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.

Confabulous

Above: Leigh Alexander, right, defends Princess Debut to a skeptical Mitch Krpata and Michael Abbott, left and center.

I had the pleasure of joining Leigh Alexander as a guest on the latest episode of the Brainy Gamer podcast, as part of Michael Abbott's new "Gamers Confab" roundtable discussions. We covered quite a few topics, including what we're playing now (Rock Band 2 ftw), the difficulty of keeping up with all the fall releases, the desirability of keeping up with all the fall releases, and the state of the survival horror genre. That last subject takes up about the second half of the conversation. We talked about Dead Space and Silent Hill specifically, with room to talk about classics of the genre, and what the hell makes a game scary, anyway.

I thought we had some pretty interesting things to say, while covering a lot of ground. Mostly it was nice to have the discussion with live people, as these are topics I never discuss with anybody in real life. Sometimes it's nice to just sit down and shoot the shit about these subjects, without all the editing and hard work of a good blog post. You sort of get the impression, listening to the podcast, that we all felt that way.

Have a listen, won't you?

The sounds of silence

Above: Nothin' unusual happenin' here

My review of Silent Hill: Homecoming is up now at thephoenix.com.

The comparison to Dead Space is unavoidable. As horror games, they couldn't be more different. Dead Space is all surface: it's loud, flashy, and precision engineered. Silent Hill is a bit more sloppy as a game, but it's also the more subtle and disquieting experience. Both are good, but I think the overlap between them is probably as small as it could be while still falling under the general heading of horror. I liked Silent Hill a bit more, although since both games essentially did what they set out to do, I imagine that opinions differ.

I mentioned in the first paragraph of the review some of the glaring gameplay problems. I left one out: You can't invert the Y-axis for your camera controls. You can invert them for aiming a gun, which is something you don't do often in this game. Probably 80% of the combat is with a melee weapon. I'm a Y-axis-inverter since old times, and it took me a good five hours to get used to this. In a weird way, that ended up making the game scarier, since I always seemed to be looking just slightly away from where I wanted to. Given the choice, I'd still have wanted the option to change it.

Mama, I'm coming home

Above: Hellooooo, nurse!

Reviewing games can be harder than I think people realize, but it's still not that hard most of the time. Although it takes work to play through a game and then write a decent story about it, at least it's usually easy to figure out exactly how you feel about a game. Once in awhile, though, along comes one of those split-personality games, one that has much to recommend it, and much to recommend against it. The biggest difficulty in reviewing a game like that is figuring out what kind of reader you should be targeting.

I say this because I'm currently playing through Silent Hill: Homecoming, a game with a tepid Metacritic score, but also at least one passionate defender whom I respect. I can't help but compare it to the last game I played, Dead Space, which I liked but did not love (review to be posted soonish.) Both are nominally survival horror games, but in many ways they couldn't be more different.

Dead Space is a polished gem of an action game, made at the highest level of competence. But it's also, in the final analysis, "just" a shooter. Its scares are exclusively of the loud, icky variety. Silent Hill has that, too, but it has a more subtle and insidious approach to horror. For all that critics have rightly lauded Dead Space's sound design, it's Silent Hill's audio that has gotten under my skin: the crackle of my radio when monsters approach, the snuffling of hungry beasts somewhere in the fog. The fundamental difference between the game is one of subtext: Dead Space is all surface, and Silent Hill is all about the primal fears that lurk underneath.

And yet -- Silent Hill is also, in some ways, not a very well made game. It hews to the rules of the genre: save points are few and far between, resources are scarce, and the controls are almost useless in key moments. Excusing the combat because it's supposed to be bad sounds like a lame argument even before you've finished making it -- but one of the reasons I didn't find Dead Space as scary as I hoped was because the combat was too good! Silent Hill's problems are even more mundane than that: I lost about 20 minutes of progress when my character got stuck between a bookshelf and a filing cabinet, and I had to reset.

The other day, I was reading through some of my old reviews, and was a little chagrined to realize how inconsistent my criticisms have been across games. Sometimes sloppy details cut the legs out from under a game with a gripping story, or sometimes they seem irrelevant because I've gotten so involved in the narrative. Sometimes all the polish in the world can't make a game interesting. There doesn't seem to be a consistent metric, except that I like what I like.

This may not be as bad as it sounds. One of the only truths about video games I've ever come up with is this: A good game succeeds in spite of its flaws, while a bad game fails in spite of its virtues. You may choose to judge a game by how well it plays to its strengths, or how egregiously it showcases its weaknesses. Sometimes that's an easy call. Sometimes it isn't. The hard part is knowing that, whichever you choose, half of your readers will probably disagree with your priorities.

I think I know which way I'm going to go here.