ben is on the inter.net

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.