Disclaimer: I haven’t played Uncharted 2 or Assassin’s Creed 2 yet, which is like putting out Best Picture nominations without having seen Saw XVII. Right. Forward.

Coming in at the buzzer:

Dragon Age: Origins

So here’s the thing about Dragon Age (I’ll leave off the subtitle). I really just chalked it up to “Another Bioware RPG” and all the baggage and RPG-trope bullshit that comes with it. Now, smash cut fifty hours of gameplay in the future to the third act. Suddenly, the depth of the characters starts to be realized. Suddenly, it seems I am making decisions that don’t shoehorn back to the predetermined story path.

Generally decision nodes in RPG stories do something like this:

And most of the time, in Dragon Age, this is still the case. But when you get to the third act, you get to a number of decision points (sorry for being vague, but it is deliberate to avoid spoiling for everyone) that do not merge and thus have differing overarching effects on the world to follow. The amount of cutscenes and additional dialogue Bioware had to create for these eventualities seems immense and it is likely why the bulk of this is concentrated at the end of the game.

I actually loaded earlier saves and played through these points to see how differently things could play out. It was quite surprising. I got to certain decision nodes where I sat for thirty seconds or so before making a decision, trying to figure out what the consequences would be. It wasn’t a clear dichotomy between being a Dudley Do-Right and a Snidley Whiplash magnified by the fact that the results would affect the remaining portions of the game.

So yes, at its heart, it is a kill-all-the-ugly-things RPG. Click. Click. Click. Use a spell. Drink a potion. So forth. And yes, they seem to crib heavily from earlier titles in the series (Aside: Is Shale not HK-47? While I appreciate a character with dry wit, it seems they are interchangeable. Replace squishing skulls with meatbags.) But, they did so in a world that while Tolkien-inspired, builds a lot of its depth separate from the normal tropes with characters who had some measure of complexity.

The characters in Dragon Age are more interesting than the characters in Avatar. I think that speaks well for our industry going forward.

Dominion

Holy shit, I’m cheating. This is a card game, like printed on dead trees and stuff. But it is the most compelling card game I’ve picked up since I first picked up Magic: the Gathering in 1995/1996. Dominion hits all the right notes of MTG (creatively forming decks and combos, light probability theory, variety of play) with none of its lows (richest player wins, infinite combos, requirements to memorize vast numbers of cards and mechanics, netdecking).

In Dominion, the group randomly selects ten “kingdom” cards that serve as the universe of possible effects for that game. With 25 different kingdom cards in the base set plus many more in expansions, the permutations allow very few games to play out exactly alike. Players all start out with the exact same deck and use their turns to buy these kingdom cards to expand their deck’s buying power (or hamper their opponents). All in all, it is simple enough that non-gamers “get it” and get into it (and can win!), but complex enough that us nerds go to message boards with spreadsheets and discuss optimal strategies to no consensus.

It is simply put, a masterpiece of game design and people interested in game design would be remiss to not consider its implications simply because it is not in digital form.

Team Fortress 2

I’m just cheating all over the place, aren’t I? This game came out in 2007 and underwhelmed me. While I enjoyed its art style, it just never pulled me in. My ex-roommate convinced me when watching him play early this year that maybe there was something to it. I downloaded it from Steam for the PC (I originally had the Xbox 360 Orange Box version) for $20.

I joined at just the right time. Since then, there have been a number of free (FREE) updates that have significantly upgraded and changed the game’s mechanics. I could list them in detail but it would take far too long. For a game that already has a surprising level of tactical depth, it is quite impressive. There were numerous updates to classes and starting with the Scout update, each provided some new gameplay hook that the game was previously lacking. In the Scout Update, it was now possible to stun even invulnerable players. That little change altered gameplay dynamics significantly. The Spy/Sniper update changed the play dynamics of both classes significantly. There was a Halloween update that ran for only a week that included new achievements and new art. And now there is crafting? Good god. Add to this a handful of fantastic teaser pages and videos. Add TO THAT ridiculous limited time sales that knocked the price of the game down to $2.50.

How does Valve support this from a business perspective? Is it a loss leader? Do they still do volumes of TF2 sales that supports the ongoing development? I have no clue. But you can tell when a game is a labor of love, and TF2 certainly is. It came into its own in 2009 and that’s why it deserves continual recognition. It is an achievement in art, design, writing (for a game that doesn’t have cutscenes!), production and business.

Afterthoughts:

I spent a lot of time this year playing iPhone and Facebook games. I could probably make a case for a number of them to be included. Certainly Lock n Roll at $3 or Canabalt also at $3 provided a great deal of interesting play for not much coin. It might been due to my employment situation or it may be a more widely indulged trend, but I shied away from expensive games this year. The ones I did buy didn’t really provide me that high multiple of value-for-money (Brutal Legend for one), but I suppose they weren’t trying to. The above three games cost me a grand total of $40. I got the Dragon Age from EA folks and I bummed the copy of Dominion. Did I just look at full-priced games as same-old because I couldn’t particularly afford them or was it just a particularly bland year?

Previously:

2001 – Halo, Ico
2002 – Splinter Cell, Jet Set Radio Future
2003 – Disgaea, Beyond Good and Evil
2004 – Katamari Damacy, Burnout 3: Takedown
2005 – Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!, Psychonauts, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Meteos
2006 – Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Dead Rising, Guitar Hero II
2007 – Portal, Hotel Dusk: Room 215, Passage, Bioshock
2008 – The World Ends With You, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, Left 4 Dead, Chocolatier 2: Secret Ingredients

I feel pretty safe with this now that I’ve got some time into most everything I wanted to play that came out this past year. Did you see the BAFTA nominations come out? I thought I saw an earlier article that said Metal Gear Solid 4 was nominated for Best Writing or somesuch and I was about to pitch a fit, but I don’t see it now, so I’ll keep my yap shut. I thought overall, the list was top notch.

Anyway, as usual, the vast majority of the games I liked were titles I didn’t even know were coming until they got release buzz. But if I had to pick 3 (or 4), these are what I would pick:

The World Ends With You

Ballsy. Square-Enix is a Japanese company that makes primarily scripted role-playing games set in fairly run-of-the-mill fantasy worlds. You pick Attack, some flowery animation happens. You win. You level-up. Cutscene. End credits. Square cashes your check. While many of us sharpened our teeth on their Super NES era adventures, the company really came into prominence in the Playstation era with Final Fantasy VII when technology could allow them to create any hair-brained magical imagery they wanted. And they’ve exploited that formula in various ways since with bigger budgets and flashier screen-candy. Even their handheld episodes tended to follow this model. The stories rarely strayed from the Zelda meets LotR tropes and that was fine because you pretty much knew what you were getting into.

Then came The World Ends With You. From the title alone, you realize that this isn’t exactly going to be Dragon Action Menu Blaster XVII. The setting is a ghost world version of a place in metropolitan Tokyo that few Americans know about with a protagonist following a youth subculture that even fewer Americans understand. So that should sink the game here, right?

One can imagine sitting in a conference room at any major developer and having the designer say “We’re going to need a bigger and more expensive cartridge to store all the authentic songs we need for the game.” Or “We’re going to have battles on both screens at once that the player can control.” Or “We’re going to separate the game into three different stories.” And then I can imagine the executives saying “No, that isn’t necessary, go with the smaller cart.” Or “That sounds too complicated. Do one thing and do it well.” Or “Stick with one story. If the user can’t anticipate the beats, they will be frustrated.” Thankfully, either this game hid from those executives or the team found a way to ignore them.

What makes this game remarkable is that it features a collection of mechanics that are too familiar to many users: instanced battles, collectible powers, scavenger hunts, location-based battle effects, etc. yet these items are presented each in a way that reflects the game’s unique setting and milieu and suddenly all that was old and cliche is new and exciting again.

It all balances perfectly on a razor’s edge: the adjustable difficulty makes the grinding unnoticeable without being either too easy (because you will never get the drops you need) or too hard (because there is plenty to acquire on lower levels).

Despite the “Cross Battle” system being… well… unmanageable without the AI doing the hand-holding, and the admittedly dubious-at-times dialogue choices,  the game executes everything else flawlessly, providing a much more enjoyable holistic experience than pretty much anything else I played in calendar year 2008.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

Here’s an interesting dilemma: Brain Age was incredibly popular, selling umpty-billion copies, yet all the Brain Age clones fell flat on their face. Why? It seems so sure fire: people love to feel smart, developers love to make games that can be done from scratch in ten weeks, why didn’t all the clones get the love of the original? Was it a case of brand loyalty?

My theory when Brain Age was released is the same that it is today: it was a fad. Simple enough. By time the clones came to market, the fad had passed. But the fad was not that people wanted games that make them feel smart, the fad was the design in which is was presented.

Enter Professor Layton and the Curious Village. It hits the same aesthetic reaction that Brain Age does, but achieves it in an entirely different manner. Instead of solving batteries of simple brain puzzles, you solve a hundred slower-paced but more challenging puzzles. But you can’t just box up puzzles and sell them alone or you will look like Brain Age, so you wrap them in a compelling story.

That’s exactly where Layton excels. You are put into the shoes of a Sherlock Holmes-type investigator figuring out a mystery that seemed straight out of a Scooby Doo or Hardy Boys adventure. Why are you answering puzzles in the kayfabe world? I don’t know, but it made for a funny Penny Arcade comic. The reason in the real world why you do it is to string along the story. The narrative is the carrot.

It wouldn’t have worked if the narrative wasn’t presented with excellence and it was. The turn-of-the-century motif was unique and the art direction of the characters and cutscenes constantly got compared to Miyazaki, which should be a measure of great success.

I’ve done that damn wolf/sheep/grain puzzle to the left in probably a dozen different games or puzzle books in my life, yet when I do it in Layton, it is with joy because it is part of a collection that scratches an itch in my brain that few other video game challenges scratch and is coupled with a whimsical story that no other title imitates.

I think it would have sold twice as many units had the cover and title adequately explained what the game was about. When are the sequels coming stateside? Why does this game has no imitators when Brain Age had twenty? Laziness?

Left 4 Dead

I have a thing for Zombie Apocalypses in games and stories. I’m not entirely sure why. It may be that zombies provide a safe and reliable antagonist that is both easily explained and surprisingly imaginable. Or it just may be that in these tales you are provided with the moral ambiguity of killing things (bad) that were once people (good) that still look like people (good) yet want to chew your face off (bad). And zombies play on that tinge of agoraphobia that I think more people have than will admit. A single zombie is disturbing, but a thousand zombies are scary.

But even with the wonderful, yet cliche setting, Turtle Rock (now part of the Valve homunculus) could have fallen flat on their face like so many others (Hunter: The Reckoning was the first that came to mind, but I am sure you can think of a dozen others). How did they avoid that?

They had an aesthetic they wanted and they stuck to it doggedly. That aesthetic is to stick to the zombie survivor movie formula like white on rice (The chick! The black guy! The combat vet! And… the other guy!). They do this by taking advantage of the vogue that co-operative based games are now a part of and the processing power that allows a true scary-level horde of zombies on screen at once.

Everything in this game is about providing the experience of going through this hell on Earth with your buddies. Where the co-op in Army of Two was a nice idea executed in the wrong way, Left 4 Dead nails it. Need health in the middle of the field? Have to ask your partner, but you will be vulnerable while you heal. Boomer attack? Best guard your buddy until the attack wears off or he is toast. Witch in the way? You better all be on the same page and have those lights turned off.

The game is the perfect example of sticking to an idea when feature creep could have sunk the battleship. How many people told them they needed to have a story mode? Where were the cutscenes? How did the outbreak happen? What happens to the survivors? How do they get to these four different areas? The much vaunted “AI director” sounds like marketing speak for a good complex way to ensure replayability and makes much more sense in a game based on fear than on skill. I imagine that was the retort they used when publishing wanted more more more – sorry, we’re working on this AI director and it’s a beast, but it will provide replayability so people won’t be selling this on eBay by the second day. Win!

The only way to play this game is with one or more human players that you know in co-op. To look at it any other way would be like saying umbrellas just aren’t that great on partly cloudy days.

Chocolatier 2: Secret Ingredients

Didn’t see this one coming, right? Well, that’s because I am cheating. This game didn’t get released until the tail end of 2007, but I only discovered it in January 2008. Unless you knew that before I said anything, you can’t criticize me.

Chocolatier 2 is a “casual game”. But wait, come back! It is a casual game that has you travelling around the world to find ingredients for exotic recipes that you learn over the course of an RPG-like adventure building wealth by succeeding in taking adventage of fluctuating market prices in different markets. Sound casual? Casual is such a misnomer. It is accessible.

What is particularly striking is the attention to detail. The game takes place over a number of years. If you go to New York City before the Empire State Building is erected, it will be absent from the skyline. If you go after, it will be there. New modes of transportation make themselves available throughout your travels through the 20th century as well. And don’t think you can min-max your way through this either. I tried flooding the market on a particularly exotic saffron-based confection since it yielded the best profit per week and watched the margins go from astounding to great to competitive to not worth it in a few months time. Your strategy will be constantly changing, especially when what you want is out of season. These bits separate the game from Tradewinds and other economic sims.

Moral: There is depth here. The word “hardcausal” has been thrown around to describe it, but the term is sort of meaningless. It is casual in that it has a theme that isn’t space marines, but is hardcore in the sense that it has depth. It is casual in that it has a little shooty minigame as part of the core mechanic, but it is hardcore in that one has to pay attention to the locations and seasons of ingredients to succeed. It’s casual in that my mom can play it and enjoy it, but it is hardcore in the sense that I did play and enjoy it.

I can’t recommend this game enough. I just saw that a sequel has just been released and I am keeping myself from playing it because I have a ton of things to get done.

Whoever makes the DS version of this will make some sweet money. Get it?

So every site in the world is crowing about what they thought was best. That’s really useful if there are games on the list you haven’t played, but worthless if they spend the whole time drooling over GTA4. Kotaku listed a summary of major/minor sources’ GOTY choices. Of note is the complete absence of Gears of War 2, Super Smash Brothers Brawl and Wrath of the Lich King. If each source had a vote in a kind of AP poll of Games of the Year, being able to rank 1-25, that might be interesting. Unfortunately, no one with a voice has come up with it. Additionally the Kotaku post is missing input from my two paragons of gaming opinion: Penny Arcade and MTV Multiplayer.

Since my utility from these lists is derived from finding hidden gems, I personally forego the One Game To Rule Them All format and give a short list (3-5 titles) that really “did it” for me that year by being particularly innovative and/or just by sticking in my craw and being unforgettable.

For history’s sake, here are the previous lists: (Also: Can you believe I kept some sort of blog since 2001?)

2001 – Halo, Ico
2002 – Splinter Cell, Jet Set Radio Future
2003 – Disgaea, Beyond Good and Evil
2004 – Katamari Damacy, Burnout 3: Takedown
2005 – Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!, Psychonauts, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Meteos
2006 – Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Dead Rising, Guitar Hero II
2007 – Portal, Hotel Dusk: Room 215, Passage, Bioshock

Last year, I had to craft a longer “short” list before narrowing it down to the above four.

I will do the same here, but today I start with some tongue-in-cheek titles like I did in this article last year.

First, the snarky bits since I am on the Internet where no one thinks about being nice before typing. Last year I made up the following awards:

2007:
Most Underrated Overrated Game: Halo 3
Most Underrated Underrated Game: Assassin’s Creed
Most Overrated Overrated Game: Super Mario Galaxy
Most Overrated Underrated Game: Flow

But in retrospect the names were a little tough to parse. “Most Underrated Overrated” means that it was a game the public/press decried as overrated, but was actually pretty good. “Most Underrated Underrated” meant a game that wasn’t proclaimed a Game of the Year by anyone, but probably should have been. “Most Overrated Overrated” meant a game that had a ridiculously high Metacritic compared to the actual consensus quality of the game as measured by enthusiasm post-launch period. And the last category was a game that everyone said was underrated even though everybody knew about it and wouldn’t shut up about it.

These kudos were actually a lot harder to come up with than the games of the year since their overratedness or underratedness is relative to expectations. Regardless:

Most Underrated Overrated Game (aka Great-Game-That-Didn’t-Meet-Public-Expectations): Burnout Paradise

Public reception seemed to be blasé about Paradise but I found it not only to be innovative in terms of game design and user interface but innovative in terms of content delivery with their DLC packages. It’s a damn fun game that I have never seen mentioned on any Game of the Year posts. It has flaws, but it provides the core Burnout experience in a fun, new way. I think it lost megapoints by not including a Crash mode. Certainly that was my favorite mode in Takedown and I am hoping it comes back in future installments. A Crash mode at user-defined points in Paradise City seems both feasible and filled with potential, especially given the shared-with-friends aesthetic that they tried to hit. If you didn’t try Paradise, you missed out.

Most Underrated Underrated Game (aka Great-Game-That-Even-The-Bloggers-Mostly Missed): Valkryia Chronicles

I feel wrong giving out this title to a game I haven’t yet finished considering the many other capable titles available (Etrian Odyssey 2, King’s Bounty: The Legend, Pixeljunk Eden), but I am going to even with only 50% completion. The game not only molds together tactical RPG with light elements of the precision FPS, but it avoids what turns me off on most strategy games by changing mechanics in every chapter. Very few fights are similar because in one you may have to take out a megatank that can obliterate your forces, in another you may have only a subset of your army, in another you may have to use the cover of sandstorms to move your army, and so forth. Each chapter brings something new and interesting and this is even in lieu of the beautiful cutscenes. The story could be better, but considering the game is Japanese, it could also be a lot, lot worse. I am generally surprised that this was released to no fanfare, especially given the drought of PS3 console exclusives. If you are interested in strategy RPGs at all, you owe this one a try.

Most Overrated Overrated Game (aka Mediocre-Game-That-Metacritic-Would-Have-You-Believe-Is-The-Second-Coming-Of-Christ): Grand Theft Auto 4 and Super Smash Brothers Brawl (tie!)

So this seems like an odd choice in the case of Brawl because it didn’t show up at all on the Kotaku List of Lists, but it had a 97 Metacritic for a very long time only to settle down to a 93 after some absentee ballots rolled in. Even with the dip, it is rated above most of the other GOTY contenders. Do this thought experiment: replace the beloved Nintendo characters with random IP that you have no attachment to. Is the game still good? Do you notice the vast camera issues? The control issues? The lack of polish (to be VERY generous) in the single player mode? No game with a 93 Metacritic was ever so riddled with basic flaws. Grand Theft Auto 4 is a much easier choice. Only 5/86 reviewers on Metacritic gave the game below a 90. 48/86 gave the game a perfect score. It is currently the top rated game on both the Xbox 360 and the PS3. And unlike with Brawl, my quarrel is not that it isn’t a good game, but instead that it isn’t a perfect game.For every wow-neato moment, I had a similar and more powerful moment that both broke the illusion of the world and caused frustration and annoyance. The police that attempt to kill you if you brush up against them and that employ kamikaze techniques are probably the primary culprit that ruins the experience. The indestructible trees have been widely ridiculed but in a game whose primary kudos mention the “realness” of the world, it is the little things that do one in. For instance, don’t run into an officer on foot while in a drunken stupor or he will try to murder you in cold blood and there is damn little you can do about it. But I’m no nitpicker on minutiae – the meat of the game annoys me. It has the Wind Waker syndrome where 80% of the game is spent trying to get somewhere to do something interesting rather than having 80% of your time actually spent doing interesting things. Oblivion solved this systemic Morrowind problem by including fast travel. GTA has no analog. For every mission, you have to carefully (as to not upset the kamikaze kops) navigate across the world, checking your map multiple times only to get interrupted by calls from Cousin Roman when you are on the other side of the world. It’s a shame because the game has so many great moments hidden behind a veil of repetition and same-ness from earlier efforts in the series. Best game of all time? Not so much.

Most Overrated Underrated Game (aka Please-Just-Shut-Up-About-This-Already): Braid

Again, like with GTA, this criticism comes not because Braid is a poor game. I had a good deal of fun with it. Instead this comes from the legion of Braid followers that have been telling us for four years that this is gaming’s Citizen Kane and that it will not only change our perceptions of what games could be, but our very perceptions of life itself. I’m not making that last bit up, it was from a preview that I currently cannot place. While we didn’t get a new school of philosophy, we got a very capable and beautiful puzzle-platformer with a satisfying ending despite an incoherent and deeply pretentious story. Clever? Yes. Industry-changing? Not really. So can we stop talking about it now?

Extra snark awards:

Best Game Story Apparently Lifted From a 10-Year Old Boy’s Notebook Doodles: Metal Gear Solid 4

Seriously, I cannot stand the sites that praise this story. Histrionics, melodrama, and eye-rolling moments abound. It had the shit-blowing-up-factor of a Michael Bay movie with the meaningless philosophy of a coke addict’s ramblings. One comes to expect that from this series by now, so I wasn’t offended by it. I felt quite entertained by how ludicrous it was. What I am upset with are sites calling the writing “amazing” or “deep”. Neither words apply.

Best Game Starting with Q: Quantum of Solace
Worst Game Starting with Q: Quantum of Solace

Thanks to Matthew Gallant’s game list for this one.

Least Useful Name for a Game: Infinite Undiscovery

So what is the act of undiscovering something? Forgetting it? How can one be forgot to an infinite degree? And even if you answer that question, what the hell does that tell you about what the game is? A game’s title doesn’t have to be useful, but it should at least be coherent.

Okay, this post went on long enough. My top picks of the year come tomorrow with a big disclaimer that I haven’t played most of the top games of this year yet and will render a final verdict long after we stop forgetting that it isn’t 2008 when writing out our checks.

It is amazing at how many people cheat at Top 5 lists. You don’t get to say Honorable Mentions. You don’t get to say: “I guess I’d add so-and-so if I could”. That’s cheating. You don’t get to say: “Oh, it changes so often!” Of course it does. That’s just another way to quell the fears of adhering to the constraint.

Five is a constraint. Top five lists are interesting. Top whatever lists are not. If I listed every album or book or game I thought was worth note it would be less interesting than if I could pick only three. The constraint makes it interesting.

Pecha Kucha is very interesting. Your company’s slide shows are not.

PS, my five?

1. Dream Theater – Images and Words
2. Radiohead – OK Computer
3. Transatlantic – Bridge Across Forever
4. Neal Morse – Testimony
5. The Clarks – Let It Go

I’ve been very quiet lately because I’ve been going through some tough times here at work and I don’t want to post anything on design because I’m quite beat down and cynical at the moment. So something a bit lighter is MTV Multiplayer’s (best games blog on the web, IMO) list of the top 5 games of the first half of 2008.

The January-July period is usually pretty light, the lions share of sales and hence quality titles (we can debate this chicken-egg thing if you want, but I won’t do it here) but we’ve seen “blockbuster” titles all through this first half: Smash Brothers Melee, Grand Theft Auto 4, Mario Kart Wii, GTA5 Prologue, Metal Gear Solid 4, Wii Fit. It’s a pretty big year.

So when I read this article, I tried to think of what my top five were. I hated Smash Brothers Melee. While I appreciate the effort, I was fairly disappointed with GTA4. Mario Kart Wii shipped fairly broken. I refuse to pay $30 for a demo, so GT5 is right out. Metal Gear Solid 4 was impressive, but it feels like it was directed by a fourteen year old boy. I’m not done with it, so I don’t want to completely write it off just yet. I haven’t even seen a Wii Fit anywhere so I can’t comment on it, but it seems all the suckers who got real excited over it the first week now have it in a corner.

My favorite game I discovered this year is hands-down Chocolatier 2, but it actually was released in 2007, so it is disqualified from this list.

So the games I’ve really enjoyed and appreciated this year are probably: The World Ends With You, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and Boom Blox. Then there’s a list of also-rans that don’t quite make it to that top tier but I enjoyed nonetheless: Burnout Paradise took an adventurous turn, although it got bogged down in repetition. Etrian Odyssey II takes no adventurous risks, but is such a nostalgic good time for me that I think it deserves mention. Space Invaders Extreme does the unthinkable and makes something that feels completely new out of old parts and dethrones Pac-Man Championship Edition as the best reimagined retro game out there. From watching my roommate, Battlefield: Bad Company looks excellent. And the Spore Creature Creator is addictive. Should it count as a game?

In re-reading this list( and I know a simple little list is not so provocative of a blog post, but cut me some slack), I noticed something:

Big Budget Blockbusters:
Burnout Paradise
Battlefield Bad Company (maybe)

Smaller Titles:
Everything Else, including my Top 3.

Am I just getting elitist in my exposure or are the blockbusters getting Hollywoodized and Sterilized to the point where they are a little interesting to everyone and super-interesting to no one? Will we see an era of great innovation from little titles or will we just see bland blockbusters push all innovation out of the industry? I sure hope it is the former.

Meme time. I can be like Ken Levine and list my five favorites of all time:

1. ActRaiser (SNES)
2. Silent Hill (PS1)
3. Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past (SNES)
4. SimCity 2000 (PC)
5. Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (X360)

Unfortunately, I hold only ~1/100,000 of the clout of Mr. Levine.

Any other designer-blogger people want to chime in? It’s much harder than it looks. No copping out and saying things like: the Final Fantasy series. Five games. No honorable mentions. No series. No qualifications. Go.

This isn’t on the previous post’s list of things I wanted to talk about, but I’ve honed down the best games of 2007 list that I drafted in a previous post. My final list for 2007 is: Portal, Hotel Dusk: Room 215 and Passage. Passage wasn’t on my original list, but after really thinking about it, it deserves to be. While I really enjoyed Assassin’s Creed and Skate, they were both flawed games, that I am certain will improve on the inevitable iterations. I’ve lost the buzz I once had for Puzzle Quest, even though I still think it is a great game. And while Peggle is still the ultimate casual game, I probably won’t feel a need to come back to it in five years. Has the well ran dry on it? I’m I tired of being pledged to pay for the game for a third time?

As I grow older or rather as I grow more annoyed by working in the industry, I am less impressed by excellent execution on stale ideas. Madden is still an alright game every year, but I find it hard to care, even though I share studio space with the people who give it life. I’m at the last boss in Eternal Sonata which is essentially Final Fantasy VII/Star Ocean: Second Story with a more interesting coat of paint. And while I’ve put thirty hours into it and enjoyed it, it is a saccharine kind of joy because while the mechanics are extremely sound, they just don’t produce the same aesthetic that they did ten, five or even two years ago. I realize that isn’t a problem with the game, but with me.

Rest assured, I’m not straying to incomprehensible pap in a weak attempt to find something new (For instance, Space Giraffe is still a terrible game), I just think my barometer for fun is becoming a little more sensitive to certain inputs.

I read this thread about whether Portal or Passage is the better game with mild disdain. While Kotaku commentors rank only above Gamespot/IGN board posters and Youtube commentors on the intelligence food chain, I was surprised to see people insisting that Passage wasn’t a game. This is literally the stupidest non-trolling statement I’ve ever read on the Internet. By any reasonable definition, Passage is a game. Unless your definition of a game is “interactive software that I am told I will like by websites if I pay sixty dollars for it”, then maybe it isn’t a game, but I don’t know many people who openly subscribe to that ethos. I’ve seen people comment that Twilight Princess had a great, original story in the same tone that one would say “We’ve always been at war with Eurasia”, but I really think calling Passage a non-game takes the cake if cake was an honorable mention for a kind of ludo-Darwin award.

Sorry for the digression. Back to normal posting soon.

Not that anybody cares really, but I personally enjoy reading other people’s “best of the year” lists in the hopes that I will find something new or change my mind about something I dismissed. Considering the AIAS nominations came out today and chock full of decisions I disagree with (I’ll leave it for another post or not at all), now seems like as good a time as ever. In an earlier post, I mentioned that I single out a few games a year as being my favorites and then I add them to a list (sort of a personal hall of fame) in order to go back at a later date and replay some of my favorites.

Here’s my previous list:

2001 – Halo, Ico
2002 – Splinter Cell, Jet Set Radio Future
2003 – Disgaea, Beyond Good and Evil
2004 – Katamari Damacy, Burnout 3: Takedown
2005 – Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!, Psychonauts, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Meteos
2006 – Oblivion, Dead Rising, Guitar Hero II

This year it was very hard to pick three games. I started out only picking one (Ico was added to 2001 after the fact), then because I had a hard time choosing one I moved to two, then to three. I’m apprehensive about moving up to four because I don’t want it to be an “every game I played this year that was marginally good” list, but 2007 was so jam-packed with good content that it makes the whittling hard. So I’m going to put my ideas out there and whittle down from there later. Here’s what I came up with:

	I can’t really say anything about Portal that hasn’t been said. It has a clever new game mechanic, a clever nontraditional villain, the best ending theme in gaming history and it bravely cuts itself short before overstaying its welcome. My expectation for Portal originally was that it was going to be a moderately distracting puzzle game. I didn’t foresee it being my game of the year.
	Continuing with the theme of games I didn’t expect to be good, skate came out of nowhere offering the best control scheme I’ve seen in a while coupled with a huge interactive environment that was essentially the definition of a playground. I never enjoyed the Tony Hawk series, so the addiction to this game was very unexpected. I’m comfortable saying that this is the best sports title since Madden 2005.
	From D3, a publisher I expect nothing but Japanese shovelware from, comes this original melding of puzzle game (yes!) and RPG (double yes!) Buggy as hell and laden with design flaws, but the strength of the core idea carried it to critical acclaim. The irony here is that I am a story snob and Puzzle Quest endeavored to have the most cliche story in the history of cliches.
	This is the only game on my list of things to watch for at the beginning of the year (I first saw it at E3 06!) that actually panned out to be as impressive as I thought it would be. While it has it’s flaws, I don’t find it nearly as repetitive as some of the other traditional Game of the Year candidates (Mass Effect, I am looking at you).I was particularly impressed by how they could keep the city looking so beautiful while simultaneously having umpteen dozen unique NPCs walking around the world. I was reminded of the 360′s Hitman game where there is a Mardi Gras level and you walk through a crowd of 4 different people copied and pasted a hundred times over with synced animation. This game is next-gen. Add to it that it had a story, while incomplete, that I actually cared about (although I didn’t care about Altair at all, the supporting cast was well-created) and Assassin’s Creed was a winner. I’m so surprised at the panning this game got from some critics. Maybe Ubi sent them some Ebola virus with their review copies? I guess they just want the same Zelda game again for the fifteenth time that they can’t be bothered with something that reaches new ground and pays for it by having some flaws. It also gets bonus points for doing something that Splinter Cell made me do. After playing that game, I had a keen awareness for the next few weeks of where all light sources were around me. After playing Assassin’s Creed, I now notice any outcroppings on any wall I look at.
	Peggle is the ambrosia of casual games. I bought it for PC and then for iPod and I will likely buy it again when it comes out on XBLA. There’s nothing magical about the game – it is just so well-crafted and addicting that one comes back again and again for just one more level. In a time where people claim to need 60-hours of cutscene laden, bloom-lit, emergent gameplay, it is nice to see that a well-designed casual game can still rake in gobs of money.
	If you’ve ever heard me talk about games, you know what a snob I am for stories that are well-crafted, characters that are multi-dimensional and gameplay that enhances the story instead of running parallel with it. Hotel Dusk delivers, while trying out a unique choice in art direction that shows all of the characters as animation pencil sketches like in the infamous A-ha “Take on Me” video. I actually felt for poor Kyle Hyde, where he could have easily been a hackneyed hard-boiled ex-cop. If you haven’t played this game and you enjoy a good story half as much as I do, you owe it to yourself to play this game.

The fact that I don’t have Halo 3, Rock Band, DiRT, Mario Galaxy, HL2:Ep2, Guitar Hero III, or Bioshock on the list just goes to show what a great year it was.

Also, there are a number of games from 2007 that I haven’t played or completed but want to that may get added to the list post facto: Uncharted, Ratchet & Clank, Aquaria, Eternal Sonata, God of War II, &c.