Even Halo had car driving in it! Wow!
Haha, anyway, 2011 is an interesting year for me because, just like most of the PS3 era, I was so heavily hooked on NBA 2K online competitive play and running a franchise game by game in MyGM - oh, to be a basketball fan in the time before MyCareer and MyTeam ruined everything - that I didn't find time for much other gaming at the time and came to most things after the zeitgeist had wound down. That being said, through PS+ and game sales I did eventually get to play some pretty great games from 2011, and these are those!
NBA 2K12: There's a reason Polygon included this in their Top 100 Games of the Decade; I think it was actually in the Top 50 even? It wasn't just an incredible basketball sim with some super-fun roster diversity (OK, most people were picking the Lakers or the Heat, but still, the lesser teams were formidable in capable hands), its nods to the history of basketball with mostly complete rosters from dozens of the best teams of all-time, period-accurate rules and presentation for each decade and some truly stellar recreations of historic athletes in their primes made for the ur-game of simulation basketball. If the joke about sports games is that they're glorified yearly roster updates, 2K12 was the exception that proved the rule: for once, a publisher truly could've just released the same game again next year with roster and attribute tweaks and it would've been a better decision than the path 2K Sports actually followed.
Mortal Kombat: I don't know if my interpretation of this franchise was ever true, but for me personally MK had gone from a marque title to an afterthought in the years following MK4 (an accidental camp masterpiece and you can't tell me otherwise!) by wading way too deep into the fighting game waters and getting way too desperate in search of new characters and official lore. While I still miss the zaniness that accompanied '90s fighting games and their character-specific endings, MK9 did yeoman's work in collecting the original trilogy into a canonized text and recontextualized what a fighting game's story mode is capable of in a way that's so shockingly competent and cool it's kind of insane that Netherrealms are still the only studio on the block doing something like this. While MK has also experienced a revival in the competitive fighting scene, I love that they found a way for non-competitive players like me to scratch that adolescent itch of mashing out combos and compel me to do so against AI opponents for reasons other than "I fucking hate how cheap Shao Khan is and I once again must muscle my way through 9 pretty easily defeated AI opponents in order to show him how much he sucks!"
LA Noire: I love that this game has had such an up-and-down reputation in the history of games, but I feel like it's settled in pretty nicely over the past few years as a somewhat disrespected, certainly misguided little gem of technological hubris and bygone Q&A storytelling. The ability to skip driving around town by riding as a passenger was a masterstroke, the Mad Men of it all was lost on me then but has only grown more charming with time (and repeated rewatches of Mad Men...) and while it will never not be frustrating how loud and wrong Cole can be at times (especially given the weight of player expectations in certain scenes), I can appreciate that that aspect is eventually revealed to be somewhat of a character trait and more feature than bug. Perhaps the game could've been a little less restrictive (and also a lot less open, paradoxically) but it's a real shame nobody with the time and money to give this sort of game another shot has any interest in doing so. Also: you can have your Marios, your Zeldas, your Halos, your Mass Effects, your Final Fantasies, your Grammy-winning Civilization IVs...best video game theme of all time. Not best score overall, but goddamn what a theme!
Batman: Arkham City: A lot of people argue that this game took the franchise in the wrong direction, turning it from a Metroid-esque puzzle box into a schadenfreudian toybox for Batman fanboys. Fortunately for me, this was a PS+ game and Arkham Asylum was not, so this was my first foray into the Rocksteady Batman Combat™ ecosystem and good lord was it a treat and a half! Flying around as The Bat felt cool, getting to hear all the old Batman: TAS cast reunited was a hoot, the punching and kicking was revolutionary (again, by my measure) and the story was pretty fun. Not to mention it had a lot of numbers that could go up and a then-novel skill tree that still seems to be the foundation for, like, every third person action game at their core anymore. What more could you want, other than less, which you already had and apparently preferred? Lunacy, I say!
Bastion: Without this game, there are no Supergiant Games games, which would be a sadder world than the sad world we currently live in. I don't have a lot to say about it other than I enjoyed my time with it and found it quite good, even if I didn't feel the tug to NG+ it even once the same as I did with Transistor or Pyre, both of which I played first.
Portal 2: Man, this was a game, huh? As someone who sucks at puzzles, I definitely had to look up solutions several times, but almost entirely in the back half when things got a little too physics-puzzley technical gibberish for me to comprehend at all. That I wasn't scrambling to the internet for a solution to every puzzle was a testament to all the clever ways this game first presented you with a seemingly impossible series of tasks and slowly taught you how to complete them simply by always following its own rules. It helped that it was funny, too. This is the only Valve game I've ever played, and even off just the strength of this one game I understand the reverence people have (had?) for that tiny little indie developer.
Uncharted 3: Look, I get why some people think this was a sour note to end the original trilogy on. It's got some weird magical realism (ie. suspiciously convenient) elements to its storytelling that hold up less and less on repeated play and, all told, its set pieces are a little less magical than Uncharted 2's (that boat though). That being said, the new characters in this game are a real smash, especially Marlow, who I'd still argue is the series' one great villain and should totally be played by Helen Mirren before she retires. That café scene is a real chiller for a series that's all swashbuckling and antics, I tell ya! But more important than anything else, Uncharted 3 did something so tailored to my desires it almost felt like a rug could be pulled out from me at any moment: they introduce a ludicrously magical endgame element, tease that this is going to influence the gameplay in some way...and then they just end the game! No nigh-invincible kinda-zombies or interpretations of whatever you called Kimari's race in Final Fantasy X, just some more regular schemgular tricked out mercenaries and roll credits! Thank the heavens! What genius!
Lastly, I just want to say that it sucks I can't write about inFamous 2 in this post, which oddly enough most people seem to like more than its predecessor in the way I prefer City to Asylum, but for me it just didn't feel right to be playing an electrified super hero in a city half-sunken under water. It didn't feel as free as the first, and the story felt hackneyed in a way that the first also did, but more, and I didn't want that franchise to double down on the dumb bits of it. inFamous and Second Son are both super great, but I really don't have anything to say about inFamous 2 other than there's a great game in there, buried under a bunch of bad ideas and good intentions gone wrong.
...I guess Mass Effect 2 also came out this year? Didn't appear on the scroll at the top of the Google search results page. Weird, considering Captain America and Thor games do. Well, guess what? That game's better than every other one I mentioned here! And you already knew that! End post!
Log in to comment