of Darkness of video games. Now I’m interested. I don’t care about your fire physics, tell me about the character’s decent into darkness because of the environment he’s chosen. Sometimes I don’t think developers grasp just what makes their game interesting.

I’ve rambled enough for now.