Year in review: The worst games of 2009

Above: "It's just me hitting orcs with an axe 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.

For some reason, every year when I go back over the reviews I've written, I'm much more picky about what to include on the list of the worst games than the best. I'm not sure why. I think it stems from a genuine desire to respect other people's opinions. Even though I'm comfortable panning something popular, it seems like a dick move to take the next step and declare something to be definitively bad, especially when I'm in the minority. It's a good thing when people hold different opinions about games, isn't it?

Even so, the only thing people like arguing about more than a list of the best games of the year is a list of the worst games of the year, so here you go.

First, there are the games that undeniably had their merits. Not necessarily badly made, they were lacking in some crucial area.

New Super Mario Bros. had the classic level design that fans loved, not to mention graphics and sounds that put anybody over the age of 20 on the express train to Nostalgia Land. Thanks to insanely frustrating co-op play, it also nearly caused me to have to spend the night on the couch. Hot tip: Don't play video games with me unless you enjoy profanity.

I covered Brütal Legend already, in the superlatives post, so I won't say much more about it here, except that no game this year disappointed me more, because I expected so much. My own fault, I guess.

Scribblenauts is a terrific idea that works sporadically in a toy-like way, but didn't make for much of a game. I would definitely play whatever 5th Cell does next, but I hope they listened to some of the criticisms of this game.

Wanted: Weapons of Fate was actually a fun way to spend an afternoon, but you've got to be kidding me, charging $60 for a five-hour game that has no multiplayer. I'm all for keeping your game short if the quality is high, but at some point you're just showing contempt for the consumer. (By all accounts, it sounds like Rogue Warrior is a much worse game, and is only half as long, so I kind of wish I'd played it, if only for this list.)

Next are the games I really didn't enjoy, to the point where I actually couldn't understand why people liked them. inFamous is chief among these, with a robust Metacritic score of 85, and many vocal fans. There was almost nothing I liked about it. I thought it was self-serious, I thought the magnetic platforming was sloppy and intrusive, and I thought the combat was dull. Prototype was far superior.

Like its predecessor, Puzzle Quest: Galactrix was a great idea with a horrible execution. The Nintendo DS version especially was ugly, slow, choppy, and all around unpleasant to play. None of the problems from Challenge of the Warlords were rectified. I won't be playing the next one.

Arcade-style sports games are a great idea, but The Bigs 2 was a terrible one. Although the home run derby made for a passable side game, the problem with the main game was that, with all its exaggerations and hyperbole, it lost sight of the spirit of baseball. NBA Jam was great because it took what's enjoyable about basketball and amplified it. The Bigs 2 took what's enjoyable about baseball and threw it in the trash.

We're really into the dreck now. The Godfather Part II would have been nothing more than a lousy GTA clone, if it weren't carrying such an august name. Badly made games are a dime a dozen, but games that crap all over the legacy of one of the greatest American films are rare indeed. Frances Ford Coppola would be furious about this, if he were still alive.

But the worst game I played this year was also the first game I played this year. Lord of the Rings: Conquest was a viscerally unpleasant game to play. It was just bursting with bad decisions. Believe me, I take no pleasure in knowing that a lot of people lost their jobs when Pandemic closed down recently, but if you want to know why it happened, this game is a good place to start.

Tomorrow: The best games of 2009.

The Bigs 2 comes up small

Above: Dustin Pedroia, looking somehow even less human than usual.

My review of The Bigs 2 is up now at thephoenix.com.

I am by no means an expert on sports games. The reason I wanted to play The Bigs 2 is that I expected it to be unlike most sports games. And it is, to some degree, but a big part of the reason I didn't like it turned out to be the extent to which it betrayed the game of baseball.

In my life, I've been fortunate to attend a couple of significant baseball games. My favorite memory is game 3 of the 2003 ALDS, the Boston Red Sox against the Oakland Athletics. The Sox had dropped the first two games in Oakland, and were facing elimination at home. After the game went into extra innings, the Red Sox brought in pinch-hitter Trot Nixon, a fan favorite and a lefty who'd been on the bench to start the game. Trot launched the game-winning bomb into the center-field seats. You know what, I could almost feel the shockwave from that blast.

The Bigs 2 does a good job of rendering that type of thing. When a "big blast" home run bursts into flame, streaks across the sky like a comet, smashes into a building, and shatters all the windows, I'd say that's faithful to the spirit of the sport. It's exaggerated and cartoonish, sure, but it captures something true about the way a game-changing home run feels. It takes something real and pushes it to the extreme.

Most of the rest of the game does not do this, usually for less obvious reasons. The fielding animations are just terrible -- there are hardly any of them, and the transition from a fielder's picking up the ball and actually throwing it is cumbersome. Fielding at all is bizarrely difficult, because your fielders stop running well before you have a chance to tell where the ball is in relation to them. These fielders are actually slower than their real-life counterparts.

As for the mini-games that mark every dramatic catch, they're not only insanely difficult (for you, not for the computer), but they bear no resemblance to what the player onscreen is actually doing. It's as though another game entirely parachuted in for just those sequences.

Batting is a little weird too. I understand that the pace needs to be quicker than in a faithful sim. Yet I can't really understand why The Bigs 2 punishes you for taking a pitch. If you see a pitch coming that's not in your batter's wheelhouse, you'd think the smart move would be take the strike. But doing so fills up the other team's turbo meter, so you have to just flail away at every throw. That's stupid. In all the time I spent with this game -- which, I'll grant you, was not a lifetime, because I disliked it so much -- I never once saw a batter walk.

I mentioned this in the review, but perhaps not strongly enough: I hate, hate, hate the way this game portrays the players. To a man, they are depicted as mean, joyless, roided-up idiots. When the art isn't inadvertently comic (Jonathan Papelbon's head looks like Charlie Brown's), it's just frightening (Joe Mauer does not, in real life, walk around looking like he's spoiling for a fight). I'm only half-joking in the review when I say they should have made J.D. Drew into a literal robot. A great way to make a cartoon-like baseball game that still showed love and respect for the sport would have been to try to represent the players' personalities in an outlandish way.

But that's not what The Bigs 2 is about. It's about turning baseball into just another violent, stupid, adolescent power trip.

(Did I just do the thing where the blog post is more interesting than the published review?)