2006 Ranked
Is 2006 an underrated year? I feel like my top 10 this year is killer.
List items
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It makes perfect sense to me that prior to the 2016 soft reboot, Blood Money was popularly considered the best Hitman game. It softens some of the series' harder edges, making for a friendlier game, and widens the player's tool set to allow for a wider range of lethal and non-lethal options.
Levels in Hitmans one-through-three would essentially collapse if the player decided to go in guns blazing; civilians would panic and nonsensically return to their routines, enemies from across the level would magically deduce the players' position, etc. Unlike Hitman: Codename 47, Hitman 2, or most especially Hitman Contracts, Blood Money emphasizes comedy and/or systems-driven catastrophe as an acceptable or even preferable outcome of player choice. Blood Money signals this primarily via character design. NPCs are caricatures in this game; they're crude depictions of classic crime-movie stereotypes. Their dialogue is written to be roughly equivalent with an American Pie film.
This unseriousness in tone and characterization goes beyond an aesthetic choice - it's crucial to the function of many Blood Money levels. 2006 was a time of extreme moral panic around video games in America - the fact that Blood Money is a video game in which the player can essentially choose to stage a mass shooting in an American suburb without public backlash comes largely down to the fact that virtually everyone in the game world feels like a parody of a human being. Of course, the fact that Blood Money's violence lacks gore or tremendous amounts of bloodshed also helps a great deal.
A lot of the way people consider the Hitman franchise is directly formulated here, in Blood Money. Nearly all of Blood Money's levels are based around singular high concepts. Consider how Hitman levels have worked up to this point. Hitman: Codename 47 and Hitman 2: Silent Assassins staged assassinations around broad, spy movie concepts like motorcade assassinations and the infiltration of underground Russian prisons. Contracts, especially, featured levels with unusual concepts in which 47's role isn't immediately clear. When you start a Contracts level in which 47 is infiltrating a rave in a meat-packaging factory or a level in which he's interrupting a weapons deal aboard a submarine, the big-ticket, set piece kill could be anything.
This is not the case in Blood Money. When you start a level in which 47 infiltrates an opera house as the cast rehearse an execution scene, you *immediately* understand how the set piece kill is going to work. When you start a mission that tasks you with assassinating the groom in a wedding - especially when the priest and the cake are holding up the start of the ceremony - you immediately understand what your options are. Blood Money doesn't challenge you to find a solution to the puzzle, exactly - it gives you the solution right away. The challenge is all in the how, not in the what. The new Hitman titles operate much in the same way, and this ideation of the Hitman formula alone is a *huge* factor in those games' success. So long as there is a super clear, coherent throughline in the completion of a level, players will stick with it regardless of how open or dynamic the level design is. That clarity of purpose eliminates the potential for frustration or lack of clarity and, I think, actually frees players up to be *more* experimental than if they were given no clear throughline at all.
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Bully is one of Rockstar's best games. The fact that it demarcated an end to a certain style of Rockstar game rather than a new era of Rockstar game is a tragedy. Rockstar games are defined by their fatalism - sometimes by their nihilism - but Bully, while mean-spirited, is anything but nihilistic. At its core, this is a game about an institution undermining the health and wellbeing of a generation, as well as the generation's response to that dehumanization. Bully's antagonist is the nihilist of the story, not the player character; the player character builds camaraderie within each of the school's discrete social groups.
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Dead Rising is basically a silly, hyper video-game-y adaptation of Dawn of the Dead - so much so, that the packaging of the original game actually contained a note that it was legally obligated to tell you it took inspiration from Dawn of the Dead - but it's not a surface level adaptation. George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead were vehicles for social commentary, in which zombies were a conceptual vector for the concepts of consumerism and the obliteration of individuality at the hands of groupthink.
Dead Rising adapts those concepts for the modern age: the zombies in this game spawn from a project designed to endlessly clone and replicate meat for a consumer base who purchase and consumer it on an exponentially higher scale than ever before in history. Choosing to cast the player as a journalist feels significant: causing havoc in a shopping mall might be the reason you show up, but what you end up doing is documenting the consumerism apocalypse.
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Double Agent has this excellent conceit, and it gets there in this hilariously clumsy way: Sam Fisher's life is ruined when his daughter dies in an off-screen accident, and lacking a reason to live, volunteers to undertake a suicide mission as a double agent within an incoherent terrorist organization. There's a lot of interest in the "what" but little interest in the "why," in other words, and a lot of Double Agent can be unpacked from there. What Double Agent wants to do is to continue to put the player in situations in which morally good actions in the immediate may lay to catastrophic consequences down the line. Besides suddenly imbuing the Splinter Cell formula with much higher and more evident stakes, this also creates a genuinely fascinating push and pull for the player: you can't simply be the perfect spy. Sometimes it's in your best interest to act in opposition to your handlers for the greater mission. It gets even more complicated once you start to build relationships with people in the terrorist organization, some of whom are more redeemable than others. Ultimately, Double Agent would've benefited from more nuance in the level design and harsher restrictions on potential actions depending on faction alignment, but this was still a bold re-imagining of what the Splinter Cell series could do.
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This was my first Bethesda title, and I didn't really 'get it' at the time. I'd like to revisit Oblivion some day, but it stands out most distinctly in my mind for its generic high fantasy setting and feel. It's this wide open world with infinite possibilities, which happens to also be the most boring snapshot of corny fantasy shit possible.
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Elite Beat Agents is one of several Nintendo-exclusive series which, despite being this incredible, scope-expanding title, has gone completely forgotten by its publisher. This partly comes down to the fact that Elite Beat Agents is the rare *perfect* touch-based rhythm game published by a company who gets really weird about releasing games on cell phones, but still.
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Gears of War is sort of complicated to unpack, because it's simultaneously an ingenious piece of game design and a transparently adolescent power fantasy. In its favor, I'll at least say that the adolescent power fantasy is also very good. The part of the Gears campaign that really works is that the setting is the really creative part. I don't really love the Locust or find them especially interesting, but the broken world of Gears of War very much is. Besides the fact that it takes place on a version of Earth in which it sometimes rains glass, the entire conflict being contextualized as a result of this post-fascist dystopia in which the majority of people are in active opposition to the ruling class is pretty unique.
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Harmonix made some interesting choices with Guitar Hero II that would reverberate through both this series and, later, Rock Band. Whereas Guitar Hero assembled a diverse list of tracks from a wide variety of genres, it also featured tracks which virtually anyone could enjoy regardless. Songs from bands that might otherwise be unfriendly to those who dislike the genre or artist were usually crossover hits; "Infected" by Bad Religion, "Ziggy Stardust" by Bowie, "You've Got Another Thing Coming" by Judas Priest.
By comparison, Guitar Hero II's track selection is more esoteric; there's just no way you choose to licesnse "Psychobilly Freakout," a Butthole Surfers track or, hell, even a song as politically charged as Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" if you're concerned about mass audience inclusivity. Guitar Hero was such a cultural phenomenon that it didn't matter. Moreso than the first game, Guitar Hero II reintroduced bands like Rush, Danzig and Iggy Pop into the cultural conversation of a younger audience.
Part of the reason older and weirder popular bands were so easily accepted by the player base is thanks to Guitar Hero II's game design. Guitar Hero, from the top down, was about recreating the fantasy of conquering the world with your wild guitar skills, which you accomplished by nailing the guitar parts of a bunch of crowd pleasers. Guitar Hero II's fantasy is a bit more specific: it's about being a guitar solo master. A, uh, Riff Lord if you will. Hammer-ons and pull-offs, where you can play notes without strumming so long as you hit the previous note, was a tertiary mechanic in the original game, and demanded pinpoint accuracy. Guitar Hero II both utilizes hammer-ons and pull-offs more heavily and widens the timing window with which they can be used, to steer more players into relying on them.
Guitar Hero II's fantasy, then, isn't just to become a "guitar hero." It's the fantasy of becoming the guy at the Guitar Center who spits out the solo from Crazy Train over in the corner while everyone else farts out Wonderwall. Weirder tracks slot in pretty nicely with that fantasy so long as the pace is up and they're difficult to pull off. In fact, Guitar Hero II doubles down on the spectacle of the expert Guitar Hero player by design, capitalizing on the notion that some people were fans of the game as a kind of spectator sport.
And this is the divergent point for rock music games: they all get divided between Guitar Hero II-likes and Guitar Hero-likes. Rock Band, for its part, *deeply* widened the variety of genres and the potential for music consumption in the genre, whereas Guitar Hero III would famously triple-down on the notion of the rock music game as Guitar Center Spectator Sport experience.
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Despite its cute exterior, Viva Pinata is one of the most manic managerial sims in video games. Unlike Sim City, Civilization, Tropico or Evil Genius, Viva Pinata forces the player into the management of an inherently cannibalistic system. You force creatures to breed, build up a surplus of those, and offer some of them up as prey for bigger creatures, who are more valuable and therefore more desirable. Meanwhile, parasitic creatures can and will destroy the various houses and supplies you build, while also consuming other creatures they can get their hands on. Unlike traditional farming sims, Viva Pinata happens *so fast.* It's a harrowing version of an already complicated style of game - honestly, a more *disturbing* version of a style of game - yet, deceptively, it's the cutest management sim on the market. Very, very strange.
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Back in the arcade days, there used to be a ton of games about simple premises like this. The promise of Microsoft's "Xbox Arcade" idea was that downloadable games would naturally gravitate towards this simple, high-concept-y style of budget game due to the inherent limits of the Microsoft store (both technological and arbitrary on Microsoft's part).
Obviously, this was a short-sighted plan, as it only took a few years before basically everything was purchasable online. I think the core premise of Xbox Live Arcade produced some interesting titles though: besides a host of rereleased arcade titles, it produced games like Zuma, Boom Boom Rocket, etc. If Geometry Wars is the platonic ideal of the mid-aughts Xbox Live Arcade title, then I'd say Marble Blast Ultra is just one step below it. It's the kind of game you might think; a puzzle platformer (emphasis on the platformer) in which you play as a marble. The devs of this game were really clever, emphasizing a sense of speed and unusual manipulation of gravity. Weirdly enough, of all the games that aren't backwards compatible on Xbox One, this might be the one I miss the most.
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Tomb Raider has seen so many reboots over the years. The funny thing is, all of them are completely distinct from one another. Angel of Darkness was a (kind of) soft reboot which recontextualized the series as a dramatic adventure game, the downloadable Lara Croft titles place Lara in the kind of puzzle/action title that predates the Tomb Raider series and the Square Enix reboot is a classic example of mid-'10s gritty 'realism.'
Legend, for its part, doubles down on the pulpy, bubbly, Indiana Jones-esque action adventure which inspired the original title. The original Tomb Raider titles were sometimes dismissed as 'Hot Girl Indiana Jones,' and that was never quite right, as those games were dark and often bizarre; I don't think Indiana Jones will ever find himself in a duel to the death with a skinless clone of himself, after all. Legend very much is a mid-aughts Indiana Jones clone, or at least, a mid-aughts action movie clone with an overall penchant towards replicating the Indiana Jones films by default. Lara is given buddies in this one, a grappling hook, and a casual, quippy demeanor. There are more action set pieces than there are puzzles.
Ultimately, Tomb Raider: Legend is closer to the Uncharted games which would release shortly afterward than the original Tomb Raider games. Of the variations on the Tomb Raider series, Legend is the one with the shortest shelf life, I think, but I much prefer its breezy, fun-first appeal over the clunky torture porn of the newer titles.
Legend also was the last game in the series that featured old-school video game-y modes like time trials and unlockable bonus content and stuff like that. I think a series like Tomb Raider could benefit from the sort of casual experimentation with formula of, say, the James Bond series. Every game in a big franchise like this has to be this gargantuan, massively budgeted media event, which inevitably leads to self-important narratives which fold back in on themselves. I don't need a Tomb Raider game to answer the question, "why is Lara Croft so strong and cool?" That doesn't really matter! I'd much rather see a studio develop their own take on the original formula than write another origin story or character study in a franchise that is about raiding tombs.
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Brain Age, in intention and design, is similar to Wii Sports: both games are explicitly designed to capture as many people who don't regularly play video games as possible. Between the two, I think Brain Age is the more interesting game. While I can only assume the core premise of Brain Age is pseudo-scientific, there is admittedly something compelling to completing daily miniature problem solving tasks, competing with yourself to better your own score. Even if the 'reason' for the player to engage with the daily tasks is centered around the nebulous concept of a 'brain age,' I think having people consent to little brain teasers on a daily basis is probably a net good. The heavy use of Ryuta Kawashima's floating polygonal face is also some quintessential Nintendo stuff, somehow both bizarre and paradoxically familiar at the same time.
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Half-Life 2 introduced an episodic formula onto a non-episodic series at a time in which episodic titles basically didn't exist in the video game industry. In that sense, it's really, really cool that more Half-Life 2 content exists in its own, separate state. Forgetting the fact that Valve was destined to leave the Half-Life 2 arc behind, Episode One is a decent bit of extra content descended from a terrific first person shooter. It feels distinctly unimportant, even in comparison with the lousier Half Life 1 expansions, but it's a fun return to Valve's oft-referenced dystopia. Worth the time.
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The cultural import of Wii Sports can't be overstated, but the actual *function* of Wii Sports can - and often is - overstated. There's a reason why Wii Sports is rarely discussed as a single player game, and it's not only due to its limited amount of content: the core mechanics in this game are very, *very* limited, and the vast majority of the experience is an illusion. The Wii remote doesn't enable much fine tune control, but the function of Wii Sports is to convince you that it does. Put more directly, Wii Sports is explicitly designed to convince you that the Wii can do things that it actually can't in the hopes that you might buy one. I wouldn't even say it's cynical to call Wii Sports an advertisement pretending at being a game; it's use as a pack-in with the console made Nintendo a metric butt-ton of money, after all, and there's a good reason that no other game in the Wii catalogue comes anywhere near Wii Sports' sales number.
However, because of Wii Sports ubiquity, it became a kind of universal touchstone. Regardless of what the function of the game is as a marketing tool, it did something really cool, too: it obliterated the distinction between people who like video games and people who don't. While the potential ceiling of the Wii Remote was quite low, Wii Sports' self-explanatory mechanics opened the door for virtually everyone to try it out and enjoy it. While I think Wii Sports might've had the potential to not only introduce video games to people who didn't already like them but actually *keep them playing* - which, based solely on the sales numbers of other Wii games, it failed to do - I still think it was a success. Regardless of its intentions or the somewhat dishonest nature of its visualization of the Wiimotes abilities, it still created this mass cultural touchstone and is worth studying in and of itself as a cultural artifact.
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I have the sneaking suspicion that, had Ubisoft not released this video game about screaming, babbling, squishy rabbit guys, the noxious Minions franchise would never have had the inspiration with which to pollute our cultural consciousness for the last decade. The Rabbids are functionally identical to the Minions, right down to their role in the story of their own games. If I'm even half correct about this, whatever value the player gets from Rayman: Raving Rabbids was not worth it.
If you can forget all that, though, this was an very surprising Wii launch game that best exemplified the Wiimotes capabilities. While Raving Rabbids is a mini-game collection, the mini-games are mostly pretty easy to engage with, but that's not what makes Raving Rabbids work. The *framing* of the minigames is the genius of it. Rayman gets trapped in another world full of a gladitorial rabbit species who punish him (and one another) for the pleasure of the Rabbid commoners. They're chaotic, plunger-equipped creatures of doom who explode with shrieky enthusiasm for violence. They're kind of...perfect? Idk, at the very least, this game and the later Rayman: Origins series revitalized a franchise that should by all rights be a relic of the PS1 era.
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So many clever ideas in this game. Star Fox 64, this game's direct predecessor, featured three linear paths towards the final level that the player could zig zag between in the hopes of unlocking one of two endings. Command, on the other hand, allows the player to literally draw a path from level to level on disparate wide scale maps, adding a tactical element to a mechanic that could previously be described as a choose-your-own-adventure-style secret path hunt. Similarly, choosing different members of the Star Fox roster leads the player towards different plot conclusions.
Where Command slips up as yet another Star Fox title to be buried under the legacy of 64 is in its combat. Having so many wide open combat spaces does indeed allow for a greater degree of tactical play, but it also leads to some extreme repetition. 64's levels were filled with debris, obstacles, plot twists and unique enemies - Command, on the other hand, fails to differentiate any one local from the last, and recycles most enemy types.
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There was no reason for Excite Truck to be good, and it is admittedly lacking in content, but it was a genuinely fun launch game for the WIi.
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It's partially due to Nintendo nostalgia and a general lack of availability, but Tetris DS has to be one of the better, more interesting Tetris re-releases out there.
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Me & My Katamari is sort of depressing when you consider it's the first title in which Konami was like 'this is OUR thing and we don't CARE if the original developers didn't intend for future Katamari projects to exist,' but I have to admit, a functional mish-mash of Katamaris 1 and 2 on a PSP is unquestionably a good time. Although, I might prefer Konami just put the same version of We Love Katamari on every platform that's ever released 'till the end of time.
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There are many good ideas in Portable Ops, but the best ones were cribbed by Peace Walker and Phantom Pain in such a way that makes Portable Ops feel almost irrelevant. This was the first title in the MGS series that allowed Snake/Big Boss to 'recruit' new soldiers from off the battlefield, but it lacks the fulton balloon mechanic from those games that insta-removes the new recruits from play.
This works exactly like you'd think - find a new recruit towards the end of a long level that you'd like to add to your base? Well you're gonna have to knock him out and drag him all the way back to the start of the stage, where your truck is. Besides being a considerable chore, it can also potentially invalidate the tactics of a particularly stealthy player. In my mind, the best MGS player is the one who can sneak through an environment without interacting with any enemy whatsoever, but doing so here means disallowing yourself from capturing new recruits. In other words, Portable Ops gets the credit for the last MGS entries' best mechanics, but it doesn't work in a vacuum whatsoever.
Portable Ops reveals to us the final mission leading to Big Boss separating from the US government. During the release of MGS4, this seemed like enough of a bridge between MGS3 and the original MSX games that you could sort of fill in the blanks with where things would go after that, but living in a world in which Peace Walker and Phantom Pain exist, Portable Ops barely even registers as significant on the timeline.
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I don't prefer ebooks but I am the kind of person who can, at least, endure ebooks. In fact, I read the entirety of Moby Dick from my cell phone at a shitty mall job when no customers were around; that's a lot of ebook to consume!
However, I seem to be incapable of enjoying a comic book on a phone or tablet. Screens are fundamentally incompatible with the way I consume comic books. I don't like the way you're supposed to allow the app your using to dramatically zoom from panel to panel, which adds this weird, distracting extra layer to the story, and I especially don't like having to pinch and zoom everywhere if I'd rather frame everything myself. It's not a good time!
Somehow, Metal Gear Solid: Digital Graphic Novel is the major exception to this rule. More than a typical comic e-book, MGS: DPN is a gamified comic-book replete with minor dramatic animations, music and sound effects. As the comic book progresses, the player is able to scan each panel for secrets. Besdies the regular zoom capability any comic book app allows form, MGS: DGN actually allows the player to zoom *past* the panels themselves, seeing beyond objects that would otherwise conceal something from their view.
Even as someone who is hyper familiar with the MGS series enough to actually own some of the comic books, I thought this was an inventive take on a format I was heretofore disinterested in.
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The Tony Hawk's franchise was spiraling by the time it got to Project 8, but all the same this was the last title in the series I allowed myself to actively anticipate. It was the first THPS designed from the ground up for new hardware, and it had what initially appeared to be a promising new feature: slo-mo custom tricks the player could invent on the fly, a la Skate.
Free from the initial thrill of new tech, I'd say Project 8 is definitively one of the worst Tony Hawk games produced. The mechanics had changed just enough for it to feel like some terrible hybrid of the previous titles' arcade-snappy gameplay and Skate's more realistically paced skateboard-sim design. It succeeds in neither category.
What's more, Project 8 attempts to iterate on Tony Hawk: American Wasteland's open world concept by making each disparate level cohesively segue into the next, but a commitment to 'realistic' tone and gameplay means that this open world consists of a suburb, a city street, a factory, another city street, an amusement park, and a high school, but it all ends up feeling like this bizarre, flat, mostly barren cityscape inhabited by like fifteen pro skaters and their dads.
The problem with Project 8 generally, besides the fact that it feels like a very old game with some clunky new mechanics stapled on top of it, is that it has no meaningful identity. The humor isn't there, the art design is a grey, corporate slab seemingly designed to serve back-of-the-box bullet points, and the game's various challenges feel sometimes punishing, a far cry from the more lax, welcoming difficulty of past titles. Even the digital pro skaters look tired.
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I feel like any Twilight Princess discourse is somehow mildly controversial, but I really do feel like this was a low point for the franchise. It's better than the brighter, flashier Skyward Sword, which is all too eager to waste the player's time, but Twilight Princess fails to even meaningfully iterate on past titles. If anything, its a depressing, muddy-looking concession to the Zelda series' loudest, worst fans, and served to further remove the series from its past successes.
I think the worst part of it for me is the art design. Skyward Sword may be the worse game overall, but Twilight Princess is surely the worst looking mainline Zelda title. It isn't just he 'we're pandering to dorky teen boys' grimdark wolf or the overall grey-ness of the color scheme; the character design alone should be enough to qualify Twilight Princess for removal from the Zelda canon. If you feel differently, google the Oocca, the inhabitants in this game's sky temple, and come back to me.
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Ultimate Alliance is one of those games I wish I liked. During its pre-MCU release, it felt like an exciting and chaotic trip through some niche spaces in the Marvel universe. But I can't, for the life of me, determine what people possibly get out of the X-Men Legends/Ultimate Alliance series. The combat is so distant and automated, and it isn't like it's got the mechanical depth of a Dragon Age to keep it engaging. Most of the combat in this game feels slipshod and miniscule as a result. I don't know that I'll enjoy any title in which the difference between playing as Spider-Man, Elektra, Luke Cage and the Hulk are, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from one another.
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I've always wanted to like Just Cause more than I do, but this first game is just a little *too dumb* for me to latch onto. It's got that 'we're a big open world made in '06!' thing of making good on the promise of the big and open part, but filling it with a ton of recycled content and little appreciable character.
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Vice City Stories is probably my all time least favorite GTA title. It's the only time I've played a mainline Rockstar release (that table tennis game included!) in which I got the distinct sense that they were on autopilot. Vic Vance's story feels forced into in the GTA III timeline like a square peg in a round hole, the mission design feels lazy and over familiar, and most of the significant plot beats feel designed to fill insignificant plot holes in other titles.
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Like all Monkey Ball games, Banana Blitz is at first a fast, refreshing change of pace, before transitioning into a diabolical obstacle course designed to hurt you. I sped through this game in a weekend swearing at the television the entire time while my girlfriend laughed at me.
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Feeding Frenzy is a fun time waster! I like the idea that, when a fish eats another fish, it makes the first fish bigger. What a nightmare concept...
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Sneak King is frustrating to play if you take it even a little bit seriously or put any effort into progressing through the game's three or four stages, but I absolutely love it for its surreality. The fact that it's an interactive advertisement only heightens the experience. I can't say a grown man in a scary mask popping out of a dumpster to surprise children with a hamburger made me want to eat at Burger King, but it did make for a compelling, weird advergame.
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Q Entertainment added The Black Eyed Peas to Lumines and I abandoned it forever. Go find the tracklist to this forgotten PSP sequel and take a look at the cover art. What a way to kill a magic little puzzle game.
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Two things about Okami. First, I'm just gonna say this, I don't care who knows it: Okami's art style is not the revelation it was marketed as. It's perfectly in line with other cel-shaded titles, and the pop-y, comic book-y look of the blocky character and environment designs don't mesh with the game's ink was aesthetic overall. Ink wash art work is usually subtle and carefully shaded to create a sense of atmosphere - Okami's cel shading is anything but subtle. It's an anime look that gestures towards an older aesthetic and its aesthetic value is therefore dramatically overstated.
Second: I made it like 2 to 3 hours in before I turned it off. Okami's intro, like its visual design, is a multi-faceted failure. At Okami's outset, people are *chatty.* It's two hours of text boxes and laborious tutorials for simple concepts. Folk tales typically don't waste time getting to the point - either do the Zelda games Okami is clearly replicating.
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SingStar in the PS2 era makes no sense to me at all. It's great Karaoke software and I love its presentation - including the music video behind the lyrics and notes is a nice touch! - but how could anyone possibly enjoy a karaoke night with just 30 tracks from one genre to choose from? Do you just switch out discs and wait for everything to load if you have a friend who prefers country over pop, or '80s music over contemporary rock? It seems unusable in that setting. The only way I could see it is if it was just me and one other person who liked SingStar inherently, but...I'm not that person, and I don't know anyone who is that person!
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LEGO Star Wars I was a cute time waster, but it was blisteringly short. What if, instead, every single level in it lasted 45+ minutes, and the only way to do everything was to play each level at least twice? It only took one sequel, but LEGO Star Wars II was enough for me to drop off of the LEGO franchise completely. I prefer the short, fun little time waster to the epic-length kids game that in a real, active way does everything it can to literally waste your time.
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Red Steel is an infamous failure, but it is, at least, an infamous failure with some personality. The fantasy of Red Steel was that it would be a combination of high fidelity shooting and swordfighting, but in reality the shooting and swordfighting were quite a bit more boilerplate than in games without motion controls. The most damning thing I could say about Red Steel, especially as a launch title, is that it made me question the entire premise of the Wii. And I still do! Wii Sports aside (which itself is only a good example thanks to its ubiquity), I can't think of any Wii titles that wouldn't have been as good or better without motion controls.
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My experience with Resistance: Fall of Man is entirely relegated to its multiplayer, which was sub-par, especially for a PS3 launch title. Grey, anonymous environments, generic weaponry, map designs that were featured some variation on labyrinthine corridors and wide open arenas with nowhere to hide. I might like this one quite a bit more if i'd sunk any time into the single player.
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It would be hard to overstate how difficult it is to play Saints Row after having played any of its sequels first. As early as Saints Row 2, Volition crystallized their supposed GTA-cloned franchise into a joyful and cohesive open-world crime comedy opus, but Saints Row the First is comparatively dull, insipid, and aimlessly stupid.
Say what you will about the sub-South Park-ian comedy of the GTA franchise, but Rockstar builds its open world crime sims like an architect designing a house. In Rockstar games, the game mechanics blend into the game spaces, and the game spaces feel designed to support both game mechanics and narrative. In GTA 4, Rockstar's NYC simulacra, we're given a space dense with people and grime but little in the way of otherworld-ly ramps or destructible spaces. It's an NYC that's been manicured to simultaneously allow for action film set-pieces and lowkey slice-of-life hangout sessions, dates and day to day minutiae. It works because GTA 4, generally speaking, discourages mayhem.
GTA: San Andreas, more presciently, splits up its Los Angeles look-a-like into various gang territories that are easily won but never conquered, forcing the player into a cyclical war of attrition against rival gangs. Whether or not this is fun is besides the point - it's a coherent replica of '90s gang warfare, put through a '90s gang warfare film lens. The game mechanics support the game's narrative idea that gang warfare is local, personal and fought via attrition.
Saints Row, on the other hand, is almost certainly the product of developers whose entire relationship to gangs, movies about gangs, or popular gang culture is entirely secondhand; Saints Row feels like the product of a studio who have seen the Fast and Furious franchise a hundred times over, and absolutely nothing else. Yet, Saints Row wants to demonstrate the same cultural cache as GTA, which is comparatively reverent to the media it steals from.
Besides the question of authenticity (whatever that means in this context), the WHY of the power fantasy eludes Saints Row completely. WHY am I driving all the way across town to recapture territory I've already won, WHY does this series of missions revolve around a fellow Saint infiltrating another gang as a double agent when I've already spent so much time going guns-a-blazing, WHY does GTA make the sexual subtext of advertising the text and, more than anything, *what does a street gang even look like and how do they work?* They certainly don't look like primary colors slamming cars into or shooting rockets at one another. The lazy writing and adolescent attempts at world-building might work in the other Saints Row games, which immediately code themselves as wacky comedies, but here they're more frequently off-putting or offensive.
The devil is in the details, and that's where Saints Row is at its most embarrassing. The shooting mechanics are little more than functional, and leave little possibility to the player than zigzagging through gun fights firing wildly into enemies. Driving a car feels heavy, slippery, but rarely fast. There are many escort missions, and most of them force the player to rely on AI companions who would sooner sprint into a moving vehicle than fire a gun at an enemy. The soundtrack is potentially the worst of any of the major open world titles, and belie the game's sub-par budget. Saints Row features like fifty mid-aughts emo and alternative bands that are quite simply TOO embarrasing, the hip hop station is trash and buries most of its biggest names as features on album tracks by tinier artsits, and the metal station careens into soft rock with tracks like Great White, three (!!!) Bango Tango tracks and Winger.
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Black is an EXTREMELY embarrassing military action FPS. All cutscenes are filmed in live action, but the voice acting is very obviously ADR-ed, so the editor/cinematographer chose to skirt around that by just hiding the actors as much as possible onscreen. The gameplay is dull in the head junk - enemies are bullet sponges and everything feels loose and unreal.
And the game's core conceit - the ultimate 'gun porn' game? I mean, what stage of teenager-dom do you need to be to read a pitch like that and think 'yes, that rocks and is not embarrassing.' At least Borderlands had the good sense to use creative license with its world design and weaponry. This is dorm room poster fodder. Throw it in the trash.
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Big Bumpin' is probably one of the thinnest excuses for a video game I can think of. It's an advertisement where you donk into your friends and think about burgers.
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