BBAlpert

Hotline Miami.

2012 was a strange year to me for games. I'd been struggling to come up with some unifying trait or theme to describe my feelings about the titles released this year that impacted me the most, but then I heard this.

What I have to say about Jeff's song is precisely how I feel about a large chunk of 2012's games.

I saw this posted on the beta site and clicked it with cautious curiosity I'd known from the Bombcasts that Jeff had been in a band/thing, but never gone as far as to look for any of their songs. So I figured this would be a good opportunity to hear how Jeff's writing skills and creativity could translate to rap lyrics. I was expecting it to fall somewhere between "kind of disappointing" and "that's actually kind of neat." No offense meant towards Jeff by any means, but I was not prepared for it to be fucking awesome.

And that's how I felt the best games of 2012 came into my life. It was always the same steps:

1. Initial reaction: "Oh, they're making one of those games? I wouldn't get my hopes up for this one."
2. Reviews start coming in: "Hold on a second, people are saying that this game isn't awful? That not only is it not terrible, but that it's actually GOOD?"
3. Pleasantly surprised when playing: "This game is fucking awesome! I can't figure out how it turned out as good as it did, but GODDAMN"

Maybe it was just a wake-up call that I'd become too cynical when it comes to video games. But I had a lot of reasons to be skeptical about some of these games.

I'd been less than thrilled with earlier games in the series/by the developer

• I've played Mondo Medicals and Mondo Agency by Cactus Software. They were interesting little novelty art pieces, but nothing about the mechanics stood out, and the stories/presentations were more "interesting... I think?" than anything else. But fucking Hotline Miami, man... That fucking game...
• Spec Ops: Stealth Patrol for the PS1 was the game that shook my faith in the scores from reviewers at PSM (Playstation Magazine). I naively took their word (that this game was a 4/5 title) as law and picked this up for $10 at launch. I immediately wanted my money back, and never trusted PSM scores the same since then. What I expected from Spec Ops: The Line was the cover-based-shooter - ass - cover-based-shooter that was the beginning of that game, not the batshit crazy places the game went later on.
• I've been a long-time fan of Telltale Games. I was totally on board with the Sam & Max , Homestar Runner , Wallace & Gromit , and Tales of Monkey Island games. I somewhat enjoyed the Puzzle Agent games. I... well, I played Hector: Badge of Carnage. I got about 2 and a half episodes into Back to the Future before losing interest. And given Telltale's apparent trajectory (and JP's reviews), I didn't even both with Jurassic Park. Were it not for the constant barrage of praise from the GB crew and community, I would have tragically passed on The Walking Dead entirely. Luckily, I didn't.

I had never had any desire to play the developer's games before (assuming I'd even heard of them)

• The Far Cry series has never really done anything for me. I was tempted to look into Far Cry 2 after hearing a little something about its fire simulation thing, but then I'm the sort of person who would love a game that was JUST a sweet physics simulation. Okay, so I might want a little bit more than an advanced fire system (I'm looking at you, Little Inferno). But for all I'd heard about the systems and structure of the Far Cry games, it wasn't until Far Cry 3 that I really started to hear anything talk about it being particularly fun. In full disclosure, I haven't played Far Cry 3 yet, but it's something I plan to get by the end of the year.
• I feel that adventure game fans and horror movie fans are kindred spirits. In my opinion, what makes a true fan of either genre is the willingness to wade through the absolute trash that both have to offer. Playing Grim Fandango or watching The Exorcist are great, but the test is whether you can pick something up from a dollar-bin and not get completely soured on the medium. The reason I mention all this is to explain why I wasn't expecting much from The Book of Unwritten Tales. I've jumped into plenty of adventure games sight unseen, and most of them have turned out to be hot garbage (the exception that surprised me the most so far as been Toonstruck, check that out if you can). So when I saw TBoUT on Steam, I was looking at a self-described comedy/fantasy adventure game from some German developer I'd never heard of. The ability to play different characters was interesting, but the characters in the screenshots looked like they could easily end up being 1 dimensional fantasy stereotypes that do nothing but "joke" about their surroundings by needlessly breaking the 4th wall constantly. For whatever reason, I picked the game up anyways, and I honestly think it deserves to be up there with games like Day of the Tentacle as an all-time adventure game great. The puzzles are unique and compelling, the writing is clever and genuinely funny, the game is satisfyingly paced, and the voice acting is astonishingly well done. In other words, it has become my go-to recommendation for anything that wants an adventure-ass-adventure game.

A troubled origin for a sequel to a so-so franchise

I played the first 2 True Crime games. They were fun. They weren't amazing, but they were decently entertaining. I wouldn't necessarily be against trying another True Crime game, but I also wasn't particularly devastated or surprised to hear that it was getting canned. What confused me was why Square Enix was bothering to pick up the assets and finish what I had assumed to be a doomed game.

Somehow Sleeping Dogs turned out not only to be a competent open world crime game, but one that somehow got each element so perfectly right that it made me excited about the prospect of playing another open world crime game. And that's why I don't make the decisions, I suppose.

The combination of game mechanics and a business model that almost completely represented everything that was wrong with the industry at the time

The pitch: So we took God of War, took out the upgrades and weapons and abilities, chopped the game's length down to about 5 hours, expanded to QTEs to fill about 4 1/2 of those hours, and we're going to charge an extra $15 for DLC on top of the $60 game price if the player wants to see any semblance of resolution to the story.

It feels dirty, but if loving Asura's Wrath is wrong, I'm not so sure I want to be right. I just hope other developers don't take that as a signal to try this a second time.

So 2012 was either the year of pleasant surprises, or the year that my judgment went completely to shit and I lost the ability to recognize a good game on the horizon. We'll see how 2013 goes.

*edit: Added new section for The Book of Unwritten Tales, and moved Far Cry 3 into it as well

@SerHulse said:

There needs to be another semi-regular series on Giant Bomb, where the crew plays one of these, things.

There's plenty to choose from as well.

• Mining & Tunnelling Simulator
• Digger Simulator 2011
• Street Cleaning Simulator
• Garbage Truck Simulator
• Euro Truck Simulator 2 (an honest-to-goodness sequel!)
• Police Simulator
• Stone Quarry Simulator
• Airport Firefighter Simulator
• Bus and Cable Car Simulator
• Gardening Simulator
• etc. etc.

They'd be set for life!

Drew, Vinny, and Dave in Simulation Stimulation.

Either them or a Jeff's room stream. As mediocre as the actual game was, I watched all 4 hours of his Funky Barn stream, and could probably have watched more.

Jeff and Dave count as celebrities, right?

(I was trying to make Tested-style block dudes of the GB crew)

@President_Barackbar said:

@Rastopher said:

David Prassel actually claims that's not how it went down at all and that the whole thing is a "schmear campaign" set up by people that are pissed about being fired.

Why would people who were pissed about being fired start a cream cheese campaign?

You can be sure that Prassel's been involved in more than his fair share of capers.

I apologize for nothing.

@Seaborgium said:

@MasterBrief said:

were you using the saplings as a fence there? Still wish there was some structures more along the lines of buildings you could actually go into. Maybe way way later as it would defeat the fire element.

Nah, I was just planting them near my base for convenient twig gathering. Some people do plant enormous walls of trees, though, which apparently makes you invincible to attack.

I thought they fixed/broke/balanced that in a recent patch.

@Giefcookie said:

I enjoy watching people play games, sometimes more than actually playing them. It all depends on the game. I have no urge to play Asura's Wrath but I watched a full playthrough of it and really enjoyed that. Same with The Walking Dead. On the other hand there are games I can't bear watching other people play because THEY ARE DOING IT WRONG AND OH GOD GIVE ME THAT CONTROLLER.

I agree for the most part, but I don't think I could stand watching someone else play The Walking Dead, unless they were already making all the decisions I would make.

I can't think of anything that could stop you from living pretty much indefinitely by setting up a fire pit in the grasslands near a beefalo herd. You have effectively an unlimited supply of grass, seeds, and manure, so you can build and maintain a ton of farms for food and you never run out of fuel for your fires (a rope can keep a fire going all night and then some, if memory serves). Plus, whenever hounds attack, you can kite them in circles around the beefalo. Eventually the hounds will shift their focus from you to the beefalo, at which point the entire herd converges and tramples them to death.

The only thing that can stop you at that point is boredom.

*Edit: Crap, title should say "do" not "to"

http://consumerist.com/2012/12/17/watch-out-for-photocopied-fake-discs-in-your-local-redbox-kiosk/

Summary: Somebody rented a game from a Redbox kiosk, only to find the game disk replaced with a cut-out black and white photocopy of the disk, which apparently was enough to convince the kiosk's scanner that it was the real thing.

But the fact that someone was clever enough to come up with the idea of photocopying a game disk, ballsy* enough to test their theory, and lucky enough for it to (evidently) work is pretty impressive to me. It also seems like an elegantly simple solution, that not unlike the old "using a Cap'n Crunch toy whistle to fuck with pay phones," feels like way too basic an approach to actually work.

*On the assumption that if it didn't work, Redbox already has the credit card number used to rent the game in the first place, and could potentially just charge the full price of the game, plus whatever fees/fines they wanted for trying to steal from them. Or just someone who's enough of an asshole to steal someone else's credit card and use it for other criminal endeavors.

Glad you were able to figure it out. I was going to say that it sounds vaguely like the setting of Cargo! The Quest for Gravity, but that's not an adventure game at all.