Year in Review: Year-end superlatives

Above: A winner is you, everyone.

All this week, we'll be recapping the year that was. Today: year-end superlatives.

Welcome Trend: Critical Non-Consensus

With the annual "Year in Swooning" quiz, I'm trying to point out how carried away game sites often get when it comes to the flavor of the week. But there is some progress in this regard. This year, I felt like there actually was legitimate, respectful disagreement about some of the highest-profile games, both indie and major-label.

Consider:

• Deadly Premonition, a game with a Metacritic score of 69, nevertheless becomes a cult hit, thanks to word of mouth and the work of impassioned critics.
• Heavy Rain, a game with a Metacritic score of 87, nevertheless is savaged mercilessly in Boston's second-biggest newspaper.
• Some idiot calls Limbo "the worst sort of art-for-art's-sake garbage."
• Even Seth Schiesel doesn't like something.

I think it's a sign that gamers are feeling more self-confident that we don't have to band together all the time. This is a good thing!

PR Knuckleheads of the Year: Gabe and Tycho

Count me among those who thought the original comic was not only hilarious, but took aim at a worthy target. But the followup was a disaster. When some readers objected, Gabe and Tycho could have taken the criticisms in the spirit they were intended. A simple apology would have done nicely. At the very least, acknowledge the complaints respectfully and move on. Hell, ignoring them would have been better than what actually happened.

Instead, Gabe and Tycho doubled down with a comic that not only mischaracterized the complaints, but essentially said that the people who were offended are stupid. And then followed that up by selling Dickwolves merch.

All this was uncharacteristic for two guys who are so generous and inclusive, both with PAX and with Child's Play. These are the guys who banned booth babes from PAX, with the blessing of a majority of their readership. So I certainly don't doubt their motives. To their minds, a joke is a joke, but a bunch of their readers disagreed and I think they they did real damage to their brand by assuming a defensive posture instead of listening. To this day I don't think anything approaching an apology has come out, not for the first comic or for the followup.

For myself, I don't think they would have needed to apologize for the original strip, but they could have dealt with it in a better way than becoming the latest and most ironic exemplars of John Gabriel's Greater Internet Dickwad Theory.

Game Blog of the Year: Gamer Melodico

Barely one year into it, Kirk Hamilton and company have already made a big impact with Gamer Melodico. They did it all: good-natured jabs at obnoxious game design; satire; finding inventive ways to comment on topical subjects; round-table discussions that make you feel like you're sitting in a coffee shop with the writers.

All of it's done with a good attitude, a healthy sense of humor, and keen minds. I can't sum up the site any better than they did themselves: "Gamer Melodico is a blog about games, written by friendly people who like to play."

(And, what the hell, an honorable mention for Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits. Paddon's not on-target all the time, but, in the words of Han Solo, "I must have hit real close to the mark to get her all riled up like this, huh kid?")

Developers of the Year: Ex-LucasArts dudes

No big-budget studio jumped out at me this year. Rockstar San Diego did great work with Red Dead Redemption. Retro Studios successfully rebooted Donkey Kong Country. Quantic Dream accomplished most of its very ambitious goals with Heavy Rain. 2K Marin not only stunned me by releasing a worthy followup to BioShock, but by all accounts the "Minerva's Den" DLC was even better (unfortunately, I didn't play it).

But I have to give a shout-out here to two people that I am always rooting for, who found their voices this year with downloadable games. Ron Gilbert, via Hothead Games, brought us the hilarious DeathSpank, which was followed almost immediately by a surprise sequel. And Tim Shafer's DoubleFine Productions rebounded after the disappointing Brutal Legend to release Costume Quest, a funny and light downloadable game that's gotten plaudits from a lot of people whose opinions I value. 2010 was a good year for both of these guys, and they're two of the best we've got.

Publisher of the Year: Nintendo

Even though I still struggle a bit with a lot of the newer Nintendo games, it's hard to argue that Nintendo isn't the big-name publisher that is consistently putting out the highest-quality products. On the Wii, Super Mario Galaxy and Donkey Kong Country Returns were both worthy of their names, and Metroid: Other M was respectable. On the DS, a little game called Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem! was my biggest surprise of the year. Maybe sales of the Wii are flagging, but year in and year out, Nintendo never disappoints on the software side.

Game Console of the Year: Xbox 360

We've long since reached the point at which everybody has made up their minds on this generation of game consoles. Five years into it, the Wii's star has started to fall a bit, the PlayStation 3 has never gotten on track, and the Xbox 360 has almost defaulted to the head of the pack, massive hardware failure rates notwithstanding.

So why choose the Xbox 360 as the game console of the year? For one thing, the only hardware this year that even approached the level of buzzworthy was Kinect. The jury's still out, but it's got a lot of potential. It was the Xbox that once again had the lion's share of big exclusives, both in retail and download. And, price hike or not, Xbox Live continues to be the best online gaming option around. That's why I bought my second Xbox 360 this year.

That, and my first one red-ringed after almost five years. It was like the death of the last living World War 1 veteran.

Tomorrow: Honorable mentions.

Request hour: Sound effects, great writers, and PC vs. console

We're nearing the end of the increasingly inaccurately named "request hour."

Jorge Albor asks:

What has been your favorite audio effect in a videogame (ambient sound, music, etc.)?

Sometimes I think we underestimate the importance of sound in a video game, particularly as a feedback mechanism. I love the way coins chime when Mario picks them up, and the jingle that plays when Link opens up a secret area. You learn to associate these things so closely with success or failure that when you hear something in real life that sounds similar, you feel a little jolt. Some of my favorite sounds in games have been:

• Mega Man teleporting ("blort" is what it sounds like in my mind)
• The high-pitched death rattle of the Combine soldiers in Half-Life 2
• The whispering priests in Resident Evil 4
• Hadoken!
• The wind in ICO
• Reloading the double-barrelled shotgun in Doom 2

And my all-time favorite background music is in Ridley's Lair in Super Metroid.

Iroquois Pliskin asks:

Which video games writer do you read, and say to yourself: "Man I really wish I could write like *that*"

I'll give my my answer: Tycho Brahe.

Maybe you aspire to write like some non-video-game critic instead. Like, I really love Dave Hickey; I'd push quite a few old ladies down the stairs in order to write like that.

Tycho would be one of my answers, as well. He has a way with metaphor and visual imagery that seems effortless, although it's probably not. And he's damn funny. I often find myself saying exactly what you do when I read his stuff. I also admire the elegance and lucidity of Tom Chick's writing, and the raw knowledge that Jeremy Parish drops in every sentence. A bit closer to home, I'm always impressed by Duncan Fyfe's creativity, N'Gai Croal's insight, Michael Abbott's humanity, and, yes, Iroquois Pliskin's erudition. Often when we get talking about what's wrong with the way people are writing about video games, it's easy to forget how many people are doing an awesome job these days.

In the non-game but still-critic arena, there's no one I hold in higher esteem than Roger Ebert. I also think Anthony Lane is hilarious (David Denby is fine, but when it's a Lane issue of the New Yorker, I always read the movie reviews first).

I'm also gonna throw out kind of a weird one: I have always been in awe of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 writing staff. I was flipping through The Amazing Colossal Episode Guide the other day, and I laughed all over again reading a sentence about an "oily" guy "lazing about on his grimy, sticky sheets." Their word choice is always perfect.

Ed Borden also has two questions:

Why do game on a console over a PC?

Growing up, I always did both, although I've always felt a greater affinity for consoles. I'm not sure why that is -- I have fond memories of playing Dark Castle on our Mac Plus, and then later Wolfenstein and Doom on the PC. In my high school years, I actually spent a good bit of money on graphics cards (3D accelerators!) for the family computer, so I could play the Quake games. I'm not even sure how many hundreds of hours I put into Quake 2 CTF. Had a clan and everything. A bumbling, incompetent clan, which placed dead last in the only competition we ever entered.

These days, I'm not sure I could really tell you why I don't play computer games. I almost said that it costs too much to buy a decent computer, but I've spent $1,250 on consoles since I bought my last desktop four years ago, so that can't be it. One of the reasons I bought the computer I'm using now was to play Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. I did that, and then proceeded to play nothing else. The funny thing is, I still prefer the mouse-keyboard combo to dual analog sticks in a FPS, and I'm far more proficient with it.

So the answer, clearly, is that I've been brainwashed.

Are you real, or just a construct for an ARG ad campaign?

I have some bad news for you.

That does it for request hour. Thanks to everybody who participated. I thought it was great to have the chance to explore a lot of different topics. We should do this again.

The infinite idiocy feedback loop

So, first I said Kevin McCullough was not worth responding to, and then today Tycho of Penny Arcade said much the same thing. But not before writing a comic about him.

The point is well-taken that page views are the fuel that drives this man's infernal idiocy engine, and that we only encourage this sort of behavior by giving him more of them. Not to mention that finding himself besieged by a horde of frothing gamers will only serve to further convince Kevin McCullough that game players really are a bunch of trogs driven wholly by their baser impulses. It hardly matters that on the subject at hand, hot alien sex in Mass Effect, he is empirically wrong and we are right.

Still: Should we simply let these insults pass? I would agree that there is probably a better way to reach Mr. McCullough than the way most people chose, but I guarantee you that he also received a fair number of thoughtful and considered responses from people who showed him the respect he never afforded them. I further guarantee that McCullough disregarded the substance of these emails, except for his admission that, okay, you can't really make your character's boobs whatever size you want.

I tend to think that a hard truth is more valuable than a beautiful lie, and so while it would have been easy to let this moronic column die as McCullough himself one day will, alone and unloved, the fact is that the record needed to be corrected. That so many felt it necessary to stoop to his level does not undercut their essential rightness.