Games of the decade: Crackdown

Part of a series of subjective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

Crackdown
(2007, Xbox 360)

The funny thing about Crackdown was the desperate ploy Microsoft used to sell it. The game came with a code to access the Halo 3 beta, and while it might be easy to forget now that everybody loves Crackdown, at the time the beta was all anybody was talking about. It's even easier to forget now that Crackdown didn't really blow people away at first. A Metacritic score of 83 is good but not great. Most of the complaints seem to be that it's too short lived.

This is why making predictions is a bad idea. Years later, Crackdown is one of very few non-new games that I still take the time to play, and so do some of the people I see on my Live friends list. Yes, you can bomb through the campaign in a relatively short period of time, and powering up your character all the way isn't too arduous, but it seems to me that those reviewers were discounting the staying power of Crackdown's most enjoyable feature: the platforming.

If there were nothing to do in this game except climb buildings looking for agility orbs, it would still be more fun than most games. It's that good. (Unfortunately, I'm still looking for one last agility orb, and the accompanying achievement. Alas!) In the time since it came out, there have been plenty of other games that tried to give you a similar freedom of movement, inFamous and Prototype chief among them, and none of them managed to replicate Crackdown's joy of movement. Every game designer should give his game this test. If you remove everything but the action the player will be performing more than any other, is it still fun?

More on Crackdown:

• "A deeply flawed and laughably shallow exercise in comic book violence"
• The best game so far this year

Friday afternoon tidbits

E3 bugs me. You may have noticed. Despite how it might appear, it's not because I'm a crabby old hermit who scurries back into his cave at the first sign of mirth. I love when people get excited about video games. I do it myself. But E3 is basically a big TV commercial, and it is strange that people don't take what they see there with a bigger grain of salt.

Every presentation has been conceived for maximum marketing impact, and I don't think the fans or the members of the media do themselves any favors by buying into the hype. Both in the press and in the wild, there's a tendency to breathlessly parrot every new announcement, as though it's surprising that there are sequels to popular games in the works. Besides which, there's a long history of games that made a big splash at E3, only to be delayed or canceled -- not to mention disappointing. I just want people to take games on their own merits, that's all.

Nevertheless, E3 was the story of the week, and as such, it comes up a lot in the links.

-Hardcasual absolutely killed it this week with their faux-E3 coverage. They punctured the bubble around the show, and they did it with good humor. This was the can't-miss coverage of the entire show, even though it was all lies. My favorites: "Microsoft’s Natal To Deliver 1:1 Teabagging on Xbox Live" and "Vendor Outside Los Angeles Convention Center Debuts Sleeker, More Delicious Hot Dog Wrapped in Bacon."

-Another cynical take on the show came from the Phoenix's Mike Rougeau, which, while harder edged than Hardcasual's coverage, was a welcome corrective after days of identical live-blogs and tweets.

-Speaking of which, while the real-time coverage of the Big Three press conferences was a bit much for me, several outlets did a great job afterward of looking at the big picture, none more so than Offworld. Brandon Boyer discussed "The 7 things you need to know about Microsoft's press conference," "The 5 things you need to know about Nintendo's press conference," and "The 5 things you need to know about Sony's press conference." Boyer's write-ups were free of gushing or hype, and instead took a measured look at the competitive landscape coming out of the show.

-It was also nice to see a bit more scrutiny applied to some of the games after journalists got their hands on them. Brian Crecente and Leigh Alexander wrote dueling opinion pieces about the upcoming Dante's Inferno game. Crecente is dubious:

While the developers seem genuinely interested in trying to present a tour of Dante's hell that remains at least mildly representative of the original works, it can't remain a passive experience and still be a mainstream video game.

Their answer: Make Dante the game's hero, Beatrice the game's damsel in distress.

It's this shift in perspective, no matter how tangentially rooted in history, that most threatens to deflate the experience of Inferno.

While Alexander welcomes the artistic license:

The Divine Comedy, after all, is largely a poem about two guys walking and talking -- not exactly the core gameplay of an action game. In that way, the liberties the team took were intended to create a stronger video game, a more reasonable priority for, well, a video game, than focusing on a strong epic poem adaptation.

My own feeling is that once you hear the words "Dante's Inferno: The Video Game," you probably shouldn't be surprised by any departures from the source material.

-And a couple of non-E3 links. (Holy crap, this post is getting long.) I had never listened to the Gamers with Jobs podcast before, but I enjoyed their discussion of inFamous, because their experiences seemed to track with my own. That leaves them, Tycho Brahe, and me as the only holdouts, I think.

-I did enjoy the completionist aspect of inFamous, though. The city is composed of three islands. Each island starts off under the control of gang members, which is represented by a red outline on your map. Upon completing each side mission, your map shows a chunk of gang territory changing colors. This almost single-handedly kept my interest throughout the game. It was also reasonably absorbing to search for blast shards, but not nearly as fun as hunting agility orbs in Crackdown. Anyway, GameSetWatch ran a good piece about the psychology of collectors and hoarders, which seems relevant.

Have a good weekend, all.

"A deeply flawed and laughably shallow exercise in comic book violence"

Jeremy Parish has written the definitive take on Crackdown, which he calls his favorite game of 2007. I agree with every word. Many games were "better" than Crackdown last year, from an empirical perspective. There were games with more satisfying and thoughtful narratives, prettier graphics, and what Erik Wolpaw referred to as "dicey underwater moral choices." But there was no game that was nearly as much fun from start to finish.

People often say that they play games for fun, which is not a position I wholly agree with. Yes, fun is a component of games, but the kinds of games I usually like aren't "fun" in the traditional sense. They're often grueling, depressing, and, ideally, thoughtful. BioShock was a great game, the best of 2007, but making those dicey underwater moral choices wasn't exactly what I'd call a good time. Fulfilling, yes. But it didn't make me giddy. It left me drained some of the time, awed at others, and when it was all over I felt more a sense of relief than elation.

Crackdown, though? Completely naughty, illicit, guilty-pleasure fun. There's a troubling, not terribly buried subtext to the game that takes the shine off if you look at it too closely, and if the gameplay weren't as exciting and addictive as it is, I wouldn't be so apt to let it off the hook. But the game is loud and dumb, and so reckless in its pursuit of open-world mayhem that it's hard not to be won over simply by its energy. Parish says the musical equivalent of Crackdown is Journey; I'd suggest Andrew W.K.

It's worth remembering that this game was a fairly low-profile winter release, marketed not for its gameplay but for the included invitation to the Halo 3 multiplayer beta test. Lots of people made the joke that Microsoft was selling the beta invite, with Crackdown as the freebie. I've never been happier to be wrong about something. Almost a year later, this game has stuck with me. That's a rare feat.

Oh yeah, it's less than $30 at Amazonnow, too.