Game of the Year or Year of the Game?

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

Game Of The Year Awards!

This year has surely been The Golden Year Of Gam­ing since the launch of the SNES. So many good games have been launched this year that simply pick­ing one and nam­ing it Game Of The Year would deny the oth­ers their just deserts. Also, such an approach would be too sub­ject­ive as my tastes in gam­ing have evolved over 20 years of play­ing games and the fact that the major­ity of my gam­ing is on the PC. So this year I am going to change to a cat­egor­ised list.

I love gam­ing. Gam­ing brings many pos­it­ives in my life.  Increas­ing such things as hand eye coördin­a­tion, reas­on­ing abil­ity, aware­ness and even mor­al­ity. I love the world­wide com­munity that has sprung up, test­a­ment to the fact that gamers are really a social bunch who just some­times lack the skills or con­fid­ence to be ‘face to face’. ‘Screen to screen’ offers gamers the chance to ful­fil the need for friends and the need to chal­lenge and be chal­lenged in what amounts to a very safe envir­on­ment. Size mat­ters not while on-line.  Only skill, determ­in­a­tion and the will to win with style.

In the his­tory of gam­ing there have been many golden years, but there has not been one recently to match the out­put this year. Almost every genre has had a mas­ter­piece released, some have had three or four, and some have been record break­ers in all pos­sible senses of the word.  There has also been dis­ap­point­ments.  In defence of the over hyped games this has to also go down as hard­est release year of all time since many games that would have been lauded by the pun­dits and pub­lic have been up against such leviath­ans that they have barely made a splash in the heav­ing sea of major releases.  Sim­il­arly some games that we have all been look­ing for­wards to for many years have been over ana­lysed for crit­ical faults that would have been simply over­looked in a more fal­low sea­son.  It has been sur­vival of the fittest.

I have endeav­oured to remove much of the sub­ject­ive reas­on­ing in this list, but some, of course, may remain.  This was the year that the major releases, with a few polit­ical excep­tions, were released on all the major plat­forms at the same time.  Finally the per­son who doesn’t own all the dif­fer­ent plat­forms doesn’t have to miss out!  So without fur­ther ado here is my per­sonal gam­ing set for this year:

Graph­ical Achieve­ment Of The Year

Hon­our­able Mentions

The Orange Box — Halo 3 — BioShock

This cat­egory is made for First-Person-Shooters and 2007, more than any­thing else, will be remembered for the high qual­ity of the FPS’s released. Other top shelf games released against the entrants in this list have van­ished without trace and will never reach their full poten­tial.  This says some­thing about hype, and the amount of cash pumped into the mar­ket, that I don’t much like.  On the pos­it­ive side indy games are going strong.  I still play the bril­liant Mount and Blade (which costs a ten­ner) and Gal Civ 2, which remains a top seller.  How­ever, since mak­ing the games in the fol­low­ing list costs mil­lions, don’t expect the situ­ation regard­ing mar­ket­ing to change soon.

Run­ner Up

Crysis

Crysis is without doubt the best look­ing game ever released onto the PC at least it is if you have a PC with the power of a 2001 mono­lith.

My rig was con­sidered top of the range a year ago, but now struggles to dis­play this game in all its undoubted glory. In the old days simply hav­ing a graph­ics engine this good would have been enough, but not this year, The Golden Year.

Crysis suf­fers in only few areas. Firstly, the AI is a dumb as a bucket of span­ners. This is on pur­pose as the game’s main fun fea­ture is play­ing “Pred­ator” and hid­ing in the jungle lay­ing traps for the patrols.

This is a sand­box zone where you are mak­ing your own fun and not at the mercy of the developers. Noth­ing is as fun as sneak­ing up to a sniper, leap­ing clean over his head, grabbing him from behind and throw­ing him off a cliff. If our friend sniper had bet­ter AI, and shot you clean through the eye the second he saw you, the whole effect would have been ruined. Any­how this AI restric­tion does show up the gaps in play (Unlike Far­Cry where the dumb AI fit­ted the dumb mer­cen­ary enemies). Another thing sim­ilar to Far Cry is the sud­den change of play style.  Here, around half way through, the entire game stops with the sand­box and becomes some­thing else. As if the cre­at­ors real­ised that Half life 2: Epis­ode 2 was com­ing out and they damn well bet­ter put back in the cine­matic themes. This jars with the jungle sec­tions and you find your­self miss­ing them. Finally, the game steals shame­lessly from any action film in the last 15 years. Espe­cially Pred­ator, Ali­ens and Star­ship Troop­ers.

The actual shoot­ing in the game is well handled and the sense of com­bat is clearly atten­u­ated to some sense of real­ism, espe­cially on the ultra hard “delta” dif­fi­culty. The gun mech­an­ics are flaw­less and the feel is well handled.

A worthy run­ner up just don’t men­tion the ending.

What end­ing?

Exactly!

Win­ner

Call Of Duty 4

The win­ner in this cat­egory has to be Call Of Duty 4.

This mod­ern inter­pret­a­tion of the prior Call of Duty games steps up to some of the best on-rails shoot­ing ever designed. Fant­ast­ic­ally themed levels com­bine with a very inter­est­ing plot that engages the player totally, even­tu­ally lead­ing to a strange effect to find in an FPS; start­ing to really care. By the end of the game I actu­ally felt an emo­tion regard­ing the NPC’s fates. Also top banana in this game are the graph­ics and per­spect­ive shifts. This game defines why you need good graph­ics.  Graph­ics must drive the story, be part of the action, not just be a back­ground.  This game uses the graph­ics, it doesn’t just dis­play them.

The very clean design of the graph­ical sys­tem leads the player through some amaz­ing set pieces that really deliver. Whether it is pro­tect­ing a stricken tank from sui­cide bombers, blast­ing through a rain shattered tanker in a stormy sea or enga­ging in SAS house-to-house hunt­ing the game is peer­less in its approach to immers­ing the player.

Even the intro­duct­ory cred­its are in game as you play the part of a third-world-dictator being driven through the city and dragged to his exe­cu­tion. By the end of the game you are so used to see­ing the amaz­ing amounts of scenery that you get quite spoilt by it.  The final chase sec­tion fea­tures entire cit­ies of high qual­ity 3D being chucked about as your truck flashes by. This is a titanic achievement.

Explo­sion, bul­let and battle effects are all excel­lently presen­ted and at times I felt that I was play­ing the film Black Hawk Down, or any num­ber of top-draw mod­ern war films. This effect is fur­ther enhanced with some fan­boy quotes from such films as Ali­ens being peppered around the place (which all raise a smile for those “in the loop”). Also the sounds are expertly cued to the action and all the voice act­ing is timely and of a high quality.

One par­tic­u­lar mis­sion deserves a men­tion, which is the sniper mis­sion to Pryp­riat near Chernobyl. This mis­sion is the prob­ably one of the best designed and smoothly executed pieces of gam­ing ever set to disk. Every­one loves this mis­sion and rightly so. A per­fectly encap­su­lated exper­i­ence that ranks along­side the best out­put of any game ever.

Shoot­ing in this game is entirely gov­erned by the dif­fi­culty level set by the player. On top dif­fi­culty it is very very tough and some­times even get­ting the first shot off will not guar­an­tee vic­tory in a fire fight. Tac­tics, luck and an exact­ing aim are all neces­sary to win and the enjoy­ment level can suf­fer in response. How­ever, with the dif­fi­culty turned down a notch the game opens up a little and is prob­ably the best fun gun­play ever.

Prob­lems do exist. On some levels the enemies can pop into view and on the harder dif­fi­culty set­tings you will suf­fer many replays as you get nailed again and again. Also the whole “keep mov­ing for­wards or enemies re-spawn” dynamic is not to my taste. But, set against the pos­it­ive exper­i­ences in this game, these are ser­i­ously minor points of contention.

Truly the best shoot­ing game this year and pos­sibly any year and an amaz­ing graph­ical achievement.

The COD4 trailer:

Best Mul­ti­player Experience

Hon­our­able Mentions

Call of Duty 4 — Halo 3 — Enemy Ter­rit­ory: Quake Wars 

Run­ner Up

World in Conflict

World In Con­flict is a smash­ing game and one which has received a lot of effort in the design of the mul­ti­player elements.

The single player game has some of the most inter­est­ing effects ever seen in Real Time Strategy, includ­ing a very high stand­ard of graph­ics out­side the play­ers actual focus, which lends itself to the immers­ive feel­ing that you are play­ing only a part in a greater con­flict. The mul­ti­player is the nat­ural exten­sion of this in that you are actu­ally only play­ing a part in the greater con­flict. By for­cing the player to pick the role of a com­mander of one type of force the game places you into a storm­ing battle, the win­ning of which is not entirely in your hands, and you step up to become part of a lar­ger team effort.

This is true mul­ti­player team com­bat. With the right team in place vic­tory by com­bined arms can become a mes­mer­ising exper­i­ence that you really feel a part of.

The only issue is in find­ing said team.

Play­ing with “Inter­net pud­dings ™” can be dis­pir­it­ing for exactly the same reason. Since you can­not win the battle alone, plus that fact that every unit type has its nemesis, you can some­times feel that mul­ti­player is like banging your head against a brick wall.

Whilst this is not the design­ers fault, it pre­vents the game tak­ing the top slot.

Win­ner

The Orange Box: Team Fort­ress 2

So the top slot goes to the remake of an old classic.

TF2 re-imagines the entire on-line shooter in a way that no other developer would have the balls to do. Only Valve have balls this big. The Orange Box is already a default top buy this year and in no small part this is due to this king of on-line FPS games.

The ori­ginal concept of Team Fort­ress and Team Fort­ress Clas­sic (my old TFC site) has been honed to a fine point. This would be good enough, but then Valve have layed over the top a car­toon look-and-feel that works. Not too camp and not too car­toon like at all really. The char­ac­ter­isa­tions are simply a mas­ter­piece of design. Whereas you ima­gine the car­toon look to detract from the anim­a­tion and shad­ing, this is a car­toon by Pixar not Hanna-Barbera.  It is all high shaded 3D and smooth anim­a­tion which beguiles the player into act­ing more to type. So, spies become more sneaky and sol­diers charge into more battles all thanks to the most fun class bal­an­cing ever created.

The clever maps mean that you never get bogged down and the vari­ations on a theme means that the dif­fer­ent rounds, modes and styles all mesh together. The fact that the maps are quite sim­ilar is entirely on pur­pose so that a style of play can be honed into a set of play para­met­ers that work on any map. This is what happened to Counter Strike and why the older maps were dropped in favour of dust-U-likes. Ded­ic­a­tion to your char­ac­ter is never un-rewarded by the design lay­out of the map.

This is why many other games are not in this top list.

Team Fort­ress 2 is simply too much fun to put down and has depth in spades for those will­ing to look bey­ond the screen shots.

Best end­ing

Win­ner

The Orange Box: Portal

The best end­ing this year is per­haps also the best end­ing of all time.

/spoilers

Portal star­ted out as a minor pro­ject to add to The Orange Box. The sort of long-shot that only a com­pany like Valve would go for.  Well, long-shots some­times pay off. The end­ing to Portal is a long-shot inside a long-shot.  On paper hav­ing the com­puter you just killed sing to you would be a recipe for, if not dis­aster, mark­ing your game as com­pletely weird.  In real­ity the song is so charm­ing that you wont care. GLADOS surely hit the nail on the head when she wrote: HUGE SUCCESS.

Bril­liant, funny and it will have you hum­ming it for weeks. If ever a small, quick game stuck in my mind it was this one. Why? Because of that song.

Here is the win­ning end­ing in all its glory:

Best open­ing

Win­ner

BioShock

Rede­fin­ing openings.

/spoilers

BioShock wanted to impress me from the first moment.

I star­ted watch­ing the intro sat back deep into my chair with a beer in hand. I watched as it unfol­ded not­ing the aes­thet­ics of the scene. Then the main char­ac­ter fell into the sea and it was on fire. I watched the sea glisten and the fire burn. I remem­ber think­ing that this was some of the best CGI I had ever seen and a very neat look­ing open­ing; what with all the droplet effects. Then noth­ing happened. I looked closer, sud­denly I real­ised that this wasn’t CGI, this was in real time! I moved the mouse and the cam­era smoothly panned across the fiery dev­ast­a­tion. My jaw hit the floor and with small whim­pers of “Wow” com­ing from my lips I swam my character’s body towards the Rap­ture elevator.

No game intro has had that effect on me.  BioShock dis­ap­poin­ted me even­tu­ally, but that intro lif­ted my spir­its through the first two thirds. It was a hell of a thing for any game to live up to. That is the per­fect intro. Some­thing that starts the player’s engines. Starts them start fall­ing in love with the game. Sure a game needs to live up to that intro, but like all those who we fall in love with, fate is decided in those first few seconds.

/spoilers

The intro set-up the twist in the tale quite nicely. The simple acci­dental nature of your arrival to the city, the trip down to the sea bed and the huge sense of “new­ness” the city evokes is all one with the awe of dis­cov­ery. Since you are see­ing the game in the first per­son this sense delays the player from real­ising that you are simply a pup­pet in this play and this strange city being revealed to you is no stranger after all. All good intro’s trick you in this way. They set-up the feel­ings for a reason.

BioShock’s is a mas­ter­piece.  Here is its open­ing, watch and learn:

Best Innov­a­tion

Win­ner

The Orange Box: Portal

I include this as a cat­egory mainly in response to the Edge art­icle on the same sub­ject I read today, they have Halo 3 as the most innov­at­ive game of the year. Now I have played Halo 3 and if any­thing it is simply an exten­sion of Halo 2. Even a little deriv­at­ive of Halo 1. Claim­ing it is innov­at­ive, not to men­tion they gave it 10 (there is no account­ing for taste), is akin to an actual crime.

Of all the games released this year the obvi­ous choice for innov­a­tion is Portal.

Portal has rebuilt the puzzle game, res­cuing it from Pop games and on-line lunch­time pur­suits. The sense of space being manip­u­lated, the core dynamic of Portal, is amaz­ing. Being thrown around and flipped as you dive into portals from heights and come out at odd angles, all from the first per­son per­spect­ive, is com­pletely new. Com­pletely. Portal is miles ahead of any­thing else released this year in terms of fresh ideas up on screen.

Real throw-away ideas that should, by all rights, have been dropped onto the cut­ting room floor.  Not be picked up, pol­ished, buffed up to a mir­ror shine and given to us like some res­cued pearl of a game. The core mech­anic is so simple but that is essen­tially its strength. The new trick is to shift it to the first per­son. Of course, they didn’t stop there. Valve, like a great movie dir­ector, ladles detail into the back­ground plot hold­ing this story together. New ideas wheel out of Portal such as Cake, GLADOS, the Com­pan­ion Cube and the empty obser­va­tion rooms. This is all not core to the game, but it is core to the player enjoy­ing the actual puzzles. Portal is a simple story beau­ti­fully told. Like a pot from ancient China; It has the most intric­ate and dazzling paint­ing on the sur­face, took expert crafts­men much effort to paint it, mas­ter pot­ters to bake it and weeks of glaz­ing to fix it but in the end you still just keep flowers in it.

Portal is a innov­a­tion mas­ter­piece bar none and no one but Valve could take such a small idea and build it into some­thing that every­one loves.

Game of the year

Win­ner

The Orange Box

Game Of The Year is always a sub­ject­ive judge­ment. Edge may say Mario. Microsoft may say Halo. PC magazines may say who­ever they are most bribed to support.

I say that it is The Orange Box.

Not just because it is the best. Not just because the game play of its com­pon­ents are all bril­liant. Not just because it comes from the best developers in the world. No, rather because it rep­res­ents the best value I have ever seen in a gam­ing pack­age. So many games do not live up to their hype. Half Life 2 has exceeded the hype in every sense.

Epis­ode 2 man­ages to refresh the entire game and still come up with new and inter­est­ing ways to play in this amaz­ing environment.

Team Fort­ress 2 redefines what you can do with the on-line genre. It is the grand­daddy of the FPS reborn as a new and excit­ing injec­tion into the dead arm of online gam­ing.  Other games may dis­ap­pear up their own arse, but TF2 never takes itself too ser­i­ously all the while hav­ing a his­tory that blows all oth­ers clean away.

As for Portal, it is genius.

In this world of bribed on-line reviews, fat-cat gam­ing sites and the EA ‘Mas­ters of Gam­ing’ all get­ting their cut of my hard earned money The Orange Box is stick­ing it to The Man.  Why? Because all the money goes straight to the developer, bypassing the can­cer­ous polyps that infest the rest of the industry.  HL2, Steam and The Orange Box are ensur­ing that future years of gam­ing can be as golden as this one was.

Buy­ing The Orange Box is to a strike a blow for the free­dom of the gam­ing industry.  Qual­ity years await us ahead with con­tent like this com­ing out, see you in 2008 and remem­ber to damn The Man!

The HL2:E2 trailer:

Com­ments welcome!

Basho

Pop­ular­ity: unranked [?]

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