The Year in Review: The Worst Games of 2008

Above: "It's just me throwing a glaive for an hour and a half. It cost 80 million dollars."

Today through Christmas Eve, we'll be recapping the year that was. Today: The worst games of the year.

To start with, let me say that I played nothing this year as cynical, calculated, or insulting as the two worst games of last year. The generally acceptable level of quality in 2008 extended to the weaker games, most of which were at least competently executed, and only lacking imagination in some crucial way or another.

Take Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law. It was exactly like a (marginally) interactive version of the television program, which I enjoy. But it turns out that it is not fun to (barely) interact with a TV show, or to (almost) affect its storyline. Even when the jokes are good. Who knew?

And when I say that Dark Sector was one of the worst games I played this year, part of the reason why is that it could have been really good. I loved using the glaive, at least at first, and for the first couple of hours of play I was convinced that this game would turn out to be a real sleeper. But then I started getting bogged down in all the little annoyances and aggravations, and it became harder to appreciate what the game was doing well. Ultimately, I think there were too many possibilities left unexplored. Why could you only electrify the glaive in designated hotspots? Why couldn't you shoot out a lightbulb and electrify it that way? If that would have messed up the play balance, there's a simple solution: make an enemy that's invulnerable to electricity. There you go.

Similarly, The Bourne Conspiracy was a great game to look at, but that was all you could really do: look at it. Its total reliance on quicktime events meant that you'd have about all the fun you were going to have with it by the time you'd reached the first driving level. Matt Damon was right when he said they could have made a better Bourne game by trying to be more cerebral.

Look, I just don't find Super Smash Bros. Brawl fun in any way. I apologize. I'll accept that I'm wrong about this. But to the guy who commented on that review at thephoenix.com to make sure everyone knew that I was an idiot and it was a surefire game of the year contender: how are you feeling about that prediction now?*

But there was one game this year that soared well beneath the rest. A game that was not just poorly conceived, but actually physically painful to play. I speak, of course, of Guitar Hero: On Tour, whose non-ergonomic peripheral was even more agonizing than listening to the hot licks of guitar legends like Maroon 5, Smashmouth, and Los Lonely Boys. As I said, on one level I'm amazed they could even put together a Guitar Hero game for the Nintendo DS, but otherwise there was nothing good to come of this. Easily the worst game I played this year.

*Note: After writing this post, I recorded the Brainy Gamer podcast with Spencer Greenwood, who actually did choose Smash Bros. as his game of the year. So much for that zinger.

Tomorrow: The best games of 2008.

A two-pronged Hump Day assault

It is apparently the law that all games bloggers must link to Zero Punctuation, so let me say how much I enjoyed this week's review of Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Yahtzee certainly has the courage of his convictions. I was gratified that he shared many of my sentiments about the game -- except his jokes were much, much better.

After I watched the episode, I revisited my own review to see where we'd overlapped, and found that a helpful reader had commented:

the writer of this article obviously has no knowledge of video games. if you are thinking about getting this game get it, it is a contender for game of the year. hopefully this joke of a review doesn't count on metacritic. PS. i suggest you find another career, seeing as you clearly suck at this one.

Sadly, it's true: My reviews don't count on Metacritic.

Also, via Andrew Sullivan: Move over, Power Glove! Emotiv Systems has introduced a mind-reading game controller. This page is woefully short on specifics, but I, for one, welcome the ability to remove my stupid, stubby thumbs from the play-control equation.

I wonder how heightened emotions would affect your digital mind waves? I get angry pretty quickly when I'm losing. If I were to try to use this to play something like Unreal Tournament, my character would soon start committing suicide upon respawning, just to save time.

It was a graveyard Smash

My curmudgeonly review of Super Smash Bros. Brawl is now up at thephoenix.com. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, like my Wii cheerily glowing blue to indicate a new message from Nintendo HQ that threatens my life, this post will probably be the last I have to say about it.

For all that I've already written about Smash Bros., I think the end of the review comes closest to the core of what I'm trying to say. The game derives all of its appeal from classic Nintendo games, but it doesn't give anything back to those games. This may be the sort of distinction that's clear only within my own mind, and makes no sense to anybody else. I'll try to explain, one last time.

When I play a game, especially a good game, I want to surrender myself fully to the world it depicts. I want to play make-believe for a few hours. In a strange way, Hyrule, Zebes, and the Mushroom Kingdom live on in my memory as places I've actually been, where I did things that actually mattered. This isn't to say that I can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality, only that the experience of playing a great game is one of displacement. Smash Bros. pops that bubble.

The obvious objection is that Smash Bros. is intended to be played multiplayer, which is true. But online play without headsets may as well be single-player. These days, I can't necessarily get a group of living, breathing people together to play on short notice. I did play two-player Smash Bros. with a friend of mine, though, and we had a pretty good time. The question I always ask my critic self in these situations is this: Am I having fun because I'm spending time with my friends, or because we're playing this particular game? It's usually the former.

I am willing to accept that I'm probably just off-base in some fundamental way on this game, and that's okay. It's not something like Mass Effect, where I'm pretty sure I'm taking crazy pills. I'm glad so many people are playing and enjoying Smash Bros., because anything that gets people playing and discussing games is a net positive as far as I'm concerned.

Overdrawn at the memory bank: The power of nostalgia in games

I've been splitting my time recently between Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. The two games couldn't have less in common, except for one thing: they both tap into a deep well of nostalgia as an implicit part of the gameplay. These aren't your typical sequels or spin-offs. Unless you had some prior emotional attachment to the source material, it's likely that these games wouldn't make any sense to you at all.

Smash Bros. draws on well over two decades of some of the most popular and enduring gaming franchises around, from Donkey Kong through Pikmin. For those of us of a certain age in the early 1990s, the question of who would win a fight between Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog was a matter of grave import. Now, we can finally learn the answer. Hell, if you've ever played a video game in your life, you've probably spent time with more than one of the Smash Bros. roster. The whole experience of playing it is like being on a runaway train through nostalgia country.

But here's the thing I don't get about Smash Bros.'s popularity: The game is terrible.

Above: Your childhood memories exploited like the Brazilian rainforest.

I have never had fun with a Smash Bros. game in my life. Mostly, that's because the weird, floaty controls sometimes make me wonder if I'm commanding the right character. (I will grant the possibility that with four combatants onscreen, I often am trying to command the wrong character.) Now they've added a crappy adventure mode called The Subspace Emissary, and it is such a lousy example of platforming that I would have stopped playing it after about half an hour if beating it weren't the only way to unlock several major characters. The controls just aren't made for precision jumping and environmental navigation, and with few exceptions the levels are repetitive and boring.

The Subspace Emissary, to its credit, doesn't really try to hide that it's just playing you like a fiddle. There's a story that makes no sense -- something about all the evil Nintendo characters trying to turn the good Nintendo characters into trophies -- but it's all just an excuse to burn through the cultural capital Nintendo has built up over the years. I'm reminded of when a heel pro wrestler gets on the microphone and insults the city he's in, just to score some easy boos. Smash Bros. is one cheap pop after another:

Look! It's Link, from The Legend of Zelda!

*Cheers*

Look, it's King Dedede!

*Boos*

Considering that Nintendo has been coasting on its major franchises in this generation, all Smash Bros. does for me is remind me that there was a time when these characters and their accompanying motifs meant I was in for a wonderful time. For all Nintendo's innovation on the hardware side with the Wii, Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime 3 were only more of the same, with a slightly different control scheme (in fairness, Super Mario Galaxy did innovate to a greater degree). And that's the case here.

Nintendo is banking, literally, on the fact that millions of people already know and love these characters. Obviously, if you like the game to begin with, this will strike you as no problem. For me, I can't help but feel like Nintendo's exploiting their most valuable properties -- or they're exploiting me.

Crisis Core similarly looks to the past for inspiration. It's a prequel to one of the grandest achievements in the gaming canon, Final Fantasy VII . But it does something Smash Bros. fails to do, and that's add to the original game instead of just strip-mining it for its vast, revenue-producing resources.

Above: Sustainable, long-term nostalgia farming.

Admittedly, I didn't approach Crisis Core with quite the level of built-in love for its source material as I had for some of the characters and settings in Smash Bros. (Metal Gear Solid and Metroid in particular). I played FFVII only once and loved it, but couldn't give you a detailed synopsis of the story, or the exact materia combination I used to vanquish the Ruby and Emerald Weapons. Still, the last time I played one of these FFVII spin-offs, I think I was doubly disappointed that it wasn't just a bad game -- it was a bad FFVII game.

Well, Crisis Core is a good game. A very good game. It succeeds on its own merits, as a stripped-down, portable RPG. The gameplay reminds me more of Final Fantasy X than VII -- there's no overworld screen, and your character, Zack, travels from one locale to the next essentially on rails. Zack fights battles on his own in a nearly real-time manner. Although you can queue up Zack's next action -- attack, cast a spell, use an item -- you can also guard or evade an enemy's attack at any time. Doing so uses up Action Points, which are analagous to Hit Points and Magic Points, so it's not always the best idea. It helps to streamline the gameplay, while still maintaining that basic Final Fantasy feel.

The Final Fantasy VII connection isn't the crux of Crisis Core's appeal, but it does serve to flesh out the universe and deepen the fanbase's understanding of the events of FFVII. In the original game, Zack was a character seen in flashback. He was integral to the narrative, but only in backstory. Crisis Core puts him center stage. The game essentially is that cutscene blown up to full size.

Consider how well-known characters are used. Sephiroth doesn't just pop up in a cheap cameo, like Frank Sinatra in Around the World in 80 Days. We knew, from Final Fantasy VII, what Sephiroth had done. We didn't understand why. Crisis Core fills in that picture. And in the hero, Zack, we have an inversion of the usual alienated Final Fantasy protagonist. Zack starts off as the idealistic company man, and grows disillusioned as the reality of Shinra and the SOLDIER program becomes clear to him. If you draw a line from Zack's naivete through Cloud's nihilism and his eventual redemption, you'll come up with something like a circle.

In both cases, the callbacks and references to games we already knew and loved work best when they're used as a spice, and not as the main course. Although millions of gamers genuinely enjoy the Smash Bros. gameplay, and a small minority even make money on it in competition, the latest installment strikes me as a bloated, aging rock band playing all its old hits. Nothing about it adds to our appreciation of the source material.

By contrast, Crisis Core crackles with vitality. Instead of reminding me what it felt like to play Final Fantasy VII for the first time, it's giving me something more valuable for the future: memories of what it felt like the first time I played Crisis Core.

Good old Nintendo Wii

Well, after not using it for months caused my the graphics card to partially melt itself, now my Wii seems to be resistant to loading Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Twice it gave me an error message that recommended turning the system off, and now it's displaying the loading screen while making a horrible grinding noise.

Oh, there we go: "An error has occurred. Press the Eject Button, remove the Game Disc, and turn the power off. Please read the Wii Operations Manual for more information."

So that's great. It seems like every time I put a new game into this system, it doesn't want to run it. There's almost always an error message of some kind. Usually it only happens once, though. I feel like I read something about Smash Bros. giving people trouble.

To Google!

Edit: Yep, here it is. Great that Nintendo will pay for shipping for me to get this fixed, but that doesn't really help me file a review next week. Awesome.

Smooth move, Best Buy

All right, unrelenting pressure from my peers in the gaming community, not to mention my editors, led me to pick up Super Smash Bros. Brawl at Best Buy. Generally I'm a big fan of that store, not least because I can walk in two days after the release of a popular game and buy it without being guilt-tripped about not reserving it by some choad wearing a Bluetooth earpiece. Best Buy just takes your money and gives you the game! It's a revolutionary business model.

Even so, I was pretty upset to see this:


Did you catch that? Take a closer look.


Yep. And that was plastered on every one of the dozens of copies they had on display. I mean, if you're going to try to gouge gullible consumers, you could at least make sure you're spelling your stupid sales pitch correctly.

I still like them better than Gamestop.

Super Smash Bros streets early

Word is that several retailers have broken the street date for Super Smash Bros Brawl. This according to threads on NeoGAF and Hipinion, so I'm convinced. One piece of advice: You're better off checking your local independent stores instead of bigtime chains, what with all their "rules."

Still can't say I care too much. I don't think Nintendo's PR firm is sending us a copy, either.

But you guys feel free to go nuts on that thing.

Buy Smash Bros. for $19.82

No, that's not a typo. As of this writing, Super Smash Bros. Brawl is available for pre-order at Wal-Mart.com for under $20 (shipping raises it by a couple bucks). Limited quantities? Bait and switch? Colossal corporate screw-up? Either way, you probably should act fast if you're interested.

(In fact, the site has several games available for pre-order well under market value, such as Haze and The Club. That lowers the likelihood that somebody messed up.)

Update: They fixed it! It's now $49.82.