Year in review: Honorable mentions

Today through Christmas Eve, we'll be recapping the year that was. Today: 2009 honorable mentions.

We may never see another year like 2007 again, when we were treated to one astonishing game after another. But 2009 was no slouch. Like last year, quality was generally high, with just a few stinkers, and even those often suffered more from understandable fatal flaws than from all-encompassing ineptitude. No doubt about it, I played a lot of good games this year.

In chronological order:

Skate 2: Still extremely challenging, Skate 2 improved upon its predecessor mostly by giving you the ability to walk up steps, which was very necessary.

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin: A mish-mash of styles that didn't all work together, this game had enough high points to be worth playing.

Killzone 2: Graphically impressive and with a fun, team-based multiplayer mode, it wasn't one of the best FPSes ever made, even if you do have a functioning brain. But it was a good one.

MadWorld: Sort of a better idea than it was a game, MadWorld was striking and unusual, and comically violent.

Guitar Hero: Metallica: I'll be honest with you. This, not The Beatles, was my favorite music game of the year.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena: This would be here if it were only the high-definition remake of Escape from Butcher Bay. The Dark Athena chapter is not quite as good, but actually better than I thought people gave it credit for.

Punch-Out!!: Absolutely worthy of the name. Extremely fun. Also controller-throwingly difficult. (But what isn't, really?)

Ghostbusters: The Video Game: Funny, breezy, colorful -- the definition of good but not great. It's also my nephew Sam's favorite game to play with me, besides X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Which reminds me...

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: I never wrote about this game, but I played it a little and found it to be a fun, good-looking beat-'em-up with some neat cinematic events. It's also unbelievably gory. Did I mention Sam is four years old?

Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal: Telltale is doing a fine job with the LucasArts relaunches. Not so fine that I sought out the subsequent episodes, but hey, I'm a busy man.

'Splosion Man: Another challenging throwback to the sidescrolling era, this played like Sonic the Hedgehog mixed with the "Barrel Blast" level of Donkey Kong Country.

Fat Princess: A surprisingly relaxing take on competitive capture-the-flag gaming.

The Beatles: Rock Band: Well, it is the Beatles, after all.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: A really slick package.

Assassin's Creed II: It takes a good eight hours to get to the point where this game is fun. Once there, it can be, at times, brilliant, but it still gets in its own way too much.

Tomorrow: The worst games of 2009.

Quiz: The year in swooning

Match each of these games with the breathless excerpt from its review.

1. The Beatles: Rock Band
2. Batman: Arkham Asylum
3. Killzone 2
4. Resident Evil 5
5. Red Faction: Guerrilla
6. Street Fighter IV
7. inFamous
8. Brütal Legend
9. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

A. "...one of the most memorable video games ever created. Not because it is particularly innovative, but because the mixture of shooting, climbing, creeping, thinking, laughing and simple astonishment works perfectly."

B. "There are very, very few games which truly make me sit back and go 'wow'. Among the slew of games that I’ve reviewed this year, there are only a couple that I really enjoyed playing, and continue to do so. [This] is one such game – even though I aced my Public Speaking and English Literature classes, words only slur together when I try to describe this game."

C. "This is simply a superb genre defining experience with two unforgettable endings."

D. "This action-adventure is so smart, so well-written, and delivered with such an obvious love for its source material, I daresay it is both the best licensed game ever made, and arguably the best game of its kind in our current console generation."

E. "...provides a transformative entertainment experience. In that sense it may be the most important video game yet made."

F. "The gorgeous graphics, the superb sound, the great (if sometimes twitchy) AI of your partner and the jaw-dropping gameplay take everything that was brilliant about [its predecessor] and ramp it up to the next level, making for one of the best gaming experiences ever!"

G. "This game deserves a place on everyone's shelf, from the most casual fan... to the most hardcore. No matter your personal skill level, you owe it to yourself to buy this game. [Its] incredible art style, rock solid gameplay, and infinitely compelling multiplayer make it stand out as one of best games of this generation."

H. "A fantastic game that sucks you in and doesn't let go... a seamless merger of technology and story telling that raises the bar for the industry."

I. "...the best console first person shooter ever. It will be bested one day, and that is as it should be, but this game has set the proverbial bar so high we reckon it'll be the king for a good long while... Hail to the king, baby."

1. E (New York Times)
2. D (Gamespy)
3. I (Playstation Official Magazine Australia)
4. F (AceGamez)
5. H (Gaming Nexus)
6. G (ZTGameDomain)
7. C (Play)
8. B (MEGamers)
9. A (Cynamite)

Friday afternoon tidbits

I haven't played any video games this week, and I've had no problem falling asleep at night. I hope these two facts are not related.

-Some very smart people are trying to get a new gaming magazine called Kill Screen off the ground. They're trying to raise $3,500 to publish the thing. As of this writing, they're over halfway there. Take a look and see what you think.

-Congratulations to Denis Farr of Vorpal Bunny Ranch, who is the newest writer for GayGamer.net. Here's his first article, "NieR's Gender Confusion."

-Michael Abbott says it's time we paid more attention to the Sims. It's a point he also made persuasively about sports games: lots of non-"core" games actually have incredibly deep role-playing and storytelling elements, if we'd bother to look for them.

I don't know, though. All I ever did when I played the Sims was make a bathroom with glass walls, and then I named two Sims after my friends and got them to kiss.

-This is only marginally related to video games: (former?) NBA player Paul Shirley writes in his ESPN.com column that the Beatles don't hold up. I am glad to see somebody make the anti-Beatles case in this ham-handed a fashion, because it deflects attention from my much milder criticisms of the band. Among Shirley's silly, self-evidently false statements are things like "We were not around for The Beatles. Therefore, we cannot judge their impact on popular music," and "The arrangements used by Oasis are more complex, the sound is denser, the production is better."

Shirley also claims that Dean Koontz is superior to Bram Stoker.

-Hey, since we're not even talking about video games at this point, why not also take a look at Dan Brown's 20 worst sentences? Sometimes I think that I should read one of Brown's books before declaring him a shitty writer, but I really don't think it's necessary.

Friday afternoon tidbits

It's hard to believe it's been 8 years since 9/11. I don't have any commentary, sincere or snarky, nor do I want to say anything about it in relation to video games. Not even, "Really puts it all in perspective!" Just a terrible anniversary to have to mark every year.

-I mentioned in my review of The Beatles: Rock Band that the future of the franchise lies with the Rock Band Network, and not tributes to past bands. Why do I think so? Because of things like this: local rockers the Bon Savants are beta testing the RBN, and video-blogging their efforts. Tell me this isn't going to be an incredible way to hear new music.

The Bon Savants, by the way, are very good and you should listen to them.

-I also really enjoyed Ian Bogost's trenchant, contrarian take on Beatles Rock Band. The comments show what can happen when you take aim at a sacred cow (though it should be said that most are thoughtful in their own right, which is what happens when you've got dudes like Iroquois Pliskin calling you out). I think a lot of people disagreed with the broad brush Ian used to paint the older generation, which is fair, but his point was sound: it is precisely this older generation that pivoted from peace and love to grabbing everything for themselves at the expense of others (giving us gems such as "Get your government hands off my Medicare!"). Is it everybody in that generation? Of course not. But who else is highjacking social progress in this country?

Okay, so the argument does pertain only slightly to the Beatles. Fair enough.

-Two last links about The Beatles: Rock Band. First, John Teti's perceptive takedown of Seth Schiesel's New York Times review. I am very happy to see game reviews getting column inches in the Times, but I am less happy when they are as silly as Seth's was. He means well, I know, but Teti correctly notes that the tack he took in this review was to denigrate the entire medium of video games in order to convince his readers that this one really is good.

Beyond which, whenever I find myself typing in a review that a game is "one of the most," "one of the best," or "important," I delete it and write something else. That way lies madness, not to mention looking like an idiot in retrospect. Sean Sands at Gamers with Jobs notes that, at the time, no one predicted the impact that Guitar Hero would have: "...in November of 2005... No one in our forums was even talking about this odd and expensive game full of cover bands and fairly simplistic gameplay. On the cusp of a cultural phenomenon, no one saw it coming."

And now that everybody knows how important and popular music games are, now we're going to anoint the 800th music game as the most important of all time? It's never that easy. This is selling low and buying high.

-Although she doesn't mention me, I'd like to think I had something to do with moving the gears that resulted in Meghan Watt weighing in on Game Informer's Metacritic article. For the record, although I didn't contact Meghan for comment when I wrote my piece, I did ask OXM editor-in-chief Francesca Reyes to respond. Though she agreed to get back to me, it never happened, and ultimately I felt I had to run the piece as it was, especially after Kevin Gifford's "Game Mag Weaseling" column remarked positively upon the same GI piece.

-In Crispy Gamer, Kyle Orland answers a question I've had for a long time: how PR companies decide what outlets get which games to review. It explains quite a lot about the difficulties we've had in the past getting some companies to respond. PR people from Boston, or with Boston ties, are almost always excited to get covered in the Phoenix. Others may need some convincing.

There does seem to be a quid pro quo involved, too. I understand not wanting to send a first-person shooter to a reviewer who's previously said he hates the genre, sure, but it's infuriating that PR companies may decide to punish reviewers who run negative reviews. I've said it before and I'll say it again: ultimately everybody is better served with honest and tough reviews. If an outlet has a reputation for being hard on games, then wouldn't a positive review from them mean that much more? Won't the median quality of games go up if critics and gamers are demanding more of them? It seems basic to me.

Of course, it takes just one influential publication to trade scores for early access to throw that out the window. And there's more than one.

Hey, that was the longest links post ever. Maybe I should start cutting these into individual posts.

It's not called "Rock Band: The Beatles" for a reason

My review of The Beatles: Rock Band is up now at thephoenix.com. This is probably Harmonix's strongest work in terms of presentation, and I understand that the music of the Beatles is highly regarded in some circles.

Still, it seems like there's no way to talk in a measured way about this game, or the band, without coming off like the proverbial turd in the punch bowl. When I say on Twitter that I'm not a huge fan of the Beatles, I mean exactly that. I'm not taking a veiled dig. I have a couple of their CDs. I find many of their songs to be terrific. And yet I don't make an emotional connection with almost anything they've done, not like I do with my very favorite bands. Therefore I say I like the Beatles. But I am not totally sold on a music game that features only them.

Maybe I buried the lede, too, because the real issue I see is that Rock Band has been the catalyst for introducing people to new bands, and new ways to experience music. This game is more about elevating the Beatles over the player. That's no small distinction. For example, I've developed a habit of delivering a drum solo at the beginning of every Rock Band track -- just a little wailing away while the song cues up. It's a way of making the songs mine. You can't do that in The Beatles. Hit a drum pad before the song starts, and nothing happens, because that sound isn't on the original recording. There goes your live performance feel. (I should say that they did a great job with the audio of shrieking teenaged girls, though.)

More important, it's the game's way of making sure that you don't dare mess with perfection! I'm not a huge fan of that attitude. Past -- and, technically, current -- Rock Band games are about engaging with the music on an equal level. This game, though, is a ball-washing of the highest order. Maybe the Beatles are more deserving of such treatment than any other band, but I don't think any band deserves that treatment. Not now that I've seen the alternatives.

There I go, sounding like I didn't like the game. I liked it a lot! I like the Beatles! I had a lot of fun with this game, and I look forward to playing it more in the future. I am just suspicious of claims of divine authority.

Friday afternoon tidbits

Ah, Labor Day weekend -- that special time when we celebrate the industriousness of the American worker by taking Monday off, sleeping until noon, and getting drunk before dinner. What a great holiday.

-The Beatles: Rock Band is the big story next week. CNN Money ran an interview with the founders of Harmonix, who explain how years of failure set them up for big-time success when the right opportunity arose. They could never have planned for Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but those games have allowed them to realize their original goals in an unexpected way. I'd bet many of the employees -- rockers all -- feel the same way.

-Speaking of The Beatles: Rock Band, we are not allowed to speak of The Beatles: Rock Band. There's a strict embargo in place until tomorrow night, to the point where I'm afraid to even speak the group's name out loud, as though they were Bloody Mary or something. Yet somehow the New York Times went ahead and posted their review, with a September 6 dateline. Crafty. Sadly, I can say nothing more at this point, lest you find my corpse floating in the Charles River, a microphone cord wrapped tightly around my neck.

-Two very interesting takes on Batman: Arkham Asylum from Travis Megill and Justin Keverne. Both are concerned with the game's portrayal of mental illness as something to be stigmatized, instead of the health problem it actually is. Although I did take note of the shrieking "Lunatic" enemy type, none of this occurred to me while I was playing. It's a fair point. Even though the majority of the foes are garden-variety criminals, Batman does lay a beating on a good number of inmates who've committed no crime, and may understandably be freaked out by a six-foot bat in their midst.

The argument you could make in defense of the game is this. Many writers in the Batman universe have explored the idea that Batman himself helps to foment the crime that he fights. Gotham City is often seen to be feeding on itself. Arkham, too, can be interpreted to be creating the dangerous, criminally insane element that it's ostensibly there to cure. In all likelihood, these inmates were less dangerous before they arrived there. This doesn't exactly play out in the course of the game, and I wouldn't hold it up as a bulletproof argument. But there is something to it.

-Another good critical compilation at Critical Distance, this time with a look at the strange saga of PixelVixen707. Part 1 is by L.B. Jeffries (himself writing under a pseudonym!), and part 2 is by Michel McBride-Charpentier. As an ARG, PV707 was undeniably well executed, although it was strange that this was not an opt-in game. Pen names are one thing, but misrepresenting oneself is another, even when it's not malicious. It still makes me feel a little weird. No one can deny that "Rachael Webster" was a valuable voice in the games blogosphere. Whether she was written by J.C. Hutchins or someone else, it's too bad that her contributions ran out when the marketing budget did.

-Chris Dahlen's awesome weekly Edge column continues with Dr. Demento's take on Kind of Bloop, the cover of Kind of Blue done entirely in chiptune. You read that right: Dr. Demento is still alive.

-Finally, Simon Ferrari created a very cool tool: a game bloggers search engine, which exclusively searches "independent, non-commercial game bloggers." You'll never guess who's the top result for "Fairway Solitaire."

Labor away, my friends.

Friday afternoon tidbits

By the time you read this post, I will be watching District 9. I am expecting it to be awesome. While I'm doing that, why not check out these links?

-The big story this week was the New York Times' massive article about The Beatles: Rock Band. It's an extensively reported piece with quotes from all the big players, plus some insightful commentary about the value of music games (some of which echo what I wrote about earlier this year, here and here). Excellent reading. I also realized just now that it's The Beatles: Rock Band, and not Rock Band: The Beatles, in contrast to Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and Guitar Hero: Metallica. Not that there's much to take away from that, but it's interesting.

-A rather bizarre conversation developed earlier this week, between Penny Arcade's Gabe and Tycho, on the subject of pick-up artists. Amanda Marcotte wrote a perceptive response to their exchange, with which I agree almost fully. I just want to say this: I know Gabe isn't some cretinous, cave-dwelling woman hater, but perhaps because of that, his comments go far toward illuminating the unfortunate mindset that many in our community seem to have about male-female relationships (which we also talked about a bit last week). Still, this isn't a problem exclusive to the gaming community, for better or worse.

-Since we're getting all political here, take a gander at L.B. Jeffries' explication of TIE Fighter as a post-9/11 parable. It's a fascinating and educated take on the nature of empire, which also reminded me that TIE Fighter was freaking sweet.

-Bill Harris's running series about playing through the NHL playoffs with his son nearly melted the ice around my cold, cold heart. I recommend you start from the beginning, because otherwise you probably won't be quite as mushy as I was when you get to the end.

(As I said to Dan Bruno on Twitter, this whole experiment -- in which Bill actually made a playoff schedule for him and Eli to follow -- reminded me of Ben Abraham's Far Cry 2 perma-death experiment, which is still ongoing.)

-Congratulations to Simon Parkin for his Games Media Award nomination. He's one of the best, and in very good company.