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.

Sister act

My review of BioShock 2 is up now at thephoenix.com. Games like this are fun to write about because they're really about something, and you can engage them thematically in a way that everybody will understand. Tom's point about emphasizing the "game-ness" of games hits home, but in the case of something like BioShock 2, story is such a huge part of it that I don't think you're doing readers a disservice by focusing on it.

Especially in the lead-up to Heavy Rain, it's been interesting to me to see how many people instinctively resist a game that emphasize story over play. Saying games have to be one thing or another seems to me to ignore the best thing about video games, which is how broadly they can be defined. You could write a review of BioShock 2 talking only about the story. You could write a review of it talking only about the gameplay. Either one could be honest and illuminating, because the game strikes a nice balance between the two, and even uses one to strengthen the other (though not to the extent of the original).

But BioShock 2 is the rare case that succeeds equally well on both counts. Most games land on one side of the divide. I think that's okay. The spectrum of games that has pure play on one end, and pure story on the other, is a long one indeed, and I don't think we should be trying to shorten it. A game with a great story may not need incredible game-ness, and history is full of examples of games with crappy stories that are still a blast to play. We can have it all!

Yet it is true that for all that I thought this game succeeded as a story, I still spent an inordinate amount of time trying to shoot people in the face with rocket spears. That doesn't really come through in the review.

Friday afternoon tidbits

Links! Getcha hot links here!

-News that Activision CEO Bobby Kotick regrets buying Red Octane instead of Harmonix is no suprise. What is a surprise is how little he seems to have thought about it at the time. Stephen Totilo quotes Kotick as saying, "We really didn't even think, 'Hey we should go to Boston, and meet these Harmonix guys and see what they're up to.'" I don't think it's with the benefit of hindsight to point out how stupid that was.

On the other hand, nobody in the music-game business is exactly flush with cash at the moment. This week, the Boston Globe reported that Harmonix may have to pay back some of the $150 million bonus they received from Viacom in 2007. The sad part about all this is that it was so obvious what was happening as it happened. There's still a strong future for music games, but the market got oversaturated, and we won't lament the loss of these excess SKUs.

-Great essay at Ta-Nehisi Coates' Atlantic blog about the politics of Bioshock and BioShock 2. Looks like somebody named "A. Serwer" wrote the post, rather than TNC himself, which I say in order to give due credit. Some of the greatest praise you can give to the BioShock games is that a post like this doesn't seem like it's overreaching to find relevance in them. I don't even have anything to add to it.

-The upcoming Game Developer magazine has a port-mortem of my favorite game of 2009, Borderlands, and GameSetWatch has kindly excerpted some of it. It sounds like Borderlands had a tumultous development, even more so than most games, so it's all the more amazing that they ended up with such a great final product. You wonder what they'll be able to do with the sequel, having laid down such a solid foundation.

-Another great Hardcasual piece this week, "StarCraft II Beta Puts South Korea in Economic Freefall." How do you know it worked? I shared it in Google Reader and somebody said he thought it was a real headline for a minute.

-Steve Wiebe has reached the mountaintop once more, setting a new world record for Donkey Kong Jr. You may remember Wiebe as the good guy in the incredible documentary King of Kong. I know a lot of people have accused the movie of playing a little fast and loose with the facts in order to tell a more compelling story, but it's a terrific film all the same.

Why we need sequels

I've played four new games so far in 2010, and three of them have been sequels. I sometimes fall into the trap of complaining that publishers are too quick to pick the low-hanging fruit of existing franchises, rather than trying to establish new ones, but a well-executed sequel seems more common in the world of video games than other media. Games build on their predecessors in many ways, by taking what works and altering what doesn't. This doesn't always result in a better product, but more often than not, making a good game results in keeping one eye on the past.

Still, it's strange how some sequels that seem necessary can blow it, and some that seem unnecessary can end up feeling vital. The most interesting thing about the sequels I've played is that two of them seemed like no-brainers, and turned out to be disasters. And one of them seemed like a terrible idea, until it proved that good play mechanics will always justify a game. With sequels, as with anything, you can't pre-judge. Here's a look at what these sequels attempted, and how they fared.


The sequel: Army of Two: The 40th Day

Why it was a good idea: The first Army of Two was an uneven shooter with enough good ideas that a sequel seemed like a slam dunk. That game attempted a satirical storyline that was ballsy in its invocation of timely, real-world events, and snuck in a subversive sense of humor under the radar. But as a shooter it was only so-so, lacking big-money moments and feeling repetitive even well before its running time ended. If the developers could have polished up the gameplay, the sequel could have been a big winner.

Why it didn't work: Taking exactly the opposite approach, The 40th Day jettisoned what worked and kept what didn't. Gone was the humor, and the more overt and risky topical references. Still there were the uninspired arenas that felt articial and forced. The sequel even messed up the controls, making it next to impossible to do something as simple as heal your teammate. A sequel is a great chance to refine and iterate, but the opposite happened here.


The sequel: No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

Why it was a good idea: No More Heroes could barely contain all its ideas. It was so funny, fresh, and original, you'd be forgiven for assuming that this franchise could lay golden eggs. I figured Grasshopper Manufacture could get up to No More Heroes 10 and still be surprising me. I was ready to follow this game anywhere.

Why it didn't work: Desperate Struggle ends up feeling like the contractual obligation album, delivered without much care or attention. It makes overtures to some of the misguided criticisms of the original, which diminishes it. It's funny, but not nearly as sharp or trenchant in its commentary as the original. And the addition of a new playable character that winds up not feeling so playable is just the nail in the coffin.


The sequel: BioShock 2

Why it was a bad idea: The first game was close to perfect, a single-player adventure that was artistically adventurous, philosophically challenging, and hell of fun to play. A sequel seemed like a bad idea not just because there was no way it could be as good as the original. Rather, BioShock seemed so self-assured and hermetic that it was hard to imagine how BioShock 2 could be anything but a cash-in. I mean, multiplayer? Really?

Why it worked: The world of Rapture may have been more fertile ground for storytelling than it seemed. Just being back there is a pleasure, and the new antagonist, a collectivist counterpoint to Andrew Ryan's rugged capitalist, is as good an idea as any. But the biggest thing BioShock 2 has done is remind me how much fun the first game was. In the years since BioShock came out, I've tended to think about it only in terms of the setting, story, and themes. But it was a blast to play! So is the sequel. The plasmids, the retro weapons, and the numerous combat styles are as good as ever.

Really, the notion of BioShock as this singular work that sprang, fully formed and perfect, into existence is a bit off. Though it was technically a new IP, it was building on the ideas of several thinking-person's shooters that had come out in the previous decade. In its own way, it was a sequel, too.* Almost all games are. That's why we need them.

*And the non-sequel I played, Bayonetta? Hard to argue that it could have existed with the Devil May Cry series pointing the way.

Breathing room

Game Informer's cautious realism is vindicated once again with news that Sam Fisher has, in fact, snuck past his fall release. The list of games not coming out this fall is an impressive one. Besides Splinter Cell: Conviction, you can look forward to not playing Bioshock 2, Heavy Rain, Singularity, Red Steel II, Bayonetta, MAG, Starcraft 2, Red Dead Redemption, and almost certainly many more. The fall 2010 release window is starting to look like Omaha Beach.

This is the best news I could imagine.

In recent years, the holiday videogame season has turned into a form of ironic punishment. If you like one AAA action title, the reasoning goes, you're going to love several of them every week! So we flail to keep up with the rising tide of must-have games, using each new release as a handhold on the way to the next one, because, dude, I'm pretty sure the one that comes out next week is GOTY material. It's like your mom catching you with a cigarette and forcing you to chain-smoke a whole pack, just to teach you a lesson.

In the meantime, nobody can stop to sink their teeth into games that deserve thoughtful consideration. Some games get overlooked completely amid the hubbub, games that at other times of the year would rightfully earn the spotlight. Sometimes it seems like being a gamer today is more about catching 'em all than about playing them once you've got them, in the same way that Facebook is more about collecting people like baseball cards than about friendship.

I say we should enjoy the chance to go deeper with fewer games this year. And it's not as though we'll be wanting for anything new: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2, Beatles Rock Band, Brutal Legend, Halo 3: ODST, Borderlands, Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time, Assassin's Creed 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and freaking dozens of other games are still on the schedule.

Geez, look at that list. It would be nice if a couple more of them got pushed back, actually. We'll never have time to play all that.