It’s hard to think ahead to other games at this point. This time of year, we’re generally buried in the year’s best releases. I’ve still got eighteen more riddler trophies and four riddles in Arkham City, and my character in Skyrim is level 21 and he’s only begun to scratch the game’s surface. I haven’t even bought Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, which is one of my most anticipated games this year. But look what’s coming…

Trine 2
As I mentioned recently, the release of Trine 2 completely caught me off-guard. Since I’ve still got a bunch of PSN dollars from a card I bought a while back, I’ll likely snatch this one up on December 6th. I loved the first one, and it’s the only platinum PSN trophy I’ve got.

Amy
Amy was supposed to come out in September, then on Halloween. Then it was supposed to come out in November. Guess what? November is over now. Still no Amy. But the videos look so good. Let’s hope that the delay has given the game extra polish. I loves me a good survival horror game.

The Last Guardian
This release date has been pushed and pushed, and currently sits at some point in 2012. It’s probably my number one most-anticipated game for 2012. Oh, look. It was my most-anticipated game for 2011 too.

Mechwarrior Online
The latest in the Mechwarrior series has been re-envisioned quite a few times, but now looks to be a free-to-play title. It may very well be the first free-to-play game I actually try. I’ve been a big fan of Mechwarrior, if not a fan of online multiplayer games.

Pixeljunk Monsters Browser Game
What’s even more ridiculous than Greg wanting to play a free-to-play online multiplayer game? I’ll tell you what. Greg wanting to play a browser-based MMO. My love for Pixeljunk Monsters is that strong. Hopefully the browser game is half as good as the amazing PSP edition.

Lots of good games in 2011, and this portion of the list has some of the best. Picking up where I left off on Monday, Bastion is a game I took no notice of during its previews during Pax East 2011 when I was there, despite my friends’ enthusiasm over the game. After all, it was an XBLA game, and I had no XBox. By the time the Steam version was announced, the game had already gotten a lot of praise and I picked it up. How awesome was it to have such an excellent story in what appeared like such a retro-style game! The music was stellar, and the gameplay had a lot of nuance. B+.

Batman: Arkham City is very possibly my own personal game of the year. Skyrim is very good, Portal 2 was awesome, and I’m really looking forward to Skyward Sword, but Arkham City had excellent gameplay along with a good story that had an ever better ending. A.

I’d been looking forward to Beyond Good and Evil HD since having first heard of the game. If you haven’t yet realized it, Beyond Good and Evil is just about my most favoritest game evar. It should go without saying that I was a fan of the HD remake. Sadly though, the controls on this version were seriously subpar. B+.

The end of the year is approaching, and this year I’ve actually cataloged the names every game I’ve played. By my count, that’s 38 games. Rather than write up one mega-article like I did in 2010, I’m going to split this thing up into a dozen pieces and finish with an article about my favorite games of the year. Yay.

Looking back on my Games of 2011 preview from the beginning of the year, things don’t match up. I skipped Dragon Age 2 after playing the horribly disappointing demo, and The Last Guardian was pushed to 2012. I just bought two copies of the Steam version of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, but haven’t yet started playing with my wife – I think we’ll enjoy that one.

Atom Zombie Smasher came from out of nowhere and stole my heart away. I seriously love the game. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Blendo is my favorite game studio since Troika went kaput. I’ve already finished a great many campaigns already, but I know I’ll be going back to this one quite often, if only for achievements.

It’s a fantastic game for when I just want to kill fifteen minutes, and I’d love to see a cell phone version, as I would play that sumbitch constantly. Atom Zombie Smasher gets a solid A.

I played A Boy and His Blob entirely in the presence of my four year old daughter, even letting her control things from time to time. While I understand it’s more forgiving that the old NES version of the same game, I got stuck on a puzzle midway through the levels at the city location, and never had the motivation to look up a solution on GameFAQs or the like. It’s a fun and creative game, but I’ve lost interest and haven’t played it in months. I give the game a B-.

I’m also including my replay of Batman: Arkham Asylum on hard difficulty as one of the games I played this year. It was more than 6 months following my initial playthrough, and I did go through the entire game and picked up an additional 5-6 Playstation trophies. the hard difficulty was indeed harder, but damn was it good. Arkham Asylum is still an A.

I’ll try to chime in here every week with three new games from my games-of-2011 list. I figure that we’ll be into 2012 by the time I finish.

When the first Trine game came out, I waited forever. It was supposed to release in the Spring, and by the time it actually came out, it had passed. [insert haiku about days of summer passing]

This time, the complete opposite is true: I just found out this morning that Trine 2 is going to be available in less than 2 weeks. With all the time I’m putting into Skyrim, I haven’t yet bought Skyward Sword, and I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for Trine 2, but I’m glad that it’ll be available if I want it.

Well, I’m finished with Bastion and I’m playing Skyrim – my Bosmer elf Leroy is already 11th level. But enough about Skyrim – I want to talk a bit about Bastion. I’ll say right out that I loved the game. Its music is one of the best parts of the game, but I also enjoyed the story and the unexpected twist. It’s no Heavy Rain twist, but I love when the story takes a turn that you never saw coming.

The gameplay and combat are very old-school, although they’re thankfully a great deal more forgiving than many other old school games. You may have heard about the game’s dynamic narration – the narrator will comment on actions that you take in the game as you take them, and his narration is keyed to certain progress points, so as you progress through a level, he’ll continue his progress in segments as you hit certain points. It works very well, and the guy is a great gravely-voiced voice actor who sounds like he’s stepped right out of a western.

It’s no Skyrim – you won’t be spending 50 hours in the game, but it is very good. You should buy the Steam version if you don’t own an XBox 360.

Where to begin? Back in 2009 when I first heard of Batman: Arkham Asylum, I totally wrote it off, like a dumbass. I was at the time in talks with a videogame distributor because I was considering opening up a small-town video game retail store in Colorado, and I remember scoffing. I scoffed. Pfft. Batman? That’s not gonna be any good. She assured me otherwise, but it wasn’t until a year later that I picked up the game and grew familiar with the flavor of crow.

I loved Arkham Asylum, and Arkham City refines the original game’s formula. The fighting is slightly more complex due to even more options, but still as smooth as ever, and now you can counter multiple opponents simultaneously and use the environment as part of your attack animations. The first time Batman slammed a thug’s head into the wall as part of a standard attack, my jaw dropped.

I don’t know whether the game was actually shorter than the original, or if it just feels that way. Time passes quickly when you’re thrashing hardened criminals. I’m currently listed as about 50% complete in the game, although I’ve finished the game’s main story. I still have a lot of side quests and riddler trophies to pick up. And I’ll probably try out the new game plus at some point. I may not get the calendar man achievement, finish all the combat and predator challenges, or finish all the augmented reality training – gliding through hoops is a bitch! – but I’ll try like hell to get every last Riddler trophy. I did it in the first game.

I really feel like the role of Catwoman has been overstated in the gaming media. She has a few very short segments, and aside from the non-story challenges and the post-story ability to roam the city as her collecting catwoman trophies, the amount of time you spend as Catwoman in-game is very small. I don’t mean to detract from Catwoman – she’s fun to play and very well implemented – but if I’d had to play without the DLC I wouldn’t feel like I was missing out on that much.

The last thing I’d like to say – and I can’t say much here because I don’t want to spoil anything – is that the game’s ending was wonderful. I won’t put it in the same class as the amazing ending of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, but if Mark Hamill is quitting as the Voice of The Joker, he couldn’t have gone off on a stronger note.

It wasn’t until I lost my internet connection for two weeks as part of the Connecticut Snow Apocalypse 2011 that I was really bothered by single-player games that function only when connected to the cloud. It started when I was playing Atom Zombie Smasher. It’s a steam game, so it was constantly trying to sync with the cloud. That’s fine when I’m connected, but the issue is that in offline mode, the game would hang for five minutes at a time when quitting. A few times, it froze the machine entirely. The worst came one time when I tried to play and my machine was entirely unable to start Steam due to lack of connectivity. It would try for a while, and then ask me if I wanted to start Steam in offline mode or quit. When I chose to start in offline mode, it would tell me that I’d chosen an invalid option and close out of Steam. I had to tether my phone in order to start the game at all. Starcraft 2 was pretty bad too. Although it let me play the single-player campaign in offline mode sometimes, at other times it would simply not work disconnected.

These games are supposed to work offline and don’t. This makes me even more tentative about games like Diablo 3 which will apparently require constant connectivity. Even Mass Effect 3 will require a one-time online check. As always-on internet connections become more common, I think we’ll begin to see more and more of this. But goddamn it, it bugs me.

This year, it’s not necessarily the sheer number of games that’s got me pinned down, it’s the fact that there are three big ones, and they’re all huge. I’m already 10% of the way into Batman: Arkham City, and I’m really enjoying it. They’ve integrated some of the fighting moves so well that I find myself stunned when Batman smashes guys’ heads together mid-fight, or slams somebody into a wall, or ends the fight by dangling a guy over the edge of a building and interrogating him. The game is definately a game-of-the-year contender, and may prove to be better than Portal 2, which is saying a lot.

In about two weeks, Skyrim comes out. I’ve got to play it on PC for the mods, which means that I’ll likely be buying a new graphics card for my 4-year-old PC. As huge as Arkham City is looking to be, Skyrim is likely to dwarf it in scale. The only game I’ve ever spent more time on than Oblivion was Ultima V on my Commodore 64.

Lastly, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. The bonus here for me is that unlike the other two games, I’ll let my four-year-old daughter watch me play Zelda, which means there’ll be more hours in which to play, because if Twilight Princess is any measure, Skyward Sword is gonna be another long-ass game.

It’ll probably be nearing the end of 2012 by the time I’m done with all three of these.

I’m a fan of the Humble Indie bundles. I received the first two as a gift from a friend, and not long ago bought the third for myself. For those of you unfamiliar with the Humble Indie Bundle phenomenon, each is a grouping of games created by small independent developers and sold for a pay-what-you-want price. They have no DRM, are available on multiple platforms, and much of their profit goes to charity.

I’ll stop right here for a moment and admit that all this preface about the Humble Indie bundles is so that I can write about Atom Zombie Smasher, but the bundles are good, and the background info is good info.

The first bundle included World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Penumbra: Overture, Lugaru, and Samarost 2. Of these, I enjoyed World of Goo and Penumbra: Overture and didn’t so much love the others.

The second bundle was much better. It included Cortex Command, Machinarium, Revenge of the Titans, Osmos, and Braid. By the time I’d gotten this bundle, I’d already played Braid, loved it, and written a hint series about the game on this site. The one from this bundle that grabbed me was Osmos, wherein you play a tiny amoeba trying to envelop and “eat” smaller amoebas and thus gain mass in order to eat increasingly larger amoebas. It’s a really good game, although the later levels get way too difficult. I believe that Osmos is now available on iOS, and I highly recommend it.

I never tried the unnumbered “Humble Frozenbyte Bundle” but I recently dug into the third bundle for the first time. I quickly learned that Hammerfight‘s controls were a bit wonky for my taste and And Yet It Moves didn’t hold my attention. I’d played the flash version of VVVVVV previously and didn’t feel the need to jump back in, although I’ve heard more than one person rave about that game. Cogs is one I played for about a dozen puzzle/levels before growing tired of the 3d puzzle-slider mechanic, and Steel Storm is a fun old school shoot-em-up that I continue to play bit by bit. Crayon Physics Deluxe is a game I took notice of long ago, when it was still in development. The premise was very creative and cool, much like Scribblenauts. But like Scribblenauts, the implementation somehow didn’t quite measure up.

Lastly, my favorite game in the bundle, which is my favorite game in any of the bundles. It might be my overall favorite game that I’m playing currently. Atom Zombie Smasher.

Atom Zombie Smasher is done by Blendo Games, who made the amazing Gravity Bone, which I featured long ago in Free Game Friday. After having seen what great stuff Blendo puts out, I’m going to have to revisit their catalog.

In Atom Zombie Smasher, you coordinate the response to a worldwide zombie outbreak. Your playing field is a map of multiple territories, and both you and the zombies score points on a victory track. The default setting has a 2000 point victory condition, but there are many settings to tweak. The zombies score one point per citizen that they convert into a zombie, and 10/20/30/40 points each round for level 1, 2, 3, or 4 outbreak areas. You score one point per citizen you rescue, and 20 points per round for each territory you capture. There are also certain milestones along each victory track at which specific events will occur – each side can unlock new abilities. For example, you can begin to rescue scientist and can gain access to orbital cannons and llama bombs. The zombies can increase their rate of infestation and begin to create super-zeds.

But this outer strategic level is only a housing for the meat of the game, wherein you evacuate citizens from the city. You first get a setup phase, where you can position snipers, ground troops, landmines, dynamite charges, and barricades. Then you click “begin” and the zombies begin coming. You set an evacuation point, and the citizens rush to it while the zombies pursue. You do your best to hold the zombies back while minimizing civilian casulaties, but the trick is that any citizen caught by a zombie becomes a zombie. Rescuing scientists can unlock new upgrades, and things like zombie bait, artillery, and the orbital catbird cannon help a lot. And if you take too long and night falls, even more zombies show up.

The game is very difficult, but very fun. I have yet to win a campaign, but I’ll be playing this one for quite some time.

Assassination. No, I’m not talking about the classic college campus game, I’m talking about assassination within the context of tabletop role-playing games. It’s really hard to do well. This is the subject of this month’s RPG Blog Carnival.

There’s something fundemental about assassination that doesn’t gel with games. In reality, assassination is just about the furthest thing from a game. It’s generally done quickly and without preamble of any sort. There’s no warning – you’re dead before you knew that there was any threat. Whereas the purpose of a game is to have fun in enacting a story, the purpose of assassination is to kill as effectively as possible. The combat rules of most RPGs with which I’m familiar don’t lend themselves well to handling the mechanics of an assassination.

Player Asassins

If you’re running a game wherein the players are the asssassins, their job can be separated into four phases, each of which can make for enjoyable gameplay.

1. Planning
This can vary depending on how well-guarded the mark is, but any good assassination should involve a lot of planning. This phase is the domain of the thinkers and the planners. Indeed, this phase of the mission will often take the majority of the characters’ time, if not the majority of the players’ time. Research must be done on where the target will be and when, and care should be taken to ensure that the target and his protectors have no warning of any threat. The location can be scouted, the protectors can be researched, confederates can be enlisted, props may be planted. The asssasins can envision possible points of failure and create contingency plans. And any points of failure that are not identified can be fuel for possible complications that the GM can introduce during subsequent phases.

2: Positioning
Whether it’s conning their way into a party, setting up camoflage at a good sniper position, or taking out the guards and stealing their uniforms, taking an appropriate position to prepare for the assassination is critical. This phase is the domain of the spies and the rogues. It’s espionage-heavy, and can involve a hefty amount of sneaking, bluffing, lock-picking, and mugging. It can also involve a lot of terrain negotiation, whether that’s climbing the exterior facade of a building, approaching a lake house underwater, or climbing through air ducts.

3: Execution
This is what is all comes down to: the kill-shot, poisoning the glass of wine, or ambushing the caravan. It may be quick and silent, or it may be explosively loud. This is the domain of the sniper and the brawler. What the players need to keep in mind here is that their goal is not to win a battle; their goal is to kill one individual and make their getaway. To that end, the situation should often be set up such that a traditional battle isn’t feasable. Perhaps there are a large number of innocent bystanders. Maybe the target’s protectors comprise overwhelming forces who can’t immediately be brought to bear, granting the characters time to escape if they’re quick. This brings us to…

4: Escape
This phase may not always exist. Escape may often be as simple as walking away. But it has the potential to be the most exciting phase of the assassination. It may be that in one instance the execution of an assassination is ridiculously easy and the escape is the truly hard part. Chase scenes are another thing that all RPG systems aren’t set up to run well. But whether you need to set up house rules, design a skill challenge, or play a mini-game, you as the GM have the potential to make the escape more harrowing and fun than players might ever expect.

Complications
Many RPG systems use complications as an actual game mechanic. Whether or not the system you’re playing has such a mechanic, you can make complications an integral part of the assassination game. After all, if everything always ran one hundred percent according to plan, the game wouldn’t be very interesting. As a GM, your job is to make the complications interesting and surprising.

For example, if during the positioning phase a player bluffs badly and a guard is onto him, you can let the players know that if the situation escalates into combat the target will be warned and the assassination plan is ruined. Thus it is to the players’ benefit to allow that PC to be taken captive – if the target’s group feels that they are still in control and have nothing to worry about, the players’ plan can proceed.

Player-as-assassin games aren’t common, but they can be done well. Involving assassins in your game as NPCs, however, can be more of a challenge.

NPC Assassins

Assassination generally happens quickly, often quietly, and if it’s done right there’s no warning and no chance for retaliation. In the immortal words of the late Pat Morita, If do right, no can defense.

This means that if a PC is a target, assassination is totally unfair, because it would amount to the GM simply telling a player that his character is dead. No die rolls, no narrative escape route. So instead, if the assassin is an antagonist, then the target must be an NPC.

Plots where the players must discover the assassin have been done plenty. The issue is that if the PCs are tracking down the assassin, it’s very possible that he may find out. If so, he’s going to deal with the players the same way that he deals with targets. He’s got no reason to expose himself in a toe-to-toe fight when it’s so much simpler to work from the shadows, as he’s accustomed to doing. And exposing the PCs to assassination is off the table for the reason mentioned above. If the players know that they’re never at risk of being unceremoniously picked off when they least expect it, it robs the assassin of his teeth. It removes what makes an assassin truly scary. The feeling that while you’re a target, you’re never ever safe – no matter where you are. Your dinner could be poisoned. There could be a bomb in your refrigerator or your toilet, or a tiny poisoned needle in your pillow. And if you ever plan on going to sleep, watch out.

The problem is that in most games, players won’t want their character killed off unfairly. It simply isn’t fun. But there are a number of ways you can make it work.

For one, you could decide upon a time period, and without telling the players exactly what that is, decide that (for example) once per 12 hours or once per 36 hours, there’s a certain chance (50%-100%) of an assassination attempt on the PCs. If an attempt occurs, you need to make sure that it has a good chance (more than 50%) of killing a player character. If you go this route, you need to make sure that your players understand and that they’re okay with having a character killed off this way if they take too long.

Another approach might be to reverse the planning phase as described above. Instead of researching and planning an assassination, players need to set up defenses, gather information about the assassin, and overall stay paranoid. This kind of game can be tense and thrilling. If you’re running a game of this sort, I encourage you to throw in red herrings and jack-in-the-box type false alarms. Insert evil laugh here.