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.

Monkey business

Above: Guybrush drinks in the beauty of Flotsam Island.

My review of Tales of Monkey Island episode 1 is up now at thephoenix.com. There's a brief mention of the voice acting, although not to the degree that I talked about it yesterday. Instead, I spend more time in the review talking about what works in this game, because on the whole it's a pretty entertaining way to spend a few hours.

Still, it feels pretty insubstantial on its own, and depending on your play style it may be worth waiting for the entire series so you can play through all at once. That was the case I found with the Sam and Max revival, anyway. But there I go scooping myself again. It's all in the review!

The voice of the oppressive

Above: Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate.

The only accurate blanket statement anybody can make is that there are no accurate blanket statements. But this one is close: voice acting never makes a game better, and can only make it worse.

Let's acknowledge the exceptions early. Plenty of games have had good or even great voice acting (The Darkness and Half-Life 2 come to mind). I'm saying that the presence of recorded dialogue is, at best, a net zero for the overall quality of a game, and more often, it's a negative. The history of atrocious voice acting is well documented elsewhere. Yet the campy grandeur of the original Resident Evil is, in its own way, one of the biggest reasons to enjoy that game. It's the games with passable voice acting that can be more insidious -- games where speech adds nothing, while slowing down gameplay or, more often, hammering you with the same few soundbites over and over.

Lots of games suffer from repetition. Recall Marcus Fenix growling "Nice!" after every successful active reload. Resident Evil 4 is still my favorite game of all time, but one of its two noticeable flaws was the merchant's boundless curiosity about what you were buyin' or sellin'.* Recently, Ghostbusters, a game with better-than-average voice acting, decided it would be a good idea for Egon to shout "Aim high!" every four or five seconds during battle. What's the logic behind stuff like this? I think it's, "We've paid for the actors' time; we'd better get our money's worth!"

Nowhere is this a bigger problem than in adventure games. Games like Tales of Monkey Island rely on dialogue for everything. The story is told largely through character interaction, and many puzzles can be solved only by sweet-talking the characters who have what you want. The voice acting is just fine in this game -- totally serviceable. It is not, however, so good that I want to hear the same handful of lines repeated dozens of times in the course of a five-hour game.

Guybrush has only a few stock responses when you attempt to use an item somewhere it has no use. He says something clever about almost each one. And he says the same clever line every time. It's possible -- no, likely -- that many of you are smarter than me, and in the course of playing an adventure game aren't reduced to trying to use every item in your inventory with every hotspot on the screen. That's just how I roll, and in the old days, when the written rejection was superimposed over the action, it was easier to ignore.

Worse, in this case, is that the game seems to provide the player with more dialogue choices than they actually recorded for Guybrush. You'll see four different jokes to choose from, but when you select one Guybrush doesn't say it. He says some canned, plot-advancing line, one that may or may not also be funny. Then, the player has no option to go back and explore the other lines. I think this is also a case of the producers trying to maximize their dollar: you pay the actors as little as possible, and use their work as much as you can. A sensible business decision; not great for the gameplay.

Tales of Monkey Island is pretty fun (my review is coming later this week). Still, I couldn't help but think that it would have been better if the developers had gone the text-only route. They could have packed more jokes and deeper dialogue trees into the game, while saving on costs and even bandwidth for digital distribution. Instead, they hired actors and ended up making, perhaps, a lesser game.

(Then again, it's totally possible that you can choose to disable the speech and enable subtitles. I didn't even think to check that until right this second.)

*The other flaw: QTE knife fight against Krauser.