Likewise, I played Batman: Arkham Asylum this year, and I finished both Dragon Age: Origins and Trine this year. Each of those would be on my best of 2010 list had they actually been released in 2010.

On the other hand, I played Uncharted 2 this year and absolutely hated it.

So let me think. What games that were released this year did I play this year and love?

First, Heavy Rain. Of course Heavy Rain is first. It was an amazingly tense and well-told story, but my favorite thing about it was the way consequences were handled and the fact that you never had to go back and replay a scene at which you’d failed. I know that this type of design has to present some substantial challenges, but I really hope that more games are able to take this approach in the future – especially survival horror games.

Secondly, Enslaved. It’s difficult for me to lump Enslaved in alongside Heavy Rain since I just finished playing Enslaved last week, but it was a far better game than I’d been expecting.

Lastly, Hoard. I don’t often play games without stories or games without endings. But Hoard is a great little bite-sized game, and it’s a lot of fun to kidnap princesses, roast knights, and burninate the countryside.

As an honorable mention, I’d also like to include No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle. Hard to put it on a best of 2010 list, and it wasn’t as good as the original, but I really do enjoy the ridiculous humor of the No More Heroes games, and Desperate Struggle gave me some laughs.

16- Okami (Clover Studio, Playstation 2, 2006)
Okami is squarely within the genre carved out by the Zelda games. It’s based on the Japanese story of how the sun goddess saved the world from darkness, and told via a beautiful cel-shaded landscape. You play the wolf goddess Ameratsu, guided by an insect-sized Poncle artist named Issun. Your first few missions involve healing trees and landscapes blighted by darkness while battling demons. As the story goes on, there are many cities, many dungeons, and many landscapes to be freed of the cursed darkness. Along the way, Ameratsu learns sacred brush techniques, which on the Wii version of the game can be executed through Wiimote gestures. The brush techniques can be used to solve puzzles, and can often also be used in battle.

Okami is the single best-looking Nintendo Wii game I’ve ever seen, and I’ve written an article about it entitled An Argument Against Photorealism. Cartoony games tend to age much better than games that attempt photorealism.

Okami was a very long game – perhaps longer than Zelda or even Final Fantasy 12. It’s hard to believe how much gameplay they can fit on a single DVD.

15- Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, Playstation 3, 2010)So far, Heavy Rain is my favorite game of 2010. The graphics were beautiful, the voice acting was excellent, and the soundtrack was so good that I often listen to it while writing code at work. But all these things, while they do add quite a bit to the game, are not what make Heavy Rain great.

Heavy Rain was a well-written murder mystery, and the fact that it was interactive made it better. It’s a big choose-your-own-path story where the choices are sometimes unintentional. The branches can come as a result of a conscious choice, as a penalty for a failed challenge (e.g. losing a fistfight or crashing your car) or because you simply didn’t react quickly enough. All these branches split and rejoin portions of the story to create a very complex piece of interactive fiction.

But my favorite part of Heavy Rain, at the risk of repeating myself, is the way it handles the permanence of consequences. It is impossible to get a Game Over screen in Heavy Rain before the final credits roll. You can fail challenges, characters can die, but the game does not end. The story goes on, and you witness the consequences. Quantic Dream’s use of this mechanic has many excellent results. First, you never find yourself dying, reloading, and replaying the same sequence over and over. Frustration from having had to do this has caused me to rage quit many games. Secondly, because your failures are immutable, you need to be certain to succeed the first time. Because the first time is the only time. This creates a lot of tension when you’re fighting for your life, because if you die the character is dead.

I can’t say enough good things about Heavy Rain. I love the game, and I find myself wanting to share that joy. Go out and buy it.

14- Street Fighter 2 (Capcom, Arcade, 1991)
Street Fighter 2 is probably my favorite arcade game of all time. I loved playing Point Blank and Dungeons and Dragons: Tower of Doom, but I’ve probably put more time and more quarters into Street Fighter 2 machines than into all the others put together. Oddly, when I put together my list back in 2007, Street Fighter 2 was fourth on that list. Today, I can’t see placing it that highly, but I still love the game.

When it was first released, I remember thinking how weird all the characters were, and how E.Honda’s thousand hand slap was just way too powerful. I remember discovering my first combo: the jump kick/leg sweep with Ken and Ryu. I remember first learning how to throw a fireball on the Street Fighter 2 machine at a local bowling alley. I remember the first time I saw a Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition machine at Riverside Park in Agawam, Massachusetts. I remember the yells of protest from the local players when someone got cheap with the jab-jab-throw tactics. I remember thinking how the game must have subliminal messages, because I’d see Street Fighter 2 when I closed my eyes. For a time, I was honestly worried about what it might be doing to me. I remember working at an arcade where we ran a Street Fighter 2 tournament. That’s where I learned how to use every character in the game. It’s easy when you can play free. I’ve got lots of memories of Street Fighter 2. Some bad, but most very good.

Back in the mid-90s, Street Fighter 2 was more than a game – it was a culture. And I was immersed neck-deep in Street Fighter 2 culture. I knew all the people at the local arcades who were good at the game, and I always had my quarters lined up for the next game. In these days, a four hit combo not made entirely of jabs was amazing, and there were rumors that a six-hit combo existed with Fei Long, although I never saw it. Cross-ups and cancelling special moves were new and strange techniques used only by the best amongst us, and only when needed – it was never fun to mercilessly crush a lesser opponent. There was a kind of code amongst the better players – a sense of honor. If you had a sizable lead, you’d generally back off of a dizzied opponent and let him recover. And you’d never intentionally win a game by throwing a fireball at a near-dead opponent. Doing so would risk you being labeled as cheezy. Fight with cheap moves like that often enough and nobody would want to play you.

I know that I’m not talking about the game itself so much as my own experience with it, but this is what Street Fighter 2 is to me, and this is why I love it.

Be sure to come back next week when I’ll begin with my top ten games of all time.

If you want to hear it, download episode 14 and skip ahead to 58:00. I’ll paraphrase here.

There’s a painting down here in Atlanta. It is stunning. I stood there at looked at it for ten minutes straight. I just could not believe that anyone could make something that looked this amazing. To me, if a game can do that – that kind of emotional moment – I feel that that would be considered art.

What he said here struck a chord for me. There have been very few games that have had this exact effect on me. I could tell you that a number of difficult moral decisions in Dragon Age and the tense scenarios in Heavy Rain have brought about  emotional moments for me, but to hit the truly good ones, I’ve got to go back a bit further.

My continual references to Resident Evil 2 must have gotten trite to those theoretical few who read this blog regularly, but the terror I felt in this moment, being chased by the T-103 zombie was potentially the most exciting game moment of my life. Similarly, the rooftop chase in Beyond Good and Evil made me sit back after completing it, take a deep breath, and just say “wow.”

 But if I’m looking for a truly emotional moment in a game, the one I’d have to use is the very ending of Half-Life 2, episode 2. It’s made entirely possible by the “acting” of one Alyx Vance, which is of course a combination of excellent voice acting and excellent character face modeling. I swear – that scene just about made me cry. And a video game has never before done that.

And whereas the Playstation 2 absolutely dominated the market with such titles as Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, and Katamari Damacy, the Playstation 3 has until recently had no such list.

But check this out.

Heavy Rain
I’ve written about Heavy Rain plenty. It’s a phenomenal interactive murder/mystery. I’ve already bought a second copy as a gift for a friend, largely because I needed to share the experience. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking the game up. It’s so choice.

LittleBigPlanet
I haven’t written about LittleBigPlanet on this site, largely because I haven’t played the game much, although we do own it. My wife, on the other hand, played through the game nearly to completion. I’m sure that I could lose myself in the game’s creation engine as I once did with Neverwinter Nights’ Aurora Engine creation studio. But for now, I’ll continue to resist.

Pixeljunk Monsters
My love for Pixeljunk Monsters seems to know no limits. Years after buying the game, I’m still playing it. And just a few weeks ago, I finally unlocked the second-to-last level in the expansion. It is very hard.

Trine
I know that there also exists a PC version on Steam, but Trine on the Playstation 3 is superior, if only because you can play the game with three players. It’s also the only game on which I’ve ever managed a platinum trophy. Not easy.

Uncharted 2
Everyone else seems to love this game more than I do, but I’ll admit that it’s a good game. I’m probably less than halfway through right now. I’ll have more to offer as I progress further.

In addition to the above, I’m interested to try the punishingly difficult Demon’s Souls, and I know I’ll soon pick up a copy of God of War 3. Also, as soon as The Last Guardian hits store shelves, I’m all over it.

Part of the reason for the shift may be that true survival horror games can be frustrating. When I tried to play Resident Evil: Code Veronica X a few years back, I got halfway through the game and had to stop playing because I had no healing supplies and no ammunition, and it was impossible for me to progress. So I restarted the game from the beginning, being more careful this time. I got further, but once more I found myself stuck with no supplies, and so I had to stop playing. I never finished the game, and that’s frustrating.

Scarcity of resources is a big part of traditional survival horror, as is the ability to avoid enemies rather than confronting them directly. In fact, the lack of experience points or loot encourages players to run from enemies, since there’s no reward in defeating them – only the possibity of being injured. And motivating players to flee rather than fight makes the game’s foes feel more frightening.

But one of the ways that games have evolved over the past decade is by better respecting players’ time. Diego Doumecq had an excellent post that explores this: “The games of yesterday were more directly designed for kids…. (They had) …all the time in the world”. I’ll admit – when I was eleven years old, playing Realm of Impossibility and Legacy of the Ancients on my Commodore 64, I had all the time in the world too. Diego writes about the pacing of games: about grinding, and having to repeat challenging tasks over and over until you manage to do it without your character dying.

Ever since video games have existed, the consequence of failure has remained consistent: you die, and you have to retry. Thus, a player finds himself repeating the same section of gameplay over and over, and this can grow extremely frustrating. Either you’re defending Nova Prospekt from an assault by The Combine over and over, reloading your progress each time, or you’re replaying Ghosts and Goblins over and over, starting from level one each time.

The first I’d seen of an alternative was when I played Heavy Rain. It’s the only game of its kind I’ve ever played where there is no Game Over screen as a result of player failure, and where you never have to reload a game as a result of failing. There are certainly consequences, and game characters can certainly die, but you’re never forced to repeat a scene in the game because you failed. As I’ve written before, this makes for a very different type of game experience, and I strongly feel that assigning this kind of irrevocability to a player’s choices and failures makes for a far more engaging game experience. In Heavy Rain, when I was playing through a scene in which my character was fighting for her life, I was anxious. I was sitting bolt upright in my chair and trying my damnest because I knew that if I screwed up and that character died, the character was dead. No reloading and trying again. And that is the sentiment that survival horror games need to capture.

I’m not saying that creating this type of game would be easy. Even if you create a cast of six or ten characters, it’s easily possible that all of them could die, and then what happens? But if the game designer combines an approach where less plot-critical failures carry consequences lighter than death (end up in the hospital, fail to get that really nice shotgun) and where the difficulty is carefully moderated to remain challenging without becoming deadly except during a small number of set pieces, this approach could work very well.

I don’t know whether the makers of survival horror games will latch onto this mechanic, but I’d absolutely love to see it happen.

Here’s my own review: “WOOO!”

Heavy Rain’s story has been called ‘dark’ by some. And upon reflection, I suppose it’s hard to term a game dealing with the murder of children as anything else. But until I heard that, I hadn’t directly compared Heavy Rain to Dragon Age. A big part of the reason I loved Dragon Age was because it was a mature story. And by mature, I’m referring to more than just the sex and violence. I’ll grant you: Dragon Age may have had too much blood, and Heavy Rain may have had a bit too much nudity, but it’s more than just these that I’m referring to when I discuss the games’ maturity.

Even apart from the choices/consequences facet of the gameplay that I’ve already discussed, the fact that the game doesn’t pull punches, doesn’t ruin the surprises by heavy-handedly foreshadowing, and uses strong language and violence in the same way that non-broadcast shows like Dexter do works in its favor. The game isn’t for kids, and that’s not just because it has language and violence. It’s because kids wouldn’t necessarily appreciate the theme of fatherhood and be able to put themselves in a position to understand the gravity of the decisions you need to make in the game.

My compaints about the game are few. For one, while the quicktime actions in the game were intuitive, simple walking was very often the most challenging part. Even when the camera angles were good, it was sometime difficult to walk across a room in the direction you intended, which got very frustrating when there was time pressure. And when multiple actions were available, it was generally difficult to determine what action might result from pressing right and what action from pressing X. In cases like this, you were being asked to make a decision. For me, more often than not chance would decide, as I wasn’t sure what the result of a button press would be.

More and more as the game progressed, I realized how much work must have gone into the branching story. So many characters who influence the storyline heavily might have died. How differently would the story have unfolded without their presence?

I loved Heavy Rain. Even without any of the other factors, it’s a hell of a murder mystery.

I’ve been playing Heavy Rain now for two evenings, and I’m probably 5 or 6 hours in. Before they made Heavy Rain, Quantic Dream released a game called Indigo Prophecy, which I absolutely loved despite the game’s severely flawed denoument. I can say now that although Heavy Rain contains no science fiction beyond some advanced technology that likely doesn’t exist yet, the same basic feel is in place: what Quantic Dream terms “interactive fiction”. I’ll try to lay out how I feel about the game in an entirely spoiler-free way.

But what’s struck me most about the game up to this point is the notion of consequences. In most games, the sole consequence is death. Your character dies and you reload. But imagine for a moment that you couldn’t reload. Imagine that the game could continue after your death. The only game that I’ve ever played with any kind of similar system was Ultima III, back on my Commodore 64. In that game, when one of your characters died, the game would immediately save the character’s death to the floppy disk. In Heavy Rain, the game constantly saves your progress, your decisions, your advancements, and your failures. And it makes the consequences of failure far more severe than in any game I’ve ever played. Your decisions are irrevocable, your failures final.

Last night, I was dealt my first major failure in the game. The character didn’t die, but having experienced what that character has gone through, I know for a fact that he’d rather have died than failed. But no – that isn’t quite right, because if he’d died, he’d have failed, and the consequences of that failure would remain despite his death, so he had to survive in order to succeed. But he did not succeed. And I felt – through him – what it’s like for a man to throw himself heart and soul at something and fail. In Heavy Rain, like in real life, there are no retries. And I find that I love that. It’s just a game, and I love when a game makes me feel something, even if that something is a total sense of defeat. Just as long as I’m not expected to retry until I succeed.

There are also a number of games out there that I’m just dying to play. Chief amongst them is Heavy Rain, a game that I’ve been looking forward to from the day it was released. I loved Indigo Prophecy despite the plot derailment in the later portions of the game, and with all the thought I’ve put into the fact that Dragon Age was the first game in a long time to make me feel anything, I’m hopeful that Heavy Rain will achieve something similar.

Uncharted 2 is coming down in price – I can get a used copy for around $35 now, and it’s at the top of my EBay shopping list. Also high on that list is Retro Game Challenge, a DS game that I’ve heard a lot of good things about. It contains a number of different games made in a retro style. Old skool racers, RPGs, shooters and platformers which ostensibly maintain the old style of gameplay while removing the most annoying things about those games. All this is wrapped with the storyline of a 12-year-old sitting in front of a TV with his friend in the NES era, entering cheat codes and achieving high scores.

Another game I can’t wait to get my hands on is No More Heroes 2. I may wait for the price to come down a bit before I get a copy, but I was a big fan of the first one, and I’ve heard that the sequel removes all the flaws of the original and makes the gameplay a bit easier. Maybe I’ll be able to finish this one.

I’ve decided that the PC is the platform on which I want to play Batman: Arkham Asylum. It’s a GFW Live game, and while that interface annoys the crap out of me, its one benefit is that I can get XBox achievements. And since GFW/360 achievements, PSN Trophies, and Steam achievements are the only achievements that mean much of anything to me, I’ll be happy to add to my collection.

From early on, I’d decided that I did not want to play Demon’s Souls. A game that everyone lauds as the most difficult and frustrating game they’ve played since Ninja Gaiden doesn’t sound appealing to me. But when I heard the Brainy Gamer gamers’ confab folks discussing the game on Michael Abbott’s four part best of 2009 podcast series, I grew intrigued. Many of them cited Demon’s Souls as their favorite game of 2009, despite the game’s oppressive difficulty. I pondered this as I played through Trine’s Tower of Sarek level twenty or thirty times, trying to pass the level without dying once. Maybe I am up for it after all. In the end, I determined that if I do try the game, I’d be best off renting it rather than buying. Less commitment that way.

But I don’t generally rent games. Gamefly’s monthly plan runs $16 or $23 depending on whether you want one or two games. That’s a bit more than I’m willing to pay given that I don’t always want to have a game rented at any given time. I may be better off trying to get a copy from a Blockbuster for a weekend. I haven’t rented anything from Blockbuster in over fifteen years, so that should be interesting.

Other games I might consider renting include the new Wii Punch-Out!, which seems like a quick playthrough, the newest Prince of Persia, which I’m very hesitant to play given how much I hated Sands of Time and The Two Thrones, House of the Dead: Overkill, Dead Space: Extraction, Muramasa: The Demon Blade, Super Mario Bros. Wii, and Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles. I’m excited to play Darkside Chronicles, but I’m not convinced that it’s going to be a keeper.

So far, this is a long list. But while I’ve listed all the games about which I’m most excited to play, there are plenty more on my radar.

A Boy and his Blob is a game that looks like a lot of fun. And while it’s not top on my list, I’d really like to try it for some point, and it’s likely more than a rental. Maybe I’ll get to it before next Christmas. Ditto InFamous. Looks good, but not high priority.

Cold Fear is a game I’ll likely download from a service like Direct2Drive or Steam, depending on where I can get it cheapest. It’s not a triple-A title, but it looks interesting, and I don’t expect it to cost much. In the end, if it disappoints, I can stop playing and I won’t feel as though I’ve lost much.

I’ll probably end up getting Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box and Henry Hatsworth in another year or so once they’re bargain basement titles on EBay. I expect to enjoy them, but I’ve got DS games coming out my ears right now, so I’m in no rush.

There are also a metric butt-ton of sequels about which I’m less than excited. Bioshock 2? Meh. Mass Effect 2? Sure, I’ll try it eventually. Assassins Creed 2? Yeah – I’ll get to it. My feelings about Killzone 2 and Wolfenstein are similar. All games I’d like to try at some point. We’ll see if I ever get around to them.

Lastly, there are a few games I expect to be released later this year. I’ll definitely be picking up Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening when it’s out. Ditto Super Mario Galaxy 2. I loved the first one. Starcraft 2 is a game I’ll try to buy on day one if I can. If The Last Guardian comes out this year, I’ll be as excited about it as I am about Heavy Rain, and I’ll get that one ASAP. God of War 3 and Final Fantasy 13 look potentially good, but I’ll likely wait until 2011 to pick them up.

Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles is the sequel to Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. I definitely enjoyed Umbrella Chronicles, but while Umbrella Chronicles covered Resident Evil 0, 1, and 3, Darkside Chronicles covers my very favorite title in the series: Resident Evil 2.

I’ll grant you that I’ll be playing it largely for nostalgia purposes, but I will enjoy it. Re-encountering reimagined scenes from the first console title I truly loved will be pretty sweet. It looks like I’ll be waiting until Christmas for the game, but that’s okay. I can wait.

While I found the original God of War to be a far better title than its sequel, I have high hopes for God of War 3. I’ll admit that there can be only so much that Kraatos can go through before the storyline becomes old and worn, my hope is that a trilogy is not too much to ask.

In the same way that Resident Evil 4 was a reinvention of the franchise, God of War needs something fresh and new if it’s not going to die of sequelitis. I can only hope that David Jaffee is up to it.

I’ve been a huge fan of Desktop Tower Defense ever since I found the HandDrawnGames site. I also always said that I’d love to see it on DS. On April 29th, I get my wish. Of all the many tower defense games I’ve played, this is likely my favorite, tied with Pixeljunk Monsters. While playing the flash version on the PC is fun, being able to play it on a handheld anywhere will be even better.

I’ve been looking forward to Heavy Rain since I heard about it as an unofficial sequel to Indigo Prophecy. I played Indigo Prophecy and loved it, despite the mind-bogglingly bizarre plot that emerged toward the ending. I also played the European version of the game, Fahrenheit, which was essentially the same game, only with a couple nude scenes and a sex minigame. Nothing you wouldn’t see in a rated-R movie, but I felt like I needed the full experience.

Aside from ridiculously good graphics, Heavy Rain’s main draw is dynamic storytelling. Apparently, your character can die and the plot will continue without him/her. I’m also looking forward to the mechanics introduced in Indigo Prophecy. The adventure game with action minigame elements, timed conversation responses, and minor stealth game elements. The game’s diversity is a big part of why I loved it.

Lastly, my most anticipated game: Starcraft 2. I’ve been a big fan of the original for many years, and I’m constantly impressed by the fact that it’s the only decade-old game that I always see on store shelves when I’m at a Best Buy or Circuit City.

I’m less than ecstatic about the fact that it will be packaged as three separate race-specific titles, but I have faith that Blizzard will make their product worth the cash. Aside from the MMOs, I’ve always enjoyed Blizzard’s games.