Other Games of 2008
What a weird gathering of games. 2007’s Other list was filled with great games knocked aside by amazing games, 2008 is a bunch of oddities that never had a chance for whatever reason.
List items
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For a band with songs like “Big Balls” and “Let Me Put My Love into You,” AC/DC takes their music surprisingly seriously. They relented by offering “Let There Be Rock” as an on-disk track for Rock Band 2, but when it came to downloadable songs, they didn't want people cherry-picking tracks. All or nothing, they demanded, and so we got a track pack with songs from the AC/DC Live, er, live album.
Not everyone likes live tracks, but the bigger problem was for those who bought the track pack immediately upon release: at $40, this wasn't cheap. Probably around a year later, if not sooner, the pack could be found for significantly cheaper. Oops.
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Where Age of Empires: The Age of Kings for DS took Advance Wars-like gameplay and added an increasing focus on buildings, Mythologies added deities. They’re really not that different from the historical heroes from Age of Kings, which means that Mythologies really isn't that different from its predecessor, and that’s kind of okay. How many games take the gameplay of Advance Wars and does something different with it? Not many, and it’s a lesser world for it.
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When Neversoft created Guitar Hero 3, Harmonix developed the original Rock Band, and Neversoft was forced to play catch-up. Unfortunately, Guitar Hero: World Tour suffers from many of the same problems that Rock Band had a year earlier, such as hardware defects with the new instruments, while offering little exciting. It’s easily the worst of the “main” Guitar Hero games (we don’t talk about GH: Van Halen), although honestly not a bad game.
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Sometimes it’s just fun to shoot zombies. And sometimes it’s fun to be attacked by a wave of zombies with three other people. Thanks to an AI controlling the zombie spawns, stages can go from quiet and calm to mass chaos within seconds, and it’s never guaranteed to happen at the same time and the same place. Put simply, its unpredictability is its greatest strength.
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Remember a time when Capcom cared about Mega Man? Unfortunately, by Mega Man 9, we were cresting the hill of that relationship and unwittingly entering a period where Capcom started washing itself of the Blue Bomber. But Mega Man 9 was pretty cool, right? Difficult, too, almost as if Capcom was getting fans used to pain.
Oh.
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When the level is learned, the direction clear, Mirror’s Edge is amazing. When you’re unfamiliar with the level and knocking into everything, killing whatever momentum was gained, Mirror’s Edge is aggravating. Hopefully the sequel manages to help with those issues since first-person parkouring (is that a word? MS Word doesn't think so) away from enemies still holds great promise.
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Konami, the company that created the plastic instrument subgenre with the Japan-only GuitarFreaks and RockMania, watched on the sidelines as Guitar Hero and Rock Band exploded in popularity… until 2008, when they released Rock Revolution.
They should have just stuck to the sidelines. Rock Revolution is a horrible game with very few redeeming values. Not only is the soundtrack composed of songs already in the competition, but they were only covers. Worse yet, they were bad covers (“Won’t Get Fooled Again” sounds almost country). It’s ugly and completely lacking in character, which includes the generic characters. Finally, the note track uses the overhead perspective, but it’s not as user-friendly as what GH and RB use.
Unless you’re a fan of these games who wants to see how bad they can get, there’s no reason to buy Rock Revolution. If you are a fan, don’t spend more than $5.
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Will Wright’s Spore was released to high expectations. Why wouldn’t it? This was the guy (and company, Maxis) behind SimCity and The Sims, two insanely successful franchises. And there’s promise behind Spore, going from a cell to a land-based creature and beyond, but the problem is that it’s kind of... boring.
I should note that I never got passed the creature stage, which means that I lost interest reasonably early. That hardly saves it, though.
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Time Hollow was my first blush with a visual novel, and I swear that I can’t remember how it caught my attention. Still, I am a fan of time-travel stories, and Time Hollow offers a decent one, although the ending… I’m going to spoil the story, so be warned:
Protagonist Ethan spends most of the game being assisted by Kori, a girl “pulled” from time. Although it’s obvious that Ethan develops feelings for Kori, the story ends with her being “returned” to her time, where she falls for Ethan’s uncle and has a child together, who looks exactly like Kori. So in this new “time,” Ethan is cousins with a girl who looks identical to the girl who likes.
Oh, Japan.
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I tried Wipeout HD once before getting it free from Sony as part of their “we’re sorry that PSN got hacked” program and disliked it. I love F-Zero, and Wipeout looks the part, but it’s slow and the courses are boring in comparison.
I’m not sure what changed between that first try and the second, but maybe it was to stop comparing it to F-Zero games and allow it to stand as just a racing game with power-ups. (When I say it like that, maybe Mario Kart would be a better comparison.) Still, I enjoyed it much more, although I never stuck with it for long.
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