The Year in Review: Honorable Mentions

Today through Christmas Eve, we'll be recapping the year that was. Today: 2008 honorable mentions.

If you hear me complain that 2008 was a blah year for games, it's not to suggest that we lacked quality software. Quite the contrary. Rarely did we have to go more than a month or so without finding something decent to play. But so often, that's all these games were: decent, especially compared to last year's standouts. This year, nothing I played was as purely fun as Crackdown. Nothing moved me as did The Darkness. Nothing blew my mind like Portal (well, maybe Braid). And nothing synthesized everything I like about games into one superb package, as did BioShock.

Then again, it's not anybody's job to make exactly the game I want to play, and I'm happy any time I play something I like, even if I don't love it. And this year, there were a lot of those. In chronological order:

Burnout Paradise: Wasn't perfect, but nobody does high-octane racing with spectacular crashes like the folks at Criterion.

Army of Two: Again, not perfect, but I played through the whole thing and it kept my interest. I thought the topical references were ballsy, the interplay between the leads was hilarious, and the Aggro system actually worked.

Ikaruga: Glad I finally got to play this cult classic, even if I ran away from it in terror once the review was finished.

LostWinds: Cute, with a winning aesthetic and a fun, innovative control scheme. I just wish I had known going in that it was only episode 1.

Ninja Gaiden II: I was far too unskilled to get the most out of this game, but even playing it as a button masher made for a gory good time.

Space Invaders Extreme: Raise your hand if you saw this coming.

PixelJunk Eden: Thanks to the Serious Games Journalist Network of Pretension for turning me onto this one. It was just a nice, relaxing game that you could lose yourself in without realizing how taxing it actually was.

Dead Space: A triumph of execution, with excellent graphics, sound, and play control. I spent a lot of time harping on the negatives with this game, but it was a polished shooter that was well worth playing.

Silent Hill: Homecoming: Atmospheric and creepy. I thought this was the better horror experience, compared to Dead Space.

Gears of War 2: I wrote, scheduled, and published this post without remembering to include Gears of War 2, even though it was better than most of the other honorable mentions. Partly, that's because the top 10 list was touch and go for a while there, but I think it also goes to show how GoW2 made less of an impact than its predecessor. Horde mode is awesome, though.

Prince of Persia: It's as if the folks at Ubisoft Montreal made a list of everything that's annoying about platformers, and one-by-one excised each item from their game. The result feels a little bit like an extended QTE at times, but the newest Prince of Persia is beautiful to look at and a pleasure to experience.

Tomorrow: The worst games of 2008.

Insult Swordfighting visits the Brainy Gamer

I was flattered to be invited to appear on the Brainy Gamer podcast. Michael Abbott writes one of the most considered, highbrow gaming blogs around, and it was fun to be able to talk to him in person. We chatted about No More Heroes, Burnout Paradise, the state of the gaming community, and a whole lot more.

Cross-blog conversations tend to erupt pretty frequently, particularly when a game like No More Heroes shows up, but the nature of blogging is still pretty solitary. You tend to soliloquize, or invent straw men to bounce your arguments and opinions off of. It was nice, in this case, to actually trade some ideas with a like-minded person. Give it a listen!

Burnout Paradise review, plus one more wrong thing

My official review of Burnout Paradise is up now at thephoenix.com. It doesn't really cover anything different than the two blog posts I've already written about the game, but you should read it anyway. Don't do it for me. Do it for my benevolent corporate overlords.

There's one jarring omission from the list of things wrong with Burnout Paradise that I need to rectify. How could I have forgotten to spotlight DJ Atomica and his wretched playlist? EA's continued insistence on saddling one of their best properties with a brainless announcer and those execrable Trax™ just reeks of boardroom synergy.

I refuse to believe that the cost of hiring one competent composer to score the game could possibly exceed that of licensing all these no-name bands. At least in past Burnout games you could count on them throwing you a bone like the Futureheads. In Paradise, the only good songs are the old ones (Faith No More's "Epic," Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage"), and they play "Paradise City" so much that even that's starting to get tiresome. And even if you disagree with my musical taste, chances are there's plenty here that doesn't suit you, either.

Strangely, the soundtrack includes lots of electronic music from the first three Burnout games, and you know what? It sounds great! It's much better racing music than some band called "Army of Me," because it was made with the game in mind. It complements the action onscreen, instead of calling attention to itself. I don't see what's so difficult about this.

Yes, you can go through and disable any Trax™ you don't like, which is better than nothing, but that's fairly low on the list of things I want to be spending my time doing in a Burnout game. At least the Xbox 360 gives you the option to use custom soundtracks.

What's right with Burnout Paradise

Yesterday I went into some detail about what I thought was wrong with Burnout Paradise. There's one correction to make: apparently you can stop an event, either by entering showtime mode or simply stopping and waiting for several seconds. That's better than I thought, but still counterintuitive and unhelpful. A restart option still would have been nice, too, loading times or not.

With that said, there's a lot to like about Burnout Paradise. In some ways, it leaves treadmarks all over other racing games. I have never understood the appeal of realistic racing games such as Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport. Realism in games is like a spice: it's best used sparingly, and only when necessary. The Burnout formula is much more fun. Instead of the sterility of professional racetracks, it pits you against fast-moving, rush-hour traffic, and creates incentives to drive dangerously. Instead of calculating your car's friction and weight shifts around turns, it gives you a simple but effective power-sliding mechanism that makes sense the first time you try it -- even if it takes a lot more time to master. For several games now, nobody has captured the white-knuckle thrills of fantasy racing better than Criterion. And in Burnout Paradise, they did it again.

The best part about this game is simply that its sense of speed is unparalleled. There's no learning curve in which you need to totter along trying to get a feel for how it works. You start off fast, and gradually work your way up to near-lightspeed as you earn new cars. Even the slower cars seem not to have a top speed, though. That "zen-like state" I mentioned yesterday? If you're hitting it just right, it feels like the car upshifts into eternity. It's like the trip to Jupiter in 2001. And if you think I'm exaggerating this, I'd suggest that maybe you haven't played the game.

But it's not just how fast the cars go. It's how the speed is integrated into the gameplay. After a crash, you're plunked right back down onto the course at about half-speed. Most racing games make you rev back up from a standstill. At its best, this game is all about forward motion. Even when you score a takedown, you're treated to a brief, mostly slow-motion shot of your quarry's demise, and then you're dropped right back into the action.

Which brings me to another point: takedowns are so awesome. Yes, I miss aftertouch, but smashing up jerks is just never going to get old. In Burnout Paradise, the nearly endless array of real-time wrecks is stunning. Your opponents bounce off of any nearby objects, parts of their cars fall off like that scene in The Blues Brothers, and if you're really lucky they might plummet off a cliff. The all-encompassing awesomeness of takedowns is why Road Rage continues to be my favorite event.

One of the new events in Paradise is an inversion of Road Rage, called "Marked Man." And it's a worthy addition. In it, your goal is simply to make it from one waypoint to another without getting totalled. Never mind that it's easy to do against computer opponents. I've talked a lot in these two posts about what I think the spirit of Burnout is, and Marked Man fits right in. It's like your classic car chase, with everybody on the road gunning for you. It helps to wreck your opponents, but it's not necessary. What's good about Marked Man is that you can choose the type of approach that fits your style of play best: you can try to outrun your opponents, outflank them, or outlast them. You can pick the type of vehicle that works the best for your strategy. And this without sacrificing anything that makes Burnout great, as with finding those yellow gates.

Finally -- and this may be where the biggest line of demarcation is between people who love Burnout Paradise and those who don't -- the online interface is implemented almost perfectly. Notice I don't the online play, necessarily. For one thing, given the choice I almost always prefer single-player to multiplayer. It's just this thing I have. But I'm also not too enamored with useless competitions like who's been able to drift the furthest during a session. Still, all the usual event types are great fun, and human opponents are certainly more skillful and unpredictable than computerized ones. What's more impressive is how the online play is integrated into the single-player. You can hop instantly into a game with two pushes of a button. No lobbies, no waiting. I don't care what the technical hurdles are: I want every single game to start doing this immediately. Now that we know it's possible, we can't go back.

All this, and I haven't even posted the actual review. That's coming soon.

What's wrong with Burnout Paradise

No, that's not a question. There's a lot wrong with Burnout Paradise. On balance, it's a good game, and the problems I have with it tend to be isolated rather than systemic -- which is to say that they don't poison every aspect of the game, and it's mostly possible to ignore them.

Still: they can be really irritating.

Most of the issues stem from the decision to go open-world. In some ways this move was genius, especially considering the amazing, seamless integration of multiplayer. And it's nice to have some latitude simply to dick around, experimenting with jumps and optimal race routes. Still, I'm not convinced that the benefits of this new design outweigh the costs.

For example, once you start a race event, there's no way to restart or quit. Big deal, you say? Imagine this: You've started a race, and you're zipping along, trading paint with another contender. Ahead, the road doglegs left before entering a tunnel. You take the turn wide and rocket into what looks like a shortcut. Except it isn't a shortcut. You've stumbled onto some train tracks, and they take you into a freestyle stunt zone that has no easy exit. As you're squinting at the upcoming route to try to find a way back onto the road, you're putting miles between yourself and the finish line. Not only can you not win at this point, but you still have to find a way out and limp to an eighth-place finish before you can do anything else.

Now is it a problem that you can't restart or quit?

Another dismaying omission: they've done away with aftertouch. Aftertouch, you may recall, was the ability to take control of your car during a wreck and steer its mangled corpse into the paths of oncoming racers. It isn't just that it was a clever and often hilarious way to score takedowns. In fact, aftertouch was a crucial part of what made Burnout great, because it integrated crashes into the gameplay in a way no other game did. Instead of taking you out of the game, they drew you further in. In Paradise, you get lovingly rendered but essentially useless slow-motion crash scenes. It's especially vexing when you're heading somewhere in freeburn mode and accidentally clip an island or something, and then have to watch a pornographic shot of your wreck for several seconds. There's not even an option to skip it.

While tooling around the open world can actually be great fun, the obligatory inclusion of hidden collectables makes no sense in the context of Burnout. What I always liked about the series was its fanatical devotion to its core gameplay tenets: speed, jumps, and wrecks. Every event type played to one or more of those. "Burning Route" is all speed. "Road Rage" is all wrecks. "Crash" is jumps and wrecks. Races are a combination of all three. Speed, jumps, and wrecks. Burnout Paradise has a free-roaming mode that includes yellow gates, which mark shortcuts (helpful for speed), and Burnout billboards, most of which can only be accessed by finding huge ramps (good ol' jumps). With 400 gates and 120 billboards to smash -- with achievements for completing either task -- that's a lot of speedin' and jumpin'.

Just one problem: To find the Burnout billboards and yellow gates in Paradise, though, frequently you have to... stop in your tracks. Slamming through gates is awesome when it happens organically. It's possible to reach a zen-like state of Burnout where you come bombing down the hills, streak across city limits, and pound through one gate after another, weaving through oncoming traffic, slashing your way through parking garages and leaping over rooftops. But that's much less common than driving down the street, seeing a gate pass by, slamming on the brakes, and backing up. Most of the billboards require a similarly slow-paced reconnaisance and plan of attack. Essentially, this part of the game rewards stopping. That's antithetical to the Burnout ideal.

Worse still, although the shortcuts can be helpful, finding gates and billboards doesn't actually have an impact on gameplay. Compare this to the agility orbs in Crackdown. Acquiring those made your character stronger, and better able to complete his tasks. Furthermore, finding agility orbs gave you the ability to find even more agility orbs. Instant, satisfying feedback. Aside from the achievement points, there's really no point to clearing the board in Burnout Paradise. That's upsetting, coming from a franchise that had previously been so lean and mean. And that, ultimately, is the biggest thing wrong with this game: there's too much fat on the frame.

Criterion has added all sorts of features that don't really make sense in the context of what Burnout usually does. I liked the drive-thrus a lot for things that mattered to gameplay, like the body shop and the gas station. Without even taking your foot off the gas, you can repair your car's damage or max out your boost meter. That's brilliant. And then there are paint shops, which change your car's color. Really? I can't imagine needing anything less, at any time, for any reason. "I'm trailing in this race with under half a mile to go. There's only one thing that can save me now: new paint job!"

Still, all this makes it sound like Burnout Paradise is no good, and, as I said up top, that's not the case. It is a good game, with lots of features that work wonderfully. Tomorrow, I'll talk about what's right with Burnout Paradise.

The auteur theory of games

I've been having an interesting discussion with Michael Abbott in the comments to this post. The question: Can inspiration survive the collaborative process intact? Or does the team-based approach to design necessarily dilute a singular creative vision?

At first blush, my feeling is that the list of video game "auteurs" is pretty small. I could name you Shigeru Miyamoto, whose games tend to emphasize the allure of new worlds hidden just out of sight; Hideo Kojima, who delights in breaking through the fourth wall to draw explicit parallels between his fictional stories and the real world; and now Suda 51, whose embrace of game symbols and history is almost post-modern.

Generally, when I play a game, I don't get that feeling that I've tapped into the psyche of some cracked genius. Many good -- even great -- games still feel more like a machine that's been precisely engineered, rather than a sloppy work of genius. Along those lines, I was struck by a comment Gus Mastrapa made on a post Chris Dahlen wrote about Burnout Paradise:

I’ve always taken issue with the Burnout series’ reticence to commit to a style, position or even attitude. The worlds are always kinda bland, generic even. The radio hosts are usually suicide inducing. The crashes and racing are awesome, but the setting is so non-committal that it irks me for some reason. Who gets the opportunity to make a world and fashions something so utterly devoid of character?

I read that and thought immediately of No More Heroes. By any measure, Burnout is the more polished and "professional" of the two games. Its open world is seamless. It is a technological marvel, and at its best it provides a gut-level thrill that I'm not sure is matched elsewhere. But the game lacks any kind of a voice or point of view. Paradise City doesn't possess an ounce of the character that Santa Destroy has. Whatever attitude Burnout Paradise contains comes from a place that rings false, especially as expressed through the riffage of DJ Atomica. My instinct is to attribute that difference to the lack of Suda 51-like personality at Criterion Games.

Of course, that conclusion could just be ignorance on my part, simply because Criterion doesn't have a celebrity figurehead. It may be presumptuous to think that Suda 51 is the only one who had any input on No More Heroes. And, as I think about it, I could name you dozens of designers with distinctive styles. Peter Molyneux. Sid Meier. Tetsuya Miziguchi. I might be saying there aren't many game auteurs only because I haven't thought about it long enough.

On the flipside, you have development houses that continue to produce singular work. Abbott compares the game industry as we know it today to the studio system of Hollywood's early days:

...it's very easy to discern an Atlus game, a Sega game, a Capcom game, and a Grasshopper game. They each have very distinctive features and stylistic signatures. Yes, they can't necessarily be traced to a specific designer, but I think their distinctiveness is no less pronounced...

MGM films looked very different from Warner Bros. films, which looked very different from Paramount or RKO... the collaborative, factory-like system of filmmaking in the 30s managed to generate such singular, artistically distinctive films.

The parallels are easy to draw. One place you see this in action is in the sharing of tech across development houses owned by the same publisher. Naughty Dog and Insomniac seemed to lend each other a hand between the Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank games, for example. And once one EA game implements a new feature, it tends to propagate pretty rapidly throughout the company (such as how every EA Sports game started to implement the right analog stick in the same model year).

And certainly there are teams with unmistakable styles. Games by Team ICO, say, are as unique as anything in the industry. but Fumito Ueda doesn't tend to enjoy the rarefied status of other rockstar designers. Yet Wikipedia credits his work on ICO as "Director/Lead Designer/Lead Animator/Cover Design/Art Direction." How could he possibly have had more of an impact on that game? It could just be that those of us with no knowledge of what it takes to make a game don't know quite where to give credit, or place blame, especially these days, when it takes a team of dozens to ship a game.

No doubt there are convincing arguments on both sides, and I'm fairly certain that this is the sort of thing that doesn't have a true answer. What do you think? Are great games the product of a determined visionary, or a group of talented people working in perfect harmony?

Winter games preview 2008

Putting together a seasonal games preview is always a dicey proposition. You don't have much to go on for release dates besides what Gamestop tells you -- and quite often their guess is as good as anybody's. With that said, I'm fairly certain that some of the games in my 2008 winter preview will be released on schedule, such as Burnout Paradise and Devil May Cry 4. Grand Theft Auto IV? Not so much. That's due for another catastrophic delay or two.

And if the Tom Clancy game that caps off this feature makes it out by April 1, I will eat my hat. You hear me? My hat.

Burnout Paradise demo impressions

Putting together a demo must be tricky no matter what the game is. You need to provide enough of a flavor to whet people's appetite for the whole thing without compromising either your game's quality or your business model. If you strip out too much, you may not accurately convey what your game's about. Include too much, and you may have eliminated the incentive to pay for more. This trick is doubly difficult for an open-world game, in which the experience is defined more by the user than by the developers. And that's the trouble the Burnout Paradise demo runs into a little bit.

Full disclosure: I'm head over heels for the Burnout series. They're not just my favorite racing games, they're some of my favorite games period. That's why I'm a little wary of Paradise; it's hard to imagine how such tightly constructed layouts and busy traffic patterns could survive the move to an open world. What made past Burnout games so great was its fanatical focus. Anything extraneous was excised entirely, and everything essential was revved into the red. A free-roaming, virtual world seems like the philosophical opposite.

After spending some time with the demo (admittedly not a ton of time), I'm not convinced that Criterion Games has solved these problems, but that may be due to the limitations of the demo format. For one thing, the majority of the race events are locked. Because you can drive anywhere you want in the city, the way to trigger specific competitions is to hold down the gas and brake at a traffic light. I found only one available scenario, and it was one of my least favorite kinds: a "stunt race," where the point was to earn a certain number of points in a time limit. Screw that, I want to race and smash up some jerks!

The encouraging part is that the racing and smashing do seem pretty sweet. I downloaded the PlayStation 3 demo, and it ran without any noticeable hitches in the frame rate. The sense of speed is as dizzying as it ever was. I died a little inside when the first thing the game had me do was take my car to a body shop, but it turns out that to fix up your car you just drive through a carport-like structure. Same goes for the paint shop, and if you drive through a gas station you refill your boost meter. I can see this working really well during race events.

The "aftertouch" mechanic is necessarily dropped from the free roaming portions of the game (I hope it's still in race events), but in its place is an almost pornographic slow-motion crash cutscene. You wouldn't confuse it for crash test footage, but watching the body panels buckle one by one, and cracks snaking across windows before they burst into tiny shards, is pretty impressive.

I also put a little time into online play, a mode called "Freeburn." I didn't quite get it. We were all driving around, doing our thing, and a stat sheet in the upper corner of the screen updated who had the longest jump, longest drift, longest burn, and so on. There wasn't any actual competition occurring. Or maybe there was -- after about three minutes I got a message that the session had ended. That was how I remembered I hate playing games online.

Urgent, breaking Burnout Paradise demo news

The Burnout Paradise demo is not yet in the Playstation store.

That is all.

Update, 3:49 PM EST: There it is. Maybe I actually am breaking this news now.

Eat it, Kotaku!