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 coordination, 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 (TM)” 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