The Year in Review: The Best Games of 2008

Above: This is the one.
(Note to Harmonix: "This Is the One" would make excellent DLC.)

We're wrapping up our recap of the year that was. Today: the best games of 2008.

If you want to read the blurbs, you'll have to read the feature at thephoenix.com. But for discussion, here's my list of the top 10 of 2008:

1. Rock Band 2
2. Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
3. Braid
4. Far Cry 2
5. Left 4 Dead
6. Fallout 3
   
7. No More Heroes
8. Grand Theft Auto IV
9. Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2
10. Yakuza 2
    

A couple things should go without saying. First, yes, I am aware these were my favorite games of the year and not objectively the best. Second, there were more than a few 2008 releases that I missed, although thanks to my cram session I think Fable 2 might be the only serious contender there. But who knows, maybe I would have loved something that got tepid reviews elsewhere, like The Force Unleashed.

I do feel that 2007 was a much better year for games overall. Not that it matters what the calendar says. You could reframe the debate and come out with a much different-looking list, as Iroquois Pliskin does in suggesting that video games completed the Tiger Slam from August 2007 through August 2008. What the heck -- we all enjoy these year-end lists, even if bitching about them is also fashionable. It's nice to take a minute and reflect on what we already have, before rushing headlong onto the next thing. Isn't that what the holidays are all about?

With that, I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

(Posting is likely to be light until January 5.)

The Year in Review: Best of the Blog

Above: Actually the best of Insult Swordfighting.

Today through Christmas Eve, we'll be recapping the year that was. First up: the best of Insult Swordfighting, 2008.

I don't mean to get all introspective and self-centered on you, but on a personal and semi-professional level, this was a great year. I started tracking this blog's subscribers and page views last December. Since then, daily page views have more than quintupled, and the number of feed subscribers has increased more than tenfold. My thanks to all of you.

Just as satisfying was finding so many great blogs that I had no idea existed a year ago (and some of which didn't even exist a year ago). We are heading in the right direction, all of us, and I'll look forward to seeing what 2009 brings.

For those of you who are newcomers to Insult Swordfighting, here are some of the highlights from the past year.

January: The New Taxonomy of Gamers launched. I'll leave it to N'Gai to tell you that it was "the year's most essential blog series." I wouldn't go that far, but I am proud of it. It's the first thing I'd tell somebody to read on this blog, if they asked.

February: Some excellent discussion arose here and elsewhere regarding No More Heroes. I had too much to say about it to confine it to a review, so I wrote a blog-only review to supplement the Phoenix piece, which also triggered an interesting chat with the Brainy Gamer about the auteur theory in games.

March: A look back at sinking ships in games was not the greatest post ever, but it remains one of the most popular pages on this site for Google searches. Plus I have to pick something for March -- which was, if I'm to be honest, a pretty lackluster month, filled mostly with updates on the status of my Wii repairs.

April: Does relying on nostalgia help or hurt games? Is using familiar settings and characters a crutch, or an opportunity to enhance our appreciation for the classics? I looked at the contrasting approaches of Super Smash Bros. and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. Also in April: a big-ass think piece for the Phoenix about video games and social responsibility.

May: Oh hey, another weak month, but I think a post about when a game is finished raises some ideas that should be explored more. Not by me, of course. I have Gamestop users to make fun of.

June: Metal Gear Solid 4 broke my heart. The dialogue and the cutscenes were just too much. If you were to chart my enjoyment of the game as a function of time played, it would look like one of those waterslides that drops straight down.

July: ...right until the the conclusion, in which I stopped trying to convince myself I was enjoying MGS4 on any level.

August: I went temporarily insane, thanks to an overdose of Geometry Wars 2, poring over the leaderboards like somewhere in there was hidden the true name of God. Also in August: what I thought was a pretty good post about user experience never gained much traction.

September: Mega Man 9 has much the same impact as Metal Gear Solid 4, causing me to question my love for the franchise.

October: The year in swooning quiz brings chuckles, guffaws, and, presumably, the undying hatred of everybody mentioned.

November: In a post almost as self-indulgent as this one, I say hello to an old friend, and goodbye to his kick-ass Super Nintendo games.

December: I answered some of the questions in Shawn Elliott's reviews symposium. Man, it seems like that happened just yesterday.

Tomorrow: Year-end superlatives.

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!

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?

No More Heroes review

My review of No More Heroes is up now at thephoenix.com. It covers much of the same territory as my previous posts about the game, but, er, you should still read it anyway.

I think if I ever have a kid, I'm going to name him "Dr. Peace."

The "New Wave" of games

Another great post from the Brainy Gamer about No More Heroes, comparing Suda 51 to the auteurs of the French New Wave. Without having seen, well, any of the films mentioned, I think I'm still on board with that thesis.

To gank a thought from my review, it seems to me that the amount of money and effort it takes to make a big-time console game these days practically requires design by committee. Too many people are involved in every level of the process -- from the artists, to the sound guys, to the suits sweating every nickel and dime -- for one person's vision to make the leap from conception to reality. Lots of good and even great games come out every year, but most of them lack that stamp of individuality, even if the graphics are polished and the online play is stutter-free. BioShock seemed to have that singular inspiration driving it, but apparently most of the storyline only came together near the end. With No More Heroes, you really get the impression that you're playing a game that has sprung, intact, from the deepest recesses of Suda 51's mind. While it's not as polished as a lot of games, that's a point in its favor. (See Leigh's comments on this post.) Frankly, I can't believe this game got made.

Right now, Roger Ebert's review of The 400 Blows is featured on his web site. At the top is this quote from Truffaut: "I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between." No More Heroes, it could be said, expresses the joy of making games. Or maybe the agony of making games. Certainly, it revels in the joy of playing games.

No more No More Heroes embargo

All right, the review is done and I've been able to read what some other people have to say about No More Heroes. I recommend both the Brainy Gamer and the Aberrant Gamer, each of whom covers much of the same ground that I did in my review (to be posted next week). On one hand, I'm glad that my impressions of the game seem valid. On the other hand, this may mean that I'm not as singularly insightful as I thought I was.

No More Heroes is a game about games. In the larger world of media, I can only think to compare Suda 51's work here to the filmography of Quentin Tarantino. Not because No More Heroes and Pulp Fiction share a fondness for sex, violence, and profanity, but because you get the impression that Suda 51 has played every game ever made and wants to give them all a shout-out, just as Tarantino does with films. No More Heroes is a pastiche that incorporates influences from the earliest arcade games through last fall's Manhunt 2. It seems to revel in the hoky symbols and twisted logic that took root in games by necessity.

In the early days, if designers wanted to denote enemies dropping loot, they had no real choice but to represent it graphically with something like a big ol' dollar sign. These days, games are trending toward more realism in this regard. Recent shooters like Call of Duty 4 and Gears of War try to minimize their HUDs, for example, in order to break down that fourth wall. No More Heroes seems to feel that the fourth wall is crucial to a game's identity. Your area map is a blocky grid, but only slightly more blocky than the streets and buildings of Santa Destroy itself. Important locations are marked by enormous, pixilated icons that hover over the sidewalks. Power-ups are placed inside treasure chests, which are barely concealed around corners of the mostly straight-ahead levels. And loot? Your fallen enemies blast you with a torrent of jingling coins.

The trend toward open-world games has resulted in games like Grand Theft Auto giving your character side missions, simple tasks that don't advance the storyline but earn your character money or items. Here, again, No More Heroes doesn't try to shoehorn side missions into the narrative, but celebrates them in all their superfluous glory. In order to get the money he needs to advance in the game, Travis takes on such arduous tasks as mowing lawns, picking up trash, and gassing up cars. The banality is so extreme that it crosses the line to audacity. (The only problem is that, well, they're still not that much fun to play.)

For as much as No More Heroes seems to be a mish-mash of other people's ideas, I was also intrigued by its take on its characters' physicality, which takes an angle I'm not sure I've seen before. To the extent that most game characters seem to have functioning bodies, it's either to bleed or to indulge in occasional hot alien sex. In the essays I've read, most people have glossed over the fact that, in No More Heroes, the save point is the toilet. Potty humor on one level, yes, but I don't believe anything in this game is so insignificant. I think it's a rebuke to all the games that treat their virtual denizens as the artificial constructs we'd like to think they aren't. Travis picks his nose, lusts after his female employer, and, yes, frequently uses the bathroom. It's about time somebody in a game did. All that running water in BioShock, and your character never gets the urge to go, even once?

No More Heroes doesn't necessarily strike me as a game of the year contender, but it's an important breakthrough precisely because it doesn't need to be judged along the traditional review axes. In fact, on the Metacritic page is this excerpt from the IGN review: "...it’s a pain to trek through, and a painfully low-tech visual offering. Pop-in is everywhere, control is irritating at best, and the frame rate is all over the charts. It’s an absolute mess." It's not often I feel justified in saying something like this, but it's hard to imagine a reviewer so completely missing the point (except maybe when I reviewed Mass Effect, but that's neither here nor there). That's like bitching about a movie being shot in black and white after 1950. The look of this game was a choice. No More Heroes is a game with things on its mind, not least of which is its own identity. I feel richer for having played it.

And, frankly, I'm just glad I finally got to play a game that let me use the word "pastiche" without having to strain for it.

Curse my self-imposed No More Heroes embargo!

Here's the thing: I really want to talk about No More Heroes. I want to read Leigh Alexander's "Aberrant Gamer" column about it, and Michael Abbott's post at the Brainy Gamer. In all likelihood, I want to comment on their posts. This is the kind of game that demands to be discussed. It is impossible to play it and not think about it; think deep and analytical thoughts about what it is, what it isn't, and what it means. And it's impossible not to want to share those thoughts.

But I can't, just yet. I'm filing my review overnight tonight, and until that's done I don't want to read what anybody else has to say about it. No reason to go into it biased.

So... be prepared for some No More Heroes posts starting tomorrow. They're going to be great. I swear!