Games Of The Year 2008

Ok. So I was gonna do a big proper run-down from 10 to 1 on this, but I can't be arsed because there are so many games I haven't played, or haven't given enough time to. Besides, as you'll see, my feelings about a game can't always be summed up all that simply. There are ten games here, but this is not my top ten. Rather it's the ten games I felt most like giving awards to. You'll see.

Best Retail Game
The main purpose of this award is to illustrate how my two favourite games of the year are download-only. As such the winner isn't actually that important. Anyway, it's Dead Space.

Best Sequel
Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 is possibly a flawless example of how to make a sequel. It's still got the main mode which is better than ever, and it adds five extra modes which all play with the formula in brilliant ways, building tactics that are useful in other modes, and are varied enough to be fun while never being just novelties. Plus it's prettier and has better music. Yeah, it's the perfect sequel. Which means it's Game Of The Year right? Oh unless someone released a really amazing original game. Hmm.

Best Worst Sequel
Super Smash Bros Brawl is basically the same as Super Smash Bros Melee, which in all honesty wasn't that much better than Super Smash Bros No Subtitle. Somehow it still ended up being my most played game last year.

Best Game For The First Hour Or So
God, Boom Blox got really boring after that, didn't it?

Best Game That Was Split Into Five-Second Chunks And Mixed Together With Five-Second Chunks Of The Worst Game Ever
Consistency is not a word Mirror's Edge knows. Playing it, I can't help the feeling that if I could just peel away the moments of perfect clarity, beauty, exhiliration and grace (of which there are many) and make a game out of them, it would be the best game ever. Problem is, the game left over would be so abhorrently evil that it would probably destroy the world and everything in it.

Best Drumming
Admittedly I haven't played Guitar Hero World Tour, so I am completely unqualified to judge this award. However Rock Band contains some very fine drumming indeed. In fact it is the most fun I have had drumming in a game this year.

Best Game I Had Already Played
Banjo-Kazooie was so much better than I thought it would be. I'd barely rose-tinted it at all. See, this kind of thing is the reason I didn't do a top ten. You can't really put retro-re-releases in a top ten can you.

Best Game That I Still Can't Make Any Sense Of
This sort of game is the other reason I didn't do a top ten. No More Heroes could reasonably go in any position on the list. It renders criticism utterly irrelevant. I can't properly articulate why I like it. I can't properly articulate why I hate it, either. The only real flaw I can pin on it is that none of it makes any fucking sense.

Best Place To Stop Playing A Game
I'm told Zack & Wiki becomes really horribly unpleasantly frustrating at some point along the way, but fortunately I'm nowhere near clever enough to get that far. I'm tempted to just leave it where it is and preserve my love for it.

Best Game
Braid, obviously.

Tomb Raider: The Benny Hill Years

So Tomb Raider finally deigned to make itself available for Silver gamers. (Users with a Silver Xbox Live account, I mean, not gamers over 70. That would be weird.) I dunno about you but I'm getting quite hacked off with the limitations of Silver accounts. Unless I'm missing a really obvious button somewhere I can't even upload my Braid times without a Gold account, which is really silly. Anyway, Tomb Raider Underworld. Or should I say Tomb Raider Underwhelming? Ha! Nah, probably not.

Good things: Looks brilliant. Gorgeous environments. Routes through levels less obvious than before. Nice atmosphere. Same old solid platforming and okayish combat. Whatserface Mrs Lara's Voice Actress Lady is still good.

Bad things: Lara runs too fucking fast. In fact everything in the game is too fast. Lara's animations, the tigers, the little rats that flicker from the floor to Lara's throat like Mexican jumping beans... it's like watching a video of Legend sped up a little. I might get used to it, but just now it's horrid. Combat becomes a terrifying frenzy of rolls and dodges. When you're running down a beautifully drawn corridor you want a bit of time to admire the foliage, but before you know it Lara's already jittered off to the other end of the level. It's really bizarre.

Of course you couldn't admire the foliage even if you wanted to because the camera is pretty temperamental too. It doesn't seem to do what I want, which would be fine if it was good at doing its own thing, like in Galaxy, but it isn't. Other niggles include occasionally obscure level design and a really abrupt ending - so much so that I thought I'd died and only realised I hadn't when the title screen popped up. I'll still get the game, though. I've got to have something to complain about. (Also: shooting tigers, kicking ancient vases to pieces, stamping on rare spiders - is Lara the least ecologically friendly adventurer type woman ever?)

Anyway, as if to make Sunday's post even more redundant, I've had a go on Mirror's Edge as well. It's a lot of fun. I'm especially impressed by the feeling of connection with your character - she has weight and momentum and obeys the laws of physics occasionally, so she's already one-up on Lara "made out of crisp packets" Croft. Hearing her pant as you run is a nice touch as well (and probably thick with masturbatory potential for the more pathetic end of the platform game fan spectrum). Controls were fine. I appreciate the minimal use of face buttons, allowing you to hang on to the joysticks most of the time. Combat and shooting is pretty clunky, but seriously who cares. That don't-shoot-anything achievement is mine.

It was the PS3 version so I hated the pad, but otherwise it pretty much meets all my expectations. Meets, but doesn't exceed. Still, that may be a lot to ask from a demo consisting of a quick tutorial and a very short level I've seen played through a dozen times before. I'll have to play the full product to find out how the other levels hold up, and more importantly how long it turns out to be. I have concerns. Other than that, can't complain at all.

No word on Banjo yet in case you're wondering. My flatmate's getting Little Big Planet tomorrow so as soon as I manage to steal it off him I'll let you know how it is. Until next time, look after yourself - and each other. (And try to violently murder as much endangered wildlife as you possibly can.)

Two Lists About Geometry Wars

Top Nine Reasons Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 Is The Best Game On Xbox Live Arcade That Isn't Braid

1. It's so good it regresses my vocabulary. While playing it I am incapable of saying any words that aren't "oh shit".

2. It's so incredibly gorgeous in all its radiant neon glory that it makes the original (which I used to think was really pretty) look utterly bland and boring by comparison. Seriously, play it. You won't believe how badly it's aged.

3. Bombing the whole screen scatters geoms everywhere, and you can have loads of fun by saying "geom nom nom" while you hoover them up.

4. The multiplayer is fantastic, if only for the humour value of having someone next to you saying "oh shit" during the short periods when you're not saying it.

5. Sequence is so blatantly unfair I don't think I'll ever reach the end, but it's all worth it for the level with all the greenies. They way they swoop and billow around your line of fire is just spectacular.

6. Wax Off is the best achievement since... well, Pacifism.

7. Gates are both your greatest friend and your bitterest enemy. I think I've died more times at the hands of gates than any other enemy. Why would you build a gate and make the edges deadly? That is extremely poor gate design.

8. Also I know that enemies can go through gates, but I completely forget every single time one appears. Why do I do this? I can go through gates, why do I think the enemies can't? It makes no sense.

9. Waves: when you play it, you will shit bricks.

Top One Reasons Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 Is A Stupid Piece Of Shit That Should Go And Die Somewhere

1. WHY DOESN'T IT SAVE YOUR SCORES WHEN YOU'RE OFFLINE.

This Again, Sorry

Second attempt: 49 minutes 13 seconds
Third attempt (after three aborted half-runs): 46 minutes 44 seconds

I'll get this if it kills me.

Time Trial And Punishment

Braid has an achievement for completing the whole game in 45 minutes. This achievement has EATEN MY SOUL.

The game also has mini time trial challenges which are quite addictive but the big one is a work of pure evil. I can't remember the last time an achievement consumed me quite to this extent. (That's a complete lie. It was Geometry Wars Evolved 2's Wax Off, about a week ago. (I haven't talked about Geometry Wars 2 yet have I? It's amazing. Buy it. (But buy Braid first.)))

The only game I ever tried to time trial before was Prince of Persia: The Sands Of Time, and I got bored round about the baths. It was the horrid combat that turned me off I think. Braid, though, is such a tightly-designed game that time-trialling it is an absolute pleasure. I'm just concerned that my memories of the game will be tainted by the horrific ordeal of constantly falling just short of the 45 minute mark. The endgame runs at a fixed pace and contains a long section where all you can do is watch. I'm confident this section will give me a heart attack before too long.

First attempt: 57:46:03

Awesomology

So apparently there are two kinds of videogame scholar, which may come as a suprise to those of you who thought there were no kinds. As I understand it, narratologists are the sorts of people who attempt to analyse the plot of Braid (hopefully without losing their already fragile sanity in the process) while ludologists play it and go "Look, he's going backwards! WOW." These two schools of thought are equally valid and should be given equal considerati- yeah, I know, the ludologists are right, but let's pretend, ok? In any case, it's not like you can perfectly separate the two. Take Phoenix Wright. The gameplay is terrible, and while it's pretty much the best-scripted game you're likely to find, it's still nowhere near the calibre of actual decent fiction. It's like playing a crap game while reading a crap book, and yet the result is not double craptitude but one of the most entertaining game series of the last few years. It's all in the connection between the two. Even Braid mirrors its story thematically within the levels (or so my narratologist friends tell me, before going back to... doing something prententious, or whatever? I can't bring myself to actually be mean about them, sorry.)

In any case, it should be fairly clear that narratology vs ludology is a false dichotomy. There's a third way. As a chap called Jonathan Culler apparently said at some point, "the theory of narrative requires a distinction between... 'story' - a sequence of actions or events, conceived as independent of their manifestation in discourse - and... 'discourse', the discursive presentation or narration of events". I don't know who this guy is, I just got the quote off Wikipedia, and I don't think he was talking about games. But it's like Half-Life 2 isn't it? It's one of the best games ever, and that's not because of the gameplay (well-executed but fairly ordinary gunplay) or the story (alien invasion hokum) but something in between - the rattle of a railway bridge as you cling to the struts below, the empty houses strewn with dead bodies, the echo of the Overwatch robotic announcer over the river at sunset. I guess that's what this Jonathan Culler guy was on about anyway. He wants to call this stuff "discourse", but that's a rubbish name, so let's call it awesomology.

Basically almost every game relies on awesomology. (I'm sick of that already. Let's go back to discourse.) But even this is impossible to separate from the other aspects of a game. Think about your favourite game, maybe it's Half-Life 2. If you were trying to isolate just the gameplay aspects, and removed all the plot and all the discourse bits, what would you end up with? At the most basic level, what you do in HL2 is press buttons and waggle joysticks (assuming you're on a console). So if you mapped out a full runthrough of the game in terms of user input, you'd end up with a list of instructions like "move joystick this way, press trigger, press A". Timing is important of course, so let's model the game as one big quicktime event. A button press flashes up on screen and you press it in time, or fail somehow (maybe by losing health, maybe by changing the subsequent sequence of button presses to something more complicated or roundabout). Rinse and repeat for 12 hours or so, and you've finished Half-Life 2.

Except obviously you haven't really played it at all. Output is important as well as input - it's what you're reacting to that makes games different from each other. But as soon as you bring in the elements that make it an FPS, ie the acquisition and disposal of enemies, you're already bringing in some level of discourse. Even if it's all stick figures and wireframe environments. More importantly, while it would still be a pretty boring game, it would at least be more fun than a giant QTE.

Discourse is everything. I can think of very few games that don't have any of it - Tetris, I guess, and other puzzlers, and maybe some hardcore reaction-based schmups and racers. You could call these games "pure", as if it's a virtue that they're unsullied by the horrors of plots and setpieces. A lot of games get called pure, though, and it's interesting to examine why. One game series I often hear the adjective applied to is the Mario series, which I'm inclined to disagree with. If you're hoping this post is turning out to be another installment in my perpetual vendetta against Super Mario Galaxy, then you're in luck.

I like Galaxy a lot, but it is not a pure game, not by any means. In fact, I don't think any of the Mario games since Super Mario Bros have been, which may explain why I'm not all that fond of them up until Super Mario 64. Discourse is inevitably tied to a lot of non-gameplay things, including graphics and sound, and once a game ages beyond the point where these things can still impress, it's only got gameplay to rely on. I enjoy playing, for example, Super Mario World, but for me it is nowhere near the transcendant experience it's described as by people who played it when it first came out. I think this is because I'm not playing it as the most technologically advanced Mario game to date, and thus I am not blown away by its increased scope and improved graphics. The graphics aren't even all that nice from an artistic viewpoint, either.

Galaxy's graphics, meanwhile, are. I consider it one of the prettiest games ever, and the settings are evocative, and the music isn't half bad either. There's something else going on here though. I guess it gets called "pure" because of sections like "Revenge of the Topman Tribe", one of the stars in the Dreadnought Galaxy. There's a bit (about 1:55 here) I call "radiating circles of laser doom" where you have to jump over a load of radiating circles of laser doom, hence the name. The guy in the video messes around a lot, but it's a pretty easy section - just run from one end of the platform to the other jumping over the radiating circles of etc. It's pure platforming, and quite entertaining. It's odd though, because if the platform was arranged differently - say, a long thin walkway with moving straight lines of laser doom - it would be a lot less fun, and yet it would "play" basically the same. You'd still be running and timing jumps in the same way, just in a less funkily-designed environment.

It's almost as if the game is relying on the anticipation of gameplay to impress rather than the gameplay itself. When you first see Bouy Base, or the capsule in the Good Egg Galaxy, there's a sense of excitement because it looks like a fun section. But once you're in, it's standard running-and-jumping antics that would play out just the same in a less interesting setting. That's how I felt, anyway. Maybe you found them just as much fun as they looked. If you did, I can't blame you for thinking it's the best game ever, as so many people do. For me, it felt like smoke and mirrors.

I don't mean to imply that making a game visually interesting is somehow duplicitous, just that there's a lot more discourse going on than is immediately apparent, and sometimes - because of a mood you're in, or a preconception you have about the game, or a million different reasons - you can find yourself immune to it. That's the main reason I don't think Galaxy is one of the best games ever. Now hopefully I can stop going on about it and get on to something more interesting. Like Smash Bros in-jokes. Woo.

Braid To The Past

The quite extraordinarily brilliant Braid has got me thinking about other puzzley type games, the Zelda series in particular. For me, the thing that sticks out about Braid, apart from the lovely aesthetics and completely incomprehensible plot, is how much it makes you genuinely think - and, in turn, how rare this is in modern videogames.

I say modern. Since I've only been gaming for about ten years now, I've a very limited idea of whether this has always been true. Everything I know about gaming pre-1997 is basically stuff I've learned from the Wii's Virtual Console, and that's not much. Solomon's Key is a good brain workout, although it has action leanings as well (hamstrung by putting jump on D-up, but that's the NES for you).

One thing the Virtual Console neatly illustrates is how the Zelda series has got progressively easier with each installment. This is actually almost literally true. The original NES Zelda is a complete nightmare. "It's dangerous to go alone, take this! You'll die a dozen times on the second screen anyway but, y'know, take it." I felt a colossal sense of achievement when I made it so far as to find the first dungeon (which actually turned out to be the third dungeon, but let's not quibble). Link To The Past has a bit more signposting - I reached the first dungeon first, and the second dungeon second, at any rate - but it still makes it very difficult to stay alive in a way the 3D Zeldas completely don't. The Mario and Metroid series seem to have undergone similar transformations. (I still haven't completed Super Mario Bros, even with full knowledge of the warps.) Maybe this is an artifact of the 2D setting (although it's not true of the Game Boy versions), or the advent of save functions, or the ethos of the era, or something else entirely.

It does have the effect of making your quest seem a bit more epic (in the same way that a successful run of Mystery Dungeon is all the more satisfying for having previously died in several hundred different ways that were completely not your fault). That Zelda dungeon I eventually reached did seem pretty mysterious and threatening in an 8-bit way, partly thanks to the excellent music. Which is fortunate because in the puzzling stakes it was singularly unchallenging. This is the point I'm slowly gravitating towards. I actually never bothered to finish Link To The Past because the first three dungeons were so uninteresting. The very first is almost comically dull - literally the only difficulty is in finding your way around.

So I think this is one way in which the Zelda series has actually improved. Twilight Princess's dungeons were pretty good, especially the Lakebed Temple (it's inferior to Ocarina's Water Temple, but then, so is more or less any level in any game ever). Wind Waker, too, had some fine attempts once you got past the pathetically easy first and second dungeons. But none of these games tied my brain in quite as many knots as Braid... if you see what I accidentally did there.

You may wonder why I keep making the comparison, but Braid (despite taking more obvious cues from Super Mario Bros and other platformers) isn't so far away from Zelda. The structure's different, but you still gain a new ability, or have to deal with a new mechanic, for every level. It probably has more in common with Portal on the whole, but then again, maybe that's not so different either. The time-slowing ring might jar a little, but I don't have much trouble imagining the portal gun (if it was some kind of wand or something instead) popping up in Zelda.

Obviously, Zelda has more going for it than just the dungeons. Wind Waker in particular has some fantastic between-dungeon bits - ironically I'm especially fond of the section that fills the very obvious void left by the cut third dungeon, where Link sneaks onto the ship while the pirates are hanging out at Windfall. The problem is this. I fell in love with the series with Ocarina of Time, which came out when I was ten. I'm sure a lot of gamers are familiar with the phenomenon - the game's difficulty was perfectly pitched to befuddle my preteen brain, and now that I'm older and wiser the same difficulty level doesn't fill that puzzley void in my soul.

The semi-holy DS trinity of Another Code, Hotel Dusk and Professor Layton And The Curious Village failed for various reasons. With the first two, I was largely immune to their dubious narrative charms/character quirks and found the puzzles poorly integrated. Professor Layton gets away with murder in that respect, by somehow turning it into a charming quirk in itself - I began to glean a peverse enjoyment from the poorly-welded-together halves of the game ("My cat is ill! Maybe he'd get better if I could just solve this puzzle.."). But... consider this post an extended-length bragging session if you like, but they were just too easy. None were as disappointing as Phantom Hourglass though, whose facile puzzles and drab adventuring add up to the first Zelda since Ocarina I've actively despised. Apart from Braid, only Portal and Zack and Wiki have really given me the level of intellectual thrill I've so craved. (Intellectual thill? If there's a nerdier phrase in the English language, I've never heard it.)

Given that my Games Of The last three Years have been Twilight Princess*, Portal and (so far) Braid, you can imagine what direction I want the Zelda series to be heading in. With Nintendo's new family friendly direction, though, it seems unlikely. I guess not every level can be the Water Temple, but I really would appreciate... hang on, why can't every level be the Water Temple? Every level should totally be the Water Temple. Apparently the Zelda team are working on something at the moment, so someone pass on this message: make every level the Water Temple. Also put the portal gun in it. Thanks.

*Edit: Well why didn't anyone tell me Hitman Blood Money came out in 2006? Sod Zelda.