I got Dead Nation for free as part of PSN’s “oops my bad” program. In the end, I was favorable impressed, as it ended up sucking way less than I’d expected. The game’s tragic flaw is that in a world of zombies, you’re at a distinct disadvantage in melee combat, and when you’re mobbed by as many zombies as appear in the game’s later chapters, avoiding a face-to-face with the undead is easier said than done. In other words, I was overcome and devoured alive by Zed so often that I uninstalled the game. It’s one of the few on this list that I never completed. Dead Nation gets a C.

I could easily write an entire article about Dead Space 2, the summation of which would be “The excessive gore in the game bothers me much more right now than it did even two years ago”. I’m not sure why that is. It’s odd, because I remember really liking the original Dead Space. I had to go back and re-read my original take on the game just now to remind myself why I really liked it. Turns out it was because it was the closest thing I’d played to a survival horror game since I’d had a Playstation 1.

That said, I mostly enjoyed Dead Space 2. I enjoyed getting many of the different weapon-specific Playstation trophies, and upgrading my weapons. I enjoyed using detonator mines and the line gun secondary weapon in a strategic way. But stomping on corpses got old quickly. Still, I was just about into the game’s final chapter when I quit. You see, near the end of the game, you’re forced to play a mini-game where you have to guide a large-bore needle into the center of your eyeball for no apparent reason. When you fail, you’re treated to a hideous and unskippable 20-second long death sequence. After watching that death sequence three or four times, I turned off the game, and I haven’t gone back to it. It’s been over six months, and I don’t see myself firing up Dead Space 2 ever again.

It seems a shame that the difficult segment that led to me quitting Dead Space 2 was gameplay for which the game had in no way trained me. After putting all that time into the game, I’d have liked to see the ending, and getting the endgame trophy would have been nice too. Despite all my complaints, I’m giving Dead Space 2 a B.

Back when the original Dungeon Siege was new, my wife and I had tons of fun playing it together, although we never got that far. We later tried Dungeon Siege 2, but for some reason that I can’t entirely pinpoint, I hated it. When the Dungeon Siege 3 became available for a console I owned and I found that I could get an inexpensive used copy, I jumped all over it. Linda and I played through the first seven of the game’s twenty-one chapters in split-screen co-op and got stuck at the Grand Chapterhouse amidst an Ikaruga-like trap complex that killed us over and over again.

While I won’t say for sure that we’ll never go back to the game, our recent purchase of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge makes it seem unlikely. I give Dungeon Siege 3 a C+.

Ico / Shadow of the Colossus Collection

This spring, Playstation is going to be re-releasing a high-definition version of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus as a packed-together collection. I’m not too interested in the fact that it’s going to be 3D-enabled, but I’ll buy it just to replay Shadow of the Colossus in HD, and to try out Ico, which I’ve never had the pleasure of playing.

Dead Space 2

January 25th is only about a month away, and knowing me I won’t buy Dead Space 2 on release day. But I’m definitely going to play. I loved the first game.

Batman: Arkham City

I was late to the party on Arkham Asylum, but I played the game in 2010 and loved it. Sequel? Yes, please. Maybe I’ll get a copy of Arkham City before it’s a year old.

Dragon Age 2

For me, 2009 and 2010 were largely about Dragon Age. I absolutely love the setting and the strategic combat, but I’ve been seriously overexposed. And while Dragon Age was fantastic, I did not love Awakening. As a result, I may not pick up Dragon Age 2 on March 8th with everyone else.

Beyond Good and Evil HD

The thought of playing my favorite game of all time in HD with remastered character models and getting trophies gives me great joy. I’m gonna photograph every animal, win every race, and collect every pearl. Again. It’s coming out sometime in 2011, although nobody seems to know when.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge

I’ve been looking for a good co-op RPG to play with my wife ever since we finished Trine and discovered that Sacred 2 is kind of lame. There is very little information out there about the game, and I may wait to see some reviews before dropping the money for two copies. What I do know is that you play as a male warrior who uses two-handed melee weapons and a female archer. Co-op is the main focus of the game, and the gameplay videos look very good. Time will tell. May 10th.

Portal 2

There’s been a lot of hype and a lot of excitement around the impending release of Portal 2. Now scheduled for April 20, 2011, this sequel sees the addition of elements from one of Lungfishopolis’s Free Game Friday titles: TAG: The Power of Paint. Turns out that Valve bought out the TAG crew in the same way that they bought the Narbacular Drop crew for the first Portal game. Portal 2 looks amazing, and I’ll likely download it from Steam on April 20th.

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

I don’t yet have a motionPlus controller, and this game may force me to buy one. I missed the boat on A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, and Wind Waker. Twilight Princess was the first Zelda game I’d played since borrowing a friend’s NES back in the day. And I love Twilight Princess. I’ve got very high hopes for Skyward Sword, and I likely will be buying this one on release day. That’s supposed to be sometime in early 2011, but there’s been no announcement.

The Last Guardian

I’ve been looking forward to The Last Guardian for a long time. You play a defenseless boy, and must of the gameplay appears to be stealth-based. Your only means of attack is via your huge flying puppy dog companion Trico: the titular last guardian. Given team Ico’s track record, this one should be good.

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Before Skyrim was announced recently, I would quickly have answered that The Last Guardian was my most-looked-forward-to game. I loved Oblivion. I really really loved Oblivion. A sequel? Yes, please. And I’ll just say goodbye to another 200 hours of my life.

20- Ultima V (Origin, Commodore 64, 1988)
I’m a great lover of computer role-playing games, and Ultima V was the first truly great one I ever played. Before Dragon Age, before Baldur’s Gate, even before SSI’s Dungeons and Dragons Gold Box games, there was Ultima. Ultima V came out the same year as Pool of Radiance, just as Ultima IV had come out alongside Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale.

Initially, I found it amazing that you could attack enemies who were not directly above or to the side of you. You could actually fire an arrow at an orc who was five squares above and two squares over from you! The initiative system was complex: occasionally, one of your quicker characters would attack twice without a slower character getting a turn in-between. It was as if Mr. Fast attacked every 12 initiative segments but Mr. Slow only attacked every 15 segments. I loved that system.

But what really grabbed me about Ultima V was the story. Sure – it had me running back and forth, backtracking all over the huge world map many times, and took me literally years to complete, but when I was fourteen, I had that kind of time. At the outset, I learned that the evil Lord Blackthorne had taken over and was enforcing twisted versions of the eight virtues. Throughout the game, I traveled the world, picked up companions, battled enemies, and learned more of the story. I infiltrated the enemy’s ring of spies, joined the resistance, and learned mantras which let me meditate at the hidden shrines. (once I’d found them) I followed the path laid out in the journal portion of the game’s manual, which had me take a painstakingly specific route in my ship and transfer to a skiff, intentionally going down a whirlpool to enter the underworld. I then followed a river to the location where the Shadowlords had captured Lord British. There, I found Lord British’s amulet.

I undertook similar quests to get his sceptre and crown, both of which were essential. I had to talk to people to learn the magic passwords to each of the world’s eight dungeons, and then traverse each dungeon to the underworld for various reasons. Amongst those reasons was to collect the three shards of the shattered gem of Mondain, which allowed me to destroy the shadowlords. Of course, I had to follow a particular ritual and had to learn each shadowlord’s true name.

All of this took more hours than I can tell you. The story was complex, and I’ve only detailed the parts I remember now, more than two decades later. I spent hours each day for years. Ultima forces you to purchase ingredients for each spell that you cast, and there exist two ingredients that cannot be purchased, only gathered in the wild. You can ride horses, ships, skiffs, hot air balloons, and even a magic carpet – or else travel by moongate if you learn the phases of the moon properly to guide your travel.

More than twenty years later, Ultima V is a more complex game than any other I’ve played since. And I treasure the experience that I had in playing it.

19- Trine (Frozenbyte, Playstation 3, 2009)
If daddy Castlevania and mommy Gauntlet got together and had a child, it would be Trine. Trine is the modern-day evolution of these old two-dimensional sidescrolling platformers and action RPGs. The graphics and the soundtrack are both beautiful, and up to three people can play simultaneously. You get three characters to choose from, and each character is drastically different and has different ways to solve the same problems. I had an absolute blast playing Trine, as you can probably tell by the fact that it’s the only platinum trophy I’ve got on the Playstation 3. I busted my ass finishing the Tower of Sarek on Very Hard with zero deaths.

The game has three characters: Knight, Wizard, and Thief. The Knight has armor, sword and shield. His shield allows him to block attacks from any angle, which is very useful, and he’s got the best direct attack in the game. He can also jump and land on enemies, killing them mario-style. But he can’t swim. At all. In water, he sinks and drowns. The Thief is the best character in the game: she can jump high, grapple from any wooden surface, and has the game’s only ranged attack. And while swinging, if she hits an enemy, she’ll kick for massive damage. The thief is all about mobility. The wizard is the most difficult to use, but can be a lot of fun. When you play the wizard, you have a cursor which can be used to levitate objects or to create boxes and planks. You can drop things on enemies and crush them. This is the wizard’s only attack, which means that when enemies get close to you, you’re pretty much screwed.

The game has plenty of items to collect. Each level has two chests containing magic items. These can be anything from leg armor which reduces damage from hits (only the hits which connect with the character’s legs) to a magic necklace that lets the wizard create an extra box or plank. Each level also has a number of green experience vials. Collecting all of these is probably the most time-intensive achievement in the game, but the experience will allow your characters to go up levels. As they go up levels, the knight, thief, and wizard gain new abilities. which you can select. The knight gains a flaming sword, a magic thunder hammar, and the ability to charge. The thief can shoot multiple arrows or even a flaming arrow. And the wizard can create progressively more items, and eventually a floating platform.

Trine is probably tied with Pixeljunk Monsters for my favorite PSN game. If you’ve got a PS3 and haven’t picked up Trine, I heartily recommend it. It’s also available for PC on Steam.

18- Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo EAD, Nintendo Wii, 2007)
Let’s face it – first party Nintendo games are just good. Whether they’re Zelda, Mario, or Metroid, the games are just good. Mario’s latest evolution is Galaxy, and the games are wildly creative. It’s got levels where you swim underwater or fly, levels where you roll around atop a ball using only the Wii remote’s tilt, and levels where you jump around atop floating planetoids which pull you in with their gravity. In an age of 3d games, Mario Galaxy may be the only true 3d game – it’s often impossible to judge which way is up!

Mario Galaxy has you surfing atop a manta ray, transforming into a giant spring or a bumblebee, and playing in old-school 2d levels. There are boss creatures, hidden levels, and an extra level of replayability created by the comets, which turn levels you’ve already played into silver coin collecting games, sudden-death levels, or a race to collect everything inside a time limit. Mario Galaxy is certainly one of the best games on the Nintendo Wii.

17- Dead Space (Visceral Games, Playstation 3, 2008)
In a time when the survival horror genre has gone out of vogue in favor of games like Doom 3 and Resident Evil 5, Dead Space took a much-needed step in the right direction – backwards towards the survival horror classics of yesteryear. Don’t get me wrong – Dead Space is first and foremost a shooter – but it’s got the survival horror chops that Resident Evil has lost. I played Dead Space only at night, and generally while wearing a good pair of earphones. Good times.

Dead Space is one of the most atmospheric games I’ve ever played. There is no heads-up display to detract from the immersion, and the game’s sound design is amazing. When you enter a vacuum, the only cue you need is the sudden transition to the echoey, disconnected, inside-helmet soundscape that insulates you from the sounds of enemies rushing towards you. In space, no one can hear you scream.

If you know anything about Dead Space, you’ll likely know that in order to kill Necromorphs, you’ve got to cut off their arms and legs. I’ll admit that this mechanic, while novel, is hardly innovative. But it’s certainly no reason to roll your eyes and decide not to play the game. It has so much more going for it. The game’s weapons are the most diverse and fun to use I’ve seen since the last Doom game. The weapon and armor upgrade system involves welding new modules into specific nodes in your armor or weapon for different effects. And the story…

The setting of Dead Space is so rich that I can’t begin to absorb it all. But just knowing that the entire universe out there exists gives me the warm fuzzies. The immersive scenes at the game’s outset when approaching the Ishimura mining vessel really help to put you in character. They’ve gone with the Gordon Freeman silent protagonist approach with the character you play: Isaac Clarke (an amalgam of Isaac Aasimov and Arthur C Clarke) As the story progresses and you restore functionality to portions of the ship that allow you greater access to information about what has gone wrong, you’re gradulally exposed to more story through Bioshock-style audio and video recordings which are played on both wall-mounted displays and on your portable holo-projector which displays a screen right in front of you. You can even walk around while watching the video. Normally the recordings are placed where you’re unlikely to be attacked while viewing one.

I could write a whole lot more about Dead Space, but as this list nears the higher-ranked games, I should struggle for brevity and call it quits for this week.

Wikipedia defines survival horror as a game genre in which odds are stacked against the player so as to de-emphasize direct combat, and instead encourage the player to avoid enemies. This is generally done by limiting resources such as ammunition and healing items, and by making the player’s avatar relatively weak, as opposed to other action games like Halo or God of War. The setting in a survival horror game is generally dark and horrific, and challenges are often non-combat related, taking the form of puzzles, mazes, and inventory management.

From my perspective, survival horror titles are a dying breed. The old greats like Resident Evil 2 and Eternal Darkness may never be topped. Newer games like Dead Space and Resident Evil 5 are very good, but their status as survival horror titles is questionable. A quiz that I recently took identifies me as a “Survivor-Achiever”, apparently meaning that survival horror is my genre of choice. I’ll certainly admit that I absolutely love being startled/scared by games. But it happens so rarely.

Let’s take a quick look at the history of the survival horror genre. Leaving out oldies like the Atari 2600 game Haunted House, the genre sees its origins with the 1992 PC game Alone in the Dark, and with Silent Hill and the Resident Evil series that appeared in the late 90’s on the Playstation.

In the early 2000’s, we see Resident Evil: Code Veronica X and Fatal Frame, which are both clearly within the survival horror genre, and also Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, one of the first non-Playstation survival horror games.

The 2004 game Doom 3 has many survival horror elements, but most people agree that the game is first and foremost a first-person shooter.

In 2005, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was released. Although there is little question that it’s a survival horror game, I found it to be buggy and horribly frustrating. It also marked XBox’s attempt at an entry into the survival horror genre.

2005 also gave us Resident Evil 4, which to me really marked the death of classical the survival horror genre. Resident Evil had always been the flagship of survival horror games. While Resident Evil 4 was a fantastic game, it was clearly far more of a third-person action game than a survival horror game. Condemned: Criminal Origins and F.E.A.R. came out right around the same time. While both tried, neither was truly survival horror, due to a focus on combat in each.

Dead Space gave me new hope. While it can’t really be classified as survival horror, there were a few brilliant moments in the game that gave me a frightened feeling I haven’t really gotten from any game since Resident Evil 2. This is probably the best we’ll see in terms of survival horror for the forseeable future. I hope that games like this thrive in the future.

Lastly, Fatal Frame 4, which I have not played. Fatal Frame 4 was released for the Nintendo Wii in 2008, but only in Japan. That would be why I haven’t played it. It’s sad, really.

I’m not sure whether true survival horror as a genre is dead or not. I really do miss running from horrible creatures that you’re not supposed to kill. In most of the true survival horror games, you gain nothing from killing monsters. No cash, no loot, no experience points. Thus, running is generally a more attractive option. You’ll need that ammo when you’re backed into a corner.

Early on, I found that one of the themes that came up in many of my favorite games was atmosphere. I remember the first time I played Half-Life 2. At one point, I came to a beach with the sun setting over the water. The scenery was so amazing that I had to stop and just stare for a few seconds. In those few seconds, I got shot.

The amazing outdoor scenery and realistic run-down East European urban landscapes make Half-Life 2 an incredibly atmospheric and immersive game, but it’s by no means the only one. I had similar reactions to many areas in Oblivion. The snowy peaks of Bruma’s Jerall Mountains, the swamps around Bravil, and the softly glowing depths of Aleid ruins all stood out to me, made me feel that I was truly there.

The final pair of games in my immersive/atmospheric collection, which I feel I need to hit in tandem, is Dead Space and Doom 3. Both take place on dark spaceships filled with hideous demonic creatures. And while each does certain things better than the other, both make excellent use of light, darkness, and sound to create a tense and threatening atmosphere. They’re best played in the dark. Muahahahaha!

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.

Far Cry 2
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.

Final Fantasy is about story, but it’s also about level grinding. Lots and lots of level grinding. The game’s battles are simply too hard if you move from place to place battling only story-essential foes. Level grinding is absolutely essential. It harks back to old RPGS that I’d played on the Sega Master system. And in Final Fantasy 12, it’s actually a lot of fun to level grind. There’s a lot of inventory management and skill management to do – I’ve got a couple sheets of notebook paper where I’ve got notes sketched out on how my characters’ gear and skills are set up. It reminds me of mapping out Bards Tale or Wizardry dungeons on graph paper. Final Fantasy 12 gets a B. Square Enix knows what they’re doing when it comes to JRPGs.

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.

If you’re going to play this game, play it for the story and the atomosphere, because those were great. The game totally nails the feel of the original movie, and having all four ghostbusters voiced by the actual actors is fantastic. The game is very well written. The plot is probably better than that of the Ghostbusters 2 movie, and there are some really funny one-liners in the game. I have to give this game a C+.

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.

I’d been expected a new-school brawler that felt like SmashTV or Double Dragon, but what I got was not nearly as fun. At all. I had many complaints about the game overall, but the bottom line is that I just didn’t find it to be fun. At all. Mad World gets a D.

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.

I played through the whole game – start to finish – but it didn’t grab me. I enjoyed the story, but the gameplay wasn’t there, so I can’t classify it as a keeper. Mass Effect gets a C.

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.

The gameplay in Okami is a lot like the gameplay in the more recent Zelda games – action/adventure. Fetch quests and conversations with some minor platforming and a whole lot of fighting. Also, plenty of minigames. Add to that the innovative magic brush mechanic and you’ve got a winner. But what stood out most to me about Okami were the graphics. They don’t excel by being photorealistic – just the opposite – the stylized graphics in Okami are an excellent argument against photorealism. They look amazing in a far more cartoonish way. Okami gets a B.

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.

Pixeljunk Monsters
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.

Plants vs Zombies
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.

Prototype

I can imagine Prototype being a far better game on a console. Firstly, it might not freeze as often as it did on my Vista machine, although I’m willing to concede that the freezing issue may be related to the import version of the game I’m playing. While the PC controls weren’t terrible, I had some issues with the dashing controls. Firstly, the double-tap on the ‘W’ key for an air dash wouldn’t always register – I’m sure that’s my own fault, but the double-keyboard-tap isn’t the easiest motion on which to get 100% accuracy. Similarly, I found that when dashing, you corner like a passenger jet. So often, I’d sprint past a waypoint or someone I’d intended to grab, then take at least 5 seconds to turn around and run back. And when you’re in a timed event and you’ve only got 60 seconds to do what you’ve got to do, that 5 seconds can make a huge difference.

Although I’m playing a weird Russian import version that I got on Ebay and I can’t actually register achievements, I managed to complete nearly every challenge. I got gold on all but one gliding challenge and managed to complete every infected consume event. The military consume events where you’ve got to consume the commander and then end the alert before getting in can be HARD. And although I found destroying hives and bases with a tank to be super-easy, helicopters are nearly worthless. Granted, they’re the best for fast travel, but they’re difficult to hijack and they get destroyed by one hit from anything.

Also, like Ghostbusters, I can’t imagine playing Prototype on any difficulty other than ‘Easy’. Prototype gets a C+, but it might be a B- on consoles.

Resident Evil 5

I played the Playstation 3 version of Resident Evil 5, and while it was inferior to its predecessors in different ways, it wasn’t a bad game. Resident Evil 5 tried to be Resident Evil 4. But it wasn’t different enough from Resident Evil 4 to really shine, and it didn’t have the charm of Resident Evil 4. There was no mine cart chase, no jetski sequence, and no chance to harpoon lake monsters. There was a nice sequence where you could shoot at enemies from machine guns mounted to the back of a jeep, but that alone didn’t measure up.

Resident Evil 5 only really shines when played co-op. I played with my brother on his XBox over Christmas vacation, and having the game be a shared experience really changed it. For the better. The partner AI in Resident Evil 5 is laughably bad at times. The game gets a B.

Street Fighter 4

After having beaten Seth with every character in the game other than the three big bosses whom I have yet to unlock, I’ve been playing Street Fighter 4 far less. I’ve gotten somewhat competent at online matches, although like so many other online games, the people still playing are the ones who play all the time, and are thus much better at the game than I am. But the game did bring back a good bit of my Street Fighter 2 nostalgia, and despite my hatred of Crimson Viper and Rufus, I really like the game. B+

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
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.

Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People

I love HomeStarRunner. I really do. So I was super-excited to hear that there was going to be a StrongBad-themed WiiWare game, and I snatched it up as soon as it was available. Sadly, I’d forgotten that I don’t generally like point and click adventure games. And that I’m horribly bad at them. So while HomestarRunner.com gets an A, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People gets a C-.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad gaming year. Granted, there was nothing that stood out like Half-Life 2, Oblivion, or Shadow of the Colossus, but the year isn’t over yet, and I’ve still got to play Scribblenauts, Muramasa, Brutal Legend, Uncharted 2, and Dragon Age: Origins.

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

Were you to ask me what my favorite Playstation 3 game is, it wouldn’t be Resident Evil 4. It wouldn’t be Uncharted. I’m not even sure it would be Pixeljunk Monsters. It would be Dead Space. I’ve written more in depth about how Dead Space has taken up the mantle of survival horror once held by Resident Evil, but beyond that, the game is just an excellent third-person shooter. The gravity mechanics, the pivoting plasma cutter, and the pure atmosphere afforded by the soundless vacuum environments make Dead Space the best shooter I’ve played in a long time. Certainly the best console shooter I’ve played since Resident Evil 4.

I recently finished playing Dead Space, which I quite enjoyed. The next Playstation 3 game I’m looking at is Resident Evil 5. They’re both ostensibly survival horror titles, although Resident Evil has certainly slid away from that.

I think there’s a lot of similarity between the two games, but more specifically, there’s a similarity between Dead Space and the older Resident Evil titles. I believe that as Resident Evil has undertaken a major shift beginning with Resident Evil 4, Dead Space has taken up the mantle once held by the Resident Evil franchise.

Resident Evil 2 is probably my favorite title in the series, in no small part because that game scared the everloving snot out of me. I jumped – literally – more than once when playing that game. I have very fond memories of sitting in my mom’s house in a dark room wearing headphones, and falling out of my chair every time a T-virus infected zombie smashed through a window or a Licker dropped down from the ceiling.

Beginning with Resident Evil 4, the formula changed. It was an action game. A third-person shooter rather than a survival horror game. I’ll admit that I loved Resident Evil 4, but it was not a survival horror game. Dead Space, on the other hand, is quite definitely a survival horror game, and it gave me some of the best scares I’ve had since Resident Evil 2. I’ll admit that I’ve become a bit acclimated to game scares, and largely because of that, the game doesn’t have me jumping the way I did when I was 19, but Dead Space did a damn good job.

Of all the games I’ve bought for my Playstation 3, I think Dead Space is also the first “keeper”. Generally, when I’m done with a game, I’ll sell it on EBay and use the money to buy the next game I’ll be playing. I only keep it when the game is so good that I plan to replay it some day. Oblivion, Mario Galaxy, Call of Duty 4, Resident Evil 4, and Mario Galaxy are all games that have fallen into that category. But I sold Uncharted and Assassin’s Creed. I’ll definitely be selling Mad World. More on that later.

Resident Evil 4 didn’t have much in the way of scares, and from what I’m hearing of Resident Evil 5, it’s sounding like the even-numbered ones are the really good ones. But Dead Space did a better job of scaring me than any other game since Resident Evil 2. That’s why it’s a keeper. That’s why I’m proclaiming that it’s taking up the mantle once held by Resident Evil. Word.

I’m just beginning the fourth chapter of Dead Space, and I’ve found myself pleasantly surprised about a number of things. I’ll admit that in many ways it feels like a direct copy of Doom, but Dead Space calls itself a survival horror game rather than a shooter. As such it borrows concepts from the earlier Resident Evil games, and this works to its favor.

For example, the game has succeeded in starling me at least twice, and the last game to do that was Resident Evil 2. [insert golf clap here] The game’s store also has a vault feature, which works exactly the same as Resident Evil’s chest system. Neither actually makes much sense, but they’re very useful inventory management tools. I could go on about save points and weapon upgrades, but those are very common mechanics.

The method by which weapons are upgraded is also pretty cool. You’re given a grid with different points. By finding power nodes, you can weld them into the weapon’s grid and upgrade ammo capacity, reload speed, damage, or other attributes.

I would probably consider Dead Space more a shooter than a survival horror game, but that said, the game still has a number of genuinely cool moments. The weapons are also unique and a lot of fun to use. They’re generally focused towards removing limbs from enemies, since in Dead Space, as Yahtzee so eloquently put it, “limb shots are the new head shots”. One really neat feature of the game’s main weapon, the plasma cutter, is its ability to change the angle of its cut from horizontal to vertical.

While I much prefer mouse and keyboard for this type of game, I found the Dualshock 3 controls to be as intuitive as any other gamepad game I’ve played. I’ve often said that the only shooter I played with a gamepad and enjoyed was Resident Evil 4, but Dead Space comes very close, largely in part to the fact that every weapon in the game has a laser site. There’s another thing Dead Space has borrowed from a Resident Evil game. Now I only wish I had Resident Evil 2’s quick turn ability, where I could pull an instant about face by hitting a certain button. With all the necromorphs sneaking up behind me and dropping out of overhead vents, it would be very very useful.

The game’s two coolest innovations are the zero-G areas and the total vacuum areas, which sometimes overlap. There are zero-G areas with air, and there are airless areas with gravity. The zero-gravity areas are implemented so much better than Prey’s gravity strips. You stick to walls with gravity boots most of the time, but can choose to leap through space and attach to another surface at any time. And the coolest thing about the vacuum areas is the sound. Without air, sound doesn’t travel well, and even life-or-death struggles make nearly no sound. Speaking of sound, the creepy music in Dead Space is probably the best spooky music I’ve ever heard.

I also appreciate the game’s transparent checkpoints. When killed, rather than going all the way back to my last save, I only go back to the previous checkpoint, although I may not know exactly where that was. The game is also very easy to navigate, as in addition to the 3d map, you can also hit R3 to see a line along the floor leading to your goal.

Overall, I’m enjoying the game, although given how quickly I’ve reached chapter 4, I’m wondering how long the game will be.