My Year in Gaming
It's not an extensive list, but I'm going to spend a little time talking about some of my favorite games I've played this year.
Fallout 3
I mean, it's obviously good, and clearly the creation of madmen. I'm around 15 hours into the game, and it doesn't feel like I could be any more than maybe, at most, a third of the way through. It's expansive on a scale that boggles the mind for a single-player game and insanely immersive.My two main (really, only) complaints directly stem from that immersion, actually.
First, the one that is reasonable: I want to be able to interact with the environment more. I realize that making an open-sandbox game with this kind of scope is an enormous and vastly expensive undertaking, but it bothers the shit out of me that I can't break windows and explore a lot of the buildings, or climb up a pile of concrete blocks and steel rebar. It's constant, glaring proof that I'm playing a videogame, which is antithetical to their goal of creating not just a game, but a world that you can fully explore with a character you've known since its birth.
Now, the unreasonable: I hate a lot of the dialogue options. This isn't going to change until AI advances to the point at which it can (and will) launch missiles at Russia, but it's still an annoyance to me. They let me create my character in exactly the image of my choosing (down to the slope of the brow and the concavity of the philtrum), yet in conversation I must choose between caricatures of moustache-twirling villainy, Final Fantasy-level heroism, or extraordinary selfishness? I realize it's difficult to offer a huge range of options, but the level of control and variability the rest of the game offers just highlights this (sadly unavoidable) shortcoming.
Bioshock
I should love this game. I understand this, and all those who tell me that I'm deficient for not being enamored with it are probably correct. But I just couldn't get into it.
I loved the setting and the art design, truly and with all my heart. But I would've liked it more as a survival/horror game than as a shooter. The action gets in the way of my appreciation for the game, and after the fifth fucking room in a row filled with rambling old women and machine-gun turrets, I decided to put this one aside for a while.
Mirror's Edge
Yeah, it's a game basically designed for me to love it. My complete and utter fascination with le parkour has been documented in the past, though I am unable to find my old entry to link to. Further, my appreciate for petite Asian women is generally well-known to many of my friends. Thus I'm sure it comes as no surprise that I love Mirror's Edge, a game about a petite Asian woman running around a city using parkour magics.
One aspect of the game deserving special attention is its music. The game adjusts its ethereal, electronic score to perfectly fit the speed at which you are moving, or the direness of the situation in which you find yourself. I have never witnessed music interact (and enhance) a game as flawlessly as Mirror's Edge does it.
That's not to say it's perfect though--just nearly perfect. The combat system is heavily based on timed button presses (aka "quick time events"), but is too unforgiving in its demand for accuracy. I don't mind a high level of lethality in combat, especially in a game where you're a skinny chick in a tank-top fighting SWAT, but combat is not the point of the game. They are not your enemies because they want to kill you; they are your enemies because they want to stop you. The game deifies momentum and doesn't have any kind of indicator of your health (sure, the screen flashes red when you're struck, but the true violence that bullet wound has done to you isn't the physical damage, but the jerking, graceless halt it forces upon you). Within this framework, I can understand making combat difficult. But the motor operations that comprise "combat" aren't difficult ("Hit Y when the cop's gun turns red to disarm him"), just frustrating as fuck. And worse than the annoying mechanic of it, the length and frequency of encounters where you need to stop running to duck behind cover and kick some dude in the knees while getting shot in the ass is a bit ridiculous. It reeks of hesitation and fear that a game with nothing but running away wouldn't be attractive enough to the mainstream, American, weened-on-Quake-and-Halo audience. In trying to hedge their bet, the brilliant but decidedly cowardly developers ended up doing a severe disservice to their product.
Still, it's a fucking fantastic game.
I've got a lot to say about Prince of Persia, too, but the workday is over.
Fallout 3
I mean, it's obviously good, and clearly the creation of madmen. I'm around 15 hours into the game, and it doesn't feel like I could be any more than maybe, at most, a third of the way through. It's expansive on a scale that boggles the mind for a single-player game and insanely immersive.My two main (really, only) complaints directly stem from that immersion, actually.
First, the one that is reasonable: I want to be able to interact with the environment more. I realize that making an open-sandbox game with this kind of scope is an enormous and vastly expensive undertaking, but it bothers the shit out of me that I can't break windows and explore a lot of the buildings, or climb up a pile of concrete blocks and steel rebar. It's constant, glaring proof that I'm playing a videogame, which is antithetical to their goal of creating not just a game, but a world that you can fully explore with a character you've known since its birth.
Now, the unreasonable: I hate a lot of the dialogue options. This isn't going to change until AI advances to the point at which it can (and will) launch missiles at Russia, but it's still an annoyance to me. They let me create my character in exactly the image of my choosing (down to the slope of the brow and the concavity of the philtrum), yet in conversation I must choose between caricatures of moustache-twirling villainy, Final Fantasy-level heroism, or extraordinary selfishness? I realize it's difficult to offer a huge range of options, but the level of control and variability the rest of the game offers just highlights this (sadly unavoidable) shortcoming.
Bioshock
I should love this game. I understand this, and all those who tell me that I'm deficient for not being enamored with it are probably correct. But I just couldn't get into it.
I loved the setting and the art design, truly and with all my heart. But I would've liked it more as a survival/horror game than as a shooter. The action gets in the way of my appreciation for the game, and after the fifth fucking room in a row filled with rambling old women and machine-gun turrets, I decided to put this one aside for a while.
Mirror's Edge
Yeah, it's a game basically designed for me to love it. My complete and utter fascination with le parkour has been documented in the past, though I am unable to find my old entry to link to. Further, my appreciate for petite Asian women is generally well-known to many of my friends. Thus I'm sure it comes as no surprise that I love Mirror's Edge, a game about a petite Asian woman running around a city using parkour magics.
One aspect of the game deserving special attention is its music. The game adjusts its ethereal, electronic score to perfectly fit the speed at which you are moving, or the direness of the situation in which you find yourself. I have never witnessed music interact (and enhance) a game as flawlessly as Mirror's Edge does it.
That's not to say it's perfect though--just nearly perfect. The combat system is heavily based on timed button presses (aka "quick time events"), but is too unforgiving in its demand for accuracy. I don't mind a high level of lethality in combat, especially in a game where you're a skinny chick in a tank-top fighting SWAT, but combat is not the point of the game. They are not your enemies because they want to kill you; they are your enemies because they want to stop you. The game deifies momentum and doesn't have any kind of indicator of your health (sure, the screen flashes red when you're struck, but the true violence that bullet wound has done to you isn't the physical damage, but the jerking, graceless halt it forces upon you). Within this framework, I can understand making combat difficult. But the motor operations that comprise "combat" aren't difficult ("Hit Y when the cop's gun turns red to disarm him"), just frustrating as fuck. And worse than the annoying mechanic of it, the length and frequency of encounters where you need to stop running to duck behind cover and kick some dude in the knees while getting shot in the ass is a bit ridiculous. It reeks of hesitation and fear that a game with nothing but running away wouldn't be attractive enough to the mainstream, American, weened-on-Quake-and-Halo audience. In trying to hedge their bet, the brilliant but decidedly cowardly developers ended up doing a severe disservice to their product.
Still, it's a fucking fantastic game.
I've got a lot to say about Prince of Persia, too, but the workday is over.