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Superharman

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Game of the Year 2008

So I decided to go back and do game of the year lists for the two years I felt I could realistically create them, those also happened to cover the other years of how long Giant Bomb has been doing them.

Important Note: I was a student at the time (which I'll often mention) so my budget was limited. A lot of these games are borrowed. Also, unlike other GOTY lists I have on my lists page (which are generally written in the last week of their given year), this isn't strict about when I played the game. I played MGS4 in like 2014 or something.

List items

  • Braid was one of the first games that I can recall becoming super in to on a variety of levels. I remember enjoying my initial playthrough to a pretty large extent and feeling the need to read theories on “what it all meant man…” afterwards. Engaging with the game in this way lead me to some wild theories and the stars. So, I just kept playing the game and playing and playing. I reset the game so I could do it all again including re-collecting the stars. Oh and I got into speedrunning, not in a way where I was online discussing theories and ideas, but working it all out on my own. At one point, my time was in the top ten on the Xbox leaderboards at a point where it wasn’t available on any other platform.

    I revisited Braid recently and found myself again, having to work out the puzzles like I was playing it for the first time. I took it all in again, the art design, the music and all the disparate story elements. Once again, I loved the experience. I know the discourse on Jonathan Blow these days is complicated, that’s fine, but as a singular work, taken on its own and read on many levels, I still love Braid.

  • 2008 being the year I fell in love with the Idle Thumbs podcast, of course I would end up picking up this game. It was hardly love at first sight though, I remember one point where I sat there staring at the screen after yet another death wondering if I’d made a horrible mistake. You see, as a student at the time, money was a little on the tight side and this is what I ended up spending my birthday money on over Fallout 3 and Fable 2?

    While it took a while to find my rhythm, I got there eventually and pushed through realising that the harshness was just part of the design. This resulted in some genuinely frantic and intense combat situations, some that I’ll never forget. The whole thing feels so alive and rich despite it’s annoyances like constantly respawning bases. It was these little imperfections being corrected and additional upgrade systems that ultimately left me cold in the sequels. Spending a summer banging my head against this game through was an oddly fulfilling experience though.

  • One of my favourite memories associated with this game was when my housemate I shared a wall with started to play the battle theme on his keyboard just from memory because I’d been playing it so much. I’d only moved in a couple of months before, poor guy must have thought he’d made a big mistake.

    JRPGs are perfect games to chill to, you jump in, work your way to a save point and decide if you want to keep going or walk away for the day. I didn’t actually know this at the time because Lost Odyssey was the first JRPG I’d played. I got it because I wanted something to play and it was a fresh 360 exclusive. The thing is, I liked it a lot, but never really went back to the genre afterwards, maybe because for a long while, all I had was a 360.

    Lost Odyssey has so much to it that it’s hard to sort of explain, it’s a big wild plot that was probably pitched or an idea for a Final Fantasy game at some point. There is a lot of emotion in there too and some solid themes. One of my favourite things about the game though is the fiction. These memories are nothing but text on screen with music and sound effects, but they’re often touching and it turns out to be a genuinely great way to display a memory rather than a cut scene. I’ll probably replay this eventually, for now though, the memory of it is so strong that I can’t help but put it third on this list.

  • Memory time, this game scared the shit out of my girlfriend to the point where she would go under the covers of the bed so she didn’t have to watch it. When I finished it I told her it was safe to come out…and then the final scare happened and she didn’t sleep that night.

    It’s weird that I never got super into the Dead Space series, never played the second for example, because I loved this game. That might be why though, I didn’t see this as a franchise, just a great, wholly singular game. The precise combat was a thrill, the HUD elements felt ahead of their time and the entire world design was on point.

    Maybe I’m just not a horror gamer, I don’t know, I don’t really play horror games which begs the question why I loved the first Dead Space so much? Maybe that memory of the scare to my girlfriend is just so damn strong but more likely I just fell hard into the world for a week and got everything I wanted from it.

  • Funny thing about Yakuza games, their endings will often impact how I feel about the following game. Yakuza 2 is a perfect example of this, I loved Yakuza 2, it’s probably my favourite game in the franchise and part of that has to do with the relationship with Sayama Kaoru. Yakuza 3 shrugging off that relationship annoyed me to the point where I feel like I look down on that game more than I should. The same thing happened with the ending of four being so strong that the first 3 chapters of five were a total bummer.

    Yakuza 2 though was where I genuinely fell in love with this world and what the universe had to offer. It set my first post study travel destination as Japan (which actually didn’t end up being my first post study travel destination…) and I remember just gripping my controller as hard as possible towards the end of the game. Yakuza games are wild experiences and this game with things like tiger battles is no exception. Playing the game also felt like revisiting old friends, something which only continued as the series went on despite how I felt about the story they were telling. I fell in love with the series with this one.

  • Metal Gear Solid 4 is a giant bloated mess of a game and I kind of love it for that. I played this years after the fact and my big thing was that despite the fact that I’d watched retrospective videos on the series that included the fiction of this game, I didn’t feel like I’d been spoiled.

    There’s a real dichotomy in Hideo Kojima’s work where at one point he’ll be ruminating on the horrors of war and the next, smoking monkeys. As someone who has read a lot of weird shit in literature, I find it a little wanting, but oddly charming at the same time. MGS4 was probably, no, easily my least favourite of the series to that point and yet at the end, I felt jazzed about the whole thing.

    With all this being said, I am a little annoyed at this game for a completely superfluous reason. On the day I woke up and said to myself, “I’m going to finish this game today!” I dd, but also forgot that I wanted to go see a screening of The French Connection at a local cinema. I love The French Connection, it’s one of my top five favourite films but I haven’t seen it on the big screen…and I still haven’t because of this game.

  • This one has really dropped off over the years for a couple of reasons but at the time, I thought it was great and thinking back on it, I still enjoyed what they were going for. All GTA games are going to be clumsy just by the nature of their open worlds and this one certainly struggled to balance the seriousness with the satire which had become common in the series.

    I think where it ultimately fell off for me over the years was that lack of fun. I didn’t completely realise it at the time but I really wanted the craziness of San Andreas which was probably why I latched on so heavily to Saints Row The Third. My memories of this game are of the grimy world which is great in part but I don’t really remember any of the fun I had playing the game and that’s a bit of a shame personally.

  • I didn’t play this till a year after it’s initial release and getting the GOTY edition as a gift. It was a strange set of circumstances that led me getting this game as the reason I didn’t get it in the first place was because despite being a Fallout original player, I wasn’t super into Bethesda games in general. Then, in my brokenness/boredom in 2009, I decided to go back to Oblivion which I’d gotten with my 360 and I got super into it, so I decided it was time to give Fallout 3 a go.

    Now this game has been overshadowed in my memory on pretty much every level by the vastly superior New Vegas, but at the time, this game was a compulsive play that I spent 100 hours on. My Bethesda fandom would continue through Skyrim too but then fell off hard with Fallout 4, a game I finished and put in my top ten the year it came out but now kind of hate. You can’t take away the great time I had playing this game though, of course, having time to explore all nooks and crannies of the world was a big help.

  • I never finished Fable, there was just a total disconnect with that game for me which might have had a lot to do with my expectations going it for what was promised. Basically, I’m trying to say that despite the good reviews, I wasn’t willing to give Fable 2 a go, mostly because I could only afford one game at the time. Thankfully, I had a friend who loaned me the game insisting I give it a go and thinking I would enjoy it and I did, I just didn’t love it.

    My memories of this game are mostly of the, “oh yeah, that was cool” variety. There is nothing I found particularly striking or memorable about the world but I do remember some of the great British voice acting. It’s possible I’m being a little harsh on the game, I can assure you that I enjoyed playing it and yes, I had a good relationship with my dog, but it can’t go higher on this list.

  • This game gets a lot of crap and I partly get it, it’s the one without buckets of blood or fatalities, but I mean, it’s still a lot of fun. It’s also the game that sets up what we got with MK9 with both the cinematic story mode, Netherrealm becoming acquainted with the unreal engine and the relationship is likely the reason WB picked them up after the Midway collapse and we got Injustice.

    I’ve also got some really cool memories of playing this game with friends as I was able to get some of my comic friends to dig in. It might not hold up and the fact Street Fighter IV hadn’t made it okay to go back to 2D does hurt the game as MK was never really suited to 3D, but it’s still a blast and the story mode is a big does of crazy cross over fun. I wish Johnny Cage was in it though.
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