The Year in Review: Year-End Superlatives

Above: A winner is you, everyone.

Today through Christmas Eve, we'll be recapping the year that was. Today: year-end superlatives.

Today, we're handing out accolades to the games, systems, and people who made the year so interesting.

Welcome Trend: Downloadable Content for Consoles

Downloadable content is nothing new, but 2008 was the year it matured. If you wanted to play the most interesting and innovative games, you had to download them. The Wii finally branched out from Virtual Console re-hashes and offered original content like the charming LostWinds, the much-loved World of Goo, and Mega Man 9, which I couldn't in good conscience have played on any other system. Sony continued to quietly turn the PlayStation Network into a high-end boutique with games like PixelJunk Eden, Echochrome, and Wipeout HD. And, of course, Xbox Live Arcade was the videogame equivalent of the 1927 Yankees when they released Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2, Braid, Bionic Commando, and Castle Crashers all in one month's time.

Noble Failure of the Year: Mirror's Edge

But we're not talking about this anymore.

PR Knucklehead of the Year: Bobby Kotick, Activision Blizzard

As quoted in MTV Multiplayer:

The games Activision Blizzard didn’t pick up, he said, “don’t have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million dollar franchises. … I think, generally, our strategy has been to focus… on the products that have those attributes and characteristics, the products that we know [that] if we release them today, we’ll be working on them 10 years from now.”

Not that it's anything we didn't know already, but usually they're a bit more tactful than that. Get ready for more awful Guitar Hero games, everybody!

On the other hand, maybe we should be giving this guy points for honesty.

The Donut Hole Award: Fairway Solitaire

Ineligible for this year's top 10 list because it was a 2007 release, and left out of last year's because I didn't play it in time, Fairway Solitaire was nevertheless one of the most fun and addictive games to come down the pike in quite some time. You really need to try this one. I guarantee that the 60-minute demo will convince you to buy the full game.

Game Blog of the Year: Hit Self-Destruct

Put simply, nobody else I know of is doing what Duncan Fyfe is doing at Hit Self-Destruct. He's a superb writer, whose narrative approach to writing about games is insightful and often very funny. He can take a subject like the old practice of naming your save files and make it sound both wistful and hilarious, while still making a good point about the player's role as co-author of the gameplay experience.

Publisher of the Year: Microsoft Game Studios

I say this not because of its major console releases, although Gears 2 was very good and an awful lot of people seemed to love Fable 2. In a year when Xbox Live Arcade beat the doors down, Microsoft deserves a little love. They published Braid and Castle Crashers, both independent productions made with a lot of love by their creators. Surely these weren't massive expenditures, but it still shows their appreciation for a creative vision. (Bonus points: Microsoft even put up with Dennis Dyack, which is prize-worthy all on its own.)

Developer of the Year: Harmonix

Rock Band and its sequel are both spectacular right on the disc, but Harmonix is special because of its commitment to supporting their games after its retail release. The breadth and quality -- not to mention the value -- of Rock Band's ever-expanding DLC is staggering. This company treats its property, and its customers, with care and respect.

Console of the Year: Xbox 360

Hey, didn't the Xbox 360 win this last year? Yep, well, there was no clear alternative for 2008. The Wii phenomenon is well beyond the limits of my understanding at this point, but a same-old, same-old sequel and a fitness trainer are not what I'm looking for out of my game console. The PS3 did better for itself than in years past, but its biggest exclusive title was a massive disappointment. Even the 360's exclusives weren't quite as great as in years past, but it did have more of them, and better, too. It continues to be the system you've got to have if you self-identify as a serious gamer.

(Oh hey, remember when the most consistently innovative games were coming out for the Nintendo DS? What happened there?)

Monday: 2008 honorable mentions.

The honest-to-goodness last Mirror's Edge post until the next one

Above: How can I even look her in the tattooed eye after this?

Okay, the Mirror's Edge review is up now at thephoenix.com, and that really is the last I will have to say about it. Until the post about the worst games of the year, I suppose.

Thinking about this whole thing has been giving me horrible Mass Effect flashbacks. You may remember that I couldn't stand that game, in contrast to the many critics who teamed up to give it a Metacritic score of 91. That, too, was a game that somehow kept coming up in conversation over and over again -- a game I couldn't seem to wash my hands of, no matter how hard I tried. Part of me didn't even really want to. Buried somewhere deep inside there had to be the game everybody else liked, and I wanted to play that game. Alas, I never found it in Mass Effect, and, tempting new DLC or no, I won't be trying to find it in Mirror's Edge.

Turning the page on Mirror's Edge, almost

My full review will be posted later this week, so this will be the second-to-last thing I have to say about Mirror's Edge. I was fascinated to see the passionate conversation that blew up in my neck of the blogosphere about this game, because as far as I can tell this is a relatively minor fall release.

Still, it represented a new IP, and more importantly a new idea, in a season that was full of sequels you barely even needed to play to know what they were about. It had a fresher look than most games. It had an innovative and intuitive control scheme. And, like its contemporaries Dead Space and Far Cry 2, it had a great take on its lead character's physicality. Mirror's Edge took a lot of chances and stood out in a crowd of predictable franchise entries.

And yet, in my humble opinion, it really, truly, sucked.

I mean, I hated every second I spent with this game, and it's like a six-hour game. There weren't all that many seconds to hate. Intellectually, I appreciated what Mirror's Edge was doing, and that's why I kept booting it up with a sense of optimism -- optimism that was destroyed within minutes of beginning any new play session. On a gut level, I just couldn't stand the game. I swore at it. I stared in disbelief. I came close to re-enacting the control pad stress test on more than one occasion. And lest you think it's just because I was bad at it -- and I was very bad it -- the game was designed in such a way that I couldn't help but blunder my way through it without ever having to master it. It was the worst of both worlds.

As usual, Penny Arcade's Tycho summed it up well:

I have really, honestly, and truly quit Mirror's Edge. At least, I think. Writing this will probably make me feel bad, and then I'll have to go back and pound my head against it until my skull is visible. I just got to a part in the game where I said, no. Nobody is paying me to do this. This is no longer a productive investment of my leisure time. The platforming doesn't even enter into it: if I die because I fell off of some shit, that's on me. And it's not about the combat, either: it's not a matter of how its implemented, or how it could be improved. When I come into a room I need to escape from, and I see a bunch of S.W.A.T. guys, my first thought is, why are they even here? When I see the (frankly, supernatural) trailer for the DLC, my heart skips a beat: that's the game I want. After that campaign, though, I don't want anything to do with Mirror's Edge. They had an excellent, well-manifested game mechanic that probably wouldn't work as a full retail product, and in the drive to shore up that "deficiency" they did violence against their creation.

Sadly, I was being paid to do it, which kept me going longer than I probably would have otherwise. I'm not a big believer that you should stick with a bad game in hopes that it'll get better. Life is short.

What's funny about this is that for all that Mirror's Edge (and, earlier, Dead Space) supposedly represents a "new" EA, what sunk it was its adherence to traditional gameplay paradigms. You're an outlaw. You're on the run. Men with guns are coming after you. Jump onto not one, but two moving trains in order to escape them. It's all boilerplate. I continue to believe that this would have been a far more successful game if it'd been more of a playground, but that's a tougher sell. It had to be an action game if they wanted to make that great commercial. That doesn't sound like a new EA to me.

Wow, what a miserable post. You see what this game has done to me? It's turned me into an asshole.*

*Showed my true colors.

Friday afternoon tidbits

I'm hoping to get to some more Left 4 Dead this weekend, but first I have to face some other mindless, ravenous hordes when I go Christmas shopping. Just need a tree, really, since I do most of my shopping online, but what's worse than crowds of people who all want something? These days you can get trampled just for getting too close to the door at Wal Mart. Onto the links!

-Garrett Martin has written a pro-Mirror's Edge post, partly in response to what I said about it earlier in the week. He makes some good points, and while I wouldn't argue with the legitimacy of what he says, it still doesn't match up at all with my experience with the game. Meanwhile, Daniel Purvis also points out that the time trials may as well be a different game altogether, which is again true and which again doesn't match up with my experience. I will say this: the time trials are significantly more successful than the story mode as far as accomplishing what I thought ME was trying to achieve.

-Gary Hodges does a good job of negatively reviewing LittleBigPlanet without condescending or diminishing it. You could very well read that piece and know that LBP is the game for you. I also instinctively shy away from the kinds of proclamations that Gary quotes John Davison as making, that LBP "could be one of the most important game releases of the year." Or it could not be. Who knows? Not me, not you, and not anybody -- not for a couple of years, at least.

-Mike Walbridge accepted Shawn Elliott's challenge. Mike's perspective is interesting because he's looking at it from the point of view of an editor, as well as a writer. I'm lucky because I don't really need to worry about maintaining a consistent editorial tone with other people, or even worrying about how my scores mesh with that of the other Phoenix writers. That sounds like it would be a real challenge.

-Hey, Hardcasual is back. Sweet. And it gives me a chance to tenuously segue into talking about my favorite subject: myself. Apparently Chris Plante has been writing for UGO's Games Blog, alongside UGO editor Russ Frushtick. Russ and I lived in the same dorm at college, and although I knew at the time that he wrote for UGO, I didn't realize he made a career out of it. That's the second time this has happened, the first time being when I realized that Leigh and I were high-school classmates. Small world. (Oh man, and after writing this, I see a post on the Games Blog that mentions Qore host Veronica Belmont -- yep, another college classmate! Sheesh.)

Thanksgiving leftovers: Mirror's Edge

Above: Allow at least one hour after eating before playing Mirror's Edge

Still trying to recover from a long weekend spent gorging myself on turkey, stuffing, gravy, pie, potatoes, cranberry sauce, egg nog... (Note to international readers: You might be wondering how a holiday centered on gluttony differs from an average day here in America. Shut up.)

Although I spent much of my weekend traveling and visiting with relatives, I squeezed in a little bit of gaming time. Mirror's Edge continues to baffle and frustrate. I keep reading things that sound like high-minded defenses of the game, or at least more charitable interpretations than my own. And there is something strangely alluring about this game in the abstract. Each time I load it up, I find myself a little excited, thinking that this time I'll crack through that shell and get to the delicious nut inside. That feeling lasts no longer than two minutes.

But considering how varied the reaction to Mirror's Edge seems to be, I'd hesitate to tell anybody they should avoid it at all costs. Lots of people seem to love it. I think this is yet another situation where we bump up against the different reasons people have for playing games. For some, the punishing, trial-and-error style of Mirror's Edge's story mode is a virtue. For me, it's a dealbreaker. I want a little breathing room in there. It's a six-hour game, but I think it could be made twice as long by adding more laid-back platforming sections, with less at stake. Not only would ME not suffer from its wider focus, it would actually benefit. Its insistence on constant chase-scene mechanics is a detriment.

Yes, this is the opposite of what I say about 99 games out of 100. Hang on, I'm going somewhere with this.

The reason Mirror's Edge exists is to showcase its first-person free-running mechanics. I don't think that's in dispute. Matthew Gallant compared it in that respect to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, which is a comparison I've also made. There's a game that provided you a new way to control your avatar, and then wisely stepped back and let you experiment with it. THPS had game-like goals -- hit switches, collect letters, find secret areas -- but permitted you the freedom to pursue them or not, according to your whims.

Another comparison I'd make is to Crackdown, which was a more traditional platforming game, but whose main appeal also came from the way its characters interacted with the game world. Your character could climb buildings, and eventually jump over them. There was some old-school run-and-gun action in there, which was necessary if you wanted to advance the story, but the game was most fun when you just prowled the rooftops for agility orbs. You had that option. You could play it your way. The designers didn't give you a set of tools and then refuse to let you use them.

Granted, that's not a perfect analogy to what happens in Mirror's Edge. This game's designers give you a set of tools and expect you to master them immediately. When I said the game could use more breathing room, this is what I mean: there simply isn't enough time or opportunity to learn the game mechanics in a consequence-free environment. As a result, you're stumbling through what are supposed to be fluid chase sequences. Unless you're an expert, your character jerks to a halt every few steps, and dies as often as most people blink.

(I loved the way Chris Dahlen put it: "I’d say that its core problem is that it looks like Rock Band 2 but plays like Mega Man 9; you want to settle in and enjoy the thrill, but imagine if Rock Band stopped the song every single time you hit a bum note.")

So often I feel like my argument against a game is, "I don't like this because I am bad at it." I feel a little bit like that now. But I wasn't good at Rock Band when I started playing it, or Tony Hawk, or Street Fighter, or Quake, or anything else that was new or different. How a game guides you up the learning curve says a lot about its priorities -- and, I'd argue, about its quality.

Huh, I was going to talk about Left 4 Dead in here, too. Guess we'll just save that for tomorrow.

Friday afternoon tidbits, Wednesday morning edition

Above: I can feel my tummy rumbling already!

It's nearly Thanksgiving, which means we're doing the links a little early this week. These should make for some good postprandial reading, if you don't lapse immediately into a meat coma.

(By the way, did you know my first job was at a turkey farm? I have intimate knowledge of how that bird gets to your table. I've seen things I can't un-see.)

-Simon Parkin is taking nominations for the best game writing of 2008. I'd never be so tacky as to nominate myself, but, you know, if you think there's anything I've done that might be worthy of the honor, I certainly won't stop you from suggesting it to him. Ahem.

-One of those fascinating cross-blog conversations blew up this week. At issue is whether game reviewers sufficiently value innovation. Leigh wrote two posts saying that innovation gets short shrift, N'Gai rebutted by saying that execution is paramount, and Leigh responded once more that there may be more common ground than N'Gai gave her credit for. For myself, I agree with N'Gai's points. Innovation is a means, not an end. The goal, in my view, is to make fun games that are easy to play.* If innovation helps with that, then innovate away! But without execution, innovation doesn't mean much. Sometimes you might have a great idea without being able to work out all the kinks, which seems to be what happened with Mirror's Edge.

(I covered some of this ground in a post last summer, "Standards and practices.")

-I loved Daniel Purvis's write-up of playing Left 4 Dead with strangers. The notion of the players' personalities creating a storyline within the more open-ended framework of the gameplay is exciting, and something I wouldn't have expected. My copy of Left 4 Dead is still in the shrinkwrap, but I think this weekend I'm going to rectify that.

-Tim Rogers's review of Gears of War 2 is insane. I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean the man's passion for the game has transported him to another plane of being, where he is unconstrained by your petty human concerns. He has become Shiva, destroyer of worlds.

-Is it Christmas?

*Not to be confused with easy games.

Friday afternoon tidbits

No drinking beer and falling asleep on the couch for me this weekend! I'm going snowboarding. Let me just apologize in advance if I break my wrist and can't type come Monday.

A few items of note before the weekend begins:

-The comments have been great around here recently, so thanks to everybody who takes the time to respond. Blogging should be a dialogue and not a monologue. I always appreciate any considered comments, whether they're assenting or dissenting. Group hug.

-Every time I think I'm done talking about Fairway Solitaire around here, they pull me back in. Bill Harris linked to an interview with the game's designer, John Cutter. It's probably more interesting if you've played the game, such as when you come across passages like this:

"One of my theories about game design is that there is a direct correlation between the quality of an action's feedback and the perceived enjoyment of that experience. So with that goal in mind I was pretty diligent about giving players great feedback each time they "play" a card to the foundation," he said. "I really wanted this action to feel like a golf shot, with a nice solid "WHACK" sound and the card spinning and arcing down to the bottom of the screen."

It's totally true. I can't stress it enough: Fairway Solitaire is an absolute gem. At least try the demo.

-The anonymous scribe behind Magical Wasteland rarely posts, but each new update is always required reading. "In Defense of the Meaningless Video Game" touches upon some of the issues we talked about in yesterday's post on racing games. A key quote: "World of Warcraft means something (to millions of people) because it provides the framework for meaningful occurrences, not because it, itself, contains and delivers meaning." That's true. But the meaningful occurrences people create for themselves are naturally shaped by the decisions of the folks at Blizzard, whether or not either the developers or the players mean for that to be the case.

Without arguing any of the author's core precepts -- that some games are fun for fun's sake, and that most don't need to be overtly relevant to the world we live in -- I still can't shake the notion that every game has some kind of meaning. The reason it has meaning is because conscious decisions had to be made about even its smallest aspects. Yes, you can take this to ludicrous and self-parodying extremes. But think about it: For each design decision made, an infinite number of options was rejected. If you ask yourself why a particular choice was made, then that's where you'll find the meaning -- no matter what the game.

-Today, Game|Life, Kotaku, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun all posted gushing previews of the dystopian Parkour game Mirror's Edge. I agree that it sounds neat. But honestly, people: Have we learned nothing?