Game game game of the Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaar Awards!!!!!!!!!!!! Part 1

I totally forgot that I wrote 50% of this back in December then it got shelved during the hiatus. So it's time for...........

Game game game of the Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaar Awards!!!!!!!!!!!! 2013 Ed.

Alright. I know I'm excited. So in order to make this extra pointless, this year's GNG Game game games of the Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaar will be chosen from games new to me in 2013, not necessarily games that were published in 2013. Think of it more as a selected selection of selections, the cream of the crop of a creamy year of gaming, the choicest cut of many fine meats I've enjoyed playing. This isn't supposed to be an objective evaluation of these games or a means of rating them, it's just a way to recognize and point out to you the viewer some selections that you should ABSOLUTELY GO PLAY RIGHT NOW WITHOUT ANY HESITATION WHATSOEVER. Every game listed below comes with a 100% unmitigated endorsement, and I'll even be so kind as to tell you a little bit about why. 

Since this is more a recommendations ceremony than an awards ceremony, each game is only eligible for a single mention. Anyway, there's nothing more annoying than reading through an awards presentation and seeing "Mass Effect 3 is the best RPG of the year, Mass Effect 3 is the best story of the year, Mass Effect 3 is the best racing game of the year". I get it. You like Mass Effect. Seriously, 75% of the past five years' "of the year" awards around the web have been dedicated in some way to Mass Effect. You could say the series has had a............................................. SHIT EFFECT. Zinged ya!

Genre that is just okay: Best Platformer

Aw I'm just kiddin' ya guys. I love platformers! I guess? They are definitely a genre that is okay to play that reveals a lot of interesting ideas about stage design, something that carries over into just about ANY type of game, but they're primitive and thus my interest tends toward the scholarly rather than the funarly.

#2: Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse, Xbox 360, Sega Australia Ltd., 2013

The game does a fantastic job of laying out 2D paths without making them look 2D

I've already gone on quite a bit about how much I love this game, but I do love this game. IT'S FUCKING MAGICAL, OKAY? I don't give a shit about the original or Mickey Mouse, I don't even particularly care for Fantasia. This was just a singularly atmospheric, gorgeous journey. It made me feel like I was actually exploring a land of colorful ghouls and giant globs of gelatin with detail after detail after detail. It sounds cliche, but everything in the game is just so overflowing with personality. It finally occurred to me what it reminds me of - those old I Spy books, with their photographed arrays of toys and trinkets arranged into surreal landscapes. The cotton-ball clouds, the cookie cookies, the playing card towers all pop with a realism that makes you feel as tiny as Mickey appears onscreen. The platforming itself is a litany of playful gimmicks that may not be Donkey Kong Country-precise, but work exceptionally well in further developing that sense of a real space without needing the crutches of hyper-realistic physics or octopus rifts.

#1: Sonic Generations, Xbox 360, Sonic Team, 2011

Got places to go, gotta follow my rainbow!

In a blaze of cat, Sonic returns to America for the first time in the 21st century for the best racing action platformer on feet that you never thought you've played before. Sonic Generations is a really satisfying game both to explore and to master, and you'll master it as you explore. It makes the trademark Sonic speed refreshing by varying its application from stage to stage without artificially varying gameplay mechanics - the level design gives clear focus to everything from "supersonic platforming" to "supersonic mazes" to "supersonic murder" without needing transformations or team mechanics or a gigantic lineup of eleven furballs. I don't begrudge the other games their gimmicks (well, some), but there's a certain elegance to Sonic Generations - that you can visit each era of Sonic's history and get a taste of the gameplay that characterized it while still playing as the same character with the same mechanics. Maybe it only works because 20 years of game design has been condensed into a 6 hour campaign, but hey, it works. And it only gets more gratifying as you learn the ins and outs of each level and push yourself to play faster and faster.

Kill 'em til they're dead: Best Shooter

Shooters are a genre that have really changed a whole bunch over the ages. Where once we had Gradius, now we have Fark Rye. Some people pretend those are different genres. For the point of this, it doesn't really matter, does it?

Honorable Mention: Kid Icarus: Uprising, Nintendo 3DS, Project Sora, 2012
Kid Uprising gets a mention for having some terrifically fun rail-shooting action, but I can't give it a wholehearted, unmitigated recommendation because of the weird 3rd-rate action stages that make up the bulk of the game. I'm not the first to say it, but the game just does not control like a third-person game should control - and when I say "should", all I'm suggesting is that I "should" feel in control of my perspective and my movement in relation to that perspective. But the auto-scrolling levels are solid (if easy) and I can't help but fawn over a game that does 3D rail-shooting. It's a genre that's existed for like twenty years and only seen like twenty games! The stereoscopic 3D looks great as well, it really gives the action a more dynamic feeling over games like Sin & Punishment, actively contributing to playability by allowing targets to be easier distinguished, grouped, and prioritized. Area-of-effect and melee attacks just feel more... distinguished when playing in 3D - you can literally better see the space they take up. IIRC (in IRC) whatsisname said they weren't making another one anytime soon, and I'm usually not a guy to demand sequels, but I really wish Sora or Nintendo or someone would take these on-rails levels and make them into a full-length game. I promise it's at least going on my to-do list for next week if no one else gets to it sooner.

#2 Saints Row: The Third, Xbox 360, Volition, 2011

Liking this game doesn't exactly make me feel awesome about myself, as it's buried in perhaps the most moronically obnoxious presentation imaginable, but it's about as fun as a sandbox shooter can get. At first I pined for the full destructibility of Volition's earlier triumph, Red Faction: Guerilla, but as I played more I realized there was a certain satisfaction to be found in adapting havoc to Row's rigid city structure. Combined with the visceral and punishing third-person shooting, the world encourages players to get creative with their tactics. I guess using a pick-up truck as a battering ram to scatter a gang and ducking behind a building to lob grenades while waiting for the helicopter cavalry to show up just never got old for me. I appreciate a game that gives me the satisfaction of "realistic" weapons and physics (like baseball bats and grenade launchers) but throws them into utterly preposterous setups - like riding around in a tank on a helicarrier and shooting down jets. There's a great balance here between something totally over-the-top like Vanquish, which completely removes the player from reality for its absurd shenanigans, and something totally gritty and down to earth like Sleeping Dogs, which doesn't let the player indulge in the violence.

It's hard to express exactly what makes this game good. All the hype I read (before having played it) and even the above just comes across as "yeah, but isn't that every sandbox game? how is that different from GTA?". But every shooting/driving sandbox I've played before Saints Row (certainly every one made by Rockstar) is totally undone by a foundation of shit mechanics. Their hearts are in the right place but their heads are up their asses. Saints Row: The Third would be good even if it was a totally linear mission-oriented game (see Red Faction: Armageddon for essentially that) and that's what makes it work in an open world. You'll just have to take my word for it. Or fuck it, whatever.

#1 Capsized, XBLA, Alientrap, 2011

I was almost disappointed when I first saw the look of Capsized, only because I said "goddamnit, this was my idea for a game world!"

Yup, it's imperfect. Yup, it's raw. Yup, that works just damn fine. Capsized manages to combine the what-the-shit chaotic physics nonsense of a game like Red Faction: Guerilla or Worms with the strategic tension and ammo management of Resident Evil 4 with the atmosphere and methodical hunting of Metroid. How well do all those things mesh? Really weirdly! And that makes for a game that doesn't play quite like any other. It may seem to share gameplay with the brain-dead Bad Bots or be inferior to the carefully-wrought Bleed or lack the laborious architecture of Shadow Complex, but Capsized wields an awesome free-spirited naturalism that emancipates it from the oppressive digital nature that we typically treasure in "precise" games. Beyond the loosely mazey level design, the mechanics are imbued with a large factor of randomness. And that ratchets up the tension and makes the insane array of tools at the player's disposal feel a little more welcome. Capsized is a great game because it's not pure playground, it's not "Grand Theft Auto in spaceballs" - it forces the player to focus the absurdity of the action to an end. Lives and ammo are in short supply for each stage, so this isn't pure fucking around. The player needs to be able to gauge when to deploy method and when to deploy mayhem, and how to try to take control or at least recover once things inevitably get out of hand. That does a pretty good job making them feel like an astronaut lost in an alien jungle overflowing with way too much life.

I'm bored just talking about it: Best RPG

I had a huge resurgence in RPG popularity this past year. What I'm trying to say is that I have not liked RPGs for a long time and in 2013 all of a sudden I played like a thousand and was really lovin' 'em. It all goes back to Retro Game Challenge's Guadia Quest, a game that showed me that with a limited scope, I could actually still love a JRPG. I even took a slight detour into roguelikes and had a good time with Shiren the Wanderer before fully circumnavigating the globe back to that seminal WRPG classic, Ultima VII. But floating (or skyrocketing) to the top of that list we had....

#2 Crimson Shroud, Nintendo 3DS, Level 5, 2012

The game had a really fun script and made just the right amount of winking nods to its D&D origins

A short RPG?! Perish the thought! In fact, 2013 taught me that short RPGs are the way 2-B. I assume nearly every mechanic in Shroud is straight outta Dungeons and Dragons, but as I'm barely familiar with tabletop rules (I have one round to my name) I can only credit it all to the game. Shroud's got a neat terse tale to tell, following the old tradition of short/scary stories that are built entirely around one big reveal. There's no need for bullshit lore and an endless backstory to every character - it's all about moving the pieces forward to that big curtain-pull. That's just plain fun, and the handful of battles along the way are unique and challenging and follow the same mentality of stripping out the chaff. Only do anything once - and that'll make Shroud that much more fun a game to revisit. 

#1 Phantasy Star IV, Sega Genesis, Sega AM7, 1995/1993(JP)
So I have to admit that part of my love affair with Phantasy Star IV simply amounts to being swept off my feet. I wasn't ready to like a 16-bit JRPG. But Phantasy Star succeeded because it was fast and funny and kicked me in my emotional nuts before I was ready, and all the painfully cliche fantasy storytelling tropes were saved until the point where a character could react to an ancient apocalyptic prophecy with "Aw, man!" and I could feel exactly the same words echoing in my brain. The dialogue is dopey and innocent but heartfelt, genuine, and just witty enough to cut down any building fatigue. It helps that the biodome paradise scifi future has a truly unique look that escapes cliches of hyper-techno, post-apocalyptic, or utopian futurism, and that the gigantic battle sprites show off tons of memorable detail. Phantasy Star IV is, simply put, a one-of-a-kind adventure spanning beautifully developed worlds and starring a cast of unforgettable characters. That's all I want out of an epic, and as an epic this game shines.

The anime-style cutscenes add a great deal of personality and drama to the story, far more than is achieved in bland talking-headPGs like those made by Square

The battle system is solidly engaging with a nice large-scale challenge structure oriented around managing HP and TP (health and magic). There is a real satisfaction to surviving a dungeon with genuine risk/reward built into the exploration, thanks to the extremely sparse magic restoratives and revives. Definitely no grinding (early Final Fantasy) or training wheels (later Final Fantasy) here - success is driven by careful management of skills, not statistical advantage. It's not an absurdly hard game per se, but every victory feels earned. You've got to give it up for a game with such a neat way of handling random map battles (not gonna spoil it) that doesn't excise them entirely but somehow makes their triviality exciting. 

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Come back tomorrow to see my top picks released in 2013 as well as my overall TOP 3 GAMES OF THE YEAR!!!!!!!!! Will GTAV make a sweep? Super Mario Bros.? Or will it be the underdog Flappy Bird in the top spot? You'll have to wait and see!

What I'm Playing, July's end '13

In this feature, we commemorate games I have for the first time started and finished in the last few highly variable time units.

Thank god July is finally over. Ever notice what a bizarre, unpredictable month it is? Every year it's like, "nothing in July is gonna surprise me this year", and every year it gets weird. Sometimes it's good stuff and sometimes it's bad. Sometimes you discover Devo, sometimes a city blows up. Sometimes you lose your virginity, sometimes you lose your best friend. Sometimes you have a fun barbecue and sometimes you get addicted to drugs. It's July. Heightened reality. Frankly I say it's the heat what makes everyone act so crazy.

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Super Mario Land (Game Boy / 3DS VC)

Well yeah, this game is short as shit and easy too. People always point to New Super Mario Bros. for starting that trend where lives are pointless because you finish the game with like 50, but I found that to be the case with Super Mario Land as well. I had twenty-some lives upon first completion. It just really loads you up with the coins.

That said, once you die, the dyin' don't stop. Because the game has such wonky physics (Mario goes from zero to sixty in less than a millisecond, gravity seems to be a constant instead of acceleration, and your sprite has a tiny hit box (which means a tiny landing area)), it's all about getting into the flow of things. As soon as you lose your grip, it's easy to die 5-10 times in just a few seconds. That was my experience, at least. The game only offers one continue, but since it's only about ten minutes long, even that seems unnecessary.

Games Started:

Capsized (XBLA)

Here we've got a nice little indie-that-made-it-to-the-big-times-after-many-years-and-then-didn't-really-get-the-attention-they-deserved type story. Capsized isn't all the way there, but it's at least the genesis of a great game. It's basically a linear weapons-heavy Super Metroid, not too different from the recent Bad Bots or Shadow Complex, though far heavier on the atmosphere. Capsized starts off on a real lazer-foot - for one thing, the foreign jungle planet teeming with life is a really nice, not particularly common setting. Okay, Avatar and that, but I can't really think of another game short of Turok that reminds me of this environment.

The problem is that Capsized feels more like a playground than a finished product. The physics are great and the shooting is a blast (a blast!), but the levels don't hold together well. There are occasional half-baked puzzles and some decent structurally challenging fights, but too often things completely fall apart and you feel like you have to cheese or glitch your way through to the end - like no one actually bothered to take the time to make sure that the solutions worked. There were times I was kinda surprised I was playing a game on XBLA proper (a game for which I had spent money) and not the Indie Marketplace, because Bleed feels far better put together. The game looks and controls professionally, but the level design just isn't there. It's not even that it's bad or ill-conceived - it's just so raw and messy that it feels like a first draft - something unfinished or put together with a different game's level editor. I think it's extremely telling that the game has four different ways of high-jumping - a jetpack, a grapple beam, wall-jumps, and a force-push that can be aimed at the ground. Surely a bit more time spent in the levels would have demonstrated how redundant these are and led the developers to either prune a few or design specifically around them.

This is more of a nitpick, but the atmosphere is also undercut by the lack of progression in the narrative. The protagonist has crash-landed on this planet and is now on a rescue mission, recovering his crewmates. I'm now 3/4 through the game and that's literally all I know of the plot. There's been no detail of the original space mission, no history or investigation of the nameless planet I've crash-landed on, no scope or context whatsoever. I don't even know if I'm waiting for a rescue ship to pick us up or hoping to rebuild my escape pod. I think the developers/writers had all of this information in their heads, but didn't realize how tight-lipped they were being. It's just frustrating to watch a neat idea spoiled by the weak aping of age-old silent narratives.

Dragon Quest IX (DS)

Time for a little Dragon Quest, Nein? That was German for "Time for a little Dragon Quest, No?" In conclusion, I guess so. The DS of course had a million Dairy Queens to choose from and everyone's got their own little opinion on which is best, so I decided to go with Famitsu's 40/40 Game of the Year 4040, Dragon Quest IX. I like a little battle animation to go with my RPG, and besides, it got me into a conversation with a cute girl at Gamestop about JRPGs, and she actually wasn't a retard. Like, she knew who Yoko Shimomura was and Vanillaware. I know, that's some compelling story. Save it for the autobiography and all that.

Dragon's Quest IX both does the JRPG thing better than most JRPGs and does the WRPG thing worse than most WRPGs. By that I mean to say, you know how there are three basic levels on which town-crawling RPGs set up plots? You know them, so I'm not going to say. Okay, I'll say. At the highest level there is some kind of main story that usually heavily involves the main character, main villain, main maguffin, and dictates the main path through towns/dungeons/a forest. This exists in all RPGs and um, pretty much all games and stories for that matter. In Dragon Quest IX, this plot can be summarized as "God decides he doesn't like Earth and decides to blow it up, and one angel has to collect seven figs to stop him". Sound familiar? They usually do. DQIX pays very little attention to this overarching narrative and leaves it alone for hours at a time.

The second level of narrative is the town-level ("the JRPG thing"). It's composed of the individual stories that surround each place you visit on your journey, or each maguffin you collect. While these function structurally as acts, with their own setup, rising tension, and climax, I hesitate to universally assign that term, as the stories often find complete resolution and don't contribute to the overall rising tension, which would be unusual for a traditional act. An instance of a DQIX town-act is a story set in a port where the villagers have come to worship a sea-god summoned by an orphan girl. The god provides them fish, so they have stopped working and become lazy. The mayor of the town becomes even greedier and demands that the girl summon the god to bring him treasure from the ocean depths, then the true nature of the beast is revealed, the mayor repents, and the town lives happily ever after. These self-contained component tales of DQIX offer surprising emotional and symbolic depth and turn the game into what is essentially a very strong anthology of mini-RPGs.

The even more granular level is non-player-character (NPC) stories ("the WRPG thing"). These typically take the form of side-quests assigned by various scattered NPCs and are almost always entirely self-contained. DQIX has a fair share of these too (more than your average JRPG), but they're barely worth describing - a pretty representative example of what I've seen so far was an old man who told me "my grandson said I look like a slug. Go kill ten slugs for me!"

Injustice: God's Among Us (Xbox 360)

Ahh, Mortal Kombat. I mean Injust: Ice Gods Among Us. Netherrealm is definitely continuing their streak of extremely well-rounded high-production easily-accessibly fighting games. We'll talk about the propensity of the fighting genre for single-play later this week; otherwise my strongest initial impression of Ija-Gu-Gu is that it doesn't feel all that much like Mortal Kombat. It's at least as different from its Cuz as, say, Tekken is from SoulCalibur. You can tell they're running on the same engine and a lot of familiar building blocks are in place (sweeps, uppercuts, and bounces feel exactly the same), but there's way more flying around, laser-beamy flare, and time-bending speed to take the place of Mortal Kombat's delightful gore.

"A great superhero can be summed up in a single sentence" (I said that) - in the case of Injustice, that becomes "a single button". The "Character Power" button is a great way to quickly translate each of these superhumans' key advantages into battle instead of leaving players to fumble with special inputs. When I play as Green Arrow, what do I want to do? Shoot fancy arrows. The Character Power button instantly lets me shoot fire, ice, and electric arrows without needing to explore or memorize input combos. As Superman it grants super-strength, as the Flash it slows down time; Doomsday it makes invulnerable, and Deathstroke it allows perfect sniping accuracy. The button is only held back from its potential by the limited creativity in implementing certain characters' superpowers, or lack thereof. While it's fitting of the trickster king Joker to have a slippery dodge/counter, Batman's technological superiority is represented as... a couple of bat missiles. There are also too many characters who get boring super strength (Supes, Cyborg, Shazam...) or invulnerability (Doomsday, Luthor (sigh), Grundy...) and a few who pretty clearly have an arbitrarily assigned ability due to the lack of their real powers' fighting-game-practicality (Aquaman, for instance, has his famous... Water Shirk?). Still, it's a great idea that's mostly well done, and unless you're a fan of some really specific character that got the short shrift (there aren't many, and they're mostly lesser characters like Harley Quinn), I imagine you'll be pleased.

Gain Ground (Genesis / Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection)

I'd goofed off a bit with Gain Ground before, just to see what it was all about, but this is my first actual go at beating it. As an arcade port to the Sega Genesis, it's hardly friendly - the Collection's save states alleviate the otherwise quite damning save/password-free play length (at least 2 hours). Still, for the degree of punishment the game serves for using a continue (lose all of your characters), it's hard not to save scum. Anyway, I don't have a lot of steam left to write about Gain Ground right now, so check out this discussion of the game's dubious straddling of the line between shooting and strategy.

It's a great combination and certainly starts off as good fun, but from what I can tell, Ground struggles to keep the strategy elements going strong on the back nine. By that point the player is at or near maximum offensive capability and thirty screens deep, so there's not a ton to do to make things harder other than pile on the enemy waves. Which makes things play more like a generic arena shooter.

Capcom Arcade Cabinet (XBLA)

Not really an individual game, but I've been working through my impressions here already.  

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Wow this was a long post. Those were almost reviews. Could've at least split this up over two days - but you know me! I'm always contenting my fans! Plus I didn't post yesterday, so that.