2011 Ranked
2011 is secretly an awesome year. Dark Souls, Deus Ex and Skyrim are all easy 'game of the decade' contenders, and most of the AAA titles of note were host to some surprisingly personal, reflective narratives.
List items
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I have never had an experience with any piece of media quite like Dark Souls. It takes the repetition inherent to video games and extrapolates it into what is more or less a lesson about patience and persistence. It doesn't 'give' the player anything. There are no easy wins, no clear path ahead, no explicit narrative. It is a game in which every single decision you make matters.
The way in which you are rewarded by playing Dark Souls comes more or less from how you approach it. Want to understand the game's lore? Then you have to decipher it yourself by collecting the world's artifacts and studying the history of the spaces you're funneled through. Trying to beat a sequence that seems impossible? Think long and hard about the character you've built and the obstacle you're trying to overcome. That's all there is to it; you put in what you get out.
I also love the idea of a world afflicted with dementia. People become undead - i.e. lose their minds - when they give up hope. Your ability to achieve in this world is inherently tied to your belief in yourself.
What I'm saying is, the takeaway from Dark Souls is ultimately optimistic, and you feel good leaving it. That is, as long as you're okay getting smacked around a bunch to get there.
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Yakuza's sense of style and dynamic, semi-soap operatic storytelling has been there from the first PS2 title, but Yakuza 4 is the entry that defined Yakuza's grand ambitions, taking the series from bombastic, street brawl vacations through Tokyo to a truly singular depiction of a city and the kinds of people who live in it. If the first three Yakuza games are an action movie-style facsimile of the Yakuza genre films, then Yakuza 4, 5 and 0 are a search for humanity within that fantastical excess, of finding goodness in the lowest places.
Yakuza 4 defines its aesthetic in stricter terms than its progenitors. Gone are the crunchy PS2-era action game techno tracks, replaced by an uptempo jazz score reminiscent of '60s and '70s crime thrillers. The series' heretofore staid soap operatic cutscene style is no more, replaced by dynamic, fluid cinematography that echoes a certain film noir grit. Even the street fashion in the game has personality, whereas in past titles NPCs were either too plain or hilariously unreal.
Unlike the heroic, idealistic posturing of previous games, this title opens with a loan shark smoking a cigarette in the rain, on his way to collect. While series mainstay Kiryu is a major part of the story by the end, we spend so much more time with three new playable characters: the loan shark with a code of honor Akiyama, the convicted mass murderer Saejima, and Tanimura, an extortionist on the police force. All of their stories reveal a different side of Yakuza's fictional Kamurocho district - Akiyama, who hoards and subsequently redistributes his wealth, has easy access to all the expensive spots in the city, along with access to the interconnected rooftops of nearby businesses. Saejima, being on the run from the police, lives in the city's underground with other homeless folks. Tanimura, the only character fluent in Chinese, is a familiar figure throughout the enclaves of Chinese immigrants living in the backstreets of the city.
Suffice to say, while I like the original three titles in the Yakuza series quite a bit, Yakuza 4 is a more textually dense and thematically cogent title - even the minigames are designed in such a way as to further each protagonists characterization. I sure wish I'd have picked up this as my first Yakuza game back in the day rather than the comparatively unfriendly Yakuza 3, or I might not be playing catch up with these games all these years later.
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It's fitting Superbrothers was released the same year as Skyrim, because they both tie into the same childhood memory of losing hundreds hours to The Legend of Zelda games. Sword and Sworcery takes that childhood wonder and pulls the camera back on all parties involved - the player's ultimately pointless hunt for the geometric mcguffin, the developers left to anonymously grumble in and around the outskirts of the world they've invented - even the publisher's ability to ensnare you into an immersive experience they absolutely don't understand are treated as characters in a narrative arc. To give the NPCs such dry, meandering lives and to imbue the player character with internet-casual monologues make for an ingenious examination of how - and, importantly, why - we engage with video games.
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After 80 hours of playing Skyrim as a Nordic werewolf vampire hunter melee lady, I never once have felt an urge to return. If one were to graph out my experience with Skyrim, it would be a quick skyrocket to the top and then a slow descent to the bottom.
At the outset, Skyrim is an unbelievable, gorgeous world with endless possibility. Around hour 40, your character's level progression is no longer a matter of tactics but a matter of course; when new enemy types have run out and each encounter becomes another version of something you've been doing over and over all along, and when you begin to outright predict where literally every single dungeon is bound to end up the second you pass the loading screen, the clockwork of the world is laid bare and the charm inevitably fades.
But those first thirty hours? No world had ever felt so open, and massive, and my role as a wanderer in it so appealing. It reminded me of seeing playing Ocarina of Time time as a kid. I have some substantive problems with Skyrim's perpetual need to empower the player over the world around them all the time no matter the circumstance, but I'm willing to forgive the game just about any flaw for giving me those first thirty hours.
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When players finished L.A. Noire, we were all more than a little done with Cole Phelps. His by-the-book attitude and dark past as a war hero made him an engaging enough character, but dude STOP yellin' at all the victims you're helping out!
This unsolvable issue (if the 2017 re-release is any indication) of how to best represent the Truth/Doubt/Lie mechanics proved to be a frustrating narrative stumbling block, but swallow that and you'll be rewarded with one of the most convincing period pieces in video games.
L.A. Noire came so close to achieving the dream of the mature AAA title in which the player commits little to no violence. So close! It is the great video game unicorn that, if you're only playing the big releases, we've still yet to catch. Thank God for indies, I guess.
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Like Fear 2, Condemned 2 and (arguably?) Resident Evil 2 before it, Dead Space 2 is the follow up to a critical success that ratcheted up its action to broaden its audience. For me, Dead Space 2 is the most successful example of a developer completely turning around the ship on a franchise. I can't say Dead Space 2 was particularly scary, but I can say it's an intense horror shooter full of fun (re: awful, sickening, very gross, bad) surprises.
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It never seemed possible to me for this to succeed as a follow up to a game that reinvented complex player choice, but Human Revolution is so good because it limits the game's scope rather than expands it.
It is a thirty hour cyber punk epic that revolves around a single cultural issue: what will the repercussions of voluntary genetic modification be?
Literally every side quest is in Human Revolution reflects an aspect of the conversation too specific for the globe-trotting campaign. How does an idea-based job market function in a fair manner if some people can afford to buy themselves faster brains? What happens to professional sports? How would grass roots human rights organizations respond to the inevitable discrimination? It's all here, and there isn't a moment passed in this game that doesn't open the door to some further explication of the issue. Even the title, Human Revolution, is pointed in its ambiguity.
What makes Human Revolution so cool isn't that it just introduces these issues - it also allows you to make decisions in that space, and therefore draw your own cultural and sociopolitical conclusions as you play.
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The Witcher 2 is one of the only AAA games I can think of (from this era of game development) that implicitly trusts the intelligence of its audience. It assumes you are an adult and can handle complexity. The plot in this one is a bit slight for me, as it has a very Game of Thrones-y tendency to throw a ton of plot at the player at a time, but that's the only complaint I can think of. I would argue CD Project Red's Witcher 2 equals and occasionally surpasses George R. R. Martin's complexities in ethics-questioning storytelling. Imagine being put in a space like that, and then being tasked with making on the spot decisions that heavily affect the world around you, and you'll have a pretty good idea of why I like Witcher 2 so much.
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As a puzzle game, Catherine is...how to put it. Mystifying? The game is so clearly designed to be a narrative-driven psycho-sexual drama, I can't fathom a guess as to why the meat of the game's challenge comes from a bunch of bad Tomb Raider block puzzles? The idea of having to climb a tower in your dreams to escape your real-life guilt is a neat metaphor, though, and I love Catherine's willingness to ask blunt questions to the player. Sex is treated almost entirely as a reward in video games - beat Metroid fast enough and see Samus in her swimsuit, work hard enough at a relationship in Mass Effect and see a sex scene, etc. - but here it's the subject at hand. Vincent's dilemma of settling down in a relationship he's worried has peaked or indulging in some meaningless fling is treated with a fair amount of complexity. After each day passes, Vincent spends the night at his favorite bar with his crew, fading in and out of conversation to type drafts of texts he struggles to send. That is a fascinating, mundane, cool thing to do in a video game. More games need to exist in this space.
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Edmund McMillen's critique of religious absolutism that stars a naked, abused boy who fights with his tears somehow became everyone's favorite rogue-like. How? I'm sure I don't know. I do know this is a rewarding, deep, grimy game that is a joy to suffer through. The self-aware additional content packs cheapen the experience, I think.
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When I initially played Portal 2 I was sure we'd be getting dozens and dozens of more games like it. In reality, it turned out to be a bit of an outlier. It's this AAA blockbuster, roller coaster comedy, and in spite of the fact that it hews *so close* to meme, it never quite falls into that pit. I have the feeling that some of this game's humor won't hold up as much today as it did in 2011, but nevertheless I wish it wasn't such an outlier.
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Yes, the Gears of War franchise has some of the most hilarious overcompensative character designs around, but Karen Travis is a good writer, and she nailed this game's plot. This is also the most mechanically tight entry in the franchise, featuring the most full-fledged Horde mode you can find.
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One of the greatest video game comedies. Saints Row: The Third commits to absurdity in a way that almost makes it feel brave, somehow. I love this game's loose shooting mechanics, its definitively NOT half-assed emulation of the Rock Star curated radio playlist, and its 'all that matters is that this is fucking crazy' script. Strap it on?
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I don't have a lot of meaningful things to say about Uncharted 3, save for I think this game has some of the best set pieces in the entire series. This game is more emotionally resonant than its predecessors and has more in the way of mind blowing tech. All of the Uncharted games are very likable, and the fact that Uncharted 3 straight up steals that plane sequence from The Living Daylights only makes me like it more.
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Super Mario 3D Land (and by extension, 3D World) sees a post-Galaxy 2 Mario franchise attempt to drastically simplify the formula. It's an odd choice, seeing as how literally every mainline entry in the franchise up to this point has dramatically increased in scope. 3D Land can feel a little tiny, but it's still a great game. It play's more tightly than the previous 3D entries thanks to its limited landscape and is therefore a ton of fun. I think they could've done a little more to give this one a style of its own, though.
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Mortal Kombat realizes a dream I've had since I pored through Tekken 3 as an 11 year old trying to parse out the plot: it's got a genuine campagin mode that integrates cut scenes and gameplay. Not only that, but its one of the few instances of a reboot that actually does what you want it to. I remember playing late night matches of MK9 with a group of friends, all of us practically screaming at how absurdly violent the fatalities are. It's also the most fully-featured fighting game ever. Some of the game's art design is kind of lacking - just adding layers of bullshit onto the simple character designs from MK 1-3 doesn't make for a gorgeous-looking game - but then, you can always buy the classic outfit pack and play that way, I guess.
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For me, Arkham City takes everything that made Asylum so flawless and weighs it down with a bunch of unnecessary stuff that makes it bigger and worse. You can fly anywhere any time but the city is shaped like a boomerang and too much time is wasted gliding around to get from A to B. The game doesn't make good on its prison state narrative, and even goes out of its way to make the whole game seem disgusting by implying the only prisoners worth saving (or, at least, not pummeling into submission) are political prisoners; it's as if Paul Dini's Batman believes simultaneously that prisoners should not be put to death but also that their reform is impossible, making him actually DIRECTLY align with the institution he's bringing down. There are a zillion Riddler trophies that are a headache to hunt.
This is still an Arkham game, and there are moments of pure Batman I can't help but fall for - that intro is killer, for example, as is the Mad Hatter excursion. The stuff I love is still there, it's just buried under stuff I really don't like.
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Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is a joy to play and a nightmare to play well.
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Free the internet by touching Space Whale! I played this without a Kinect. It's a cheesy, ridiculous game but it's warmhearted and I'll stick around for its visuals.
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I don't know if Bastion's narrative blew me away like it seemed to do to everyone else, but I sure did love the dreamy artwork and varied yet simple combat.
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My favorite experiences with Minecraft all revolve around friends showing me what the game looks like for them. Although I've always preferred to play the game as a casual survival sim, sitting in a buddy's tiny apartment while he explained his complex lever-pulley system of ore-mining to me made me realize how great Minecraft is at bringing out that childhood need to play and create in people. And it's such a quaint, meditative space. I don't get very far when I play, but I love booting it up every once in a while and getting lost.
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Honest Hearts: Generally, the Fallout expansions that give you a new open space to explore are the best ones, but Honest Hearts is a mixed bag. Zion National Park is a tremendous idea for a new explorable space, and the conflict between Joshua Graham and the White Legs is a clever enough way to explore Graham's new American Colonialism vs. Ceaser's Roman revivalism.
I think it's the execution that does it in - Zion is a jagged, beige labyrinth with little character. It's easily the ugliest locale in New Vegas total. Fallout 3's excursion to swamp life in Point Lookout was so welcome partially because the tone, visual character and *feel* of the swampland felt so at odds with the crater that used to be Washington D.C. Zion National Park and New Vegas' twisty desert roads - well, they're both janky, Crayola beige trails walled off by cliffs. The spaces are ugly enough to obscure the text.
Old World Blues: This one is usually the favorite, and for good reason: it's a wild tone shift from the rest of the game, taking New Vegas from dark satire to Portal-esque bits, but it also bolsters New Vegas' core themes. Again, the expanse of space here fails, though. It's a large, flat, busy area filled to the gills with tough enemies, and it stinks of recycled content. Old World Blues is better than the sum of its parts, then: each derelict lab contains a secret weapon, armor or bit of lore so simultaneously stupid and clever that it makes the whole trip worth it.
Lonesome Road: This one's tough as jerky and about as interesting to the palate. Finally, the much anticipated Ulysses is here in full force, after paragraphs and paragraphs of text in the other DLCs hinting at his arrival. Thing is, he's probably the least interesting bit of this rushed-feeling entry in New Vegas' lore. He threatens, he looks like an extra in Johnny Pnemonic (or some other cursed '90s attempt at dystopia), and he monologues so fancifully and frequently that you're likely to forget who he is or why you're there at least once or twice before you reach the end.
Props to this one for its general vibe, though. There's something almost Dark Souls-y about how unremittingly horrific and brutally difficult Lonesome Road is. Even if I found myself slipping off of this new 'think about what awful things you've caused!' narrative tick, the over-levelled death claws and undead military zealots sure put me in my place anyway.
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BloodRayne: Betrayal is fuckin' metal. I could care less about the franchise as a whole, but this subdued - and by subdued I mean, isn't the whole thing usually an excuse for almost but not quite seeing boobs? - 2D beat 'em up is charming, and actually a lot of fun. I wish it controlled a little tighter, though.
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This mobile Dead Space title is ambitious, and it generates way more tension than you'd expect. This game's protagonist causes the destruction at Dead Space 2's outset, and I am an absolute sucker for canon side stories. Not sure if it actually runs on anything anymore, but with any luck it'll be rereleased somehow.
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Rage is more than a tech demo, but it's so much less than it could be. I really like the mechanics of Rage and at the time the visuals were excellent, but I definitely didn't need one more 'save the post apocalypse' story.
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SpellTower is a charming game and I miss playing it regularly.
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Bulletstorm is better than you'd think, I promise. Even its plot and characters are not the bro-stupid murder assholes they appear to be.
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I like Tiny Tower. Nothing happens in it, but I love those little guys and their jobs. I named every business in my building something awful.
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What would you get if you combined the design aesthetics of Shinji Makami, Akira Yamaoka and Suda51?
A game where a man named Garcia Fucking Hostpur (yeah) goes to hell to rescue his girlfriend except there are babies everywhere who scream at you all the time unless you feed them strawberries, which you can only earn by killing hell demons with your boner.
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Christine Love's little-known high school drama is about a teacher who is given full access to the social media accounts of a classroom without their knowledge. The game uses its plot to argue that, in some ways, the students' ability to handle their 'brand' in spite of the unwelcome surveillance is Good, Actually.
This is an unconvincing argument. Even a wholehearted embrace of the'you only see the me I want you to' stance can only frame itself as being *so* positive, whereas the potential negatives of an exposed life are obvious, and much worse. Cyber bullying, for example, is easier than regular bullying and its just as demeaning.
The game also allows you to date one of your students and at no apparent expense, which is unjustifiable.
At the time I played this during its release, I was still a teenager, and I found the game refreshing. I doubt I'd feel the same revisiting it now - I also doubt I'll find the time to do so.
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Although it's arguably the least consequential entry in the Bioware canon, there are still some fun adventures to be had in Dragon Age II. Sure, the combat mechanics were built to satisfy virtually no one on either side of the 'I like action!' vs. 'I like RPGs!' markets, but cranking this game down to easy made for a fun enough adventure.
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Resistance 3 is an interesting game, and there's something to be said for making the third entry in your big flagship franchise about a totally different protagonist than the established main character. Like I said elsewhere on this list, however, I don't need more action-movie narratives about saving the post apocalypse.
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OK, so, Dead Island is dumb. It's a pretty overrated game that gets worse the more you play it thanks to Techland throwing all of their best work into the first five hours of its 25 hour Skinner Box. It is vapid but mechanically sound, and was my podcast game for a while. I don't miss it, but I don't necessarily hate it either.
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Is there a better example of AAA developers kneecapping their own ambition out of perceived player expectation than Assassin's Creed: Revelations? It wants to imbue its thus far near-faceless protagonist Desmond Miles with a meaningful personality and character arc, but it can't give him a quiet moment of self reflection without forcing the player to solve atrocious, narratively bonkers Tetris puzzles to do so. It wants to portray Altair's complicated legacy, but introduces a cheap morally irredeemable villain to keep the player engaged. It wants to give Ezio a fond farewell, but spends more time introducing the player to bomb-building and a useless tower defense mini game than it does with its larger cast of characters, which largely go unmentioned entirely.
Constantinople is beautiful, and it's actually pretty cool to see a portrayal of a historical figure largely unmentioned in western media like Suleiman. It's also worth noting that Revelations is the first game in the series to have passable facial features and animation in its protagonist. Still, this is a game that wears its constraints on its sleeves, and without much in the way of meaningful Revelations - even though we finally meet Subject 16 (who is awful) and learn the truth of the Precursers, which was so easily implied anyway - Revelations is the first truly unnecessary entry in the franchise.
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(iPhone)
I think I liked the iPhone adaptation of Mirror's Edge primarily because it kept that saccharine white, red-stained aesthetic alive for another year. Pretty good translation of mechanics, too.
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I had an amazing night playing this with friends before I could drink and I can only imagine what a glorious, dumb weekend one could have with a Yoostar 2 drinking game.
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Walking into the fields of Hyrule in Ocarina of Time made me feel like a huge adventure was about to be underway, and it was up to me to seek out every new culture and hidden temple dotted across the landscape.
Skyward Sword made me feel like I was living in a world inhabited solely by people I would avoid at parties, and they were about to unleash a torrent of dumb anime bullshit on me. There were like six disparate bubbles and I had to ride a bird all the time to see anything. It was up to me to not play the rest of it.
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This is something of a 'pile of shame' title for me in that I've had it for years and only ever bothered playing the first two hours or so. I love Stacking conceptually, but it's just so - how to put it - plodding? It feels like doing anything in this game takes forever.
I'll give it another shot one day.
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El Shaddai is both visually stunning and an absolute slog to play through. In some ways, it's a perfect document of the inherent flaws in old-school game design philosophy; the meat of the game (a repetitive, fairly shallow beat 'em up) serves as, more or less, work for the player to complete so that they might be rewarded with story and atmosphere. The player's role in the game is, at best, arbitrary, and at worst, the game's unwitting work horse paid via immaculate visual design.
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Discourse around Rayman Origins became a bit of a bugbear for folks who were concerned that the age of the AAA 2D platformer was over. Here was a unique, vibrant new entry in the genre at a time in which there were few competitors, yet it was getting buried beneath the detritus of a hundred beige Modern Warfare clones and bro-y cover shooters. Lacking a big, traditional2D platformer save for Nintendo's abysmal New Super Mario Bros. series, Rayman Origins' relative quality to other big titles became symbolic.
In a certain sense, those fears were well-founded - there certainly haven't been that many AAA 2D platformers released since 2011. Revisiting it now, the hype around this game is...well, sort of funny! It's got a cohesive visual aesthetic, but that aesthetic is an ugly Saturday morning cartoon nightmare chock full of unimaginative character designs and needlessly sexualized female supporting characters. The pure mechanics of Rayman Origins certainly have their better merits and it does a great job merging its jaunty soundtrack with its level design, but ultimately the game never feels quite as fast, or tight, or as exciting as other titles in the genre. The entire game lacks any sort of big, foundational moment or mechanic to make the game feel unique, making it more a series of linear, mostly fine levels with some frustrating collectibles scattered around than a bold new take on the genre.
This is why Rayman Origins' use as the crux of the debate is funny in retrospect. While AAA publishers surely were abandoning 2D platformers, the indie scene was exploding with unique takes on the genre at the time, and it's only gotten better since. If anything, Rayman Origins suffers *because* of the worry around the game at the time. Even if you're a big fan of Rayman Origins - I mean, would anyone in their right mind say this game is better or even on the same footing as, say, Celeste? Or Super Meat Boy, or Shovel Knight, or VVVVVV? Or, hell, even lesser remembered titles like Bloodrayne: Betrayal or the new Shantae games?
Speaking in terms of its sheer quality, Rayman Origins is barely able to compete against practically any other 2D platformer of note in the last decade - but, crucially, it *is* the only one that came equipped with a $60 price tag.
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Halo: Combat Evolved: Anniversary Edition
343's first stabs at the Halo series certainly were inauspicious, to say the least. While the alterations to the original Halo in this remake are almost - if not completely - entirely visual, the choices made here are *wild*. Levels designed to be foreboding and alien are visually redesigned with the migraine-inducing brightness of an Apple store in a half-empty American mall, weapon designs which used to be iconically alien, inexplicably-shaped and unweapon-like now littered with the Halo Canon Official Technical Manual hyper-specificity of a premium-price Nerf gun.
The remake has one extremely neat trick, though: players can, with 0 perceptible lag, switch between the 2011 remake visuals and the original 2001 visuals. It's almost like an accidental 'how not to do Sci-Fi visual design lecture in video game form.
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I'm sure Trine is kind of fun on the single player end of things. As a cooperative multiplayer title, however, it kind of sucks.
One of my friends liked to play the knight, which means, more or less, he's the one who got to play the video game. My other friend likes solving puzzles, so he played the wizard and spent most of his time stumbling around and placing boxes on enormous buttons and lever-pulley systems in a drunken haze of rag doll physics and loose controls.
And then there was me, the archer, swinging manically around the screen in search of purpose, plunking skeletons with arrows from afar and occasionally jumping off of cliffs to my death so that I might stave off the malaise.
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The original Crysis had the misfortune of being a quadruple-A tech-first tactical successor to the original Far Cry in 2007, AKA the Year of Modern Warfare. Crysis is a game of stop-and-start subterfuge mixed with a full-on mech suit for when things go first person shoot-y; compared against the toothier, more streamlined Modern Warfare, a game that otherwise would've been perceived as a technical marvel felt almost retro.
So here's Crysis 2, four years later, and it *reeks* of Modern Warfare. In its pursuit of a post-Modern Warfare audience, virtually every element of its design feels like a stab in the dark. There are still open areas for stealth and sabotage, but they're usually book-ended by much longer corridors. The mech suit is intact, but it's...how to put this...*stranger* this time. In this new, more straightforward combat environment, it feels both overpowered and hilariously clunky. On the one hand, using Armor mode grants a temporary invincibility that can overcome near any foe on the default difficulty. On the other hand, the invisibility feature lasts a grand total of 30 seconds before it needs to be recharged. The new back-stab insta-kill moves uncloak you, but you're incapable of performing them unless you're cloaked. The sprint grants you the power of The Flash for about 15 seconds, but at the expense of blowing all your energy at once - you can't run without it, though.
You can feel Crytek force Crysis into a Call of Duty-shaped hole. The alien enemies, which were strange, squid-like creatures with indefinable abilities, temperature-based biological weapons and zero-gravity hives are, in Crysis 2, clunky, steel-clad robot guys who wouldn't look out of place in Michael Bay's Transformers series.
Somehow worse than the combat is the story, which is an incomprehensible mess. It's weird for a game's sequel to use a silent protagonist when the original game's protagonist spoke regularly - it's even *weirder* to unceremoniously refer to that protagonist as having died offscreen at some point - and it's *weirder still* to introduce a Cronenberg-ian bodyswapping horror component to the protagonist without ever expanding on that. What do I mean by that last part? In Crysis 2, the main character is slowly (apparently) subsumed by a different character, who uploaded his consciousness to the combat suit the main character is surgically (?) attached to. By the time you get to the end of the game, the *new* main character proclaims himself to have taken over the *old* main character's body, and that idea is just kinda thrown out there like it's good news the guy you've been playing as is trapped silently inside his own skin, forever. They don't even *mention* the old protagonist in Crysis 3, by the way, which stars the new protagonist! Really weird stuff.
Like any AAA FPS from this era, it's a roller coaster ride of big set pieces and aesthetically pleasing apocalyptic landscapes, but that's about it. There's very little else to it.
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You don't need me to tell you Duke Nukem Forever is bad. It's atrocious. The game's best moment is when it lets you pick up a piece of human shit and throw it around a men's restroom. Or, I guess, when it shrinks you and you have to fight tiny pig men on a kitchen sink. Which is neat! But then, you have to platform, and at that point you're left to fantasize about the good old days of shit throwin' once again.
Still, I'm glad this came out. I used to read game magazines as a kid and fantasize about what a giant mess it would inevitably be. Very rarely are massive financial/creative disasters allowed to be released to the public so far after they pass the 'this is clearly a terrible idea' stage.
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(RAGE HD FOR IPHONE)
What better way to compliment one of the most compelling instances of new tech in video games (at the time) than with a bad mobile shooting gallery?
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LEGO Star Wars III is the worst LEGO game ever produced. Not the worst 'modern' LEGO game, mind you, but the *worst LEGO game ever produced.* Besides the fact that the conventions of the "LEGO Brand Name" series had already worn out their potential by the time LEGO Indiana Jones came out, this transparently cash-grabbing sequel, which only adapts the first two seasons of a seven season-long, sort-of bad children's television show, basically doesn't work. Despite the fact that I played this for the first time nearly a decade after it released, I was unable to complete it thanks to endless bugs and its lack of an auto-save feature. Three times in a row I got to the end of a 45 minute-long level only to find that an essential object never spawned, forcing me to restart. Atrocious.
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