Alright, so the year isn't quite over yet, but it may as well be. My budget for the rest of the year is going toward not ending up broke after new years like last year (I can drink a hell of a lot on a special occasion, especially with a 24 hour bottle shop nearby), so my game purchases for the year have hit the goodbye 2009 brick wall.
I'd like to start by drawing your attention to my 2009 games of the year list. This isn't as much shameless promotion (oh, who am I kidding) as it is a precursor to what this blog is going to contain. Now, user generated game of the year lists can vary a lot, and not just because of personal tastes. You can play tons of great games over the year, and not every single one can make your own personal cut. There are some games that come out that people just simply can't afford to play even if they wanted to. There are some that they can acknowledge are probably really great games, but are just not their cup of tea. This blog is about putting some perspective on my top 10 list by running through some games in my collection of 2009 releases that deserve some honorable mentions, as well as some games I never got around to.
So without further ado and all that jazz.
2009 Collection Honorable Mentions
Infamous and Prototype These two games get lumped together a lot, and here in my blog is no exception. Both are cool in their own ways and both have little things that I wish they did better. These things are totally interchangeable. The tightness of the combat in Infamous > the loose mayhem of Prototype, the freedom of movement in Prototype > the slow, methodical building climbing of Infamous, and others beside. They're like the Gatekeeper and Keymaster of 2009: if these two games got together and made something with the best of both, bad things would happen to the fabric of reality.
Splosion Man The doughnut song gets a smile out of me every time. I keep meaning to go back to Splosion Man and actually finishing it, but it will have to wait for 2010. I still need to polish off Dragon Age, Zelda: Spirit Tracks and Brutal Legend before I get back to some single-button frustration monger (and I mean that in the nicest way possible).
Bionic Commando Say what you like about Bionic Commando, but this is one of those games that you either love or hate. Personally, I had too much fun swinging around and popping dudes with my shotgun in midair before landing on and arm-whipping them off cliffs before ripping pilots out of mechs with my huge mechanical arm to care about such petty things as linearity, lacklustre shooting, and not-so-invisible walls. Also, the ending is fucking badass.
Dawn of War 2 I'm a Warhammer nerd from way back, and as a huge fan of the original Dawn of War, Dawn of War 2 was simply a must-buy for me. The multiplayer portion was a ton of fun, but the single player sort of lost me after a while. I still load it up every now and then to play some matches before shutting it down, knowing that if it's a couple of hours of great RTS I need, that DoW2 will always have my back.
2009 Collection NQR Awards (the NQR stands for Not Quite Right!)
Tekken 6 Tekken 6 is a great fighting game. It re-sparked my group of IRL friends' love of Tekken and our weekly get togethers that consist mainly of Tekken, copious amounts of beer, and some variety of junky takeaway. Why is it in the NQR list? Because the single player portion of Tekken 6's home version is absolutely attrocious. The gameplay is terrible, the endings you're rewarded with are mostly bad, and the costume stuff I couldn't care enough about to grind the billions of yen or zenny or rupees or wtfever it is to unlock even a few of the costume pieces I like for my mains.
The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks Whoa whoa wait a minute here... A self confessed Nintendo fanboy from way back bagging out a game made by Nintendo? Sadly, Spirit Tracks is the game in the series where I've had my first major Jeff Gerstmannism (not to be confused with Jeff Gerstmannasm). Remember the 8.8? The 'no chainsaws' gag? Well, you probably don't remember the no chainsaws gag, but in any case, Spirit Tracks is a good game. It's just this time around, the thing that Nintendo put into the game to make it feel less samey than the others, the things that usually work to keep the games fresh and interesting and enjoyable, this time that thing just didn't grab me at all, and halfway through I'm sort of looking at it as 'hey, it's a Zelda game,' only in not as positive light as I previously have. The train... I could blow that whistle all day (that's what she said), but for God's sake don't make me go right back to where I started when your goddamn insta-gibbing trains that move faster than me even when I'm moving full speed forward decide to trap me between two bits of track. UGGGH!
Brutal Legend Like the metal it is inspired by, it starts off a fist-pumping, headbanging, crowd-roaring thrillride of pure awesome, but as the night wears on, you realise you can no longer feel your neck muscles, you've lost half your piercings, you are bleeding from cuts under your eyes where some dude elbowed you and your voice comes out as if you have hit puberty all over again. You press on, insisting to yourself it's still awesome, but in reality you know you're gonna be feeling it in the morning.
Aion: Tower of Eternity I'm too smart a man to be burned by the over-hype of a new MMO hailed to be the next best thing since Nazareth Online, but Aion is actually playable. It has a lot of problems, a lot of core problemsthan many would not even give a second look, but like any MMO, it isn't really the game itself but the company you keep that makes it enjoyable. I can't really recommend the game to anyone without having to roll off quite a large list of caveats, and because you don't have the same friends as I do. I guess maybe if you had similar kinds of friends and a hardwired tolerance to heavy RPG grind after years of playing JRPG's, Diablo, Phantasy Star Online and a mess of other terrible free2play MMORPGs, then maybe, just maybe, you might find some enjoyment out of Aion in the latter stages of the game.
2009 Games I Wish I Had Played
Batman: Arkham Asylum The obvious choice. When there's so much buzz about a game that a whole mess of usually decent people will actively offend you for not playing it yet, you know you're missing out on something special.
Muramasa: The Demon Blade I don't even know if it's even out here in Australia yet. It makes me somewhat like a baby ailuropoda melanoleuca that is unhappy.
Half Minute Hero I don't have a PSP, and I'm not about to go out and buy one for one game, even if it does look like the most awesome RPG to come out since for-goddamn-ever.
In closing, it's been a damn good year for games hasn't it? Oh, I almost forgot!
Closing Comments And Loose Ends
Tales of Monkey Island: Episode 5 is a fantastic end to a great series. Final ' boss fight' should satisfy your nostalgia, and the final twists make me almost unable to wait for a second season. But dude, new Sam and Max is awesome news and will totally tide me over until then.
I recently bought the full series box set of Monkey. Yeah that's right, Monkey-fucking-magic. I feel very sorry for the people in America and Canada (and anywhere else) who have never been introduced to this absolute gem of a series. Finding out that it has never aired in the Americas sorta made me a little guilty for owning my own little piece of Japanese kung-fu television history.
Dragon Age Origins is pretty damn awesome. I could play the female city elf rogue origin story over and over and over. Slaying that bigot human lord is satisfying every single time.
I completely forgot that Tekken 6 was coming out until last week. It's been out in arcades for so long that it sort of fell off my radar after the initial run into the only real arcade left in Melbourne city to try it when it first came out there.
Tekken, as a whole, had sort of fell off the radar for me after 4 and a brief stint of 5. It wasn't always the case. The first Tekken I played was Tekken 3, but Tekken Tag is what really put Tekken on the map for me and my group of mates way back in high school. Many a night were spent just playing Tekken Team Battles all night long while drinking insane brain-cell destroying concoctions and listening to heavy metal into the wee hours of the morning. And this was almost every night, mind you. It sort of dropped off with Tekken 5, as by that stage everyone was getting jobs or studying, so the get-togethers became less frequent.
I got a call from a mate of mine the other day, though. He told me he had picked up Tekken 6 and everyone was getting together for a good ol fashioned pow-wow. I was a bit taken aback since I didnt even remember it was coming out at that point. I agreed, however, and the night in question made me go out and buy it myself.
Tekken 6 is just like I remembered the series from way back when. It's still a lot of fun and totally awesome. The good thing about it is that in the competitive modes, all the characters are already unlocked from the get-go. I remember first huddling around the Playstation and taking it in turns cheaping our way through the arcade mode to unlock characters, and apart from the story stuff it always felt like a waste of time. For people that just want to sit down with mates and play some goddamn Tekken, this game is pretty much a must-buy.
The bad thing about the game, though, is how it gates the story and endings for each character. The story of Tekken is pretty dumb, but the ending movies can be pretty entertaining. The worst part of Tekken 6 is that to get the ending movies, you have to unlock each character in a really clunky and boring beat-em-up mode. The mode has you and an AI walking through some really short and uninspired linear levels punching and kicking thugs, secret service agents, sumos, ninjas and aliens (among others) until you reach a boss fight at the end, which unlocks that boss for use in Arena mode, which is a shortened Story Mode the previous games had. The game even rubs salt into the wound by not letting you play local co-op instead of using the AI, which is fairly stupid and tends to combo herself off platforms into water and insta-gibbing herself. The entire experience makes me want to punch something, which is handy since I can always go to training mode and 10-hit combo Xiao over and over until I cool down.
If you're a person that just wants to sit and play Tekken with people in the same room as you, buy Tekken 6. It's still awesome. For those of you who really need to justify their purchase with what the single player has to offer, be prepared to sit through something pretty unenjoyable in order to get to the meat of why you play the single player in the first place.
It's hard to write anything about Tales of Monkey Island, Episode 4: The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood without throwing around big fat spoilers. Hell, the title in itself is a spoiler. In an effort to rid this blog of unsightly spoiler tags, I'll just say that Episode 4 didn't resonate quite as well in a design sense as Episode 3 did, but the depth and drama it adds to the series, and the Monkey Island canon as a whole, is really awesome and unexpected. The last episode is going to be a kicker.
I also picked up Torchlight. Torchlight is a guilty pleasure game for me, as it probably is for anyone else seriously enjoying it. It's a Diablo game with some cool little additional features, and that's really all that needs to be said. But I'll say more anyway.
The inclusion of only three character classes feels a little lacking, especially when a couple of classes you'd expect to see are lumped in as skill tree choices under a single archetype. The skill trees themselves feel kind of bare, but they end up being pretty flexible. Skills are locked out by your character level alone, so it's pretty easy to pick up the better skills in a tree and become a real beast at higher levels. You can also cover up some weaknesses or even suppliment your strengths with the generic spell scrolls, which allow you to learn a few generic spells that any class can use, like summoning skeletons, healing spells, resistance buffs, and so on. To give you an example of how useful this is, I rolled an Alchemist to begin with, on Very Hard difficulty, and wanted to build an offensive caster in the traditional sense. The other two trees for Alchemist are a defensive/melee tree and a summoning tree. With the generic spells, I could buy summon skeletons and summon zombies in order to make a small but respectable summoner-esque wall of bodies between me and whoever I was firing spells at, without having to commit skill points into a second tree.
Finally, I've been playing more Warhammer Online. The latest patch has really put a lot more emphasis on getting to content that was previously very hard to get to a lot more painless to access than in months past. A lot of people who have stuck with the game had sort of hit a wall in progression, since the end game was pretty tough to get to even with a pretty well organized push by the entire realm. That's sort of been blown away now, and while the population of a server is still an issue, as a veteran player there is a lot more new things to do in WAR to keep me interested and playing.
So I'm an RPG fan. I like RPG's, but at the same time I'm pretty harshly critical about them. While it's a genre that I've liked since the early days of my gaming life, I've played so many that their common flaws take a back stage in my mind whenever I play one. This extends to MMORPG's as well. I've played more terrible free2play Korean MMO's and p2p timewasters than a sane person could bear, but they're also really good at identifying what is commonly good and bad (or more literally what I like and dislike) about the genre as a whole.
Aion was released recently, which from the beginning I was skeptical about. There was a lot of buzz around the game well before it was released, even before it was released in Korea, mainly because of how good the game looked and that you could fly. As details came up about the game, my skepticism was only heightened, and at the point where it was playable in Korea I pretty much had no reservations toward it at all. But my friends were all excited about it, and they needed a good healer (I generally play healer in every MMO I have ever played), so I made them a deal and preordered the game along with them.
I had already played Aion before the English beta started, on the Chinese servers, so I leveled fairly quickly when the head-start began. I reached level 25 in two head-start days, which are relatively painless as far as level grind goes. I am currently sitting at about 45% through level 34, and only playing for a few hours every couple of days. The reasons for this are many, and I won't bother rattling off every single little thing I dislike about the game's mechanics and structure. There are a lot of them. At the same time, Aion isn't that bad of a game. It can entertain me, usually in short bursts.
My relative apathy with Aion has sort of rekindled my love for another recently released MMORPG, Warhammer Online (yes, it's still running). That game also has a lot of flaws I can identify, but it's the little things that tip the scales. There are plenty of times while playing Aion that I just wished for some of the features of Warhammer (and even some nameless Korean f2p MMO's, some of which have some great innovative ideas among the general mess), no matter how little the feature or mechanic was, that made Aion feel sluggish and old and even asinine in comparison.
This isn't a blog made to shit all over Aion, though. It's to pose a question of anyone reading this:
Everyone has a genre of games they really love. I'm sure everyone has things that, over the years, they've grown to dislike about that genre. What are the little things that you wish the genre would stop doing, and by the same token, which little things do you wish the genre would just hurry up and standardise?
On a lighter note, Demon's Souls is awesome. That is all.
Tales of Monkey Island Ep3 was released recently, and I played through it in a single sitting this morning. It's another great episode in an already great series that's shaping up to be one of my favourite games of the year. Of course, I'm a big Monkey Island fanboy, but Telltale could have got so much wrong with the series that they hit pretty much on the head from day one. In previous blogs about the series, I've been pretty brass tacks and by numbers about how I feel about the individual episodes, but episode 3 is a bit of a special case.
Lair of the Leviathan is the third installment of the series, and going into it I thought it would be hard for them to top the antics of the awesomely cinematic Guybrush v Morgan intro, Good Guy LeChuck and Winslow's map fetish, which themselves only barely trumped the introduction of the eccentric Marquis De Singe in the first episode. The third episode doesn't have quite the opening punch of the second, but what makes it stand out is it's ability to hold my attention for the entire episode and manage to surprise and amuse at every turn.
Telltale games, having played through both seasons of Sam and Max, Strongbad, and now Tales, admittedly have their obvious weak points in the continuum of each individual episode. Sometimes the support characters just aren't that interesting, maybe you're doing something really generic that you feel like you did last episode, or whatever. In episode one, it was the crummy and forgettable support characters (apart from the villainous De Singe, of course), in the second it was a sort of draggy latter half. Lair of the Leviathan, though, kept me entertained for the duration. It was surprising to me, and I started to think about the reason for it.
The opening of Lair of the Leviathan isn't as epic as the second episode, but the way that the introduction puzzle is paced and played out is a good example of how Telltale are getting better and better at making parts of the series less gamey and more cinematic. The clues and such are presented in exposition which isn't immediately apparent as part of a puzzle, then throws you relentlessly into the puzzle with a surprise that actually made me laugh out loud, which is rare for me.
When you read the title, Lair of the Leviathan, and know the cliffhanger ending of the second episode, you wouldn't be knocked for thinking that the episode takes place entirely inside of the giant manatee (whose design reminds me a bit of the sort of Linda the Lungfish of Psychonaughts style of mutated aquatic life), but the game continues for about as long after you escape from the innards of the beast. The puzzles and scenes after the fact don't feel tacked on and really help to make the game feel less predictable and offer as much really cool twists and events as the first half of the episode.
This episode also fixes one of the major gripes I had with the previous two episodes, in that some of the support characters are completely forgettable and just there to serve as anchors for a particular puzzle. While the support characters in Lair of the Leviathan are, indeed, anchors for puzzles, they're also given more of a meaningful context and have an agenda beyond being someone to steal something from/give something to/provide a random bit of information. It gives the narrative more depth and puts some of the puzzles into the context of what is happening. Some of the funniest lines are uttered by support characters, although admittedly some of the dialogue between them works well simply because of the return of a beloved Monkey Island fan favourite (I won't spoil who it is!). He also features in the end credits, which is one of the best credit sequences in a game I can remember watching.
After thinking about all these things, I've come to the conclusion that Telltale obviously have: The story in an adventure game, and how it is presented and told, is more important than the part where you solve the puzzles. The way they are getting better at presenting the story and trying to intergrate the puzzles into the actual flow of the narrative rather than having them there for the sake of you doing something between each exposition is really awesome, and i really hope they only get better as the series comes to an end. Die-hard adventure game fans would disagree with me, but the way Telltale put a well told, well presented and amusing story over the need for bogging it down with mind-bending puzzles is the best thing to happen to the genre.
Recently, there has been a sort of huge resurgence of what people consider oldschool genres in video games. Stuff that was way popular back in the early days that at some point dropped off the map and almost faded into obscurity. Adventure games, fighting games, 2D adventures, even the rise of 'casual' puzzle game timewasters, kids today are reliving the memories of an older gamer like myself, albeit less pixelated and with less granulated and robotic voice acting (well, sometimes...).
But some genres don't have the luxury of fading away to be reborn. Ones that cling to the very thread of being modern mainstream to this day and yet have not changed all that much over the years. I am, of course, speaking of the humble JRPG.
I recently played through most of Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, the two Mistwalker exclusives for the xbox360, enough to feel the need to write a blog about them anyway. By definition, these games are, heart and soul, oldschool JRPG's. Most of what bothers me about them, and their public reception, was the manner in which they came about. They were both 'dream team' games used to push the 360 into the Japanese market. As such, a huge expectation was thrown on them in the western world that they would be somehow ascendant above all other JRPG's and would find the magical missing piece that would shatter the world of JRPG's forever.
Of course, it wasn't to be. What Mistwalker made were two perfectly competant oldschool JRPG's, in a traditional sense. Because of this, (and some technical difficulties in Blue Dragon particularly) the two games weren't exactly seen in a favourable light in the western world, yet garnered pretty amazing review scores in Japan (say what you will about Famitsu's integrity).
The games themselves, by reading reviews and playing them myself, aren't terrible games at all. Blue Dragon, is about as close to playing a Saturday morning anime that you can get. The feel of Akira Toriyama's character design interlaced with a non-complex yet well-told story akin to a fairytale or kids show makes it interesting without resorting to overtly complex ridiculousness that finds it's way into alot of JRPG's. The characters in Lost Odyssey are believable and tragic, and the dream sequences can really make you feel and relate to them.
The graphics in both games are, stylisticly, absolutely stunning. Blue Dragon in particular suffers terribly from framerate issues, and Kluke's face just looks fucking weird, but otherwise they are visual tour-de-forces. The cutscenes are very well done in both games, and as I said earlier, Blue Dragon is like watching a genuine anime from start to finish in that regard.
So what makes the games suffer bad review scores then?
Sadly, it is the simple notion that they are oldschool JRPGs. The mechanics, although suffering from traditional pitfalls like level scaling problems, are sound and not overly complex, and the differences, like all JRPGs, are incremental, leading to a sort of 'stuck in the past' feel that they were designed to invoke in the first place. But this isn't a blog about how badly done-by JRPGs in review scores. It's about games made in a traditional oldschool way being accepted and not accepted due to trends. The differences between the Telltale adventure games and classic ones are incremental, and Shadow Complex isn't exactly reimagining the 2D exploration genre. I'm not saying those examples are bad games by any stretch of the imagination, it's just neither example really go above and beyond the existing mechanics and are still great examples in their respective genres.
Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey are the same. They are games in a specific genre catered for a specific audience in a deliberately oldschool fashion, and while they have their problems and aren't for everyone, they are still good examples of the genre and are worth checking out for fans of the style. JRPG's are gonna stay JRPGs, they aren't going to magical reform into some super-genre with some massive sweeping messiah-brought change. JRPGs can't 'come back,' because they never left in the first place. So why is it that people expect them to?
I went out today with a pile of monies in my wallet, and came home with a shiny new PS3 Slim. I got it at JBHiFi, they were having a deal where you got a free game and HDMI cable with it for a few bucks less than the RRP, so I can't really complain. I also picked up two of the most interesting exclusives to me: Valkyria Chronicles and InFamous. The free game was Assassins Creed, btw, which will probably see about as much attention as the pack-ins for my previous console purchase, Lego Indy and Kung-Fu Panda.
My PSN account will be the same as my XBL one (iwilldoit9times), so hit me up on either. Make me feel at home. And by home, I don't mean Playstation Home. Ugh...
Anyone who's into DotA probably already knows about League of Legends. I'd hazard a guess that anyone remotely interested in playing it has already signed up for the beta and got accepted into the most recent round of invitations, which are probably pretty sweeping considering the amount of time left until it comes out. That said, I'm in the beta and played some matches for a few hours, and guess what?
It's totally DotA.
Which isn't a bad thing really. The Champions are all pretty well designed and very varied in their look and feel. There's no real uniformity between them, they're all just fantasy and steam-punk staples that range from your floating evil wizard guy to your little chipmunk furry with a blunderbuss to a bog standard minotaur that punches stuff.
One of the things I was a little worried about in LoL was the summoner mechanic, where your account levels as you play matches and get experience. Leveling your summoner will unlock powerful summoner spells, gain you points that you put toward an overarching summoner 'build' that effects all your champions, and opens up more rune slots in your rune book. I was afraid that this would sort of dumb down the early matches and make it hard for beginners to get a grip on the game with the inevitable twinking that will go on, but so far the core gameplay is good enough to carry it without you thinking too much about your summoner level. The spells you get are fun to unlock and swap around to find new tactics with your favourite Champions, and the rune slots and build stuff are fairly minor early on, so even if you were to play against someone with high tier runes on a low level summoner, you won't notice the difference. I would hazard a guess that later on all this stuff is pivotal to your success, since there are alot of rune slots and points to gain, but the important part is that beginners aren't really shafted in their early games because of people twinking the system.
I played all my matches to date with the Champion called Fiddlesticks, an evil animated scarecrow that drains health, can fear targets, and has some pretty nasty AoE attacks. This one hero is fun enough to make me keep playing LoL for over four hours straight, so I can imagine with a cast of many Champions there's probably more than a few that you'll take a shining to.
One jarring thing about the presentation, however, is that the game's lobby, summoner info and chat interfaces are all separate from the actual game engine in a set of browser-like windows. The chatroom stuff and buddy list bits are pretty awesome, but when once you enter a match, pick your Champion, spells and rune setup, the browsers will all close and the actual game will boot, which takes a little while on my PC. The resolution it natives too isn't great either, and I've yet to find a way to change it to something higher. The graphics are functional, but not really top-shelf. Maybe it's just because of the resolution... In any case, it runs at about 70fps on my modest P4, which is probably the most important thing. There hasn't been any lag to speak of despite my ping to the server from Australia, and the UI and game interface are really clean, polished and precise.
Considering League of Legends will be free to play, I don't see how anyone with even a remote interest in DotA would fail to check this out.
Just wrapped up Tales of Monkey Island Ep2. They really capitalized on the cliffhanger ending and delivered a truly epic intro to the episode. Some of the jokes are a bit hit and miss after the fact, and it loses a little steam at the home stretch, but overall a good follow-up to the first episode. Just remember to pick up the bucket, and all will be well.
There's a trailer there, and I must say, it looks pretty good for a game that I would guess won't be coming until late next year at the earliest. I am definitely looking forward to it. Guild Wars was my first MMO (well, it technically isn't an MMO, but you get what I mean) so I'm getting a bit of nostalgia-hype burning inside.
in other news, I just finished a first playthrough of Shadow Complex. Great game! It has a few graphical issues here and there, and yes, Claire's face does in fact look weird and mangled in most scenes she's in, but the game itself is pretty awesome. I played through on Hardcore the first time through, and it was fairly challenging early on. As you pick up more health and armor packs it becomes a lot easier, though. I was spending most of the time melee'ing everyone in sight rather than shooting them, since punching dudes gives you temporary invincibility while the animation is running, which is handy in a lot of parts of the game, especially on Hardcore where your health drops like a stone under any concentrated fire.
I recently got back into Warhammer Online, playing on an American server rather than a hometown Oceanic. It's mindblowing how different the population is, and I'm having fun with the game again. Being able to RvR at any tier consistantly and constantly does wonders for how much you get out of it. Maybe it's due to the fact I'm playing Order this time around, and everyone knows Order is easymode.
Holy crap, I just got an email telling me Tales of Monkey Island: Ep2 is out! I'll be back in a few hours.
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