2008 Ranked
2008 is one of those years where all of the big games hit much differently today than they did at the the time.
List items
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There was a period in Rockstar Games' history in which they were producing an endless stream of unconventional, daring, even experimental titles. Manhunt, The Warriors, Midnight Club 3, Bully; all of these games featured either an unconventional premise or experimental core mechanic which would be replicated by other developers in the coming years. Manhunt's meta-narrative framing of violent fantasy would be echoed in Hotline Miami, Midnight Club 3 laid a framework for Burnout: Paradise and Forza: Horizons' open world format; even Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas' commitment to an epic-scale simulation of urban and rural day-to-day life is echoed in the open world design of Assassin's Creed: Origins.
Grand Theft Auto IV is the end of an era, demarcating the last time Rockstar would find itself on the cutting edge. Later Rockstar titles would focus on singular filmic narratives set in digital spaces of unprecedented scale. Grand Theft Auto IV, by contrast, is the rare Rockstar game that actually *limited* the size and scope of its world, favoring specificity and character instead of an expansive video game feature set. GTA IV's Liberty City is a locale built to encapsulate a specific outsider view of American dysfunction. It's an open world that is, itself, parodic and critical. It's neither the photo-realistic simulation of San Andreas' Los Angeles nor the broad caricature of Vice City.
Liberty City makes a lot of sense when viewed through the eyes of Nico Bellic, GTA IV's protagonist. Nico is a rare Rockstar lead in that he's not exactly nihilistic or coming from a place of imagined superiority. Nico is critical of his environment, but he ends up forming meaningful bonds with people, as well. He cares about those around him, asks critical questions about their circumstances and the systems which put them there. This is why GTA IV will always be the best of the series, for my money: it's the one Grand Theft Auto game that actually wants you to care.
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Persona 4 is widely beloved, and for good reason: it's got a dynamic cast of characters, a compelling central mystery, a phenomenal light-psychological horror framing device for its dungeons, perfected JRPG mechanics, the list goes on. But it also does something important that the other Persona games are less interested in: it allows you to role play through the platonic ideal of the high school experience. Persona 4's lead character is in the enviable position of being the new kid from the big city, and his peers are interested in him by default. Unlike Persona 3's lovably mope-y hero, Persona 4's protagonist is confident, fashionable and widely liked.
The end effect is that Persona 4 presents the player with a whimsical, Tokimeki Memorial-like ideation of high school. Whereas Persona 1-3 painted a tense, nominally dark picture of adolescence, Persona 4 encourages you to play through high school as a kind of vacation getaway. Imagine if you could do it all again, but this time, do it perfectly; be a straight-A student with six girlfriends and, like, four part-time jobs. Save for the fact that Persona 4 is a murder mystery, I can't imagine a more fantastical high school experience.
But still, it isn't all fantasy. Part of Persona 4's genius is that underneath that idyllic trip back to high school lies a seedy, sort of para-psychological underbelly of greed, repression and judgement. The player is tasked with unmasking and resolving underlying tensions which haunt his friends and, in turn, the town itself. In that way, Persona 4 gets you to think critically about the veneer of small town living. Are the underlying problems of society really different in a rural context? Obviously, no; those problems are just expressed differently. For all its escapist maximalism, Persona 4's strength is its nuanced characters, whose problems are complicated and specific.
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The most blindsided I've ever been with a video game. Far Cry 2's commitment to its central thesis is implausible as a AAA game with a budget, a devastating piece of narrative art in a series otherwise famous for being exactly the opposite. While the sheer quality of its narrative delivery can be questionable, especially regarding the bizarre speedreading-style performances of its cast, the overarching theme of cruelty and man-made disaster is spelled out in each and every firefight.
Far Cry 2 isn't *fun*, exactly; arguably, it's unpleasant to play. But that unpleasantness is the point. By the game's end, I had gone from traipsing through blazing fires and the chaos of war-time violence in the way I would in any video game to suddenly actualizing that my mastery of the game's mechanics had turned the game into a defacto war crime simulator. The best players in this game about war will have become the worst characters in the narrative.
Far Cry 2 doesn't achieve this ambitious reversal of FPS tropes via a blunt-force 'pulling back the curtains' trick, but by introducing several dynamic elements to the game's structure that throttle the player's ability to fully control any given situation. You don't win or lose, per se, so much as you directly and indirectly accumulate material means to the detriment of every single other actor (and natural element) in the game world. This is a game where your enemies will try to save one another when you hurt them. This is a game where killing a 'buddy' may be kinder than trying to save them. You set fires in Far Cry 2, but once you do you can't put them out - you can only fuel the them higher.
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Since its release, a lot of Fallout fans have pointed to Fallout 3 as the beginning of the series' downward trend towards the XP driven shooter, but I like to see it as the high watermark of Bethesda's open world role playing. This game lacks the style and clearheaded perspective of its progenitors, but I have never played a game so eager to let you roleplay than Fallout 3. The player isn't given a series of big, plot-altering crossroads as in New Vegas so much as they're given thousands of little moments to decide what kind of person they are.
In one early game scene the player is confronted by their childhood bully, Butch, who threatens to steal a birthday gift. You have several options: concede the gift, punch Butch, threaten to punch Butch, make fun of Butch, make fun of the elderly woman who gave you the gift therefore *siding* with Butch, or take the high road and walk away. None of these options have any concrete gameplay effects - I think you can sway your position on the morality scale slightly - but they're there for a reason. Roleplaying a character shouldn't always be about flipping a switch that either saves or ruins the world; at its best, roleplaying means inhabiting a life other than your own. That can mean punching out your schoolyard bully, but it can also mean deciding to be someone who doesn't fit so neatly into monomythian heroics.
On my first big playthrough of Fallout 3, I liked being the hero, but I decided I needed to have a flaw to make things interesting. I chose to play as a Witcher-y mercenary with ethics, the kind of person who would do the right thing, but especially for the right price. One sidequest has you rescue an altruistic mercenary group led by a ex-mercenary named Reilly from an unwinnable conflict. When you do, their leader thanks you for the help. There are several responses available, and I chose to haggle for a better price. Reilly smiled, and told me I reminded her of her days as a mercenary for hire. That moment of legitimization lit a spark in me that very few other games ever have. Plenty of games allow you to try out different careers or personalities, but precious few are interested in the specifics.
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No More Heroes is a rebuke on the games industry and the people who love it. It's a game that straight out doesn't like you. The main character, Travis Touchdown, uses a non-copyright infringing lightsaber called a beam katana that requires the player to literally jerk off their wii remote to keep it charged. The game's missions are separated by a full open city to explore that has nothing in it save for a few scattered collectibles you receive no reward for attaining. One level is a mostly empty hallway that leads to an enormous robot boss, which explodes before you get to fight it. At the game's climax a surprise character appears to deliver a brutal plot twist. Before she reveals the nature of the game's plot, she suggests video game players are too impatient to listen to dialogue, and so the scene plays at a speed that makes dialogue indiscernible.
No More Heroes isn't as shocking now as it was then, but I think the heart of its criticism holds water. I don't think it's quite as bad now as it was then considering Red Dead Redemption 2, a game that demands you take baths regularly, is the most recent megahit in video games, but there are a LOT of developers that put rewarding the player as an objective that supersedes everything.
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What sets Gears 2 apart from games like Uncharted, Tomb Raider or Call of Duty is that its set-piece moments never supersede its gameplay. Even when you're waist deep in the stomach acid of a skyscraper-chomping mega worm, you're still zipping between cover spots in challenging combat scenarios. There's no 'hold the analog stick forward and watch the rollercoaster ride' moment. Gears of War 2 is all meat, no vegetables.
Also, is there a more 'this is video games in 2008' moment than the sequence with Dom's wife? There's really not.
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Dead Space holds up phenomenally well in 2019, but it feels different now. I've become accustomed to games like Outlast or Alien: Isolation from big budget horror, which actually have you on the backpedal. Dead Space may have felt carefully paced at the time, but now it's hard to ignore that you are CONSTANTLY under siege in this game. There's no quiet moment, or breathing room. Shit's popping off all the time and you are always firing wildly into a mass of eject-able limbs.
That's not to say Dead Space lacks for existential dread. The moment in which you realize the rescue ship you've been waiting for is about to crash land into you is still gut-to-the-floor horrifying. It's a sequence in which the push-and-pull nature of Dead Space is made explicit: the harder you try to survive the flying limbpocalypse, the harder the world tries to kill you.
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People in the video game industry were hungry for legitimization in the late 2000's. You couldn't read a blog post or, uh, share a link to a webcomic in 2008 without running facefirst into a debate about what the "Citizen Kane" of video games was. It was an earnest time, and I do not miss it at all.
There's a lot beneath this hilariously antiquated conversation. For one, people who grew up alongside video games were now in their thirties, and likely craving legitimization. The indie scene was also beginning to erupt, and developers were making games that simply could not be critiqued purely on the merit of their 'fun factor.'
It wasn't all faux-capital C waxing philosophic, however - this was also when serious attempts at censuring the industry at large by governments around the world. It's easy to forget, but there was a full-on moral panic about Grand Theft Auto for basically a full decade. As a result, there were a lot of writers hungry to namedrop something that proved, once and for all, that video games were art and therefore deserved to be considered as such.
Many games were cited as examples of a 'Citizen Kane,' the most frequent of which were (usually) Shadow of the Colossus, Grand Theft Auto IV, BioShock, Half Life 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Of these games, the one I am the least convinced by is Guns of the Patriots. Whereas the other titles on this list explored previously untold narrative territory or created a spectacular sense of atmosphere, Guns of the Patriots is essentially Metal Gear Solid 2/3, but MORE.
I say this more as a compliment than a critique, but this is a video game with some serious baggage. Guns of the Patriots, even bound by the core mechanics of a series entering old age, was open enough in design to allow for greater freedom in player expressivity than any previous MGS title. However, it also devoted easily double the time to dry, convoluted exposition as even the famously cutscene-happy MGS 2. I actually like extended cutscenes, but there are sequences in Guns of the Patriots in which the player is asked to sit through strings of cutscenes that equal the length of a feature film. Video games have a unique capacity for interactivity, and Guns of the Patriots' insistence that the player take a backseat for many of its most important moments almost feels like an acknowledgement that movies are just better vehicles for narratives, at least in this context.
When you're *in* Guns of the Patriots, it sweeps you off your feet. The boss fights are incredible, and the first two levels, in which Snake must sneak between warring factions he has no allegiances to or against, are so, so good. But then it all gets caught up in itself, and suddenly you're watching a cutscene in which two people confess their love for one another as they're being shot by slow-mo Matrix bullets over and over. Guns of the Patriots is just as Michael Bay as it is Apocalypse Now.
My point is, Guns of the Patriots is actually a fantastic game, but its not one that I find myself returning to as some marker of industry progress in the way that I do some other titles on this list. I'm thankful, at the very least, that we've all shed the Citizen Kane question from the conversation.
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I'm of the mind that Brendon Chung is one of the most important voices in Video Game storytelling of the last ten years, and Gravity Bone is a testament to his unique style. It's not flat out flawless like Thirty Flights of Loving is, but it possesses the same pixie stick energy, and that ending is just about perfect.
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Condemned: Criminal Origins is one of my favorite games of all time, and definitely ranks in the top 10 spookiest games ever. Bloodshot is by contrast more action-oriented, and more willing to go for big moments over the slow burn of building tension.
I still love it. Not every swing is a hit, but there are missions in this game in which you just kinda have to throw your hands up and go with it. At one point you're investigating a murder at a history museum, and then a bunch of maniacs break in and start a riot, so you're grabbing medieval swords and slashing guys and, like, screaming on your couch. I'm here for that! And the fuckin BEAR! Ahhhhh what a game. This is a good game.
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Rock Band 2 was looser and less presentationally clean than Rock Band 1. It felt like, after the success of the first game, Harmonix no longer were making a game with something to prove.
When Rock Band 2 came out, I remember scratching my head at some of the more unusual track selections. The first game featured tracks from different subgenres of rock that could act as a gateway to diehards of any other subgenre of rock. An oldschool metal head just finishing up Black Sabbath's Paranoid may tire easily of indie rock, for example, but even if they were hoping for a bit more in the way of Iron Maiden to play, can anyone really say no to the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Maps?
Rock Band 2 features a much greater track variety. It throws 70 songs at the wall hoping one will happen to be your favorite, rather throwing on a playlist everyone can agree on. It makes sense considering this was the point in which Harmonix began banking on its large DLC library to set it apart from Guitar Hero.
Rock Band 2 also marks the first time I listened to Dinosaur Jr. So it rules.
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If you haven't played Geo War 2's pacifist mode, maybe - MAYBE - you haven't lived. It has the same slow-to-start-quick-to-explode pace of Devil Daggers. You can't shoot in pacifist, you can only run and pass through checkpoints which clear out nearby enemies. HOWEVER! The checkpoints have bright red edges that kill you on contact, and they can jerk around in an unpredictable circular motion, because the checkpoints are ASSHOLES. You'll realize quickly that your true enemy is not the blue guys chasing you everywhere, it's these fucking checkpoints. You can do naught but prey they grant you safe passage. You are a surfer riding the wave of a rhombus army, hurtling towards the indifferent twirl of a checkpoint's caprice.
The checkpoints; the checkpoints. They are fickle.
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The Fable games came out at the perfect time. There was a bubble in the mid-2000s where they were mindblowing. The sheer volume of choices available made it worth the price of admission. Now, they feel like a slog.
It all comes down to how gaudy everything is. I like the extremely British quality of the visuals, but everyone in the Fableverse is always either screaming, farting, or fucking. It's a majestic medieval adventure as envisioned by a 12 year old. And, while I know the combat was never the point, doing practically anything in this game feels slow and weightless.
Credit where it's due, though: Fable II is the best in the series, and one of the few games (especially from this era) that would actually penalize the player for being a force of sheer moral good. The problem with titles like Fallout and BioShock is that they insist the player be rewarded for being a hero, even though being a hero almost by definition demands some sacrifice. This is one of the only AAA games I can think of that actually makes good on that idea.
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This is probably the version of Street Fighter II I've spent the most time with, thanks to its online functionality. A lot of my memories with it are interlinked with my hopes for the then-burgeoning market of small-scale downloadable games. HD Remix is essentially a re-balanced (or, maybe better put, balanced) iteration of the original fighting game classic. It's not barebones to the point of un-recognizability like the original version of Street Fighter II was, it's not as manic as the Super Turbo version, it's got a dramatically rebalanced AI that actually operates by the rules of the game - like a lot of remasters (or 'remixes' as it were), it's the version of Street Fighter II that exists in your head that never actually existed in material reality.
The one big misstep in this game is the art style. While the remastered animations are pristine, the actual visual style is...sharp, but also Todd Mcfarlane-esque. Characters have gone from expressive and iconographic to horrifically muscular, overdrawn monstrosities. The use of croud-sourced fan remixes of the music was a fun touch in 2008, but similar to the art style, they're also not exactly timeless.
The worst part is I think this version of the game is . Capcom seems completely disinterested in re-releasing this anywhere, and it's not backwards compatible on either Xbox or Playstation. In the end, I guess that means it fulfills the negative aspects of the digital market as well as the positive ones - it's a game that's already lost to history.
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There isn't a more landmark moment in indie games than Braid, but looking back I have this lingering feeling that the 'it was really all about the atom bomb' twist wouldn't hit me nearly as much now. I think I almost prefer the simpler narrative of Tim as a monstrous romantic partner who can't come to grips with his own actions than as a pastoral storybook grappling with the use of the atom bomb, but maybe that's just me.
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In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, there is, at any moment, a chance you'll fall the fuck over for no reason. I love this mechanic, but a very large percentage of Smash's playerbase did not. The prior game had garnered this intense competitive scene that, in order to exist in an esports space, had to surgically remove core elements of the Super Smash experience (tm). No items, no referential stages, no RNG swings of fate due to the sudden appearance of a level geometry-clipping snorlax.
Almost as if in retaliation, Brawl now included a core mechanic that forced everyone, Melee obsessives included, to reckon with the fact that Smash is intended to have some amount of random chance.
I loved Brawl's insistence to be a non-subvertable whirlwind of Nintendian destruction. It demanded that you stop taking each match so seriously and have a good time; it was not a game you conquered, but rather a game that you surrendered to. To survive the chaos in a Smash game is to win, but to CREATE chaos has always been the point.
All that said, this is a Wii game, and the rule at the time seems to have been that every franchise had to be slower and floatier than ever before - consequently, Brawl is the second-to-last Smash game I'd think to boot up if playing with friends. It's just not as sharp as the other games.
The subspace emissary was excellent, though. Maybe a little...TOO stupid, but still excellent.
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Saints Row 2 is Saints Row 3, but, like...within reason. Volition hadn't quite exploded the franchise yet, but this go-for-broke sequel was still pretty wild.
One thing I appreciate about Saints Row 2 in retrospect is how optimistic it is. Saints Row 3 and 4 were also extremely goofy, but Saints Row 2 is unabashedly positive to exist in a way those games aren't. You spend more time with the rest of the cast in 2, just bein' buddies. It's nice! Plus, this game has an actual, appreciable villain who ISN'T a British genociding alien or a series of supervillains who get sidelined after the first hour of play.
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Mirror's Edge feels so good to play. Faith's first person ninja-ing into/out of danger is fast, fluid and impactful. The play part of it was all fine and well, but the story around it was lacking. I wanted to learn a thing or two about Faith and her monochrome sprint kingdom, but you never get to stop and smell the roses. Mirror's Edge needed more than just 'exposition -> obstacle course -> exposition -> obstacle course -> credits.
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An early example of the chillout game, but before developers felt they had the freedom to diverge from traditional, objective driven gameplay. In the early goings, I LOVED PixelJunk Eden. It's moody, light, easy to poke around with. But then it gets tough; at first its all drive-by plant pollinating to a lofi study beats soundtrack, then all the sudden you're restarting entire levels because of one missed jump.
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Quite a bit was lost in the Silent Hill franchise once the original development team were no longer at the helm. In fact, I'd say the most important feature in the series - the use of monsters to reflect each protagonists' traumaus - had abruptly come to a halt with Silent Hill: Homecoming, which doles out old monsters like its a Silent Hill parade. Seeing Pyramid Head, a creature that is an *extremely specific* analogy to events exclusive to Silent Hill 2, was jarring.
That said, I think Homecoming does a really admirable job of making some creepy americana in its own right. It's no masterpiece, and it gets bogged down in some expository 'how did Silent Hill get so creepy, anyway??' nonsense, but Homecoming is still very much a game *about* something. Alex Shephard joined the military to get away from his life and has to return home, with all the baggage that confronting his childhood brings. There are painful questions to be answered about the intermingling of loyalty, nationalism and the shame of contradicting your roots to be true to yourself. It's a game where, in a world of sadistic torture monsters, going into your parents' *attic* is still the scariest part.
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A loooot of personality in this game, and definitely the best late era Rare game aside from Viva Pinata. Many of Nuts & Bolts' fans bemoaned the fact that a wide audience didn't latch on to this game, but I don't find this fact surprising OR upsetting. I mean, how many people could possibly want to spend what little spare time they have in this life exploring the logistics of building a fake car for *fun*? That doesn't make it bad, or weird, or wrong or whatever, but that is definitely a niche! Minecraft worked because it was basically a complex virtual set of LEGOs. There were far more complex machines to build than your average brick houses, but the majority of Minecraft players didn't need to worry about, like, comparative engine statistics.
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Wipeout HD didn't feel like a brand new entry in the series so much as a super refined version of what was already there in the older games, sort of a Super Smash Bros. Ultimate of Wipeout games. In other words, Wipeout HD was cool as hell, but not especially surprising.
Also, it was so hard!!! I know Wipeout games are generally hard, but goddamn. I'm so bad at them.
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I'm a big fan of Sackboy - I just wish the platforming in his games was even close to satisfactory. He's so floaty. It's...unnatural.
My favorite experiences in Little Big Planet were levels people made that invented new kinds of games within the constraints of its design, or levels that subverted the idea that it was a platforming game altogether. Of course, you had to dig into landfill-deep digital piles labelled EASY TROPHY FAST PLAY THIS to find them, but they were there.
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How often can you call a fighting game "a delight?" Never! Except right now, about Battle Fantasia! The Ryu of this game is a 12 year old who has a sword that's like, attached to a motorcycle engine. It shoots fireballs! Everyone's happy about that! Battle Fantasia!
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The FES Campaign
Persona 3 is lowkey a masterpiece, and this additional combat-heavy campaign doesn't quite do it justice. I like the combat in the persona games, but I've always felt like it was partially designed to exhaust you. Your days spent outside of dungeons are usually about how you can grow or accrue skills, and your time spent saving the world in TV land or wherever the hell slowly bleeds you of your resources and energy. You can't have just one half of the Persona experience without the other, as doing so exposes the repetition inherent to the series. It's like how removing any one ingredient of pizza ruins pizza. I'm looking at you, white pizza. You son of a bitch.
It's hard to recommend fans pass on FES, though, because there are meaningful moments between the cast. At the heart of it, FES is about a group of kids who just can't quite move past trauma, no matter how far away they run from it. It resonated with me considering the arguably bleak ending of the main game, and I'd swallow just about any halfbaked version of this game to spend more time with its characters. Unless its on the, uh, Vita or 3DS I guess, in which case I just won't do that.
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The Force Unleashed, in spite of its best efforts to be a dark new chapter in the Star Warsiverse, is probably the last time you could have a goofy good time with Star Wars. It gets a bit grim-cool for me and the combat isn't quite tight enough, but its a lot of fun nonetheless. Flinging ragdolls with your mind is *timeless. Fun.*
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In Aether, you swing from things to get to higher things, so that you may also swing from those things to get to things which have achieved even greater heights than the higher things you initially sought to climb. It's an extremely short game, but it plays like a simpler, more Edmund McMillen-ly Grow Home.
So it's, uh, Grow Home with some vague pessimistic sense of existential malaise.
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Not enough people borrow from the Atari days. This is a simple short game, but, man. Terry Cavanagh is so cool.
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Mega Man 9 is hyper faithful to the original NES games, but is so unpredictably hyper difficult it doesn't feel nostalgic so much as it feels mean spirited. I like most of the new bosses and a few of the stages, particularly Galaxy Man's stage, are inventive. Ultimately, it's more interesting to know that a NES-style Mega Man game was made in 2008 than it is to actually play this Mega Man game.
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It's funny, but of all the games on this list I think QWOP is probably the most ahead of its time. I hated it when I first tried it 10 years ago because it was such a viral sensation (is anything more annoying to a teenage contrarian than a viral sensation?), but knowing more now about Bennett Foddy, I can sort of see the genius in QWOP. It's intentionally doofy enough to get people interested in it, but it's not so broken that players laugh at it once and forget about it. People actually want to return to it to see if they can get any farther than the last run.
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In some ways, I like this game's portrayals of DC characters better than the Injustice series, but I could never get past how it played. The 2D/3D plane stuff is awkward and takes some getting used to, and even then it's too methodical. You never get any of that simple, heavy-hitting MK charm. Fun mashup story, though.
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Iron Man is one of the last in a long line of movie B games with one solid central mechanic and bad everything else. They made Iron Man control like a mech in this game! There were like six levels or something and they were ALL a mess, but sure! Why not! It's basically an Anthem prequel.
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COD4 with a James Bond skin is not a bad selling point for a game, but it's also a guarantee your game won't be very James Bond-y.
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This game's morality system was so silly. You either be GOOD, like Wolverine, or BAD like Black Cat. If you play good, you play as plain Spider-Man, but if you're BAD? Well buckle up you son of a bitch - you're dickish Spider-Man!!! Doesn't matter either way, though; you'll be swinging around a couple blocks in this empty, foggy rendition of NYC, slapping goo boys for experience points and making bad quips to no discernible audience.
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Prince of Persia's best qualities are all visual in nature. It's cel-shaded yet high-detail watercolor look was pretty unique in an era where cel-shaded visual design usually meant simple, splotchy characters. The reason why this game is so under-discussed, though, is because it has so little else going on. It's a series of really simple platforming sequences that lead to even simpler arena fights. There's just not that much going on.
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Meat Boy feels a bit like a prototype in comparison to Super Meat Boy, but speaking purely on the merits of what kinds of flash games were developed during the era, it's way better than most other games in its category.
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Feeding Frenzy 2 is fun, but I kinda wish it was zippier. Very much feels like a Windows 98 CD ROM game you'd find bundled with like 14 other similar looking games in the bottom of a bin at, like...a Staples.
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All Mario Kart games are pretty well designed, but Mario Kart Wii stands out to me as being the worst in the series. I can't say I didn't enjoy bits of it, and its definitely not as punishing as the rubber-band heavy 64 entry, but ultimately it's a racing game that lacks a sense of speed - and that's just not a good kind of thing to be! It was dedicated to that plastic wheel peripheral, which was pretty stupid. It's not fun to wave around something so weightless, especially not when your controller was explicitly designed to replace unnecessary peripherals.
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Free Radical was the first game studio I ever discovered. When you're a kid, video games, like, apparate out of the Nintendo factory. But TimeSplitters really struck a chord with me. I was determined to know everything I could about how those games were made, who made them, and *why.* I liked Free Radical's games so much I learned that video game developers were people. Who *existed.*
Haze was an enormous bummer. Not even because it was bad - in all honesty, I think Haze is a middling shooter at worst - but the exuberant, fun-first personality of all of the developer's other titles had been wiped clean in favor of a trendy 'we're a new-gen Halo' style look. Even Second Sight, a relatively grim, plot-heavy title, still practically *glowed* with all its fun ideas. Haze, meanwhile, could not feel more obvious. If you *tried* to make a really insufferable british parody game called The Obvious FPS Simulator you still couldn't match Haze.
Though, if I remember right David Doak was a named character in this game, so maybe it's actually incredibly good.
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All of the Sonic offshoots copycatting the Mario offshoots are less innovative than their progenitors, but they're always the fuller package. Sega Superstars Tennis, for example, just doesn't feel as good or as natural to play as quite literally any Mario Tennis title, but there's a generosity of Sega in-jokes and alternate modes you're unlikely to find in a Nintendo game.
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I have a soft spot for Alone in the Dark. It's so sure it's sweeping and cinematic, but in execution it trips over its own two feet, only to get back up again to a rapturous symphony. It's like a stage play where the effects budget was off *just* enough to make everything come crashing down.
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Soulcalibur IV plays well, it looks nice, and I enjoy it from a pure multiplayer perspective. But, also, I HATE it. The sloppy Star Wars tie in, the shit story, all of it. The portrayal of women in SC4 is humiliating to the human race, and I, for one, NEVER want to see Yoda get ANYWHERE NEAR Voldo. Get Voldo away from Yoda.
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Wii Fit is funny because its use as an exercise machine is, like, zilch. It's more of a 'I've been sitting for a long time and need a reason to be standing for a short time' experience.
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This was the hot shit back in the day, but I could never bring myself to fully enjoy Castle Crashers. It was just, like...there was a throughline where, if you liked South Park, you also liked Castle Crashers, and probably thought both were funny. Unacceptable. I will not enjoy your flash game poop joke fighter no matter how hard you try.
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I hate to say it, but I've never understood the hyperbolic response to Burnout Paradise. It plays as well as past Burnout games, but its big innovative feature is that its set in a flat, grey, open city. To begin an event, you had to drive to an intersection and rev the engine. Most of the races begin in the intersection-heavy city portion of the map - a rainforest of driving activity so dense you'll find yourself in the middle of a competitive crashathon without even meaning to - and end on a large slope in the middle of nowhere. As this is a game without fast travel, Burnout Paradise makes the player race from somewhere to nowhere, and then drive back; you are a child exiting a slide, re-entering the line to go back down.
I'd say its a good enough podcast game/time waster, but the quality of the races just isn't that high. Most if not all of the events feel like copy/pasted versions of classic Burnout modes. The closest modern equivalent to Burnout Paradise is easily Forza Horizon 4, and despite that game's singlular location, I can still remember plenty of races offhand because of the wide variety in individual track design. I couldn't tell you a single moment of note in my entire time with Burnout.
On top of all that, the greatest appeal of this series has always been that shit is getting fucked up ALL the time. When you're white knuckling the controller, narrowly skidding past obstacles to reach first place, suddenly careening into an enormous explosion of traffic feels like a welcome exclamation point to a race. But Burnout Paradise tasks you to travel from place to place to get into the meat of the game; having to sit and watch your car explode all over Guns n' Roses boulevard because you just barely nicked a parked car on the way to a race feels like a tremendous waste of time.
Not to mention the complete lack of a retry button. Burnout Paradise - inconceivably - does not allow you to stop and try again if you make a mistake. You have to finish a race out to end the race. Turns aren't clearly demarcated in Burnout paradise - less so than even in non-racing games like GTA 4 - and ruining an entire six or seven minute event for yourself isn't that tough to do if you're a casual fan like me. If you screw up, you either have to run the entire race knowing its for no gain or...turn it off altogether, I guess.
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I feel like the exact second 2009 hit, you couldn't walk out of your house without acquiring a copy of this game. They gave you money to have it. The streets ran red with Guitar Hero: Aerosmith
Unlike the full fledged Guitar Hero: World Tour, Aerosmith was the last game to use Guitar Hero 3's model of plastic instrument strumming, and is therefore a more consistently fun experience. Just imagine if they'd chosen an artist other than fucking Aerosmith.
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Just thinking about the concept of 'the fruit fucker' fills me with post-adolescent regret.
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Conceptually I really like the LEGO games, but FUCK they're so slow. Like - just fuckin *get there*, man! Oh god. This was around the time in the franchise where every level lasted twice as long as it needed to. When I was a kid, video games were not this laborious to play. Actually, when I was a kid, LEGO GAMES were not this laborious to play.
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World Tour was when you knew they'd lost it. Featuring butt-ugly visuals, an uninspired soundtrack and sub-par gimmicks to differentiate it from Rock Band, there suddenly seemed like little reason for Guitar Hero to continue to exist.
The flimsy nature of Guitar Hero: World Tour's design philosophy vs. Rock Band's comparatively singular output was evident in the difference between the games' redesign of the guitar controllers.
Rock Band had added solo buttons on the lowest end of their guitar necks for players to use during difficult solos. While playing chords with them was virtually impossible, the solo buttons didn't need to be strummed when hit - that is, as long as the player was in the middle of a demarcated guitar solo. Besides granting a helping hand to players on higher difficulties, the solo buttons also fulfilled the rock band fantasy of shredding your dingles off in a huge noisy solo at the climax of a song.
World Tour, meanwhile, added the slide buttons, which only worked in certain sections of songs where the guitarist clearly wasn't strumming each note out. So rather than having to tap out difficult sections of single notes, you could just slide from one end of the bar to another. In theory it has a similar effect as far as easing difficulty is concerned, but who in their right mind has ever fantasized about *not* strumming notes *sometimes* so they sound *slidey-er*?
After the soaring, arcade perfect success of Guitar Hero III, World Tour not only felt rushed, it also felt unintelligible. The franchise had lost its identity.
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This was a DS game, but I played it on iPhone for cheaper like probably everyone did. It's honestly pretty shoddy. It's one of those games that's like, weirdly too quiet and slow, and it all starts to feel depressing somehow. Between this and Bloodlines, it's funny to think that Ubisoft briefly considered Altair as their big new AAA protagonist.
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The fact that this game's campaign was widely praised at the time of release is a greater reflection of where video games were at in 2008 than what Bad Company actually is, because what Bad Company actually is is generic.
From a gameplay perspective, Bad Company is significantly worse than the average Battlefield campaign. While I appreciate that it marries the open, capture point-based design of Battlefield multiplayer to a story mode, the AI is not sufficiently intelligent on either the support or the opponent side to mimic that experience. Similarly, the level design is flat, empty, and lacking in unique visual features; it frequently feels like a made-up video game that plays in the background of a movie and not an actual video game.
And then there's the cast - Bad Company barely tells a story. The characterization is really, really broad and unremarkable. The audio mixing is weird and led to me missing nearly all of the ambient dialogue during combat sequences, and cutscenes consist entirely of one character listing a series of locations to capture and making a plan of action to take those locations. There's nothing there.
From a single player perspective, Bad Company was a tech demo for dynamic structural damage masquerading as a full-fledge single player game. Not great!
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Wii Music is so deflating. You waggle the controller around and midi trumpet noises come out of the TV. Makes perfect sense for a young child, but, like, this is Nintendo, right? Even their most simplistic fare has, at least, some whimsy to it.
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PlayStation Home was a whole lot like Second Life, but you had to pay for everything, there were very few options for customization, and the entire experience was designed for players to be advertised to. To play it was to be in a half-empty room populated by plastic-y people in Playstation merch, text-chatting about boobs beneath the shadow of a thirty foot tall mountain dew ad. Pretty cool stuff!
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I don't often feel the need to point out the way in which contemporary entertainment minimizes the tragedy of real lives lost to war, but COD: WAW briefly made me that guy. The advertising around and celebratory use of the flamethrower to burn enemy soldiers alive really put me off. Couldn't get past it then, don't feel much different now. It feels perverse, even in a franchise that generated the 'press x to pay respects' meme.
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I remember Sneak King. I remember Pepsiman. When advergaming was GOOD.
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