2009 is a surprisingly consequential year considering how infrequently it's discussed as a good year for video games. Street Fighter IV revitalized fighting games nearly single-handedly, Batman: Arkham Asylum shifted the expectations for super hero games, Dragon Age re-introduced CRPGs, and Uncharted 2 kickstarted the trend towards prestige, 3rd person cinematic set piece-athons that would define Sony's output for over a decade. That's a lot of video game stuff to chew on!
There are so few pure works of art in this world, untainted by cynicism, or industry, or the internet, or the culture writ large. Rhythm Heaven is one such pure work of art. It is perfect, and we should all cherish it. We should cherish the screaming choir boys.
Sick of these re-releases and their Indestructible censure. This is the ONLY version of the game with Indestructible, therefore it is the ONLY version of the game PERIOD. Street Fighter 4 has more singular responsibility for today's fighting game scene than any other title. While plenty of balance changes were added to the SF4 formula in various re-releases, I maintain that the simpler, less technical nature of the original release is superior. Also, did I mention it's the only version of the game with Indestructible in it?
Finally, an entertainment property that gives Octopus' Garden it's due.
The Beatles: Rock Band is more than a warm blanket of nostalgia for a decade of Beatlemania. It tries to actually capture the spirit of the band, and does an admirable job. Ignoring Rock Band as a 'games as service' series or the constant re-visitation of the track-by-track plate-spinning of Frequency, Amplitude, Phase or Rock Band: Blitz - in other words, measuring the experience of each individual game as one singular experience - I think The Beatles would stand tall as Harmonix's greatest major project.
As a long time Batman-liker, I'm going to be honest and say that the Arkham series reveals some of the uglier features of the Batman franchise writ-large, seemingly by accident. You know any game with the premise "check out this spooky INSANE asylum!" is going to be bad news, but...I mean, you could write a full novel on Arkham Asylum's portrayal of mental illness. Arkham's inmates are always either screaming, giggling, or murdering. Their caretakers treat them like animals, and the game just about encourages us to do the same. It's full on 1950s pulp schlock. This game makes the Outlast series look like The Titicut Follies.
And then there's the bizarre disparity in harsh language between Harley Quinn and every other character in the game. I punched a man into a bursting electric panel, a man whose scalp was literally stapled onto his head, and the best insult he could croak out at me was, like, "You're a Bat-Idiot," but Commissioner Jim Gordon's over here pulling out "crazy bitch" at the only female character of consequence in the entire game. In fact, so does Quincy Sharp, the asylum warden? And some of the other inmates? Everyone is constantly screaming at Harley Quinn.
My point is, Arkham Asylum is, unfortunately, one more Problematic-in-retrospect title from the late-aughts. If you can find the patience to overlook its obviously juvenile perspective, it's still an elegant mixture of loose yet hyper-satisfying stealth mechanics, the best beat 'em up combat in the business and some terrific Batman window dressing. Maybe just, uh, skip a cutscene here and there.
I think my favorite thing about Arkham Asylum in relation to its sequels is the fact that it lets you comprehensively understand a single space. Something was lost in the transition from Asylum to the bloat of Arkham City. I like the idea of watching a setting crumble and shatter along with its bruising protagonist. It gives you an escalated sense of consequence in a story that would otherwise be fairly trite.
Honestly would be #1 if you played as Elena. Can you imagine? Rolling with Jeff the cameraman in Nepal, doing war journalism, getting dragged into Nathan Drake's adventure, saving the world? Can you honestly look me in the eye and tell me that wouldn't be the better game?
The western-developed Silent Hill games largely missed the point, but Climax's Shattered Memories is inarguably the high point for the series post-Team Silent. While this game completely lacks the unique monster design that made the series so special in the first place, Climax made some really bold choices in its story and game design that make up for it. Their take on measuring players' "psychology" - the game tracks how often you look at, say, a family photo on a desk vs. the pin up calendar hung on the wall, and tailors the rest of the level to your attitude - is campy, but effective. The very good Until Dawn would later borrow this game's first person therapy sequences almost outright.
Shattered Memories has one of my all-time favorite twist endings, too. It's a good 'un.
Demon's Souls is to Dark Souls what, say, Final Fantasy was to Final Fantasy IV or Metal Gear was to Metal Gear Solid - it establishes all of the base systemic parts of the Souls series beautifully, but it doesn't *quite* put its pieces together to cohere into a landmark title the way its sequel does. That said, Demon's Souls gets *a lot* closer to what Dark Souls, Bloodborne or Elden Ring would do than Final Fantasy or Metal Gear did. This is an extremely strong debut by any metric, and its more experimental elements (the concept of a community-wide 'morality' world state, a hubworld with NPCs who affect other NPCs depending on player choice) actually make it a more interesting version of the Souls formula than some of the later games.
Whatever dude, I saw like three dragons or something, TOPS. If I had a more favorable view of western RPGs in general I feel like I would love this game, but the combat was a struggle for me to wrap my mind around.
The Ballad of Gay Tony jumped the shark with its caricature-y performances and San Andreas-esque chaos, but never has Rockstar been as HBO Drama mopey as they are in The Lost and Damned. What a phenomenal game. One of your safehouses consists of a decade-old desktop PC and a soiled mattress in Jersey somewhere. You don't even lay in the mattress when you use it, you just sit on top of it and stare ahead into the middle distance.
Plus, this game had the first fully rendered penis in a AAA game. And you gotta give it points for that.
Secretly one of the best games in Bungie's catalog. I loved all the city exploration stuff in ODST. Like any modern sci-fi game, it's pulling heavily from Blade Runner, but at the time it felt so moody and different from anything in the series up to that point.
I feel bad for the Trials Man. He's so psyched to be there. Like Icarus, he screams with joy straight into the sun and comes crashing down into fifty exploding barrels every time. Trials HD is THE modern myth.
So...what the fuck? Really. inFamous. in*F*amous. Is Cole MacGrath a fuckin iPhone? FOH
I still feel like the Ezio era is easily the most painfully straightforward the AssCreed franchise has ever been, but Assassin's Creed 2 had a lot going for it. For example, double wrist blades. Eh? Pretty good.
(All DLC)
Operation Anchorage - Wayyyy too linear, but I like Fallout 3 enough to spend $10 on a shooting gallery if I get a bit of extra lore with it.
The Pitt: No exploration whatsoever and only a little combat, but The Pitt is like a full feature film in and of itself. You're constantly making plot-relevant choices. Plus, I've spent many hours in all of this game's locations in REAL LIFE.
Broken Steel: This was the fan favorite because it raised the level cap by a third, but honestly I straight up hated this one. It added high level bullet sponges to the entire world map that made exploring certain areas really tedious, and I can't say I care about the brotherhood of steel stuff. Plus, the whole 'shaming the player for out-thinking the sacrificial ending' thing really sucked.
Point Lookout: Phenomenal. Many of the sidequests and hidden locales in this area are better than the main game stuff. I love the drastic change of setting. Honestly, Point Lookout as a singular experience is probably better than the entirety of Fallout 4.
Mothership Zeta: Goofy, breaks any semblance of world building in the game up to that point, completely unnecessary, but honestly, I'm into it.
Literally the only Call of Duty I ever got way into. Which was a mistake, because of course I adopted the phrase Oscar Mike into my every day real life. God, the MAPS in this game. So excellent. And the fact that they just straight up ripped entire sequences from the film The Rock in the campaign? It was all so good.
Remember when there was a new Bit.Trip game every single day of the calendar year and they were all very fun for exactly three hours?
Two things are really interesting about Halo Wars:
1. It fluently translates the Halo experience - probably the second-most singular expression of what a First Person Shooter is (besides the original DOOM, obviously) - into the technical abstraction, the spreadsheet-makers delight, if you will, of the RTS genre. The way Halo Wars is able to blend these genres, which feels sort of impossible in my head considering how little I get out of RTS games, is pretty neat.
2. It *mechanically* translates a genre designed from the bottom up for the broad range of motion and complexity of action of a keyboard and mouse and designs it around a controller - and in such a way that makes complete intuitive sense for someone who, say, plays a lot of Halo and virtually little else. Some of the best, most intuitive UI work in the business exists in this game. Halo Wars makes liberal use of radial menus, to the extent that even the base-building in the game visually mirrors the design of the menus. All of Halo Wars' mechanical components are built in such a way that what they're doing and what's being done to them is instantly apparent to an RTS layman like myself. It's extremely smart game design all the way down.
The only thing is - Halo Wars' central plot isn't very good. It's a shame, because for what it is, Halo Wars' narrative is lavishly produced and directed, to the extent that the cinematics and actors outperform both Halo 3 and Halo: Reach, like, *very* easily. It's just that nothing of particular import occurs within the story. Had this jarringy solid RTS game been built around a narrative that mattered whatsoever, Halo Wars would probably end up being a better title than most of the mainline Halo games.
So close to a new Amplitude...just not quite close enough. Harmonix later nailed it with Rock Band: Blitz, but this was a pretty fun PSP game all the same.
Big ups to the First Encounter Assault Recon series for being both exactly what you'd think it'd be, and also not really what you thought it would be. Sure, that creepy ghost girl is gonna scurry-sprint herself through a blood hallway at some point, but you're also going to blow up army guys with a full-on mech. It's a game with layers.
(Fury Expansion)
These guys managed to sneak FURY into their FAST racing game and not one of us noticed.
The Dead Space extended universe is...honestly? Pretty good.
I resent that, for a full calendar year, Flower was the go-to example of a game snooty people lauded as 'too artful' for the average player. Not only is that an obnoxious take, but Flower's aesthetic and intent are very, very straightforward. It's all well and fine, but not so far off from, say, a feel-good advertisement from a brand.
So this game had a boss battle where if you failed enough times - I think it was only like four or five times - they played an audio blooper reel rather than the regular dialogue. You can't just, like, do that. That's way too direct. If I'm going to be living out my fantasy of having dreads and also being Rad Spencer, I demand some decorum.
You could solve almost any problem in Scribblenauts with a black hole. A devastating metaphor for contemporary youth culture.
A zillion times better than the movie. Not sure how I feel about the fact that you're constantly flinging Wolverine into everything like a paper football, but, sure.
Call me shallow, but the eagle-eyed perspective of this game dragged me all the way out. One of the bigger video game force feeds in my young life. I wanted to like this game so badly.
I like the core mechanics of 'Splosion Man nowhere NEAR as much as I like the use of the word 'Splosion, but I like them well enough. However; how are you going to set your entire game in the same generic off-white laboratory. How are you going to consign our friend the 'Splosion Man to such a boring fate.
It turns out, I like games where all you do is pick up objects and spin them around!
Remember when Xbox Live Arcade wasn't just an arbitrary title for a digital marketplace and was instead a strong suggestion that everything on the service was a score-based time waster? Remember when hard drives were like 20 Gigs large?
Bold move to straight up jack Scrabble from Hasbro like that. I wish these Scrabble-alikes at least attempted to block all the joy-haters from using nonsense words like "zyzezorq." Everyone who deploys shit like that deserves their spot in Hell.
Remember when games like Doodle Jump were the big iPhone games? Remember when someone would bring up smartphones and then the nearest mom, dad, aunt or uncle would jump in and say something like "SMART phones??? I don't have anything like that. I have what they call a "DUMB" phone!" Remember when we used the word smartphone instead of just cellphone because their was a distinct possibility whoever you were talking to had a flip phone?
Just a bit too Deadpool for my tastes
MaaaaAAAAAaaawwwww
The most 2009 video game in human history.
Pretty much everyone attributes the shift from simple arcade ladders to full-on campaign modes in fighting games to MK9, but Tekken 6 had its own cutscene-laden story mode. Too bad it was clunky to play and the plot was a spiderweb of anime nonsense.
I don't necessarily think Tekken 6 is full-on crappy, but every new character or idea introduced in this game didn't go anywhere. Alisa in particular has to be a bottom-tier character.
My experience of Trine is entirely via local co-op with two friends. I always played the arrow lady, which means I had no practical utility to the group. I just swung from left to right, fell into holes, halfheartedly flung arrows into walls while my friends did all the useful stuff. What a sad mirror of my own reality.
I tried. This style of fighter is just too much for me. There's a zillion things going on all the time, combo chains are fucking enormous, all the character designs are stupid complicated. BlazBlue has to be one of the least friendly AAA fighting games on the roster.
All the angst of a 13 year old boy readin' his Venom comics listenin' to his old-school Linkin Park records.
In 2009, a brand new Metroidvania-esque sidescroller deserved celebration simply by the merits of its existence at all. Today, you can't spend more than four minutes on Steam without clicking past sixteen of them. In this context, Shadow Complex is unremarkable.
Aesthetically, you literally couldn't play a less unique video game if you tried. Shadow Complex is not quite as sharp with its combat as I'd like. It does almost nothing to innovate on the formula it borrows, unlike radical reinventions of the genre like Dead Cells or Steamworld Dig.
Shadow Complex also...how to put it...means nothing? The only real goal Epic seemed to want to accomplish was to make a solid Metroidvania game. There's no real readable intent, there. Games like Dandara and Iconoclasts use the genre to actually say something outside of their core gameplay mechanics. Shadow Complex just kind of...exists.
Unquestionably the worst of the Mario series. Literally everything about this game gives me a headache. The 'pleasant music for screeching children' soundtrack, the simplistic levels made complicated by the developers' brutal disregard for your couch co-op partners' bouncy heads, the complete lack of creativity in its resuscitation of the old NES games' design, the fucking atrocious "new" naming convention. It's a nightmare, this game.
In 2009, video games were desperate to integrate your MP3s into themselves. Today, we don't use MP3s, so Beat Hazard will sadly float off into the abyss of space, unpowered by your iTunes library.
All these Guitar Hero expansions used the Guitar Hero: World Tour assets and mechanics, meaning they sucked total ass. You can't just unceremoniously end your game with Free Bird AGAIN. For the SECOND time.
There's no real way to play Mass Effect: Galaxy anymore. You'd think a lost game that fills in important backstory between two characters from the series' most beloved entry would garner some backlash from players, but, nope! It was pretty bad all around!
What if Metal Gear Solid 4 was a touch-based shooting gallery without cutscenes? Exactly what fans were waiting for.
Just Dance is probably the thinnest excuse for a big budget project from a major video game publisher. Its approximation of dancing is easily reduced to gesturing vaguely in one of several directions. Its track list is less than 50% as big as any contemporary rhythm game and consists entirely of 'stuff you have heard 6 billion times at weddings.' Awful.
