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.

The Shaky Disappointment

"Give me a reason to love you" as Portishead once sang.* I'm starting my post with a song lyric in the hope that you'll be too busy laughing at my pretentiousness to notice the colossal volte-face I'm about to do on Wario Land. It's almost as bad as when I upgraded my opinion of Halo 3 from "disappointing" to "incredible" in the course of a single play session.

Once the entertainment value of the excellent animation and Wario charm has melted away, the game stinks of "will this do?". There's no sense of each level having a concept, or of the development team thinking "why is this fun?" at any stage. Put some platforms together, add waggle, add achievements (which I still find really weird in a Nintendo game), five worlds, job done. Out the door. And I thought Mario Galaxy was slightly underwhelming. Christ. Come back, all is forgiven.

Only the bosses display any real invention, and even they're a bit annoying. Oh, and there's the odd nice use of waggle, although I found my wrist really hurt after a quick session. So I went and played Wario Land to relax lol etc. Crap I've done that one before. Even the animation and Warioness isn't as good as in Smash Bros.

Despite all this I might have kept on playing if it wasn't for the game making me go back and collect more coins before letting me in to the third world. What the hell kind of game design is that? Is this a Nintendo game or what? Seriously, if a game is going to make me do that, it had better have some actual interesting levels to ease the pain. All you get to break up the monotony is some absolutely horrible submarine sections. Screw you guys, I'm going home. I can't even be bothered to find a quote from the manual to fill in that gap in the last post.

4/10.

*This article is part of a series inspired by Portishead lyrics. Next week, "Tempted in our minds / tormented inside life / wounded, I'm afraid / inside my head, falling through changes" in relation to Picross DS.

Wario Land Shake Dimension: The Definitive Review

Boxart
Wario looks happy, but so would you if you were on a big island full of treasure. 8/10

Manual
Narrated by Wario himself. Includes such gems as "I can't be bothered to go and get the manual, so wait until I edit something in here later". 9/10

Disc Art
Wario shakes a thing. Very yellow. 8/10

Stickers
It has stickers. 10/10

Waggle
Waggle the remote to do ground pounds and shake things and aim things. My wrist hurts from shaking things too much (so I played the game for a bit to relax lols). Wario has two separate ground pound moves. Amazing. 8/10

Graphics
It looks great and the animation is lovely, like a really good cartoon. It's not quite as funny to watch as Wario in Smash Bros though. 8/10

Gameplay
It's quite good but a bit MOR/easy listening, if it was music (which it isn't). Maybe it will get better later. I've only played the first world. 7/10

Music
It's quite good but a bit MOR/easy listening, no that's the other one. I can't remember much about the music so it's probably not that great. 6/10

Wario
Wario. 10/10

Because otherwise the overall score would be 8.2 recurring out of ten
and that is a completely silly score that makes a mockery of the entire scoring out of ten process.
6/10

Overall: 8/10

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.

In Brawl We Trust

Smash Bros is a religion, and these are its commandments.

I Link, Captain Falcon, Samus and Ike are all amazing, but thou shalt have no other gods before Wario.
II Any character that isn't amazing shall be referred to by a derogatory and increasingly unfunny nickname, eg: Mr Gay and Watch, Poocario, Ganondork, Mr Game and Crotch, Diddy Wrong, Wonkey Kong, Mr Lame and Watch, Lolimar, Mr Game and Wank, Mr Wank and Watch (even though that doesn't make any sense). Also Mr Game and Watch's final smash is called the Cocktopus.
III Suggested one-liners for various situations:
i) (Ice Climbers' final smash) "Ice to see you!"
ii) (Diddy Kong's "jump on your face and hit you" move) "I specialise in YOUR FACE!"
iii) (Meowth emerges from a Pokeball) "It's pay day, bitch!"
iv) (Jigglypuff falls asleep right next to an opponent) "NO Jigglypuff you stupid fucking twat."
IV King Dedede's glassy blank-eyed stare is the stuff of nightmares.
V So is Jigglypuff's final smash.
VI Whenever one of the crappy new Pokemon appears (ie more or less anything post-Mudkip) it must be immediately insulted for its inept design. ("It's just a cat with bits of plastic stuck on it!")
VII The co-op event match where you have to kill 50 Yoshis in one circuit of Rainbow Ride will eat your soul.
VIII Sonic is the worst character to play against, but by no means the best character to play as. No one knows why or how.
IX Whenever someone eats a poison mushroom you have to pretend you knew it was poisoned, even though independent studies have shown that it is impossible to tell the difference.
X Kirby's final smash is the cutest thing this side of Jigglypuff.