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Aon

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Game of the Year

So 2012 is the year of Visual Novels and pure mechanics games. A separation between narrative and mechanics, as profound as the one between church and state, with an RTS and Journey as the two exceptions. Despite the prevalence of games that attempt and succeed at only one topping my list this year, it is my sincere hope that next year’s games will be more successful at marrying the two. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll go play a social bejewelled on my Nexus. Gaming is so very hard to predict.

List items

  • My game of the year was a toss up between Katawa Shojou and Minerva’s Den. Minvera’s Den is fantastic. Amazing level art, fantastic combat arenas, named security bots and an amazing story. The twist never really felt very important, but the story’s conclusion was incredible. What a fantastic combatless climax. The harrowing memories of a lover stolen away by the blitz just destroyed me.

    I can’t even imagine how I’d cope if my girlfriend was killed in such a horrible senseless way.

    But that wasn’t the game that really got to me this year. It was the poorly written, occasionally tasteless Katawa Shojou. While the game is certainly not the monstrous fetishisation of disabled high schoolers that it has been oft portrayed as, it constantly skirts and sometimes falls into distaste.

    But somehow its quirky take on disabilities and romance got its hooks into me. Four of the game’s five romances had some interesting everyday situations, coloured by the supporting cast’s various disabilities. It’s eternally humbling how different other people’s lives are and Katawa Shojou’s peculiar brand of amateur romance got me to consider what living with a disability would be like. For about a week it was the only thing I played and thought about, which sounds kind of unhealthy in retrospect.

    But it was a pretty powerful experience that came from the unlikeliest of places. Katawa Shojou isn’t all that good and I doubt most people would have the same intense experience. Minverva’s Den and Journey are probably the best made games of the year and will be remembered for decades, if there’s any justice.

    But because I was in a weird mood that week, it’s Katawa Shojou, with its (occasionally offensive) verbose and self indulgent prose, that steals the top spot for me.

  • I was shocked by the quality of the way 999 wrapped itself up, justifying the bizarre narrative structure of Visual Novels in a way that didn’t feel unnatural and only slightly forced. I’m not sure why, but I was totally unprepared for them to try that again. I was even less prepared for them to knock it out of the park a second time. In a game that’s appeal is largely based on the ?!?! of the story’s twists, VLR has more micro reveals than I thought possible, even in what ends up being a 30 hour narrative. While a few of them fall flat, far more of them than you’d expect amazed me.

    In addition to the quality of its twists, VLR also deals with more interesting subjects than 999 did. As much fun as the craziness of Morphogenetic Fields were, 999’s preoccupation with Quantum Mechanics, an actual field of science is far more interesting. In addition VLR concerned itself with subjects I found more personally interesting than 999’s Titanic, ICE-9 and the robbing of Egyptian artefacts by the British.

    While I was initially hesitant about the increased production values voice acting, the increase in unique art assets for each of the story branches makes them each feel really damn special. Every single ending I hit had a twist so mind blowing that I thought I had just stumbled onto the true ending. While I might still be ambivalent about the voice acting, VLR is a real step up in production from 999, in a manner not dissimilar to Assassin’s Creed 2 or Mass Effect 2.

    Without the lessened atmosphere in both. I’m just worried about third entry, which has been set up to be quite a different story to 999 and VLR.

    Fool me twice and so on, but I just can’t see them pulling it off a third time. Please prove me wrong, Aksys.

  • Yet another HD rerelease. Yet unlike the other two on this list, it’s not just an opportunity for me to replay classics with added convenience. Dota 2 turned a game that was fairly difficult control and parse visually into something that most people I’ve played it with have played for more than a hundred hours. The slow release of beta keys made me feel like I was a member of an exclusive club, that playing Dota was privilege granted to me, which was just enough of an attachment to get me passed the game’s initial learning curve.

    In the long history of the Steam group I belong to, AusGAF, no one has ever stuck to a multiplayer game, prior to Dota 2. A reasonably consistent pool of eight players has hung out on Mumble for almost a full year of playing Dota most nights. The skill limit of Dota is infinite, but without a bunch of mates on voice communications, none of us would probably ever progress and would lose interest. But not only has my Dota group fulfilled a social void, but getting better has also fulfilled my need to have an ongoing project for most of the last year.

  • I’m not all over the new content of Dark Souls, Artorias of the Abyss. With the Souls games, by the time I’ve beaten them, I generally feel like I’ve gotten to know every inch of the world. I can’t say the same about the DLC content. I’m not sure whether I just didn’t struggle as much as in the default game, or whether the level design just wasn’t as interesting. Nonetheless, the new bosses were all inventive and demanding, as befits content designed for people who have already beaten Dark Souls.

    Additionally Durante’s graphics fixes have gone quite some way towards bringing out the artist’s vision of Lordran. Most of all though, this version is convenient for me as a PC gamer. I’m often just looking to kill time and Dark Soul’s satisfyingly familiar combat is one of my favourite things to accompany a new Giant Bombcast. The supreme conveniency of the PC release and the enduring appeal of Souls combat has made this my go to game for the second half of the year.

  • A wonderful strategy game and window into a fascinating period of history. Effectively narratively and ludically encapsulates a hundred years of history within a few hour campaign. The grand strategy is made more robust by the extension of years from 2 turns to 16 and the addition of railroads. The RTS portion of the game adds riflemen to the standard sword-spear-bow-horse quadrilateral of Total War.

    Although it was touched on in the base Shogun 2, set during the Sengoku Jidai, the proliferation of Western Influences throughout feudal Japan is a fascinating story. The exploitation of local labour by European and American businessmen, which was then bundled with all technological process by traditionalist factions. A war against Western Powers by Japan’s traditional leadership was financed and powered by nationalised Western arms dealers. Times of transition are always difficult, but rarely are they so complex.

    For the three weeks I heavily played Fall of the Samurai I spent most of my train trips reading up about the Boshin War on Wikipedia. The mark of any good strategy game is one you can’t stop thinking about.

  • There’s not really a lot left to say about Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, despite retrospectives like this

    http://gamasutra.com/view/news/39414/Opinion_Metal_Gear_Solid_3s_moments_are_the_franchises_pinnacle.php

    from Leigh Alexander not being uncommon. Despite this, I never fail to be surprised as to how much I like Sons of Liberty and Snake Eater. This most recent time through I’ve done a Kerotan run, which forced me to explore the environments of Grozny Grad unlike ever before as well as a Dog Tags run, which forces you to engage with more of Liberty’s numerous mechanics.

    In addition to replying two of my favourite games of all time, the collection also allowed me to try Peace Walker for the first time, which while ludically lackluster, has a fantastic art style in its drawn cutscenes as well as an amazing setting. As an Australian, I’ve never been exposed to any South American history, so the endless codex sequences about the plight of the Sandinistas and the CIA are fascinating to me, even if they are a little bit fictional.

    At its core though, the MGS HD collection is just the best version of some of my favourite

    games.

  • Despite feeling that the rhetoric around The Walking Dead has gotten quite a bit out of hand, it still has its amazing moments. The salt block in episode 2, alongside the subsequent gotcha when Clementine catches you stabbing one of the cannibals were intense and the last scene in the series brought out those tears in droves.

    However, I also felt that the talking heads presentation really held the story back, several characters were pretty hard to swallow (there might be a 22 year old lady ninja in episode 4), as well as that the shooting segments undermined all of the tension previously established. In the first two episodes, each zombie was a big deal. Then episodes three and four come along and suddenly Lee’s headshotting 10 zombies in a row without pausing?

    Additionally, the promise of player agency where there was functionally very little felt disingenuous, especially with a certain combination of your actions and the forced penultimate twist. It would be interesting to play a visual novel version of The Walking Dead and how important the false pretense of player agency is to your attachment.

    Most of my favourite scenes were certainly the ones devoid of any illusion of choice.

  • Beautiful, sincere and elegant. Manages to innovate by taking away traditional design elements. Along with The Secret World, Journey has made morse code cool again.

    It feels kind of futile to talk about Journey’s atmosphere and design decisions, because they’re all readily apparent and insofar as art can be, correct. Truly, if there is any criticism to be laid at Journey’s feet, it’s that the game feels “too” perfect. Without the hard edges I associate with independent games, it feels kinda voiceless for an indie. The highly polished indie game is here to stay. The corporate art game has been proven profitable.

    Might these be what survives the upcoming AAA crash?

  • I consider myself lucky to have gotten into the online shooter scene prior to 2007. It feels important, to have played prior to the frenetic pace of XP focused shooting that Call of Duty 4 ushered in. Perhaps it’s how an older generation people feel about FPS prior to mouse look. Despite not having had any desire to buy a Call of Duty for some years, I do occasionally feel an almost irrational urge to just right click, hold the left mouse button and recieve a hundred XP for it.

    Planetside 2 fulfills this need perfectly for me. Much like in Modern Warfare, everyone else seems to be mystifyingly worse at the game than me. The game manages to give you a seemingly high number of experience points while still requiring you to play for ages in order to unlock anything. An ultimate time sink of a repeated 30 second experience of shooting three people before dying as numbers pop out of their heads.

    However, Planetside 2 isn’t just a fill in for the biological urge we all have to play Modern Warfare. It’s also probably the most authentic war experience I’ve had in a video game, despite its kitsch sci fi setting. This is because instead of attempting to address the tragedy of war through old media narrative, the futility of war is expressed through the games mechanics.

    It’s a powerful experience that is surprisingly unblemished by the Modern Warfare esque loops that also comprise the game. Amazingly, the game can cater to either experience on demand, atmospheric played solo or satisfying with mates or a podcast. The game serves two masters astoundingly well.

  • Despite the lackluster release of Duke Nukem Forever, it seems that lately, games with troubled development histories have started being kind of awesome, as I discovered with the PC port of Alan Wake released earlier this year. Although the game’s grandiose vision of an open world slice of northwestern Americana didn’t end up panning out, its roots have made the final game special. Alan Wake has what so many linear and even some open world games don’t have (looking at your, Far Cry 3) a real sense of place. Much like Half Life 2’s Citadel, various landmarks dominate the skyline of Alan Wake’s Bright Falls, as reference for the end of each individual level as well as forming connective links between levels. This simple element, along with the striking lighting engine powering the game, created an atmosphere as strong as anything else in gaming.
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