Year in review: Honorable mentions

Today through Christmas Eve, we'll be recapping the year that was. Today: 2009 honorable mentions.

We may never see another year like 2007 again, when we were treated to one astonishing game after another. But 2009 was no slouch. Like last year, quality was generally high, with just a few stinkers, and even those often suffered more from understandable fatal flaws than from all-encompassing ineptitude. No doubt about it, I played a lot of good games this year.

In chronological order:

Skate 2: Still extremely challenging, Skate 2 improved upon its predecessor mostly by giving you the ability to walk up steps, which was very necessary.

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin: A mish-mash of styles that didn't all work together, this game had enough high points to be worth playing.

Killzone 2: Graphically impressive and with a fun, team-based multiplayer mode, it wasn't one of the best FPSes ever made, even if you do have a functioning brain. But it was a good one.

MadWorld: Sort of a better idea than it was a game, MadWorld was striking and unusual, and comically violent.

Guitar Hero: Metallica: I'll be honest with you. This, not The Beatles, was my favorite music game of the year.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena: This would be here if it were only the high-definition remake of Escape from Butcher Bay. The Dark Athena chapter is not quite as good, but actually better than I thought people gave it credit for.

Punch-Out!!: Absolutely worthy of the name. Extremely fun. Also controller-throwingly difficult. (But what isn't, really?)

Ghostbusters: The Video Game: Funny, breezy, colorful -- the definition of good but not great. It's also my nephew Sam's favorite game to play with me, besides X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Which reminds me...

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: I never wrote about this game, but I played it a little and found it to be a fun, good-looking beat-'em-up with some neat cinematic events. It's also unbelievably gory. Did I mention Sam is four years old?

Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal: Telltale is doing a fine job with the LucasArts relaunches. Not so fine that I sought out the subsequent episodes, but hey, I'm a busy man.

'Splosion Man: Another challenging throwback to the sidescrolling era, this played like Sonic the Hedgehog mixed with the "Barrel Blast" level of Donkey Kong Country.

Fat Princess: A surprisingly relaxing take on competitive capture-the-flag gaming.

The Beatles: Rock Band: Well, it is the Beatles, after all.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: A really slick package.

Assassin's Creed II: It takes a good eight hours to get to the point where this game is fun. Once there, it can be, at times, brilliant, but it still gets in its own way too much.

Tomorrow: The worst games of 2009.

Punch drunk love

Above: It's the rye or the Kaiser.

My review of Punch-Out!! is up at thephoenix.com. Updates, re-launches, and re-imaginings of old games are nothing new, but Punch-Out!! barely tinkers with the formula. Nintendo has been successful in translating Mario, Zelda, and Metroid into 3D, but in each case that has resulted in something new -- something that has fundamentally transformed each game, while still retaining the feel of the original. Punch-Out!!, though, is the same as it ever was. It plays exactly like Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! did, more than 20 years ago. What's surprising is how fresh it still feels.

I wish other game makers had the secret formula for difficulty that Nintendo alone seems to possess (even when they farm out development duties, as was the case here). Nintendo games always seem to live at the outer edge of my competence. They always seem difficult but not impossible. The difficulty ramps up so well in Punch-Out!!. No matter how hard an opponent may seem, it's also hard not to try again after losing. You always feel this close to getting it right.

I'm not even sure what's left in Nintendo's stable at this point, but if this is where the bar is going to be set, I say bring on the Kid Icarus remake.

Friday afternoon tidbits

This weekend is Memorial Day, that somber holiday when Americans honor those who died in combat to guarantee our right to barbecue. And barbecue we will. Glory, glory hallelujah!

-Jim Rossignol contributed a guest post to BLDG BLOG, an architecture blog, called "Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds." Rossignol is one of the best writers we have, and this is a penetrating, surprising, and funny look at the design of various enemy strongholds in games. Great stuff. I am a little surprised at how awful System Shock 2 is looking these days. Hard to believe that game once scared the crap out of me.

-Maximum PC's retrospective of 3D graphics cards is a wonderful nostalgia trip. It brought back fond memories of my first "3D accelerator." The Canopus Pure3D had the Voodoo1 chipset, but sported 50% more video RAM than was standard at the time -- a mammoth 6 megs of memory. I followed that up with a Voodoo2 that powered, estimating conservatively, about 300,000 hours of Quake 2 CTF. Then the Alienware system I got as a high school graduation gift was rocking the Nvidia Riva TNT2, and now I have some goddamn thing or another. I don't even know anymore.

-About halfway through this Game|Life article about whether gamers prefer violent games, I thought to myself, "Geez, this is really well written." Then I looked at the byline: Clive Thompson. Well, no wonder. Thompson's central point -- that people don't even notice a game's gore once they get immersed in the play mechanics -- rings true. I find it's true of graphics, too. I'll often gawk at new games upon booting them up, but before long I stop noticing the visuals at all, because I've gotten down to business. But that's also why I tend to appreciate games that make the effort to show me new and interesting things. They can shake me out of the stupor.

-Finally, with Punch-Out!! receiving positive notices all over the place (and rightly), I was reminded of the Perry Bible Fellowship's "Punch Bout" strip. The PBF was gone far too soon. Pure genius. If you've never read it before, I'd recommend clicking through them all.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Gettin' punchy; or, Insult Swordfighting, ruining your fun since 2006

Above: Little Mac finds Glass Joe insufficiently grateful for us saving his ass in WWII.

N'Gai's famous quote about the Resident Evil 5 trailer was, "Wow, clearly no one black worked on this game." My thought after winning the minor circuit belt in the new Punch-Out!! was, "Wow, clearly no one French, German, gay, or Pacific Islander worked on this game."

I don't want to get too deep into the weeds on this. Still, it's odd that RE5 could provoke such a firestorm of controversy starting almost two years before its release, and Punch-Out!!, which similarly relies on questionable and outdated images as shortcuts for characterization, has so far been given a pass everywhere I've seen.

Let's just run them down. In Punch-Out!!, you face:*

• A cowardly, effete Frenchman
• A stern, militaristic German
• A fabulous, lisping gay man
• A fat Pacific Islander
• A womanizing Spaniard
• A drunken Russian
• A magical Indian
• Others
  

On one hand, it's nice to see this kind of diversity in a game. On the other hand, how much would it have blown your mind if King Hippo were the womanizer, Soda Popinski the homosexual, and Glass Joe the mysterious sorceror? But that would be ridiculous, you say.

Nobody's playing Punch-Out!! for deep characterization, granted. And the game seems to do a good job of giving Little Mac's opponents flashes of personality during the fights. Their facial expressions and body language are portrayed in a classic cartoon style, exaggerated and expressive. That's why it's so disappointing to see such lazy stereotypes providing the characters' foundations -- ironically, the fighters' very design shows that the designers could have done better. (Still doesn't explain why a defeated Glass Joe falls onto a bed of croissants, or why King Hippo collapses amid a buffet of tropical island fruits.)

Anticipating the objections: Yes, most of these characters have been in the series from the beginning. If tradition were a good reason to perpetuate this stuff, you'd still see the Confederate flag flying from state houses in the South.**

And, sure, this is all in good fun. It's supposed to be funny! Not like Resident Evil 5 at all, which was all booga-booga. That's exactly the problem. Much as some observers thought that RE5 was using loaded racial imagery as a replacement for creating new horror ideas, Punch-Out!! employs stereotypes for humor, without commenting on them, or even seeming to consider them. The joke is that the French guy is a pussy. The joke is that the Disco Kid is a flaming queer. These are not good jokes.

I'm not saying Punch-Out!! would be improved with realistic opponents. But there is one character in the game who shows how you can have silly, cartoonish characters without dredging the bottom of the barrel: Doc Louis. He's a good trainer, and he often gives Mac good tactical advice between rounds. But his inspirational speeches make no sense, and even though his job is to keep Little Mac in shape, he himself is overweight. Doc may still be assembled from off-the-shelf parts, but unlike the other characters in the game, his parts come from different shelves.

*Punch-Out!! roster provided by Wikipedia.

**Oh... wait.