So Capcom just confirmed Resident Evil 6, due to come out on November 20. Great! I’ve played each of the numbered Resident Evil games to completion and loved them all, even if I’ve found all the even-numbered games to be superior. I’m hoping that RE6 is also awesome.

Not that it matters, but here’s a quick no-BS bullet point list of what I want when I play a Resident Evil game.

• BOWs. That means moaning, flesh-eating zombies rather than Ganados.
• I don’t want to be able to run while I shoot, but I want the down-and-button quick-turn. Resident Evil is not run-and-gun. It’s stop-and-pop.
• Jump scares. Lots of jump scares. Some people don’t like them. I am not some people.
• No mandatory suicidal AI companion. Shiva drove me insane.
• Set up the unspoken rules, and then break them. Kind of like Resident Evil 2 did when the T-103 zombie came through the wall and then pursued you from room to room.
• More zombies.

And that’s it.

Like so many other XBLA exclusives that eventually come to other platforms, I played Limbo much later than everyone else. I really enjoyed it though. Dark, disturbing, and pleasingly puzzly, Limbo is a perfect bite-sized downloadable game. I enjoyed it so much that I wrote all kinds of hints posts for it. Limbo gets a B.

Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles was largely about nostalgia for me. Resident Evil 2 was probably my favorite game on the original Playstation, exceeding even Symphony of the Night. The fact that Umbrella Chronicles retells that story within an on-rails shooter sounded awesome to me.

The reality is that while it was fun to re-experience the story, on-rails shooters never end up being as fun as I want them to be. And like Darkside Chronicles, it got extremely hard towards the end and I was unable to finish the game and see its ending. Too bad. Darkside Chronicles gets a C.

My wife and I have always enjoyed playing RPGs together. We’ve played Dungeon Siege, Icewind Dale 1 & 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, Champions of Norrath, and we’re currently trying out Hunted: The Demon’s Forge. So back before we’d tried Dungeon Siege 3, we tried Sacred 2.

As it turned out, Sacred 2 wasn’t that great. The game mechanics were weird and hard to grasp, the leveling and combat weren’t satisfying, and in the end we just quit before we got very far. Sacred 2 gets a D.

Before the big holiday releases of 2011 started hitting, Shadow of the Colossus HD was one of my most looked forward to games. I’d loved playing the original, and I’ve always loved replaying good games. Now, I got to replay this one with trophies! It’s ridiculous to think I’d try to get all the lizards or fruits in the game, and I didn’t have much interest in time attack or hard mode, but I did very much enjoy the playthrough. The HD remake of Shadow of the Colossus gets a B. I plan to get to Ico HD sometime in early 2012.

I’ve wrapped my first playthrough of Batman: Arkham Asylum. I’d delayed playing it as long as I had because it’s a licensed game. In general, licensed games stink. I was pleased to find that Arkham Asylum does not, in fact, stink. Awesome game. The game has me listed as 91% complete, mostly because there are a number of challenges I haven’t hit yet. I won’t be going for 100% achievements on this one, mainly because I know I’ll never finish all the challenges perfectly, and a 40-hit combo feels a bit beyond my reach, but I might consider a second playthrough on Hard difficulty now that I’ve finished the first. I did manage to get all of The Riddler’s challenges.

Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles is a fun little Wii game. I mainly bought it for the trip on memory lane through Resident Evil 2, which holds a very warm place in my heart. Paradoxically, it’s also a very scary place. The game’s fun, but I haven’t played it much recently.

Red Faction: Guerilla has been taking up a lot of my time. I bought it on Steam when it went on sale – I can’t remember whether I paid $5 or $10 for the game. I’m in Oasis, on casual difficulty, and the game’s already feeling a bit monotonous. I might just go back and play every once in a while. If only I didn’t have that damned completionist thing going, I could just put the game aside and be done with it.

Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes turned out to be a mistake. It cost $15, so it sounded like a good deal for a decent tactical fantasy combat game. But it’s seriously broken, and the dialog is hideous. I quit after 3 tries at the first battle. I’m actually unable to move where I want to. I click on a square and the character sprints in the other direction. Avoid this one. I should seek a refund.

Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening is an expansion from my favorite game of last year. I really loved Dragon Age. But this expansion has some problems. Notably, the difficulty is erratic as all hell. After a far too easy first chapter, I set the difficulty to hard, and I’ve played that way through most of the game. But when I got to the dragon at the end, I got stomped. Flat. I set the difficulty to normal, then easy, and kept losing. After my 3rd attempt on easy, I managed to pull off a victory. Barely. Jesus, I just want the game to end now, but I’m having difficulty mustering the will to go back to it for the final two or three battles.

Once I wrap up Awakening and possibly Red Faction, I’ll install the copy of Mass Effect 2 I’ve had sitting here. It might be hard to go right from one Bioware game to another. I just ordered Enslaved, and I might try that one first. I’ve also been considering going back to oldies like Grim Fandango or Metal Gear Solid. I also never got far in Torchlight. I guess we’ll see what strikes my fancy. I’ve been putting a lot of time into Gem Miner: Dig Deeper recently.

As you likely know, Resident Evil 4 heralded a rebirth for the series. And while I do miss some of the classic survival horror elements, Resident Evil 4 really is an excellent third-person shooter and action game. It’s got a lot of replayability, and some awesome set pieces. It uses quicktime events as well as I’ve ever seen them used in a game, and holds true to a lot of Resident Evil staples. As it’s seeming like the even-numbered titles in the series are the good ones, I have high hopes for Resident Evil 6.

9- Starcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, PC, 1998)

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I were in a Best Buy, and I pointed out to her a game on the shelf: Starcraft Battle Chest. How amazing is it that the game is twelve years old and still selling in a prominent place on store shelves? It’s just that good.

At this point, more than a decade later, I hardly need to talk about how amazing it was that Blizzard created three separate yet balanced factions which each had an entirely different play style and different tactics. We may take it for granted now, but it really is pretty impressive. I’ve reinstalled and replayed Starcraft 2 plenty of times, although I’ve only finished the single-player campaign once. I’m willing to believe that this slot in my list will soon be replaced by Starcraft 2, which I have yet to play.

8- Portal (Valve Software, PC, 2007)

If you read this site, you’re likely interested in video games. And if you’re interested in video games, you likely don’t need me to explain to you how awesome Portal was/is. Portal is a puzzle-platformer that introduced a simple concept and then stretched it six ways from Octember, and layered on some humor via everyone’s favorite passive-agressive psychotic artificial intelligence.

Dispire what a brief joy the game was, Portal is universally recognised as a kick-ass game. I, for one, agree.

7- Psychonauts (Double Fine, PC, 2005)

If you haven’t guessed by the name of this site, I really like Psychonauts. It’s hands-down the funniest game I’ve ever played. And while I can’t claim that humor games are my favorite genre, I’ve got huge appreciation for Psychonauts. At this point, I’ve only played Psychonauts start-to-finish twice, but I have no doubt that I’ll go back again someday and replay it a third time.

6- Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda, PC, 2006)

Oblivion had so much going for it. I’ll grant you that the engine wasn’t ideal, but seeing physics-based traps go off from a first-person perspective, gathering wild flowers to make potions, and fighting melee battles from a first-person perspective was only part of the game’s joy. Then, the modding community took a game which on its own was simply good, and they made it great. The GUI updates, improved AI, new music, and higher-resolution graphics that the modding community introduced were simply amazing.

The whole game is minimalistic. Other than the spirit sending you on your quests to destroy colossi and your own character calling to his horse, no one in the game ever speaks. You never go up levels, and you never find new equipment. The sword and bow with which you begin the game are the same ones with which you’ll finish. Your character’s only stats are his life meter and his grip meter. And while these can be improved by hunting lizards and eating fruit, this is neither spelled out anywhere in the game nor is it necessary to the game’s completion.

The colossus battles are epic, and the music and landscapes only add to the drama. I often found myself wanting to yell out loud when I found my character wildly scrambling and gritting my teeth to hold onto the arm of a hundred foot tall colossus who was flailing wildly to dislodge the human insect who was stabbing at him with a pinlike blade. yes – the game lends itself to flowery descriptions.

For a game with no dialog, Shadow of the Colossus has pathos. Nothing is ever spelled out, but as the game progresses, you find yourself asking whether slaying the majestic colossi is the right course of action. After all, what have they done? Whom have they harmed?

I won’t spoil any more for those who may still be considering returning to 2005 to play the game, but Shadow of the Collosus holds a well-earned place in my top 20 games of all time.

12- Resident Evil 2 (Capcom, Sony Playstation, 1998)
In many ways, Resident Evil 2 doesn’t hold up well. But I enjoyed the game so much that even after twelve years, it remains one of my favorite games of all time. In 1998, Resident Evil was still coming into its own. The first game had a bit of a haunted house vibe, and terrible terrible voice acting. This sequel improved the voice acting, improved the plot, and greatly improved the graphics. Plus, the scope was so much larger – rather than zombies haunting a house, the infection had spread to the entire city. The parallel storylines followed by the game’s two playable characters was a further stroke of genius.

The game’s story primarily involved learning about how the T-virus outbreak had occurred, and learning about the even worse G-virus that the Umbrella Corporation had been developing. The fun was in discovering new enemy types along the way and enjoying the scripted cheap scares, which were plentiful. Sitting in my room at night with the lights turned off, I ate that shit up.

I suppose the decision to place this game as highly as I have isn’t an entirely rational one. It’s more about the joy that the game brought me when I first played it.

11- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (KCE Tokyo, Sony Playstation, 1997)
The aspect of Symphony of the Night which I’ve lauded most has always been its amazing soundtrack, but that’s far from the best thing about the game. Aside from the soundtrack, and aside from the fact that the graphics were absolutely outstanding in 1997, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was a fantastic 2d platformer that gave you an open world, RPG elements, and so much more.

Symphony of the Night was the first Castlevania game to give your character levels and an inventory. As the game progressed, you could pick up artifacts that would grant you new powers such as a double jump, flying kick, and the ability to shapeshift into a wolf, bat, or a cloud of mist. You could gain familiars who would fly alongside you, casting spells, healing you, or just attacking everything in sight.

And the boss monsters in Symphony of the Night were memorable. Trevor, Grant, and Syfa from Castlevania III made a comeback, Waterbound Sylla from Greek myth was present, and as always in Castlavania games, Death himself made an appearance. But “Granfaloon” may be my favorite Castlevania enemy of all time: a giant sphere composed of corpses. The corpses fall off and rise up as zombies to attack you. And when enough have fallen off, Granfaloon begins firing freaking laser beams at you!

As the game progressed, you could learn magic spells or buy them from the merchant. These consisted of Street Fighter-like quarter circle motions, double button presses, or something similar. They were often difficult to pull off on a D pad, but they were very useful.

Symphony of the Night gave you two weapon slots, and two buttons with which to use them. You could dual wield weapons, such as a whip and a mace, or use a two-handed weapon, or use a sword and shield. One of my favorite magic items in the game was the shield rod, which when equipped alongside a shield allowed for a special attack: when you pressed both your weapon and shield button simultaneously, you’d trigger a magical effect based on what shield you had equipped – each shield in the game had its own unique effect. And there were dozens of shields in the game. In fact, the number of different magic items in the game was so huge that it would be nearly impossible to find them all. And many had totally undocumented powers. Many were the times I’d pull off some crazy effect and have no idea how I’d managed to do it.

As I progressed through the game and watched the completion percentage counter in the inventory screen approach 100%, I grew a bit sad. i didn’t want the game to be over. How amazing was it then when I reached what appeared to be the final room in the castle and found a second castle suspended upside-down atop the first? And the meter hit 101%…

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is available as a download on the Playstation Network. If you’ve never played, I highly recommend 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.

I came up with three game enemies that have terrified me. Keep in mind that these are not video game chase scenes – that’s a different list entirely.

Fallout 2: The Enclave
Just after you help a bunch of ghouls repair their broken nuclear reactor, you end up in a chat with a member of The Enclave – an organization whose members all wear advanced power armor at a time when you may still be in leather armor. The following video shows the conversation. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem terrifying at all, but at the time when I was playing it, I remember thinking *oh shit* – *oh shit* …and yeah… this video is not safe for work. At all.

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic: The Cyclops
In Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, throughout the course of the game, there are a few segments in which you fight a cyclops. They’re big, bad, and ugly. The guy fighting the cyclops here was all about showing how good he is at fighting it, so it never actually picks him up, but when that thing grabbed me, picked me up, and roared in my face, I think I may have screamed back at it in fear.

Resident Evil 2: the T-103
Yes – this is a game moment I’ve written about many many times before. It is simply epic. The following clip doesn’t do it justice, mainly because the guy playing obviously isn’t as scared as I was, and also because he hangs out in the inventory screen long enough to kill the mood. I didn’t stop to shoot at the T-103. I just ran my ass off.

Start watching no later than 7:30. You’ll want to keep watching until at least 9:30 for the good part.

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.

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.

My first game console was the Atari 2600 my father brought home when I was eight. I spent countless hours playing Yars Revenge, Adventure, Demons to Diamonds, and Warlords. I even loved that crappy Raiders of the Lost Ark game. But the one I probably spent the most time with was Video Pinball. Never before and never since have I obsessed so much about a numeric score in a video game. I developed a pattern whereby I could repeatedly nudge the ball – gently, so as to not tilt – and bounce it back and forth, watching the score go up and up.

A few years later, and after a brief stint with a Timex-Sinclair PC and an Atari 800XL PC, my parents bought me a Commodore 64. I do not jest when I say that the Commodore 64 changed my life. It got me interested in programming, which many years later led to a career. But 90% of the time, if I was on the Commodore, I was playing games. Defender of the Crown. Pool of Radiance. Autoduel. Maniac Mansion. The Racing Destruction Set. Wishbringer. Wasteland. Mail Order Monsters. Super Giana Sisters. Forbidden Forest. I could easily write about all of them. I had dozens of 5.25 floppies, and they all saw a lot of use.

I still remember vividly the day I got my copy of Bards’ Tale 2 via UPS. Cash on Delivery. Words cannot express the excitement I had as I broke open the packaging, slid that floppy into my 1541 disk drive, and typed LOAD”*”,8,1 – to this day, when I type that, my fingers try to hit shift-2 to get the quote.

I never did complete Bards’ Tale 2, although I likely spent hundreds of hours in its dungeons. That distinction goes to Ultima V, which was the most epic game I ever played on the Commodore. The NPCs had daily routines – the shopkeepers would close shop for lunch and walk to the bar to eat. I could have conversations with just about anyone in the game and ask them their names and their jobs. I could pilot ships and balloons, learn area effect spells, relocate moongates, and track the movements of the Shadowlords. I had to travel the world to learn the magical entrance words to open various dungeons so that I could travel to the underworld, battling mongbats, sand traps, and gazers along the way. When I finally made my way to the dungeon Doom in the center of the underworld and rescued Lord British, it was such a momentous event in my young life that I wrote it on the calendar and celebrated for a number of years afterwards.

While Ultima V is undoubtedly my most fondly-remembered Commodore 64 game, Wasteland isn’t far behind. It took the top-down style from Ultima, and mixed it with Bards Tale’s battle system to create an awesome mesh of the two. You could split your party during battle to have the melee fighters run up while the gunslingers stayed back. The game’s atmosphere was what later inspired the first Fallout game, but Wasteland was far edgier. The battle descriptions had you exploding foes like a blood sausage and spinning them into a dance of death, and a later mission in the game had you battling nuns with machine guns. You could even hire a hooker and contract Wasteland Herpes. And my favorite part of the game was the over-the-top robots you’d battle at Base Cochise. The robots you’d fight had names like Sonar-targetted Proton Carbine, Life-seeking Flamethrower, and VTOL Auto-fire Robot.

Fast forward to 1996. I’d just broken off an engagement, and I was depressed. I hadn’t played games much in the past few years, and my friend Rich talked me into buying myself a Playstation. One of the first games I played was Resident Evil 2, and it blew me away. To this day, no other game defines survival horror like Resident Evil 2 does. There are moments in Dead Space that come close, but the storyline in Resident Evil 2, while very complex, is the best of any game in the franchise. Also, the T-103 zombie is by far the best Resident Evil villain ever.

After that, I became primarily a PC Gamer, moving on to games like Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, and Mechwarrior. But I’ll always have fond memories of that Commodore 64.