Adam’s 2010 Games of the Year
And now: my goatee from 2003, here to introduce you to my GOTY picks for 2010.
[pictured above: just look at that fine goatee.]
I am adapting the criteria that Time magazine uses in awarding their “Person of the Year”: these three are the games that I liked most, or anticipated most, or thought about the most. They’re not necessarily what I think are the best games of the year—just the ones that I think will stick with me. Let’s get going.
GOTY the first: Mass Effect 2 (360). I loved this game twice. There was no other game this year that struck the such a perfect balance between grand, progressive game design—the dialogue system, the alignment system and the streamlined RPG/shooter battle system are all worthy of discussion—and being a genuine mainstream hit. Now, it’s not a perfect game by any means: the writing and story are sub-Star Trek schlocky sci-fi cheesy. But it’s worth noting that it was the only boxed game I bought new for the 360 this year… and I still played my 360 more than any other console. Either every other developer is doing something wrong, or Bioware is doing something very, very right.
GOTY Deux: Kirby’s Epic Yarn (Wii). This is going to be a strange analogy, but you know that feeling you get when you’re watching someone do something that they’re skilled at? Especially when they’re doing it off the cuff. Think of a jazz musician, or a trained artist sketching freehand, or a riffing comedian: they have the skills to spontaneously make up amazing stuff without even trying. That’s how playing Kirby’s Epic Yarn feels to me. Whenever I’m trying to describe the experience of playing game, the word “effortless” keeps coming to mind. The people who designed this game didn’t make any tough decisions, but every decision they made feels right and natural and—if you’re excuse the pun—seamless. It’s not the most innovative game of the year, but it might be the most virtuosic.
GOThreeY: Metroid: Other M (Wii). Aaaand here’s where the caveats from the introductory paragraph become relevant. Other M is on this list not because it’s a great game, but because it provoked a lot of thoughtful discussion—maybe more than any other game released this year. It’s 2010’s touchstone for conversations about narrative, gender and culture in games. But, let’s face it: Other M is a genuinely awful video game. The story makes no sense; the voice acting is beyond abysmal; the art direction and sound design are either lazy or intentionally milquetoast. Probably both. But there’s a seedling of an interesting game in there: the level design is classic Metroid, and the 2D/3D switching mechanic works surprisingly well. I would love to play a sequel to Other M that uses the same engine, but with a different director. (What are you up to lately, Mr. Miyamoto?)
Five runners-up: Persona 3 Portable, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, Game Dev Story, Costume Quest, Infinity Blade.
—Adam
Past Romantic
I was excited this summer to see that a Scott Pilgrim game would be coming to Xbox Live Arcade to accompany the release of the Scott Pilgrim movie. The graphic novel series used video games not as a series of pop culture references, but as a basis for a language that the characters in the world the books create all speak, a common ground upon which all of their conversations can stand. So it made sense to see that the Scott Pilgrim game would pay homage to the games its source material showed a love for: Super Mario Bros 3, River City Ransom, Final Fantasy, and any number of brawlers that people my age grew up pumping quarters into at the mall arcade.
As you play Scott Pilgrim, it becomes apparent that it’s not just trying to do the “retro aesthetic” that’s pretty popular among a certain crowd of gamers who appreciate being in on the reference; this game also makes purposefully old-school decisions about its mechanics, and I think that this can cause serious problems— both the choices that were made to be like “classic” games and are bad on their own and some choices that don’t mesh well with other decisions that are based on modern gaming design.
One example: you have a persistent game that saves your progress after completing a stage (well, it saves the progress for the character that PLAYER 1 is currently playing as, which is dumb but is not really related to the intentionally retro thing), but you also have a stock of 3 lives that you start with before getting a game over and then going back to 3 lives. As a result, here’s how the game basically played out for me:
- Beat Stage x, losing a life or two along the way
- Got a Game Over on Stage x+1 because I had fewer lives/less starting health
- Started Stage x+1 again with 3 lives and full health, beat it
- Got a Game Over on Stage x+2 because I had fewer lives/less starting health
- Started Stage x+2 again with 3 lives and full health…
You see the pattern. As a result I saw a lot of stages twice and didn’t necessarily do any better on them the second time; I just passed them because I had more resources than before. This is dumb. If you’re going to stick with the whole “lives”/”game over” system, you should at least not have the game save your progress like an old game and then adjust your difficulty appropriately in order to allow the game to be beatable. What I think would be better, though, would be to have lives reset in between levels, which would lend to a difficulty curve like that of the retro stages in Super Meat Boy— you have 3 lives to complete 3 stages, but those lives only apply to this small set of 3 stages. If you can complete it, that’s great, those lives don’t matter any more. If you don’t, you can try again right away with another set of 3 lives.
It doesn’t help that the game features a weird upgrade system— you can’t see how items will help your stats until you buy them, and you can buy items over and over again to pump up your stats, so the solution to feeling stuck is just to grind for money until you have powered yourself up enough to blow through enemies with no troubles. All in all, the game feels torn between wanting to be an artifact of the period of gaming that influenced the source material so much and a fun romp through the Scott Pilgrim universe. When set alongside other modern arcade brawler-style games, the game ends up feeling frustrating in a lot of ways.
Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light is a game that has similar ideas about appropriating nostalgia but I think it works more often than Scott Pilgrim. I knew ahead of time that it had a very strict limited inventory system: you can only hold 15 items per character in your party and not only does any weapon or piece of armor you’re carrying take up a spot (which basically means 4-5 spots gone immediately) but any spell you want a character to cast requires carrying a spellbook. Add on a few items to handle healing and different status effects (no stacking!) and you quickly have no room for even gathering loot. I’m willing to give this mechanic the benefit of the doubt as an intentional and carefully thought out design decision— the game does tend to aim for small outings in tiny labyrinths rather than the modern RPG’s sprawling, real-world-mimicing castles with huge sets of rooms and branching paths, so while it does require careful planning, the inventory system is just limited enough to feel like a part of the game’s challenge.
I am still on the fence about one mechanic, though— I was shocked when I started playing to realize that you can’t choose a target when choosing an action in its turn-based RPG battles. I’m still not 100% sure how it’s choosing which enemy to hit, but I know that in the case of healing an ally it chooses the person with the lowest raw health number— it’s not percentage based. I can’t tell how Phoenix Downs work in the case of reviving one out of more than one downed party member. This can be tricky. I have lost a battle because it revived the character that didn’t have the heal spell instead of the one that did, and I did find that frustrating. However, in general when it comes to attacking, you know (and it reminds you right on the attack menu screen) based on the weapon you have or the spell you’re using whether a character will attack an enemy in the front or back row (melee weapons for front, ranged weapons for rear, and spells are a mix) and you can use that along with the knowledge you gain through trial and error about elemental weaknesses to make some light strategic decisions.
However: eliminating a step from the battles does speed things up considerably and makes for a good match with the AP system, an interesting alternative to MP. The battles are turn-based, and each turn you gain one AP. You can choose to spend it on various actions— a conventional attack costs one AP, while some spells and special attacks cost more. You can choose to Defend to save that AP in order to build up more and cast a spell, but there are also other ways to accumulate more than one AP, such as by carrying over points from a previous battle or getting bonus points for getting the killing blow on enemies. In the end the battles feel simple but slightly puzzling and if it weren’t for the rare exception where I really wanted to make a manual targeting decision I’d feel like they had actually pulled off the use of mostly old-school mechanics as an intentional game design decision.
There are numerous reasons for wanting to make your game feel old. Sometimes it’s an attempt to cash in on nostalgia. Other times it’s a conscious choice to keep things simple, whether that choice is intended to reach a specific audience or to keep production costs low. I think the main risk you take with the decision to use low-resolution graphics (as long as it doesn’t cause issues with hitboxes, which I think makes it a mechanics issue) is turning off your audience due to personal tastes. When you move into the world of old-school mechanics, ignoring changes that have come along since, you risk reintroducing long-solved problems that will only feel more annoying to gamers that already know of a better alternative.
—Casey
On Walden Waterblock
Minecraft has spawned this huge community of people showing off these ridiculous things they’ve done and they’re accomplished through all kinds of means: plain old hard work, usually by a significant number of people pitching in together but sometimes the work of one industrious jobless person; the use of “creative” mode to allow things like flying through the air and having no scarcity of resources; the use of server admin commands to grant infinite amounts of resources; and even the ridiculous automated things people have done to convert various 2D and 3D imaging formats into Minecraft worlds. All of these things are totally amazing and worthy of the community of “holy shit look at this fucking thing” that has grown out of it, but speaking to my own time with the game I feel like it risks taking away almost all of the actual meaningful experience I can have with it.
I’m grateful for the the presence of the internet as a way to discover that there are people who are building entire cities in Minecraft and beating Super Mario Bros in four minutes, that I can share high score boards with my brother halfway across the country, that there can be a whole culture of people who are as obsessed as my friends and I are with shoddy translations and quirky games, but I can’t help but feel like I’ve taken away the ability to ever feel proud of what I do in a video game by making myself a part of that network. In terms of the amount of time I actually spend playing video games these days, I’m probably somewhere in the lower half among people who would consider video games a part of their identity, and when it comes to a lot of these kinds of accomplishments, putting the time into it is often a big factor.
That doesn’t always bother me— I can enjoy a lot of games just for the entertainment they bring to me or the challenge they present. But Minecraft isn’t a particularly challenging game, once you manage to make it over the initial learning hump, and I think that the rewards in Minecraft come from the pure accomplishments: building a new tool, building a structure of some practicality (which I would argue is essentially the same as building a new tool), discovering a new material, discovering a large source of some new material, or building a structure of no practical use.
Within the structure of the Minecraft community, the extremes to which people have taken the game got everyone over the first four of those accomplishments extremely quickly. I think it’s cool that people can work together to so quickly assemble an authoritative reference on a fictional world, but since there are just so many people and programming this sort of thing takes an intense amount of work, the people will always overwhelmingly “beat” the world-creators, even if Notch hires more employees. There will never be mysteries in the world of Minecraft, and I really want there to be.
I wish there existed a much harder difficulty curve to Minecraft— one that was far-reaching, not just the damage tweaking that happens in the Settings. Right now I think that in single player the game does a pretty good job of proving how insignificant you are within the scope of the world that exists, but I wish there were more things that could go wrong in such a way that the odds were stacked even more severely against you. Biomes should be bigger, so if you are in a snowy area there is a chance you will make it out of it but it will take some amount of fortitude and it’s difficult to make fire or you can’t move out in the open for too long without getting hypothermia or there is some sort of resource shortage that makes sense for that climate (other biomes would have different challenges). I wish that rather than just losing health from falling you could break an arm and maybe you wouldn’t be able to use tools as effectively for a while, or a leg and you’d walk more slowly; something that isn’t just a decrease on a health bar easily remedied with food.
The times that I feel most “immersed” in Minecraft are when I am overcoming some ultimately primitive obstacle: when I died and realized that I was carrying something valuable, so I spent two days wandering around looking for some familiar landmark and swearing to myself that I’d start leaving trails. In some ways, I ruined it for myself by browsing the wiki and the forums almost immediately after playing— if I had managed to figure out how to build something like a compass on my own, I think it would feel like one of the greatest accomplishments in gaming in my life.
If I had kept avoiding wikis and spoilers from friends, I could have kept the value in those first 4 accomplishments. I could have made it 12 months into the game before discovering portals. To tell the truth, with the game as it exists right now, I probably would never have discovered portals, because before portals there was little incentive to do arrangement of… things in the real world, just within the crafting pane. But I think that the game as developed into a beta and eventually a real final game could (and should) find ways to nudge you toward things— let you find half-assembled items that you can decompose into partial crafting patterns that you could complete, leave ruins of long-gone civilizations that could point you to the existence of items like stairs or portals or pressure plates… give you ways to not be quite as aimlessly left to your own devices, but still let you discover things at a slower pace, to make the day that you build a record player and put to use a record that you found on the second day you played and have been holding on to for months a day that you’re unlikely to ever forget.
—Casey
Shepard v. Shepard
We’ve all got problems. Hoo boy. And we’ve all got to talk about our problems from time to time. Today, we’re talking about my Mass Effect 2 problem.
I want to play Mass Effect 2 again. First time I played it, I played as Jane Shepard, my Paragon-as-you-please female soldier imported from the original Mass Effect. I enjoyed the game immensely, and now I want to play it again. I want to play it again with all of the DLC in place; I want to play it again as a different class; I want to play it again with a male Shepard; I want to play as a Renegade instead of a Paragon. In short: I want to get my money’s worth, and see the game from the other side.
Now, I should play with the male, biotics-wielding, unrelenting Renegade I made in my second play through of the original Mass Effect. On the surface, it would seem that starting a new game with this character would fulfill all of my desires.
Except.
[Pictured: Cmdr. Nutty Shepard, unbearable jackhole]
I can’t STAND this guy. My male Renegade Shepard, I mean—he’s a dick. I hate listening to him talk, I hate the way he treats people, I hate his attitudes and I hate his goals. Every time I think about playing Mass Effect 2 as this guy my heart sinks, and for a little while, the thought of playing video games loses all its appeal.
Which makes me wonder… why? Why does Nutty Shepard fill me with such loathing? Is it the way I made him look? (Gaunt, pale, snivelly?) Or have I made negative associations with him because of the things you have to do in Mass Effect to max out your Renegade points? Is it just impossible for me to stomach playing a Renegade character at all? Do I hate Mark Meer’s voice acting? Do I hate Mark Meer… as a person? Or is it something else entirely?
[Pictured: Jane Shepard. Stuck with me through the good times (Mass Effect 2) and the not-so-good times (the original Mass Effect). Spoiler, I guess: she talks about geth.]
I’m faced with deciding whether to (a) suck it up and play as Nutty; or (b) replay the game as Jane. The former would scratch my completionist itch, while the latter… well, the latter just seems like the most natural and fun thing to do. Jane and me, we’re interstellar friends, you see? It’s difficult to imagine playing the game without her.
It’s strange. I mean, I like to talk the talk about how narrative isn’t the important thing in games and how mechanics are king and so forth. But when it comes time to walk the walk, I find myself so attached to my Mass Effect 2 character that I don’t want to play the game as anyone else.
Well played, Bioware.
Related: On FemShep’s Popularity In Mass Effect at Gamasutra.
—Adam
