My Games of 2011, Part 1

So, the moment I've been dreading and anticipating is upon us, the actual 'let's quantify the unquantifiable with rankings' time of Game of the Year voting has been up on PA for a few days, but I've been doing a little research into one of the games on my list so that it could, in fact, make it on my list.  I'll explain when we get to it which should be tomorrow's post.  (Yes, I'm dragging it out over the days like I did originally, mostly because I've gotten a little more accustomed to doing this and might be a bit more verbose this year.)  Aside from the way I'll be handling the list in multiple posts, there are a few odd similarities with this year and last years list that have me a bit confused, though I suppose these things just happen.  Like last year, my list contains 12 games when I've worried for half this year that I wouldn't make 10, and of those 12 games, I've only physically played 10 of them, leaving me with two games that I feel I am knowledgeable enough to rate without having played them directly.

Neither of those games are in this post, however, so rest assured that I'm not simply grabbing two games and throwing them at the end to pad the list up.  Quite the opposite as they both scored fairly high for reasons that I'll get into when their number ticks up.  First up, however are four games that brought a range of opinions to the table, from disappointment to being impressed and from quick, satisfying romps to prolonged, satisfying, yet still unsettling sessions of a game whose length is measured in days, not hours.  I won't say that they 'earned' their spots on the list, because that implies that the games higher up 'earned' their spots as well and, with only a couple exceptions, they're basically numbered by happenstance and is not indicative of overall quality.  So, of course, with the first game on the list, I'm going to go right against that and speak directly to its (lack of) quality.

12. Pokemon White (and Black)

I've said it a few times before, and I'll likely say it several more times before all is said and done, but I did not like Pokemon White.  For what had been all but billed as a reboot of the franchise, willing to make all sorts of much-needed changes to the 'formula', White proved to be 'yet another pokemon game', doing absolutely nothing that the hype attached to it which was rather unfortunate as you might guess.  Even though it was all 'different' it was all the same and that's certainly not a step in the right direction for a game that has the possibilities and potential as the Pokemon series.  So this would be the real disappointment on my list and, were it not a game that I obviously liked despite everything I hated about it it wouldn't be on my list period.  Regardless, its spot on the list ensures that I'll get to air out all of my concerns and complaints.

As I said, the thing that bothers me is just how much White is the same as everything that came before it.  Same stupid storyline with a kid going out to index pokemon for a professor who has a bunch of aides but instead chooses to rely on a plucky tween from the same knowledge, same stupid plot hook of Team (Word) being stupid and eventually getting their crap kicked in by said tween, and same "Go here, challenge gym, win, move on, repeat" formula that certainly drives the game forward, but in a rather shoddy way nowadays.  Even all of the 'new' pokemon that they stated with vehemence that you had to use, as no other pokemon from previous iterations would be available prior to beating the game (which was instantly disproved by the existence of the Dream World which sent me a Farfetch'd before my third badge I believe) had very obvious roots into the design of pokemon past.  The same Fire, Water, and Grass starters, the obvious Pidgey-line, the obvious Geodude-line, etc. etc. were all present and accounted for, as were the fuck-off instant-run Legendaries that haven't been a good idea for three versions of Pokemon and do not change in that.

The other issue at hand, and this is the one that I really, really take issue with, is Team Plasma.  Not only do they mark a continuance of relying on a plot hook that's been tired for a long time, but they manage to be the single dumbest thing to ever grace a Pokemon game and possibly DS games in general.  There's spoilers here, but they're mild because who plays Pokemon for the story, honestly.  Anyways, the message Team Plasma is trying to spread is that Pokemon Trainers are committing unspeakable evils by using pokemon to fight battles for nothing more than pride and profit, which is okay enough of a message I guess.  Where it's muddled is how Team Plasma uses pokemon to fight trainer pokemon to convince the trainer that they're stronger so the trainer should release their pokemon.  Just mull that over a bit - Team Plasma uses pokemon battling to promote anti-pokemon battling beliefs.  Yeah.

Still, I enjoyed Pokemon White as I enjoy any pokemon game; it was fun building a team and getting across the various gym challenges and I was more than happy to start meta-planning super teams, but eventually I just got tired.  It's the same thing I've been doing since Pokemon Red and unless there's an actual change of form between Black/White and the next iteration (not the inevitable Grey version), it'll be the last time I'll bother with it.  Of course, I'm lying, but when I play the next iteration, if it's the same old thing, I just won't even bother to mention it.

11. Sonic Generations

I just recently went through Sonic Generations, so I'm fairly convinced that I know where I wanted to place it, and while I'm comfortable with where it's at I am a bit surprised.  There's very little about Sonic Generations that I disliked and, in fact, quite a lot that I liked about it.  So why is it so low on my list?  I suspect it has something to do with just how short it is and while it manages to impress, it doesn't stick to you.  I can't call it forgettable because that would just be dishonest, since it's very memorable if just because of all the neat versions of stages that are brand new, as well as faithful recreations of others.  Generations has the most consistently good gameplay of any Sonic game for a long time, as it takes the best part of the last 'good' (or at least not absolutely terrible) Sonic Game, Sonic Unleashed (though Sonic Colors is supposed to be rather good as well), in the form of just straight-forward speed-focused maps (from Daylight Sonic, obviously) and makes a game out of it without bogging it down with something unnecessary.

Really, though, Sonic Generations -did- need a little bit more of something.  Sure, you have all sorts of challenges as optional content that will likely add quite a few hours to your total time if you should go for it, but there's very little reward for doing any of it.  Getting Red Rings unlocks artwork of designs from previous Sonic games which is nice and all, but hardly locked to the game itself.  Beating the challenge levels gives you a bit of e-cred, I suppose, if your time is fast enough, and every level has a bell associated with it that'll get you a song to play during other stages or yet more artwork.  But it's all just stuff that's sort of there in the literal backroom of the game that you could very well go through the entirety of the game and not see a bit of it.  I guess what's to be said of it is that it was designed for replayability to be a main factor of your enjoyment, since there's always ways to get a better ranking and a better time on those levels, so it's all up to you to do it.

10. Shadows of the Damned

Shadows of the Damned provided me quite a bit of surprise when I started it up, some welcome and some less so, but nothing overwhelming either way.  After changing the controls to something not-terrible and reminiscent of Resident Evil 4 (which renders the first part of that sentence redundant), I was able to actually play Shadows of the Damned and even grow to enjoy it as I ran through the initial sections of the game.  I became increasingly impressed with how the game opened up to you, very subtly guiding you along its paths and teaching you how to play with the tools it offered in a surprisingly intuitive way that eschewed conventional 'kill 'em with tutorials' methods which was a rather welcome relief.  There was unfortunately a drop-off directly after I came here and sang its praises for doing just what it stopped doing directly after I said it was doing it.

An area that was fraught with things that made the game quite different than it had been reared its ugly head, complete with unintuitive bosses, instant deaths everywhere, and frustratingly difficult sections stemming from those two factors.  While I'm fairly confident that that cleared up directly after, as I touched into an area following that and was met with quite a lot of weirdness and comedy (Johnson and the pay phone, for those of you who've played) that wasn't too bad, I still can't really forget that the game essentially 'fooled' me, or that I think it did with how that whole thing worked out.  Afterwards, I learned a few things that would've been much nicer to know prior to being past them already, which only suggests that the intuitiveness of the first real boss fight was long gone and the game suffered for it.  It is rather unfortunate that I'm gauging this game while not having actually beaten it, and it's possible that I'll sort of change my stance on it sometime down the road for the better, where it's at right now is fine enough I think.  Remember, it might be '10th', but that doesn't mean I think 9 and above are better, just that they struck more chords with me that I had to consider them more.

9. Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3

The last game in this section of my GotY list is a game you've no doubt noticed I've whinged about on a fair few occasions.  I just plain don't like the map design and I think the way that story was handled on top of that was fairly poor.  That hinders the way that not only the original story can be told, but also the way the 'historical' accounts (read:  storylines from the anime) which bothers me quite a bit.  However, what the game annoys with in terms of poor design, it makes up for with simple quantity of quality Mobile Suits and pilots that will certainly grow into the next iteration as well.  Having the choice of being able to pilot Wing Zero, Epyon and Deathscythe Hell is honestly a little thing, but it's such a big thing for me and it makes me genuinely excited for the prospect of playing it again every time I load it up.  Not only that, but the chance to eventually get silly by hopping into a Ball or a Gouf or a Zaku II and destroying on a wide scale is tantalizing.

I'm honestly a big fan of the Dynasty Warriors style of run around and wreck stuff, which I'm sure you're all familiar with by now, so having it on my list should come as no surprise.  And while some will argue that the 'quality' of the gameplay is not there, or is at least dwarfed by that found in Shadows of the Damned or Sonic Generations, I say it's the gameplay that strikes more with me, hence its spot.  Quite simply, being able to store up Special Attack gauges for Wing Zero's Beam Cannon and then blasting hundreds of dummy suits to oblivion in a snap via a broad swath of destruction is something that cannot and will not get old no matter how many times I do it.  Similarly so with DeathScythe Hell's simple slice-through attack; strong enough to demolish most Mobile Suits with that single strike he makes, it's quite entertaining to unleash on someone intent on ruining your day.

So that's 12 to 9 for my Games of the Year 2011.  It was rather difficult actually getting the list put together as I've inferred, and three of these four games were fairly difficult to place, but I'm pretty happy with how it is.  Again, by no means does a game's spot at number 9 mean that I think the game at number 5 is objectively better, but when presented with numbers to assign, that's just kind of what you have to do.  Tomorrow will obviously bring numbers 8 to 5 and hopefully will be a little easier to write than tonights, though I suspect it won't.

Weekly Wrap-Up in Gaming - January 2 - January 8

Hey, I haven't done one of these in a while, mostly because I have barely had a week where I played more than one game for a reliably quantifiable amount of time, but that is not a concern for this week.  So let's get right into it, since I actually have a bounty of games to discuss!

First up is a game that hasn't gotten a lot of play since I decided I wanted to play games that didn't involve me walking around a given area and slaughtering things in the thousands with the greatest of ease.  I'll get back into Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 eventually obviously, but for now, it's best to expand my gaming horizons into games that won't eat 100 hours of my life and yet demand more.  Still, I'm not quite sure as to where I stand on DWG3 since I want to love it and I think that, through that want, I will, but I worry whether or not that will be genuine or based on enough factors to be wholly founded.  Basically, the game wins by allowing me my choice between Epyon, DeathScythe Hell and Wing Zero alone, whereas the rest of the Gundams Mobile Suits are more or less Icing on the cake.  Unless they suck.  Like The O sucks.  Because IT STILL SUCKS harglebargle.

After playing a few more history missions (and being assured through the trophy list that there are several, several more) I'm a little more prepared to suggest they actually did remember how to meld story with DWG3 however fleetingly, and while I obviously would've preferred a larger footprint I'll take what I can get.  At the same time, for as much as I griped and whinged about them in DWG1/2, I miss the story missions that actually have goals and story elements in them.  Even if I have to save Kamille's useless ass from Yazan when they're on the friggin' other side of the map are you kidding me, it was -something- as opposed to the Blitzkreig DWG3 more or less imposes as its pace.  You capture fields and if you don't do that, you probably lose and that's all there is to that.  Sure, you might have to save one pilot from two pilots if that random objective pops up, but it's nothing beyond a forced flavor element that detracts more than it adds.

Regardless, I just like the way DWG3 handles, which is to say that I liked the way DWG2 handled, past-tense, and I really don't think a lot has been changed up for DWG3.  I'll have to check, but I'm fairly certain that the Qubeleys in DWG3 still don't have unique movesets which is patently ridiculous as there's four different models of them (which are basically recolors:  Haman Karn's is white, Puru's is blue, Puru Two's is red and the Mass-Produced is either black or the same color blue as Puru's) and I'd suspect that at least one of them would fight differently than the others.  Granted, the case could be made for Puru/Puru Two/Mass-Produced as they're likely based off one another (or the Mass-Produced is based off Haman), but Haman, at least, should have a friggin' different Qubeley moveset.  Again, I haven't tested, but I highly doubt it which is double-silly considering they added more Gundams Mobile Suits to the game and -they- have different movesets than others, s'far as I can tell.

I'd like to say I have enough integrity to consider giving DWG4 a peek before buying it, but that just won't happen.  I love me some giant robot carnage and will do whatever I can to support it in the (potentially vain) hopes that that support will actually ensure a quality product.  Which is not to say that DWG3 is -not- quality, but merely to suggest that DWG2 -was- a quality product and DWG3 is not its predecessor.  So take that as you will, but be assured that I do not dislike the game, even though I may vocally grudge it for not being as awesome as I could hope for.  Which, hey, this is a thing we all do for various games for various reasons, so this is nothing new of course.

Shadows of the Damned, for a while there on the day after I gave it such a glowing first impression, gave me pause in my thoughts and lead me to think that perhaps I had spoken too soon on its intuitiveness.  Pretty much directly after the section I passed in my initial playings, I ran into a section with a mid-boss (well, a few mid-bosses....that were the same mid-boss.  I'm sure people who have played it know what I mean) that literally stumped me on how I was supposed to kill it.  You know those times when you're playing a game and nothing seems to be working, so you say to yourself "Maybe I'm not supposed to win this" and give up, hoping to advance?  That almost happened because I gave this boss my all only to find nothing effective....until I tried a specific thing for a second time and it worked from there on out.  I suppose I simply missed my shot the first time, but it was no less frustrating.

What was doubly frustrating was that the game made the classic mistake of taking a bullshit boss like that and re-introducing it at a fairly beefed up pace.  Without giving too much away, let me just say that the thing that makes this boss fairly shit is its usage of the tried and true 'shadow clone' mechanic which means there are several of these things yet only one takes damage.  And if you take too long finding the real one because you're plugging away at the fake, it just respawns all the clones (which number up to about 7 or 9 in the second fight.  Or at least, that's what it seemed like)  As you can no doubt figure out for yourself, I was quite annoyed with that, but kept through it and I seem to have been rewarded for my efforts.  The section after that has been fairly enjoyable and, er....'visually entertaining', I'll say, so I suspect that was more a bump in the road rather than a foreboding omen of what's yet to come.  Still, I did stop playing the game a few days ago so I could jump into the next game I'm discussing.

Since bumps in the road is something I just brought up, I'm just going to start this off by saying this thusly:  The penultimate boss in Sonic Generations is awful.  Some of the challenge missions are just awful.  The good news is that that's about all that is awful, however, meaning they are merely bumps in the overall road of Sonic Generations.  I actually really liked the final boss despite it being literally set up as a moment seemingly ripped directly from Dragon Ball Z and no I'm not going to elaborate on that whatsoever.  It was a fun little jaunt through a world that had been little more than a laughing stock for far too long, and a beacon of hope that suggests, perhaps, future installments of the franchise could reach this level of goodness.  Or at least keep the good:bad ratio as far on the good side as Generations managed to do.

I guess 'fun little jaunt' is the best way to describe it as well, as it was quite short obviously.  There's still hours left in the game to squeeze out if I should so desire from challenge maps and Red Ring collection, but I'm really not up for that.  Not only are the Red Rings difficult to get, there's not really a 'do-over' for them; if you miss one, you have to do the whole level over again and get to that point once more and try again.  Collectible artwork is nice, of course, but I'm honestly not too fussed.  After all, I could always find the material on the internet like that.  Seeing as that is one of the few trophies that seem a little too much effort/frustration for me to even think about, I'm not planning on Platinuming the game which means that since I've beaten it, I can comfortably shelve it.  It was nice while it lasted and I'll remember it fondly, but I don't need to wring every single thing out of every single game I come across.  To do so woould mean that I simply wouldn't enjoy games anymore which is a prospect far too frightening to consider.

The last world I've returned to is that of Harvest Moon DS's, nestled in the valley near Mineral Town which will remain the best Harvest Moon town for quite some while I suspect.  My issues in Harvest Moon DS are numerous, but so are my praises so it kind of balances out in a way that leaves me grumbling while I compulsively play it for hours on end.  While I suspect my stay will be limited in that I won't even bother to get up to the inevitable marriage that is the goal of 98% of the people who play Harvest Moon games, it'll tide me over for my portable fix while I wait for the Vita with bated breath.  Unfortunately, my PSP hasn't gotten any better and it's just a chore to play on, so with any luck, we'll get the UMD passport system in America when the Vita launches and Squeenix will actually support the thing, meaning I can just buy a license for Final Fantasy Tactics:  War of the Lions and continue playing it on there.  (Possibly taking advantage of the screenshot feature if at all possible.)  If not, well, I can still buy it I guess, it's only $10 after all, but still.

My main problems with Harvest Moon DS lie within the characters and the way buildings are handled.  The characters in Forget-Me-Not Valley (I think that's what it's called) are rather largely dull and lifeless even though they might have visually interesting designs, though that's not necessarily true for all of them.  The marryable girls all have their own quirks that are wonderful or terrible depending on your position and have been the only thing to elicit more than a bored "Hmm" from me when talking to them.  I'm supposed to care that the resident Doctor is like a cyborg or something, but I really don't.  Or that there's a Mad Scientist in town with a mermaid in his basement, but I still don't.  I guess it might be an issue of underexposure, but I could put that on the game itself as well.

The other issue is that, for rather asinine reasons, you can choose to make the buildings you populate your farmland with out of different materials to ensure varying levels of structural integrity, meaning the threat of your buildings falling down is ever looming unless you build them all with Golden Lumber which is, you guessed it, ridiculously prohibitively expensive.  Even the 'best' option of Stone is prohibitively costly and while you have the option of providing the building materials yourself to reduce the cost, there's not exactly a store of rocks around for you to crush for the raw stone in something quantifiable.  There are three rocks that spawn every day near the mine that are worth a whopping three stone each (if you have the fourth tiered Hammer) and bigger rocks here and there that assuredly give you more stone for smashing them (perhaps, gasp, four or five), but they require the best Hammer in the game which requires you to go down to the bottom of a 255 level mine, clearing its entirety of monsters, initiating an event to unlock the third mine that's even deeper, finding the cursed version of the tool you want, and then getting it blessed by a priest over the phone for 10,000 money.  (It's G in the game, but screw that noise)  It's a rather....intensive process that I don't care to bother with.

So, as you can see, it's been a rather busy week for once, and I've been enjoying every moment of it aside from the moments that I very clearly stated I didn't enjoy.  Which were few and far between, of course, meaning that my assertion that it was a good week stands firm.  It feels good to be able to do one of these again, so here's hoping the next one isn't, y'know, months from now. 

Listen Up, Pendejos!

Garcia Fucking Hotspur is in town to wreck everybody's shit.  At least, that's how I felt when I started playing Shadows of the Damned earlier today.  Yes, it's a new year, but the nominations over at PA haven't gone up (which is a little suspicious and disheartening) so everything I get in before that point (Or, like, the 9th when I made my first post in the series of GotY posts last year) I'm counting towards last year played.  It's sort of cheating, I know, but damnit, I can't not count Shadows of the Damned (and Sonic Generations, which I'm likely going to try out tomorrow) towards GotY after playing it since I haven't voted/made my list quite yet.  It's that good which just makes me all the more excited for Lollipop Chainsaw that just had a new (sort of annoying to watch) trailer go up.

I do have my complaints, but they're fairly negligible and I've eliminated one fairly completely already:  the controls.  As soon as I started in the tutorial (which was fantastic, btw) and I started aiming, I went, "ohhh nooooooo" because I started flashing back to RE4.  I have just never been able to find RE4's aiming controls 'precise' by any measure of the word, which means my cursor just sort of flies around, which means I can't do well at the game.  While Shadows of the Damned is inherently better than RE4 (I was going to add the quantifier of "in this department" here but, nah) for allowing you to move while aiming it still had the same fly-around, loose aiming that I'd come to loathe.  So I had to do what I've never done in a game (in recent knowledge) and go into the sensitivity and adjust it to waaaaaay down, I think to the two bar point.  It's a -lot- better now.  Once the game gave me a melee option on top of that....yeah.  I'm good.  It's good.

The voice-work is quite enjoyable, even going into the endearing range at certain points (storybook time with Johnson, for example) and I have no real complaints with that so far, aside from the fact that the animations don't always quite match them.  Which is not so much a problem with the VA as it is with the animation department, obviously, but a disconnect between the two bears mentioning them both.  For a moment, I didn't even notice Steve Blum starring as Steve Blum starring as Garcia Hotspur, which I think says a lot for his work in the game.  Sure, you know it's him eventually, but at the start, you just get to enjoy the accent for what it is and even after you get that, even if you're trying to think of all the other roles you've heard him in.  His banter/exposition with Johnson as you go on is quite nice as well - very funny and enjoyable without coming off as too forced, despite Johnson being your tutorial vessel for the start of the game which I'm still in.

What I'm most surprised about is the general atmosphere the game has, as it's quite honestly schizophrenic....but in a good way.  The banter and such between Garcia and Johnson distract from the fact that you're playing a game that can actually unnerve you at points, like when you stop to take a look at just where in the hell (pun not intended) you are only to realize that there's a pile of corpses nearby or a hellish bramble growing up out of the ground, looking a distinct blood color.  Or, as per a moment earlier that managed to completely take away my grin and replace it with a slight unnerving feeling, when I went down an inclined road to get some ammo and was followed by a compliment of rolling, groaning severed heads, of which I didn't realize what they were until I stopped and went back down to double-check on them.  It's a nice blend, I think, and one I'm pretty interested in following further.

Something else I have to say for the game is that either I'm just really good at it, or it is really intuitive with showing what it wants you to do without outright telling you first, obviously waiting to see if you need a bit of friendly advice before shoving it down your throat.  I've had two boss fights so far (though I suspect the first was just a mini-boss) and with both, it was easy enough to look at them and figure out exactly what I needed to do with them both.  I actually felt like the game taught me its mechanics without telling me them which is something we're sadly lacking these days.  Without giving too much away, after exposing the weak points of both bosses I fought against, the second reminded me of the first for a very obvious reason, which let me know to start shooting it, which I think is just what we need.  No hand-holding, no "Okay, this is what you have to do, don't forget to breathe..." levels of over-exposure, just the game sitting back in its chair and watching you play it, looking to see if you struggle before letting you know "Hey, you need to do this." and reclining back once more.  This might change later on, but I'm fairly impressed with it currently which is a statement that goes through for pretty much the entire rest of the game.

On the whole, I've just really enjoyed Shadows of the Damned even for what little I've played of it, and I'm fairly glad that I've skewed my own system to let it into the runnings for my GotY.  Not sure where it's going to be placed (nor am I sure about any of the other games, this is going to be really damn difficult) but it's going in there somewhere.  And aside from that, it's just a really good game, obviously, that I'm glad I decided to throw in despite wanting to destroy thousands of Mobile Suits with DeathScythe Hell some more.  Because goddamn, DeathScythe Hell is badass.  But that's a conversation for another day, obviously, as this has been Shadows of the Damned time.