Year in Review: The worst games of 2010

Above: "It's just me getting killed by a giant spider for an hour and a half. It cost 80 million krone."

All this week, we'll be recapping the year that was. Today: The worst games of the year.

As I keep darkly alluding, I found this to be a challenging year in a lot of ways.* Nowhere was this more apparent than with all the supposedly great games I struggled to play. Every year there's crap, and everybody agrees it's crap, but this year, more than any I can recall, there was crap that people kept telling me was an ice-cream sundae.

In chronological order of when I played them, here are the games I liked the least in 2010:

Army of Two: The 40th Day: I was sad to see this game go in the wrong direction, because I thought the first Army of Two showed a lot of promise. But the sequel ditched the humor, kept the monotonous duck-and-cover shooting, and added a terrible checkpoint system to boot. Nothing was worse than laboriously customizing your weapons, dying in the next firefight, and finding that you had to do it all over again. Ugh.

No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle: This is where we're talking about disappointing sequels, right? I loved No More Heroes so much, and I thought the sequel wasn't fit for the tissue box next to Travis Touchdown's easy chair. I can't even talk about it. It makes me sad.

Aliens vs. Predator: Never wrote about this one. In fact, I'd forgotten I played it until I saw it on somebody else's worst-of list. Whoever that was, damn you for reminding me of this awful game.

God of War III: Mechanically, God of War III was sound, but it was the moment when Kratos stopped being cool. Dude needs to get over it. He's like the guy who shows up at his 20th high school reunion wearing the same leather jacket he wore in the twelfth grade. It's embarrassing at this point.

Splinter Cell: Conviction: I get what Ubi was trying to do here. It just didn't work. Even if the aggro-stealth concept had worked, we'd still have had to deal with Fisher's motormouthed antagonists. Who the hell signed off on them?

Crackdown 2: We are drowning in awful sequels right now. Pinpointing the failure of Crackdown 2 is difficult, because in every way that matters, it is exactly the same game as its predecessor. Except the first game is still one of my favorites of this generation, and the second one is... not.

Limbo: Man, I don't even know. To me, this seemed like just another too-difficult indie platformer with delusions of grandeur.

Mafia II: Not without its charms, I still wonder what sane person would keep playing through this game's terrible action scenes unless somebody was paying them. It still wasn't enough for me!

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: This, not Limbo, is the game where I feel the most like I missed something. I read too many positive things from too many people I respect to discount it as simply a crappy game. But that's what it felt like to me: lousy camera, bad controls, dumb story. I can't get past these things.

Medal of Honor: If there was a more generic, mediocre shooter out there in 2010, I didn't play it.

Tomorrow: The best games of 2010.

*I'm just trying to seem dark and mysterious, for the ladies.

Friday afternoon tidbits

Rather than gaming this weekend, I'll be slogging through the cold and damp woods. It's fun, dammit!

-Chris Kohler echoes my thoughts on God of War III exactly: it's well done, and there's nothing wrong with it, but it proves beyond doubt that it's time for God of War to end. Everyone involved can walk away with their heads held high. Will Sony allow this to happen? Considering that God of War III was March's top-selling title across all platforms, I'm guessing it's not likely.

-When I was a kid, they always told me I'd grow out of video games eventually. It still hasn't happened. But, like Elysium, I find it impossible to shake the feeling that, yes, someday I still will grow out of gaming. Will it ever disappear from my life entirely? I hope not. But it's not hard to imagine a time when it doesn't seem like an integral part of my identity.

-Matt Matthews looks at the business of Gamestop. The big takeaways may not be too surprising: the biggest part of their profits comes from used sales, and that's also the part that's growing all the time. No wonder publishers hate them -- they don't see a dime from those sales.

-Now that Gears of War 3 has been officially announced, the Phoenix's Maddy Myers follows up on her post about the inclusion of, presumably, a playable female character. The tenor of the comments both on this new post, and on the original, are all the proof you need that Maddy's making good points.

-Tom Cross defends the story in Just Cause 2 -- or, more accurately, defends Just Cause 2 against its story. He brings up one of the biggest challenges for any reviewer, which is whether you're critiquing a game for what it is actually doing, or what it intends to be doing. This is where subjectivity and objectivity can run up against each other especially hard.

-Kyle Orland this week launched The Game Beat, a new media criticism blog. I'm a fan of Kyle's work going way back, and I know he'll be doing some great stuff with it.

Clash of the Titans: The Official Game

Above: That fiery dude is always photobombing people.

All right, I think we can stop fluffing PAX and get back to talking about games now. And what's this? My review of God of War III is up at thephoenix.com.

I remember finishing the second God of War, which ended with Kratos scaling Mount Olympus on the back of a Titan, and wanting to play the next one that instant. God of War III does indeed pick up right there, and for a minute I was all jazzed up. Then they knocked Kratos back down to Hades, and he started ripping people's heads off and everything, and...

I don't know. This game does almost everything right. It's better in some clearly definable ways than its predecessors, and somehow worse in the gestalt. Playing God of War III, I was aware that I was playing a game that had been produced at a high level, but I just didn't care what was happening.

There was one sequence in particular that crystallized my tepid reaction to this game. In the Gardens of Olympus, there's a neat puzzle in which you have to look at your surroundings through the jeweled eye of a statue, which will turn a flat image into a usable staircase. As you do this, you need to drag around a big pedestal in order to fill several vessels with water, because they're on pressure plates that will open up parts of the path for you. You also need to use the deceased body of Hera to weigh down the final vessel.

This is pretty standard God of War stuff, and it's a fun enough puzzle on its own. It also rewrites all the rules of the game to that point. The garden has walls low enough that Kratos could easily leap over in any other part of the game, but here invisible barriers block his path. (He can't grab onto them, either). Although we've seen him perform astounding feats of strength and agility, including prying open the clenched fingers of a Titan and leaping hundreds of feet in the air with blades akimbo, for some reason he can't carry a 120-pound woman over his shoulder without lurching around like a drunk person. Kratos can't jump while he's carrying Hera, or throw her even a few feet. For the purposes of the puzzle, the game completely handicaps him without any good reason.

Beyond that, you can't say the action is bad in any traditional sense. It looks great, plays well, and sticks to the solid fundamentals established by the first couple of games. I felt like they went a little too far over the line with the gore this time around, but that alone isn't the reason I felt so disconnected. We've just played this game before, is all. Time for something else.

God of War III: Entrails yes, lovemaking no

Above: Acceptable penetration, according to the ESRB.

God of War III is a game that does not flinch away from violence. So far I've disemboweled centaurs and decapitated minotaurs. I've pulled out a titan's cracked fingernails. I've chopped off the legs of Hermes so I could wear his boots. I've yanked off Helios's head, and now I'm using it as a lantern. I've pummeled Hercules in the face until his head was shaped like a crescent moon. And it's all been shown in center stage, brightly lit and highly detailed. It's as though the developers are daring you to see how much gore you can take.

Then, when Kratos falls into bed with Aphrodite, the game gets downright bashful.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I wanted an X-rated, fully rendered sex scene, nor do I think that God of War could have or should have tried to pull off a tasteful one,* with the more explicit maneuvers obscured by professional draping techniques. I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's true to the character that we weren't treated to a soft-focus sex scene of the kind you see on late-night Cinemax.

It's just that the contrast is so stark. God of War III rubs your face in gore from start to finish. Bones crack. Bloud spouts. Entrails festoon the columns. You see some jiggling breasts, as well, which give a whole new meaning to the phrase "bump mapping," yet the second Kratos tries a little tenderness, the camera drifts away to focus on two of Aphrodite's young (and female) pages, who watch intently.

Like most of the more dramatic game actions, the sex scene happens through button prompts, here accompanied hilariously by the grating, metallic sound of a sword being unsheathed. Match the prompts, and the voyeurs murmur with pleasure. Miss them, and they look away in disgust. It's funny, probably intentionally, but one gets the impression through much of the rest of the game that we are supposed to be taking the violence seriously on its own terms.

It's a tricky balance, because I'm not suggesting that God of War is intended as a serious dramatic work, like Heavy Rain. It is obviously supposed to be ridiculous and over the top. Still, we are meant to be in awe of Kratos's earthshaking rage. The game dares us to look unflinchingly at one blood-soaked act of brutality after another. But as soon as Kratos thinks about touching a woman, we can titter and turn away. We're like little boys who play with toy guns all day and then giggle when our parents kiss each other hello.

*"Pull off a tasteful one" might have been something users would have tried to do upon encountering an HD sex scene.

Game informing

Selected closing sentences from several previews in the latest issue of Game Informer, presented without comment:

Splinter Cell: Conviction -- "Let's just hope Sam doesn't sneak past his fall release, because we've been waiting long enough to play what's looking like one of the best games of the year."

The Last Guardian -- "With the PS3 breaking down technical barriers, the possibilities with Team Ico's next masterpiece seem to be endless."

God of War III -- "With the massive titans waging war, more gods entering the fray, and Kratos determined to topple Olympus, God of War III will be packed with jaw-dropping moments worthy of passing into legend."

Assassin's Creed II -- "We'll know more about whether our high hopes are justified as we get hands on time with the game in the coming months."

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves -- "Our time with the game left us confident that Drake's second big journey may be just what Sony needs to draw in PS3 doubters."

ModNation Racers -- "If the gameplay shows even half the potential of its customization tools, ModNation Racers might be the game that finally drags the kart-racing genre into the 21st century."

New Super Mario Bros. Wii -- "There definitely were bigger, more graphically impressive games at E3, but we'll be surprised if many of them are as anticipated as New Super Mario Bros. Wii."

Dirt 2 -- "We're eager to see what other cities Codemasters has transformed into rally circuits."

Heavy Rain -- "We can't wait to meet the remaining protagonists in the upcoming months to see if they, too, can dodge a grisly end."

Alan Wake -- "While we still have nearly a year before this spooky narrative finally hits the Xbox 360, it looks like the title will be worth the long wait."

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow -- "But if the final game can live up to the excitement caused by the trailer... Lords of Shadow may finally give gamers a 3D action title worthy of the Castlevania name, even if some series staples are missing."

Borderlands -- "With fast-paced action, strong co-op, and this much variety, we can't wait to gather some treasure hunters and start exploring this promising wasteland."

Homefront -- "Though it wasn't shown or talked about in detail... what little we've seen of Homefront looks good."

League of Legends: Clash of Fates -- "We've spent a lot of time with DotA and other games, and League of Legends is clearly the most exciting title in the sub-genre to date."