ben is on the inter.net

As of tonight I have earned exactly 6000 gamerpoints. And I haven’t finished that one game I’m working on finishing which will most likely make it into my top 10 but now I have to make tough decisions again and you could always spoil it for yourselves and see what I’ve been doing through my gamercard.

So. No matter what I say in the next few days. You have to buy the Orange Box. And if you don’t want to play it on a PC, the 360 version is really well done (other than a Microsoft violation involving their press start screen and the Guitar Hero II guitar) (also, the 360 version has prettied up versions of Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One, while the PC version only got re-releases). If you saw the Half-Life 2 demo video in the summer of 2003 and you saw something there, something that you didn’t think you’d ever see. Something in the way that floating a mattress in water was different from floating some pieces wood. You owe it to yourself to play through the game again. And you more than owe it to yourself to play through the Episodes. Just fucking do it already.

And as soon as I’m done here, I’m going to run through Gears of War, probably multiple times, because I want to see where it stands. While I love the game, and I decry it as the best game on the Xbox 360, I never played through it. I don’t even think I played past the second chapter. But now I have to. It’s a personal mission. So if you have Live, let’s get our co-op on. It’s time, my brothers.

I was pretty certain that my top 10 games were rock solid by this point, but I decided to try out ONE MORE GAME just in case it was WORTHY. So far, it looks like it might be. I’ve written my reviews for the other 10, too, I just can’t justify saying “this is what I liked” when there now my be ANOTHER, at least not until I finished it off. Which, by the way, will happen either tonight or tomorrow night. So, bear with me.

Some people are probably writing a “Worst of 2007″ list or similar, but this is probably an impossible task. While I admit, it’s hard to play every good game in a year, it’s undoubtedly MUCH harder to play every bad one. The ratio of filler to quality is astonishing on store shelves, and sometimes games end up moving from the latter to the former before they ship. Some ideas just sound like, sure, that could be fun, and then MAN do they screw it up somehow. Arguably, the BEST games in a given year are the ones that completely surpass our expectations (but, well, I’ll be writing about that starting tomorrow). The games listed here are the WORST, though. I was pretty excited about all of these only to have my heart BROKEN.

Rogue Galaxy
This game came out almost a year ago? Man, I swear it was just YESTERDAY that I took down my Rogue Galaxy pre-launch wallpaper on my PC after having been bored by this game’s numerous failures. Level5, the developers of this game, as well as Dark Cloud 2 and Dragon Quest VIII, games that I rather like, tried to make a space odyssey. This is not the only space odyssey that disappointed me this year! It seems so strange though; like, how do you mess something like this up? You’re allowed to employ endless creativity, you can have a big or small story, and you just have to keep the audience AWAKE. However! This game, like SPOILER ALERT Mass Effect below are some of the most yawn inducing, lifeless games I played all year. There’s no emotion or connection to the bland templated characters (Mass Effect has ONE good character, FINE), you have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing, and in this game, at least, the combat was unforgiving and sometimes downright RUDE. There are two screenshots of this game that are LIES. One of them is a character reaching out to the stars trying to touch them, swallowed in the vastness of the universe. The other is of a wooden pirate ship flying out over a gorgeous jungle planet. This game did not immediately present me with this sense of wonder, and quite frankly, I kept getting lost and pissed off. I might try it again in 2008 if nothing good comes out for a while.

Heavenly Sword and Motorstorm and the PS3 until October 23
Man, talk about premature launch, huh? The PS3 didn’t get a good game until October 23, nearly a year after the system launched. When Ratchet and Clank came out, I exclaimed:

What the-? This High Def PS2 I have can play games that look like 360 games?

Because seriously, man, what a terrible year this system had. If a steady stream of quality releases continues (pro-tip: it probably will ebb and flow, but it’s still pretty desperate out there), and if they come up with some reason for me to buy the PS3 version of multi-platform games (bro-tip: they probably won’t because I crave achievement points), they might actually come close to being able to beat out low-tier game systems like the V-Smile and Tiger handhelds. But man. Fucking Motorstorm. And Ninja Theory’s Heavenly Sword (a game that wanted to be Japanese so bad, they even made imitation anime!). Man, Warhawk. And LAIR (guitar wailing in sadness). All those games that people thought would make the PS3 viable, only for them to be worse with each passing release. And here we are, a year in, and there are two honest to God GREAT games on the system (pro-tip: at least one of them appears in my top 10). I just feel sorry for these guys right now.

Assassin’s Creed
Thank God I started renting games. I frothed for this game pretty hard when I saw the first trailer. I even saw the sci-fi dual plot thing right away. But MAN. These guys created a really, really good climbing engine, and then… well… that’s pretty much all there is. Well, there’s that and the really slow-paced unnecessary cutscenes in both the past and the present (these are “Forced Walking in Gears of War” moments). And the Copy/Paste/Rotate of the multiple city designs in the game. Oh, and the Da Vinci Code twist at the end. Man… For a game where freedom of choice was such a big deal, they just took so much away from the player most of the time that it’s kind of crippling. Even the climbing often resulted in a failed jump or the same “I can’t jump on that” animation. Also, more like “Assassins’ Creed.” I thought the high profile failures ended here, though…

Mass Effect
“Thank God I started renting games.” I actually bought this game before I saw that Blockbuster had it (and returning it was the best decision I made with games this year). I was really looking forward to it until I saw some of the footage of the developers on some SciFi channel thing. Bioware’s illusion of choice ends up being use to great effect, it seems! HEY REMEMBER THAT PART WHERE I PUNCHED THAT GUY NO WAY I DIDN’T PUNCH THAT GUY. Jack and I watched this part of this interview, which was maybe 30 seconds in, and we turned it off, and refused to watch the rest. I still had hope that this could be a great game, if a little misunderstood. How about that one part, like 3 hours in, where some guy says “there are three important missions for you to take, one of them requires you travel to one of these sixteen planets to find some girl” and then you have to literally go to multiple planets, drive the stupid Batmobile thing for as long as you want, and then try and find this girl DEEP UNDERGROUND (bro-tip: use gamefaqs or something); I guess if you had the patience to talk to every person on every other planet you might have at least been pointed in the right direction. Here’s the run-down: Oblivion did the whole choice thing better, KotOR did Star Wars better, Uncharted did cutscenes better (SO MUCH BETTER), and Gears of War did the shooting parts of this game better. It’s kind of astonishing how bad the RPG screens are in this game, but even more astonishing is the reviews this game is getting… This is from the same group of people that thought KotOR 2 was an unfinished mess, and this game is FAR worse than that. Try driving the stupid Batmobile thing for a little while, and you’ll know what I mean. If you enjoy being lost all the time, and you really want to watch a Starship Troopers TV series dubbed into French and then back into English, you’ll really like this game.

Silent Hill: The Arcade
Granted, I was only excited for the game for about 15 minutes (the time between when I first saw signs advertising it and when I first got to play it in an arcade), it’s just one of the most miserable gaming experiences of my life. Tim Rogers and I stumbled into the machine in the arcade, wondering what a Survival Horror rail shooter would play like… It’s actually pretty simple. You take the parts of House of the Dead that were fun, and then you throw in boss battles where you cannot avoid taking damage (I don’t mean you might not avoid it, I mean there is no gameplay mechanic allowing you to avoid it), and you get the idea. You just have to keep putting money in to see the game. I wish I’d put my quarters into that Half-Life 2 arcade shooter instead.

I didn’t realize there were so many games that I liked this year but that I didn’t like like, wink nudge etc.

Rock Band
Sigh… I really wanted to like this one more than any game ever, at least at first. It’s got a small army of problems, though, and while some of them (song selection) might be fixed over time, I ended up liking rocking out to Guitar Hero quite a bit more… Since this game is everybody’s post-’giving darling, I might as well make those complaints clear:

• The songs are boring. Some people call them easy, but I find that almost every song on this game’s list (including the DLC) to be pretty boring to listen to or perform UNLESS you’re playing the drums. There’s not a single guitar part in this game that compares to the solos in the FIRST TIER of Guitar Hero III’s list… Most of them lack interesting syncopation or wailing, and that’s pretty inexcusable in a game about ROCKING THE FUCK OUT. Similarly, most of the vocal parts are boring as SIN, and aren’t FUN. The bass parts, as usual, are lifeless. As others have put it, Harmonix made Drum Hero, and they allowed you to hook other instruments up for an inferior experience.
• The guitar that the game comes with is terrible. Maybe mine’s just broken (I actually put in for the warranty already, so we’ll see about that!), but the frets are sticky and the strum bar doesn’t register about 20% of my upstrokes. For some reason these plastic guitars get WORSE every time one of these games comes out.
• The game’s default calibration is WAY off. I think this is also true of the guitar hero games, but they hide it by introducing a sizable deadzone. I PREFER THIS GREATLY. There’s nothing worse than hitting forty of the same note, constantly strumming in perfect tempo only to have the game think that you missed the 31st note. It makes me frustrated that I’ve been unable to get it calibrated perfectly, while Guitar Hero 2 and 3 have never caused me any trouble on the 360.
• It’s got a pretty bad framerate! This doesn’t matter too much. But it annoys me, as a framerate guy. The game’s not even DOING anything. WHAT THE HELL.
• No online world tour. Really? This would have ushered in the NEW ERA.
• They made several small mistakes in how the 360 features are handled: the new instruments can’t turn on the console, so when you start up the game you are likely going to have your profile signed into the controller that’s plugged in, which is probably not what you want (since, as mentioned before, you probably want to play the drums); there’s no in-game keyboard for text entry which makes text-entry stupid on the guitars; you cannot purchase DLC from within the game, at least I couldn’t find a way to do this (you have to browse to the game in the Xbox Live Marketplace, while in Guitar Hero 3 a note appears telling you there’s new DLC and then you just go and buy it, right there, in the game’s main menu)

There’s actually more stuff that I’m unhappy with… but at the end of the day the game’s pretty fun in a group so it gets a pass, I think.

Stranglehold
SHOOTING. SHOOTING AND JUMPING AND SLIDING NOW IT’S TIME TO EXPLOOOOOOOOOOOODE. This game has, without question, the best first level an action game has ever had. Unfortunately, every level after the first gets progressively worse in terms of design. Action Button Dot Net really nailed it when they said this game was like Shenmue only done correctly; I just wish it kept the initial pace through the whole game.

Halo 3
It arrived on my birhtday! I had some glorious fun playing this game on co-op, but it didn’t really accomplish anything new and, for whatever reason, I don’t feel the need to ever pop it in again. Maybe I’ll get the last skull that I need, but I think I’d rather go through Gears of War instead. At least this was much better than Halo 2! And co-op really was pretty nice…

Pac-Man: Championship Edition
We finally get a true sequel to the original Pac-Man (not like the lousy expansion pack Ms. Edition), and it’s probably the best arcade game I’ve ever played. It’s really beautiful and classy, but somehow it’s just not as fun as Pac-Man Vs. If only they had plans for DLC…

The Orange Box
The only reason this isn’t the best game released this year is because I feel like it’s cheating. Take 4 pretty good games and 1 unbelievably fucking amazing game, put them together, and then release it like it’s just one game? It took some balls, that’s for sure, and it is easily the best gameplay value EVER. As a spoiler, two of the games that came with the Orange Box are in my top 10 list, and I wanted to honor them separately with their own praises. Which brings me to…

Team Fortress 2
I like it and all, but I’m terrible at it, so you probably won’t see me online in this for some time! People are already doing way too many “glitchy” things which just makes inexperienced players feel even worse in an online match. I will say that when you’ve got the friends to play it, this is probably the best multiplayer only experience out there (other than Halo 3 co-op and Shadowrun, which is only bad because nobody bought it).

In an effort to get back into the habit of regular posting, I’m going to do a list series where I discuss, of all things, the games I played this year that I liked the most. This is especially valid now that the year is pretty much over, and I can’t think of a single release until sometime in 2008 that would have a chance of getting onto this list. Today I’m listing out five games, in no particular order, that could have been #10 if there had been fewer incredible releases this year.

Bioshock
This game really could have been something special. In fact, the first hour led me to believe that it was. I’m glad I saw it through to the ending, but the game just had too many flaws to bump it up into the top 10. Also, the game was a little longer than I’d have liked (in fact, I’d much rather the main character killed himself about halfway through to let the game end on an exclamation point) (actually, if they did this, I’d probably have put this above some of the top picks) (oh well, maybe next time?).

Blue Dragon
I never beat this one, and unless my current pile runs out I probably never will. An epic adventure blah blah blah. The art direction is really great and the story is actually kind of OK. The sluggish battle menus are probably my biggest complaint, and while that sounds like a nitpick, this is a HUGE problem when you’ll fight probably 5,000 battles over the course of the game. On the plus side, this was the only RPG this year where you can just automatically kill bad guys without fighting them if you level up an ability.

Everyday Shooter
This game only really makes this list because I was SO PUMPED for it until I played it and found out it had really terrible control and mostly bad music. Moving on…

Contra 4
It’s a really, really hard game that feels like a remake of Contra 1 for the NES. That’s pretty great, sure, but I just can’t help feeling that the game has no real flow for how the levels are assembled. Also, you only get the good music if you play on Hard, which sucks because every person that plays on Hard will likely run out of lives before they’ve scrolled the screen twice. Sad!

Rhythm Tengoku
While this game didn’t come out this year and thus is disqualified from the main list I didn’t get a chance to play it until I picked it up during my trip to Tokyo. It’s a WarioWare-esque music game, and it has some really creative microgames.

(if you play it on co-op).

The McRib has been re-released. The collector in me must eat it.