Year in Review: The best games of 2010

Above: Not even a game of the year nod can make Ethan Mars smile.

We're wrapping up our recap of the year that was. Today: the best games of 2010.

We've saved the best for last. You can click through to the feature on thephoenix.com to read all the blurbs. Here's my list of the 10 best games of 2010.

1. Heavy Rain
2. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
3. BioShock 2
4. Rock Band 3
5. Red Dead Redemption
6. Dance Central
7. DeathSpank
8. Halo: Reach
9. Bayonetta
10. Final Fantasy XIII

That about wraps it up for 2010. As always, thank you so much for reading. Have a merry Christmas and a happy new year. We'll meet right back here in 2011.

Quiz: The Year in Swooning

Match each of these games with the breathless quotation from its review.

1. Bayonetta
2. Mass Effect 2
3. Heavy Rain
4. Battlefield: Bad Company 2
5. Red Dead Redemption
6. Super Mario Galaxy 2
7. Halo: Reach
8. Rock Band 3
9. Call of Duty: Black Ops
10. Donkey Kong Country Returns

A. "A knockout in just about every way it can be... you owe it to yourself to rush out and buy this."

B. "There are so many aspects... that make it an experience above and beyond all other open world sandbox experiences that we can't even begin to list them all. Some of the reasons that stand out are a wealth of content, a beautifully rendered and detailed world, an interesting and engaging storyline, a fantastic roster of characters with their own personalities, great and believable dialogue, the ability to experience the game world online with or against others; the list can go on forever. Rest assured that this is one of the greatest game we've played in 2010 so far, and possibly ever."

C. "There is simply not a better, more complete shooter on the market, and with all this content, there isn't any way you can find something that you cannot sink your teeth into."

D. "I have never played anything so momentous or revolutionary... In the coming years I expect the game's influence to be felt throughout the industry in terms of gameplay, storytelling and interactivity. This is a game that deserves all the plaudits it can get. So please go out and buy [this game] and reward those that have made such a groundbreaking videogame event."

E. "Far exceeded our expectations and is without question one of the best games we've played. Use whatever positive description you'd like. System seller, potential game of the year, landmark achievement; just make sure you buy it immediately."

F. "With a ton of incredible levels to conquer; gorgeous, perfectly designed graphics (wait until you see the first sunset level!); retro-inspired music; and smooth, flawless gameplay, videogames don't get much better... I can't recommend this game enough."

G. "Easily the best FPS I've played in a long time. Dialogue that makes me want to watch a feature film starring these guys. A virtually flawless single and multiplayer experience."

H. "One of the best first person shooters this year, and is obviously a must have for any action fan. Intense, gory and quite brilliant, maybe it's not refreshing but at the same time it's a stunning game."

I. "Across-the-boards perfection [that] can't be measured by any scale. It's simply in a class by itself. This is where games need to go for my money... A modern-day masterpiece."

J. "This is a rare occasion when the hype can actually be justified; ...quite simply, a masterpiece."

ANSWERS:

1. I (Play Magazine)
2. E (GameDaily)
3. D (Boomtown)
4. G (GamePlanet)
5. B (Level7.nu)
6. J (Gamestyle)
7. C (ZTGameDomain)
8. A (Atomic Gamer)
9. H (3dJuegos)
10. F (Destructoid)

BONUS SECTION:

Which game is Destructoid calling close to perfect?

1. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom
2. Rock Band 3
3. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
4. Deadly Premonition
5. Limbo

A. "Judged as a piece of entertainment, as a game that consistently surprises and amazes and leaves jaws hanging... It's pretty close to perfect."

B. "About as close to perfect as you're going to get."

C. "It's warm and satisfying with a near-perfect consistency throughout."

D. "It delivers a near-perfect competitive experience, in a way that few games... can."

E. "...as close to perfect at what it does as a game can get."

1. C (link)
2. B (link)
3. D (link)
4. A (link)
5. E (link)

Compiled with thanks, and apologies, to Metacritic.

Friday afternoon tidbits

The blogs go awfully quiet during the Game Developers Conference, although Twitter has been hopping. Sounds like a great time, and I'm sorry I missed it. I'll just have to look forward to PAX. Only two weeks to go!

-I'm a few hours into Final Fantasy XIII, and still trying to get a feel for it. When I've heard it compared to Final Fantasy X, and it's intended as an insult, I've thought, "Sign me up!" That said it is almost stifling in its linearity so far, which I didn't think about FFX. Even so, I think Jeremy Parish is right on the money when he wonders why it's such a bad thing that FFXIII abandons some long-held RPG tenets. "There are no towns" not seem to me to be an incisive criticism.

-Another great post from Sparky Clarkson this week, this time about the notion of "camp" in games, vis a vis recent titles like Deadly Premonition and Heavy Rain. I've wondered before whether games can succeed as camp, and like the commenter on the post, my feeling is it's hard because the gameplay still needs to be decent for you to appreciate the campier aspects of the story. I thought No More Heroes succeeded as camp, while its sequel didn't, and it was mostly for those reasons.

I also can't believe people have me honestly considering buying Deadly Premonition. It looks truly terrible. But everyone loves it!

-Neat article in the Boston Globe this week about the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab, whose members are doing some interesting and forward-thinking work, though apparently they're doing it for the Nintendo 64.

-The Huffington Post put together a slideshow of "the most controversial video games ever," which is not terribly illuminating but does show that today's controversial games are a little bit further along than those in the past. The difference between Postal and MW2's "No Russian" scene is the latter was at least trying to say something. Also, the article makes it seem like Six Days in Fallujah has been released.

-Yep, you need to watch this video:

Heavy pain

Above: Madison Paige, in a rare moment of not being exploited.

At last, my review of Heavy Rain is up at thephoenix.com. Much has been said about this game so far, both positive and negative, and part of the reason I spent an entire post talking about some of the game's flaws was to clear the decks for this uncommonly positive review. There's still mention of some of the egregious problems, but in the end I thought Heavy Rain succeeded at what it set out to accomplish, and it did so with aplomb.

Is Heavy Rain important? Is it the future of games? Is it the death knell for games as we have known and loved them for decades? Is David Cage a huge d-bag? I've read all these questions and more, and I don't know the answers to any of them. I don't think they matter. It's silly to try to predict a game's importance or impact in real time, and useless to discuss its creators by proxy. All you can say is what playing this game felt like at this time, and to me it felt momentous.

That's not to say that I want Heavy Rain to be the future of games. I would hate to lose games that are purely play -- not that it would happen anyway. The lesson other developers should take from this game isn't that people are clamoring to play only slow-paced, talky adventure games with no sense of humor. But they should realize that there is greater range for the medium than more shooters, more racing games, more RPGs. That they can try to make games that can be described in ways besides, "It's just like this other game, except..."

The next game I played after Heavy Rain was Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and while it's clearly well made, I couldn't escape the feeling that it existed not because somebody at DICE had a bold and daring vision for shooters, which they were willing to go through hell and high water to share with the world. I think it exists because previous Battlefield games made a lot of money, and Call of Duty games have made a hell of of a lot of money, so let's go ahead and try to move the FPS ball down the field another inch or so and see how much money we make.

Again, that's fine. I'm not saying all developers should stop making games that people already know and love, and that have a guaranteed sales base. I am saying that a few more should follow Quantic Dream's example and just freaking go for it, whatever kind of game they're trying to make. When you do that, maybe your game isn't perfect. Maybe it isn't even any good. But if you nail it, you might end up with something like Heavy Rain.

Friday afternoon tidbits

I'll be checking out Battlefield: Bad Company 2 this weekend. It's impossible not to compare every single aspect of it to Modern Warfare 2, right? Is it even worth resisting? I'm just hoping to fly helicopters into things.

Here are some links and stuff.

-Big ups to my uncle Mike, who actually did Photoshop a Cylon eye onto the PlayStation 3:


The PS3 was created by man. It rebelled.

-I'm hesitant to go too far down this path, because we shouldn't be giving a litmus test for enjoying a game, but I've been struck by the response to Heavy Rain I've seen among gamer dads. A sampling:

If you've ever been responsible for a child, either as a parent or a sibling, this game will make you feel shaky--the verisimilitude, much of the time, is stunning. There were many moments where I was more involved with my character than I've ever been in a game. I was the main character at times.
-Bill Harris, Dubious Quality

I am Julian. I am a father. I would do anything – without hesitation – to protect the 10 pounds of meconium and emerging sentience sleeping in the baby carrier in my right hand. Thankfully, I have never been tested.

Heavy Rain is, ultimately, about this: testing the resolve of parentage. That makes it a difficult game to play, as a parent.
-Julian Murdoch, Gamers with Jobs

I've spent a couple nights with Heavy Rain now and I think it's really special. If you're a parent, (especially a Dad) this game can be pretty difficult to play at times. In fact I'm curious if people who don't have kids will end up getting as much out of it. I don't know if it's an 89.85%, or a 9.7 out of 10. What I do know is that after a late night playing it, I sneak into my son's room and hug him before I go to bed.
-Gabe, Penny Arcade

When I read the varying reactions to Heavy Rain, I can't help but wonder what each player is bringing to the table. I think it's a game you have to make an effort to appreciate, but maybe that's easier for some people than others. Although I'm not a parent myself, I am at a point in my life where that's probably going to happen sooner than later. Maybe that mattered to me when I played the game. I dunno.

-The Rock Band Network store is live! This seemed like better news before I actually looked at the tracklist. I still expect great things from it.

-Great column by Jamie Madigan at GSW about the psychology of gamers called "The Glitcher's Dilemma." I love stuff like this. It's a game-theory look at playing multiplayer games in which there's a cheap path to victory, like the Zerg rush or the javelin glitch in MW2, and how it's mutually beneficial if players choose to overlook such glitches. Also interesting: the moronic first comment in response to the article.

-The funniest thing you will read this week is a re-post of a Newsweek article from 1995 about the uselessness of the internet. Among the assertions by the author, Clifford Stoll:

• The truth in [sic] no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
• Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet [sic]. Uh, sure.
• ...how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

It seems like you'd have to have the benefit of hindsight even to get this much stuff wrong. This is why making predictions about anything is a fool's errand.

To be fair, there are a lot of bad things in Heavy Rain

I've made no secret of my love for Heavy Rain, and I'm looking forward to writing a positive review of it for the paper. Still, I can't argue with most of the flaws that people are pointing out. They are there. So in the interest of balance, I thought I'd list just a few of the the things that don't quite work.

-We're told that the Origami Killer has claimed 8 victims in 3 years, and done so every time there has been a storm with at least 6 inches of rain. Maybe something got lost in the conversion from metric to whatever the hell we use in America, but six inches of rain is not a common occurrence. It's practically biblical. My local weatherman uses his excited voice every time we get more than two inches. A city that habitually gets that much rain in a single storm has bigger problems on its hands than a serial killer.

-The accents are terrible. This is the first thing most people notice, and there's no explaining it away. The problem isn't not that the characters have distinctive speech patterns -- I'm still discovering regional American dialects that I had never heard before. It's that English sounds like a second language for most of the performers. Sometimes it's charming, other times it's jarring. I can't live in a world where "been" and "bean" are pronounced the same way. Especially bad is the FBI agent's accent, which sounds like a hybrid of Bronx and Boston, by way of Sweden. It's just weird.

(On the other hand, how many times have you seen a Shakespeare play that takes place in, say, Denmark, and all the performers sound British? Nobody seems to mind about that.)

-Diction. There are some strange word choices here, not least of which is the repeated references to the "wasteland" where the bodies are found. This is not a huge problem, but occasionally a word will be off slightly, and it sounds like a musician hitting a flat note.

-So many of the details of the setting are, if not necessarily European in nature, not American. In Ethan's house, the toilet is in a different room from the shower. In the hospital, the electrical outlets are slanted. The supermarket sells live animals. Somehow, these details detract more than the accents do.

-When Ethan takes a shower at the very beginning of the game, it's in the context of a normal day. When Madison takes a shower in her introductory scene, it is creepy and weird. The camera leers at her. I felt like I needed a shower after that scene. Madison is the weakest character in the game, and is needlessly sexualized more often than not, especially when she's threatened. I recommend Denis Farr's post on the subject at the Borderhouse.

-The game is easy to break. I started a second playthrough with the intention of screwing around with it. Things came to a head when I got to the part where Agent Jayden is tying the police captain's tie. Instead of holding R1, to make him grab hold of the tie, I started tapping it. The police captain kept talking like nothing was happening, while a blank-faced Jayden kept reaching out as if to caress his tie, only to pull back at the last moment. The camera angle changed every time this happened, too. It was hilarious, and also totally at odds with the point of the game.

For all this, I still think Heavy Rain is a terrific achievement. For as much as I started this second playthrough with the intention of breaking the game, I couldn't stop myself from getting sucked in. It's a game of highs and lows, where pacing does mean slowing things down to a crawl at times. You sort of have to commit to it, like a method actor to a role.

What's wrong with Heavy Rain's controls?

Above: Heavy Rain characters contemplate internet criticism.

On Friday, I mentioned that some of the criticisms of Heavy Rain seem off-base to me. The biggest one has to do with the controls. There seem to be two essential complaints about them. One is that you're not really controlling your character. The other is that they are arbitrary quick-time events. The result: You are providing inputs at certain times, but you're just watching the characters perform the actions.

This is factually true, and experientially insignificant. I agree with Tom Cross when he says: "I’m not sure what everyone is complaining about when it comes to Heavy Rain’s controls. They’re too abstract, or something? They’re not like 'real' game controls? It’s really unclear."

Start with the question of abstraction. Sure, buttons don't map to specific actions. That's because the actions your character can perform are so different. Using the right analog stick to perform the bulk of the character's actions does seem to me to do the job, especially since Quantic Dream made an effort to have the control input track to the onscreen action (like pressing it to the right in order to open a sliding door). I suppose you could have a context-sensitive action button instead, but, really, what's the difference? Well, I can think of one: pressing a button feels less like opening a door than moving a control stick does.

Heavy Rain does have its share of action scenes that wouldn't look out of place in other games, like fistfights, and, yes, they do control differently than you'd expect. You don't have specific actions like "punch" and "guard." Instead, you have to quickly respond to onscreen prompts within a time limit. This, again, seems to bother people who are used to more traditional playing styles. I've found it to be rather exciting. I never know what's coming next, and I tend to mess up just enough to leave the outcome of the scene in real doubt.

"But you're not really playing it!" some complain. Well, I'm pressing buttons to create onscreen action, aren't I? Maybe I'm being obtuse, but I don't see a dramatic difference between these two scenarios:

-Press X when prompted to dodge an attack (Heavy Rain)
-Press the left trigger when the opponent's weapon flashes to dodge an attack (Bayonetta)

Bayonetta has been praised as pure gameplay, while Heavy Rain has been criticized for being all cutscene. Yet in each case, it's a matter of split-second reaction to visual cues onscreen. I'm not saying they're exactly the same, but I am saying that it's a difference of degree and not of kind.

A control scheme can only be judged by how well it allows the player to experience the game. Other than the first 10 minutes or so that it took me to get used to making the characters walk around, I've found the controls of Heavy Rain to be up to the task. No, they wouldn't work in many other games. They don't need to.

Friday afternoon tidbits

We had a big rainstorm here yesterday. When I walked into my local Gamestop, soaking wet, I said, "Ironically, I'm looking for Heavy Rain." The employee did not laugh. Foiled again!

-The PAX schedule has been announced! Lots of interesting stuff on there. Having not been to this kind of thing before, I'm not sure how early I need to show up at the panels I want to see, though I'm suspecting they won't be the most popular ones. I'm instinctively passing over things I know will be heavily attended, like the PA panels and the keynote, but I don't want to miss the journalism panels. I'm already building a stockpile of spitballs to throw at Croal and Totilo.

-Sparky Clarkson has one of the most cogent takes I've seen about why No More Heroes 2 is diminished by not having an overworld. Speaking of the first game's rendering of Santa Destroy, he says "the city serves the purpose of the game. It creates a sea of banality for Travis (and the player) to escape from into the vibrant world of the assassin rankings. The city helps to characterize Travis as a loser. And the city says something interesting about other open-world games." That's dead-on. And without that counterpoint, the sequel doesn't seem nearly as savagely satirical.

-I gave up on Modern Warfare 2 long ago, for many reasons, but I still appreciated L.B. Jeffries' rigid analysis of MW2's multiplayer map style. His key insight: in this game, the map is a weapon. That certainly explains my uncanny ability to get shot by opponents I couldn't see.

-I'm only a few hours into Heavy Rain at this point, and I have to say I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Despite its healthy Metacritic score, I've been surprised both at the volume and the ferocity of the criticisms I've read of the game on message boards, blogs, and Twitter. One of the more balanced criticisms comes, naturally, from the Brainy Gamer, who says that he finds Heavy Rain to be at cross-purposes.

I think there's room to like or dislike the game, and plenty of complaints to make about it, but frankly I think a lot of the complaints I've read -- not at the above link -- are misguided. I'll say more about that next week.