Best of 2010 - My Opinion Part END and UFC 125 thoughts
By Daroki 1 Comments
Ok, on to the finish, my top 5 games of the year.
5: Hitogata Happa (Gundemonium Collection)
Ok, I understand that no one will have this on their list. Fine. But of the three games released as part of the Gundemonium Collection this year, Hitogata Happa was the best of the three. While GundeadLigne and Gundemonium Recollection were fairly standard horizontal bullet hell shooters, HH was different than anything else in the package by having a vertical scrolling bullet hell with an interesting twist. If you stay alive long enough, a power meter charges which allows you to run into larger enemies which will kill you but unleash a bomb effect that will do massive damage. Against bosses this turns into a strategy of whether you want to give up one of your "dolls" for the massive damage it creates, or continue to try to use the weapons at your disposal to wear these large beasts down, in fights which are timed. Also there are 12 (13) dolls which all have different shooting styles and can be useful in different situations or different stages. It's not just dodging and recognizing patterns of bullets, it's figuring out which tool is best for the job, and if you can use that tool for the bombing attack when it's time to switch to another one. It has just enough tweaks that made it surprisingly fresh and interesting and it deserved a place on this list.4: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Portable
How in the hell do you take an epic 80 hour Japanese RPG and whittle it down to a handheld system? You do it like this. While you lose the immersion of being able to walk around in the world that you had on the PS2 versions, what you end up with is a more streamlined version of one of the best JRPGs on the PS2. A game that now takes about 45-50 hours instead of 80 by employing a point and click adventure control to the social settings while letting you still have the combat of the PS2 version. But not just the PS2 version of Persona 3, but the PS2 version of Persona 4. So you streamline the social aspects, improve the combat, then on top of it add a new protagonist who's gender causes slight and subtle changes in the way that people react to you? This was what I wanted from FES, not a difficult aftermath, but a slight adjustment of the situation to cause the reactions of the cast give you more details about them. Brilliant, and a must play PSP game for anyone who's a fan of SMT or JRPGs in general.3: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
The animation, script, and voice acting in this game come together in a terrific manner, and warts and all, that marriage of those elements made Enslaved one of the best games of the year. It's an interesting retelling of the "Journey to the West" tale, in a great environment that looks great even in the Unreal Engine, known for muting the colors in almost everything it touches. It's got the best told story with some of the most memorable characters that you'll see this year who truly pop off the screen and seem less like a collection of pixels and more like real people. If you haven't played Enslaved, just check the demo out, as the introduction to that game is one of the best openings of any game that I played this year, from 2010 or earlier. Just a brilliant and fun action adventure game that does what it's trying to do with great results.2: Bayonetta
Listen, I don't know what it was about this game, because I wasn't a fan of Devil May Cry. I'm past the time of just wanting a button mashing kill fest like Dynasty Warriors. So how did Bayonetta work so well when everything about the game made me think that there's no way I'm going to like tihs? Bayonetta works because it's crazy. In a time where it seems like Japanese developers are hell bent on "capturing the western market" it seems like the people making Bayonetta were hell bent on making the game MORE crazy. Platinum Games seemed like with Bayonetta they stopped trying to chase the market, and instead focused on an ideal and chased that instead. Bayonetta is Devil May Cry, if Devil May Cry wasn't so pretentious and just let itself be crazy and fun. It breaks out of being exploitative by empowering their characters so freely and naturally that you get the impression that those characters own their sexuality, and not the other way around. It breaks out of being boring by switching up it's gameplay in fascinating ways when you least expect it. For instance, very late in the game, Bayonetta stops trying to be Devil May Cry and tries to be Afterburner, just because it can. And it's that freedom, that devil may care attitude, that makes Bayonetta so much fun. You can almost see the title character looking at you, sucking on a lollipop, and saying in the British accent, "Silly boy, you know games are supposed to be fun right?" Bayonetta and Platinum Games didn't forget this while most of Japanese Game makers have. If not for some of the triumphs of the game that's #1 on my list, this would be my game of the year, and I'd have as many apologies as Bayonetta has for being what it is, which is NONE.1: Heavy Rain
I'm glad that I'm not a game critic, because then I'd have to be critical about Heavy Rain, and I don't want to be. I can put aside the fact that the voice acting was some of the worst that I heard this year in a video game. I can ignore the plot hole so big you can fly a 747 through it with plenty of clearance. I can instead focus on what Heavy Rain did right. First of all, you realize this game doesn't have an end state, right? There's no failure of missions forcing you to start over, as instead the game takes your successes and failures and continues on, morphing the story around what you did right and wrong to tell a distinct narrative based on your actions. It was Heavy Rain's ability to slowly spill out this personal narrative that made Heavy Rain the best ONLINE games I played this year. Not because of lobbies and friend's lists, but going to different communities and reading the experiences that others had with the game while sharing your own. It was listening to spoiler ridden podcasts after you had beaten the game and listening to the opinions of people who you spent enough time with to understand where they were coming from. It wasn't just the game that was fascinating, it was the aftermath and discussions after beating the game that gave it gravitas like no other game before it. The second thing that worked so well about Heavy Rain were the controls. People kept saying the game was filled with quick time events, but the controls were more like an advanced contextual mapped control than a quick time event. It had more in common with a game like Assassin's Creed than it did with God of War in where the buttons were mapped often to what you were doing and what was happening on screen. (You need to do something that's "up" then you'll use the Triangle button, something that's "down" uses the "X" button, etc;) When this didn't happen, the controls were being used to pass across the feeling of tension the characters had, such as in the Butterfly trial.It wasn't perfect, but it was the best attempt at this type of interactive cinema that we've seen. It did things that no other game has ever attempted and pulled them off. It caused more discussion and conversation than any other game for the trail it was blazing on it's own rather than how well it was refining what others had already done well. It was a unique beast and the best, more interesting gaming experience that I had all year, and because of that, gets the #1 slot on my list.
UFC 125 musings
Now that the gaming list is done, I just have to comment on last night's UFC 125 card and the unfortunate aftermath of the main event. Unfortunate, because while I gained a ton of respect for Frankie Edgar for surviving round one and pulling even at the end with Gray Maynard but still the third fight between them was the last thing I wanted. I had the fight 47-47 as well with Maynard getting an obvious 10-8 in the first round and treating Edgar like Velasquez treated Lesnar without the finish. Edgar's survival and rebound to take the next three rounds (no, I didn't let Maynard steal round 3 with the last minute takedowns, but thought he got the better of round 5) was an amazing thing since he wasn't the fighter who had "Cool Under Pressure" under his name when he came to the cage. Rounds 3 and 5 were close, and I could understand judges going either way with them, which they did. Scary omen for 2011 is that my scorecard lined up with Patricia Jarman's who is notorious for being one of the WORST MMA judges. Monkeys and typewriters I guess...
But just because the fight's a draw, doesn't mean that I want a rematch, at least not with Anthony Pettis waiting in the wings with the WEC Lightweight title with a legitimate call for the "winner" of the fight. Also I think that Benson Henderson and Anthony Pettis would destroy either guy in the cage last night. Henderson's wrestling I think is better than Edgar and Maynard, and neither guy wants to stand up with Pettis' unorthodox standup techniques. I would have put Maynard in a title eliminator against Henderson, and given Edgar and Pettis the unification bout and let things play out for the next six to eight months in that divisions upper echelon especially with Penn looking like he's going to try to go to 170 for yet another mismatch with GSP. Poor Penn, he can't beat Edgar at 155, he can't beat GSP at 170, there's no way he beats Silva at 185, I don't think he can get down to 135 to fight Cruz, and I wouldn't put money on him beating Aldo at 145 He's a man without a home he can call his own, which is sad for someone as good as he is. To Dana White, if we are getting Edgar/Maynard 3, can we at least get Pettis/Henderson 2?
Guida's submission of Gomi was one of the more interesting things of the night, as "The Fireball Kid" just never looked like he was comfortable or could figure out Guida's constant movement. He could hit Guida once, but never could put together combinations and eventually the fight went to the ground when he landed his best strike of the night (a flying knee which was turned into a takedown and turned into a nasty guillotine choke that ended the fight). Stann's knockout of Chris Leben not getting knockout of the night was surprising, even with the understanding that the Jeremy Stephens knockout of Marcus Davis had more interest because Davis was winning that fight handily before being dropped. Leben's a beast, that guy should have been out two minutes into the fight after the first flurry, but Leben eats punishment like that for breakfast. Unfortunately for him, Stann continued the assault for the next two minute sand the knee to the head finished someone who isn't knocked out easily. Diaz and Stun Gun had some great moments when both guys were on the ground, but generally Kim had dominant position and landed some nasty elbows to win. Note to Stun Gun, as far as GSP is concerned, you are not ready if you can't dominate a good fighter like Diaz. And let's not talk about Vera vs Thiago Silva, that was just embarrassing for Vera who had no answer to being on bottom when Silva decided to take him down. I'm waiting to hear about a ruptured eardrum or some other problem as Vera seemed more intent on protecting his right ear than getting OUT of being grounded, wait, I'm not talking about this...