Now that the end is in sight in terms of 2009’s video games, I thought I’d look back at all the games I played this year. I’ll definitely be playing Scribblenauts, Dragon Age: Origins, and Borderlands before the year’s over, and I may also be playing Uncharted 2 or Brutal Legend. But they’re all games that I’ll be spending a lot of time with, and likely won’t have enough time to fully assess.
I played a lot of games in 2009. I could manage to count 23 of them, since I’m only looking at games that I played for the first time. This means that I’m not counting Thief: Deadly Shadows, Dungeon Siege, Warcraft 3, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and Beyond Good and Evil, since I’ve played those all before.
That being said, I’m going to go through my list in alphabetical order and try to give some kind of brief rating and review to each of them.
Braid
Amongst downloadable XBox Live Arcade titles, Braid is a superstar. While it doesn’t quite fit in with the casual fare that permeates downloadable console catalogs, it’s a good game to play in small chunks. Many of the puzzles can be so maddeningly difficult as to break your brain, but there’s an immense sense of satisfaction when you finally figure them out.
I played the PC version, since I have no XBox, but while the Steam release had some issues, it was worth the wait. I played it, my wife played it, and I wrote a series of hints that ended up near the top of the google search results.
Braid’s story was a bit hard to follow, introduced as it was in small chunks at the beginning of each of the game’s six worlds, and it got really odd at the end. But the game was more about the puzzles than anything else, so all else is forgivable. I’ll give the game a B.
Crysis
Before its launch, and for a number of months afterwards, Crysis‘s big marketing line was that it would bring your $2000 gaming rig to its knees with its amazing graphics. That’s probably why it didn’t sell as well as the developers might have hoped. Crysis was good, although overall I’ll say that I preferred CryTek’s earlier title Far Cry.
Crysis was almost like two separate games, as the gameplay during the second half is drastically different from the first half. Personally, I prefer the first half, as it was much closer to the gameplay in Far Cry. I could sneak around to scout an area, snipe off a few men, then let the rest come to me. It felt strategic and fun. The zero-gravity segments in the second half of the game were disorienting and confusing. I found myself backtracking unintentionally, and the alien enemies weren’t nearly as interesting to fight as the human opponents. The segments in which you fly a fighter jet were even worse. More often than not, I’d crash and burn but never know exactly what killed me.
Towards the end of the game, during a battle on an aircraft carrier, the game froze. Every time. I was never actually able to see the end of the game, which I assume was well under an hour away. I must have tried twenty times to get through that battle, but the game froze every single time. Considering the non-fun segments and the bug at the end, I’ll have to give Crysis a C+.
Defense Grid: The Awakening
As far as Tower Defense games go, I found Defense Grid to be strictly average. It held my attention long enough to play through the entire game, but I found the aliens to be generic, the story to be uninteresting, and the computer narrator’s melodramatic dialogue to be unbelievable, as the computer got more emotional about a hinted-at past war than most humans would get. The computer’s odd fixation on raspberries was a bit funny, but that small bit of humor didn’t make up for the rest of the game. I’ll give this one a C+.
Dead Space
Being the best survival horror game I’ve played in years is no mean feat. That’s what puts Dead Space in the running for the best game that I played in 2009.
It’s nearly impossible for me to talk about Dead Space without comparing it to Resident Evil, as I believe that Dead Space has neatly filled in the survival horror niche once occupied by the earlier Resident Evil games. But Dead Space is certainly its own animal, and is an entirely new generation of survival horror title. For one thing, Dead Space is more of a shooter than any of the original survival horror games (Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Clocktower) ever were. It has the best collection of weapons I’ve seen in a shooter since Doom 3, a weapon upgrade system that I like even better than Resident Evil’s, and some excellent gameplay elements such as zero-gravity areas, vacuum areas, ship-mounted weaponry for firing at targets in space, and the kinesis and stasis modules.
Dead Space is certainly a game that I’ll return to and play again some day. I’m doubting that I’ll go for the trophy where you have to play the entire game with only a plasma cutter and no other weapons, but I’ll enjoy my replay nonetheless. Dead Space gets a solid A.
Desktop Tower Defense DS
I was a huge fan of the flash version of Desktop Tower Defense for a long time. I still believe it to be one of the best tower defense games ever made. As simple as it is, it’s got a lot of complexity and balance. Building new mazes for the creeps to traverse and arranging things perfectly can be quite a challenge, and if you start on advanced strategies like juggling, things get even more complex. The game begins simple, but has a lot of nuance.
For some reason, since I bought this game, I haven’t played my DS nearly as often as I used to. So I haven’t put a lot of time into the portable verion of Desktop Tower Defense. But they’ve added quite a lot of new modes, plus a number of achievements. Although not being able to share those achievements online somehow detracts from the experience, I’ll still enjoy trying to get them. Probably on an airplane at some point in the future. I’ll give Desktop Tower Defense DS a B-.
Dragon Quest 4 DS
Back in the day, when I played this game on a friend’s NES, I absolutely loved it. The charm and the fun are still there. I haven’t completed Dragon Quest 4 since beginning the NES version, but I’m easily halfway into the game. Once again, I just haven’t spent much time with the DS recently. I know that will change when Scribblenauts drops. But as far as RPGs for the DS, I haven’t seen many better. C+
Fairway Solitaire
While Fairway Solitaire is without doubt a casual game, it takes plain old solitaire and adds a golf theme to make it really interesting. Streaks where you don’t have to use cards from the deck become “long drives”, sandtraps and water hazards become cards that are inaccessible, and you can collect extra golf clubs that act as cards up your sleeve. While explaining these intracacies are beyond the scope of this mini-review, you should take my word that this game is amongst the better casual games that I’ve played this past year. B-
Fallout 3
While I didn’t go through all the expansions like Brandon did, I spent a lot of time playing Fallout 3. I played three characters, and maxxed out my levels on two of them. And even though it wasn’t entirely deserving of the “Oblivion-with-guns” moniker that it got in so many reviews, there was enough of that to detract from the game. All the things that I disliked about the Oblivion engine were still problems in Fallout 3, and none of the things that I’d loved so much about Oblivion were replaced with adequate substitutes. The charm of the first two Fallout titles was likewise lacking. As you can probably tell, I much preferred Oblivion to Fallout 3.Still, I did enjoy my time playing Fallout 3. GFW, while it does suck, gave me the ability to grab some achievements, and I got about 90% of the ones available, including every damn bobblehead in the game. I loved tearing up slavers with the shishkebab, I loved melting Combine troops with a plasma rifle, and that nuclear explosion was a thing of beauty. I’d just love to have seen more Wasteland in Fallout 3. You know, some snake squeezins, or perhaps a Scorpitron. Fallout 3 gets a B.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Far Cry 2. I knew that it was an open-world game and that it was significantly different from both the original Far Cry and from Crysis. Far Cry removed a number of the elements that I’d liked so much about those two games: The science fiction elements, and lying prone for purposes of sneaking. I wish I’d been able to record achievements in the game. I went out of my way to grab every diamond in the northern section of the map – had I been able to get an achievement for it, I’d likely have done the same for the southern map. The game also has some really silly conventions. Final Fantasy 12
The only other Final Fantasy games I’ve played are Final Fantasy 4 on the DS and Final Fantasy 9 back on the original Playstation. These are loong games. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 12 for years now. I tend to play for 4-6 months before getting burned out and shelving the game for a couple months. But then I go back to it. I’m still only about 2/3 of the way through the game and I plan to go back to it soon, although I’m sure I’ll quickly shelve it again when Borderlands and Dragon Age: Origins come out in October.
Galactrix
I absolutely loved Puzzle Quest. And so I was very excited for Galactrix. I’m sad to say that I was seriously disappointed with the game. The touch screen controls are terrible. Selecting the item you want with the stylus is often more of a challenge than fighting battles. And the game’s loading screens are frequent and very long. The game’s minigames can be fun once you unlock them, and tricking out your ship with improved equipment is probably the best part of the game. Overall, Puzzle Quest was a far better game. Galactrix gets a D.
Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters was a mixed bag. There’s a lot of good, and a lot of bad. My biggest complaint about the game is the uneven difficulty. There are some moments that are just way too hard. This forced me to play through the game on “casual” difficulty. I also hit a number of bugs where certain plot triggers just wouldn’t fire, and I had to reload my last save, after which things worked fine.
Lost Planet
Seldom have I had a worse experience with a game that I had with the PC port of Lost Planet. Most of my complaints had to do with the fact that it’s the worst PC port of a console game that I’ve ever played, but the game engine is also terrible – I have a hard time imagining that I’d have enjoyed the 360 version much more. This is the only game in my list that gets a definite F.
Mad World
I understand that my negative take on Mad World is primarily opinion. I know that other people (such as Brandon) really enjoyed Mad World. But I didn’t like the game at all. At all. I played nearly halfway through it (I’m guessing) hoping that it would get better, but I eventually just got bored and frustrated.
Mass Effect
If Brandon doesn’t kill me for my take on Mad World, then he’ll probably kill me for my take on Mass Effect. In a word: meh. The game was fine, but I didn’t get nearly as much out of it as everyone else seemed to. The story was really interesting, I’ll give you that, and Bioware always does an amazing job with the dialogue. But to me, the gameplay’s the thing. And the engine that Mass Effect ran on (actually, the engine that a lot of Bioware games have run on) felt old and klunky to me.
Okami
I’d heard about Okami for a long time before having picked up a copy. I got the Wii version, although Okami was originally a playstation 2 game. And I loved it.
Penny Arcade Adventures: Episode 2: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness
I’m a big fan of Penny-Arcade. I love their style of humor, and of course I love the bulk of their subject matter: video games, tabletop gaming, and general geekery. I’ve played and loved both their games. How can you not love a game where you’re battling hobos, mimes, barbershop quartets, insane asylum inmates, and robots with a perverse sexual attraction to fruit? I give this one a B. It’s inexpensive, and if you buy it on Steam, you can shoot for the Steam achievements.
I’ve certainly written enough here about my love for Pixeljunk Monsters. Although I didn’t start playing it in 2009, I likely won’t finish before the end of the year. Honestly, I’ll probably end up putting it aside again as I start playing Muramasa and Scribblenauts. Although I’ve only got two levels remaining in the expansion, there are still plenty of trophy challenges for me to tackle. The “Four Tree Rainbow” challenge is harder than it looked, and the “Rainbow Team” challenge looks to be incredibly difficult. In Pixeljunk Monsters lingo, to “rainbow” a level is to complete it perfectly – without losing a single villager. Pixeljunk Monsters gets an A from me simply because I can’t think of many other games I’ve ever gotten so much prolonged play out of.
While I’ve enjoyed many Popcap games in the past – Bookworm Adventures and Zuma come to mind – I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed any of them as much as Plants vs Zombies. I only played the game for a couple weeks, but during those weeks, I played it hard. My initial take on the game was a poor one – how could a tower defense game with only six linear lanes have the depth of something like Desktop Tower Defense? You know what? I grew out of that one quickly, and became a Plants vs Zombies addict. Steam offers achievements for the game, and PvZ became the first game on which I’d ever gotten 100% of the achievements. Plants vs Zombies gets an A. It’s all about the spikerocks, gloom shrooms and garlic.
This game totally fails, which is sad. It seemed like it had so much going for it. Great story, a very nice engine with good graphics, and the upgrade and combo system seemed like it was going to work out very nicely. If only it weren’t for all the bottomless pits. There is nothing as maddeningly frustrating as falling into the same pit for the fourth time when you have to wait for 5 minutes in between attempts. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed gets a D for bad platforming.
Tags: braid, crysis, dead space, defense grid, desktop tower defense, dragon quest, fairway solitaire, fallout 3, far cry, final fantasy, galactrix, ghostbusters, lost planet, madworld, mass effect, okami, penny arcade, pixeljunk, plants vs zombies, prototype, Resident Evil, star wars, Street Fighter
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