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/dev/games 17 Dec 2008 03:47 pm

Top Ten Games: 2008: The Pre-Christmas Edition

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I’ve been thinking about this for a while, yeah! I’ve decided to record two lists this year: one, right now, pre-christmas, and one after the Christmas break (in which I do approximately 10% of my gaming for the entire year). I’m curious what the delta will be on some of these. That said, if I don’t play any new games from now until 2009, these are the games of 2008 with which my memories are most fond.

10. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Expansion (PC). I lost nearly six months of gaming to WoW this year, most of it preparing characters for this latest expansion. When it finally came out, though I had levelled many characters, I hadn’t gotten any to level 70, and thus have not yet ingested the vast majority of content released this year. With that disclaimer in mind, I would like to point out that what I did play of the expansion (the Death Knight starting area, three times) was incredibly well made. Much better than the rest of the game, and it makes me genuinely excited to reach that content. However, I still have like 12 hours of grinding in Outland before my first characters reach the frozen north, and I really can’t stomach it at this point. I’m sure I’ll be back, and I honestly would be lying if I didn’t include this game on my top 10 of 2008.
9. Grand Theft Auto 4 (X360). I spent my first 14 hours with this game without killing a single civilian or stealing a car. Bowling, drinking, going to shows. Take the taxi wherever we need to go. I’ve got money, right? But then something changed. I accidentally killed my girlfriend doing some sweet motorcycle stunts. It’s OK, man, accidents happen, right? Well, a few days later, her ghost starts calling me. I SAW HER DIE. So I went to her apartment and a girl that looked like her came out. I took her for a ride… and blew up the car to be sure. She called again. And then the killing never stopped.
8. I Fell In Love With the Majesty of Colors (Flash). You can play this quite beautiful flash game here. This is actually a tie with Gravitation for Most Beautiful Pixels Telling Me Stories Of The Year. Honestly, I love the asthetic, and I love games that try and show me things without needing to rim-light 5,000,000,000 polygons when lightning flashes. A game that can tell me a story in 5 minutes is better than a game that never does. Granted, I wish IFILWMC had some editing on the text, but I really love the game bits so damn much.
7. Red Alert 3 (PC). It has giant robots fighting armored bears. Carnival levels. Man-cannons. User-controlled magnets IN SPACE. Live-Action cutscenes with hilarious actors. And an honest to God co-op campaign!
6. Braid (X360). A time-traveling love story with wonderful art and a really, really good premise. Some of the most hand-to-face-smacking puzzles and delicious 4D thinking.
5. Mega Man 9 (PS3). This game makes me laugh like no game has in years. It kills you constantly, forcing you to memorize patterns or be extremely paranoid. My heart has not pounded this much playing a videogame since I was very young.
4. Bangai-O Spirits (NDS). A game where explosions are the only story. You are a giant robot, usually much smaller than the other giant robots you are asked to explode, and you can pick from an impressive arsenal of baseball bats and homing missiles. Sometimes there are soccer balls. With over 100 levels on the cart, and a built-in level editor, this is THE game to be stranded with. Co-op is usually too slow to play because of all the exploding, but that is why you SHOULD play it. This game is a love letter to me and mine.
3. Valkyria Chronicles (PS3). SEGA does World War II. It’s a strategy title with a really great battle system, extremely touching and poignant cutscenes (admittedly there is too much filler sometimes, but I swear my wife gasped when she saw a civilian clipped by an opposing soldier), and blue blue skies. The art is great, sure, but expensive videogame rendering isn’t really my thing. Definitely my favorite JRPG since Final Fantasy XII, and one that I’m really looking forward to finishing over Christmas break.
2. Gears of War 2 (X360). There is a scene in this game where you have to slice open those arteries or you’re going to drown in all of that blood. Best bro-op experience since Gears of War 1; the rules are constantly changing (now you need to find cover for YOUR HEAD because it’s RAINING GLASS), and if you find the right music (NOTE: all music is the right music for Gears of War a.k.a. Beers of War, but Christmas music is best, with Cat Stevens in second), you will be high-fiving your night away.

And the best game released in 2008 is…

1. The Mother 3 Fan Translation Project (GBA… sort of). Do It Yourself Devotion! This, ladies and gentlemen, is the best game released this year. Sure, it’s a rom hack to a 2006 game. But let me tell you right now that this is as official a release of Mother 3 as we will ever see. The translation is as good or better than what we’d get from Nintendo were they ever to go through the trouble to bring this wonderful game to us (spoiler: they won’t). This is a game about love and loss and growing up and capitalism. It’s a game about failure and psychic powers and transexual merpeople. A game where a family falls apart and rebuilds itself. It is a game where you press the button to the beat of the music for best results.
It took Shigesato Itoi nearly 10 years go get this game made, and it took us another two and a half to get it in English. Even though I played it some in Japanese, I loved not needing a dictionary and being able to breeze through story segments. And seriously, this translation is THE best product released this year. It looks and sounds like a smile. Do not question me!

With that out of the way, I would like to point out that this list contains 7 sequels and only 3 “original” games. I imagine that most other people’s lists have an even higher percentage of sequels present. Well, check back in a couple weeks to see if the holidays bring me any upsets to this list.

10 Responses to “Top Ten Games: 2008: The Pre-Christmas Edition”

on 17 Dec 2008 at 5:40 pm 1.Julius said …

Whoa… no XBLA games made it. What a tough year. Also, my gaming habits have increased over the year, simply based on owning most of these titles and not just hearing about them from you.
on 17 Dec 2008 at 5:54 pm 2.bburbank said …

Well, Braid is for XBLA. I didn’t, however, differentiate it in my post.
on 17 Dec 2008 at 10:30 pm 3.Ben said …

Maybe it’s not your gaming habits that have changed but mine. Also maybe it’s not that our gaming habits have changed but that gaming has changed.

I’ll be writing about the other 2008 games I’ve played and enjoyed soon.
on 17 Dec 2008 at 11:37 pm 4.Chris said …

My gaming habits increased exponentially this year and I couldn’t be happier about it. Spent a lot of time with some top-notch titles and I still have more to play through. Braid would certainly be high on my own list, as would Super Mario Galaxy - I can’t believe it didn’t even breach your top 10!
on 18 Dec 2008 at 9:23 am 5.Ben said …

Well for one thing, Super Mario Galaxy was released in twenty ought seven, friend. But I also ended up not liking it very much. Mr. Tim Rogers (of http://www.actionbutton.net and now http://www.kotaku.com ) wrote quite a few words explaining my main problem with the game:

“In an interview some nine months after my initial, overjoyed impressions of the game, Shigeru Miyamoto told Weekly Famitsu’s editor-in-chief Hirokazu Hamamura that his team’s “main goal” in Super Mario Galaxy was to make a game that was easy enough for anyone to pick up and play — a game that could be embraced and played to completion by non-gamers, all while never once making the hardcore gamers feel like they’re being “patronized”. He actually used the Japanese verb “being licked” (like a mommy kitty licks a baby kitty, to help the image along) — he was well into meaning-business mode. Maybe he’d played the latest Zelda games, where a blasted text box will scream at you about the function of a key every single god damned time you pick up a key: “You got a magic key! . . . This is a magic key! . . . It can be used to unlock one door! After unlocking one door, this magic key will vanish!”

I took Miyamoto’s “No Licking” stance to mean that he was against the source of the licking as well as the act of licking itself. Maybe he’d stopped and asked himself two questions, regarding the keys in Zelda: number one, why can’t the game show you what a key does? When you use a key to unlock a door, maybe we could just see the key hover up above the hero’s head, fly into the lock, click, turn, and vanish into a puff of smoke as the door rumbles open? Then we’d know, deep down, “Hey, that key’s gone now.” Number two: why does the key have to disappear after we use it? The answer to the second question has something to do with how the key isn’t a “key” so much as it’s just “something to do” in order to progress deeper into a dungeon. On a deeper, weirder psychological level, the key is imprinting our children with obsessive urges to always look for the solution to the problem before their eyes in the most far-flung place. In this way, it can be construed that games aren’t running parallel to real-world logic so much as they’re scribbling poisonous crayon circles anywhere they please.

Yet Super Mario Galaxy licked me plenty of times, up and down, all over. At a certain point about three-quarters of the way through the game — this almost scarred me for life — I was swimming in a giant liquid sphere toward a floating tower, when a penguin sidled up to me out of nowhere and with a hateful snippet of a sound effect, his text box took up the greater part of the center of the screen: “PRESS THE A BUTTON TO SWIM”.

It occurs to me once again that no one in any Japanese office anywhere, precisely, has yet been able to construct a Powerpoint presentation that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that though the people who forget to use the one button on the controller to do almost everything, or else forget that keys unlock doors are forgetful enough to also have lost the instruction manual (and possibly box) of every game they own, they are probably also forgetful enough to misplace the game disc and/or the console.” -http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=295

But I don’t know. I was just bored most of the time. It was too linear for me, and it was sometimes amazing, but most of the time it felt like another game where you do favors for idiots. Like, you’re saving the galaxy, right? If you don’t do it everybody dies, right? So why is it that rabbits are CONSTANTLY fucking with you to keep you from getting more stars? The game needed some serious editing if you ask me, or it needed a mode where the characters could not talk to you and you were forced to explore, as Mario games had been in the past.
on 18 Dec 2008 at 11:14 am 6.bburbank said …

Also I apparently liked the game enough to give it 7th last year: http://www.benisontheinter.net/2008/01/27/a-summary-of-all-things/
on 18 Dec 2008 at 2:51 pm 7.Chris said …

I realized after posting the first comment that I had picked this up in early December but neglected to actually play it until January, making it an 08 game for me but an 07 game for the rest of the world (and official Top X lists).

I do, however, object to the idea that you had to be inundated with prompts and button suggestions throughout the process of playing through SMG. In fact, for the most part, if you avoid running up to NPCs or engaging them in some way you never have to read through whatever inane details they’re trying to provide. Though I wouldn’t ever call it a really challenging play experience, I WOULD say that it was a fantastic exploratory game and nearly every world held some unique method of exploration, be it bee suits or mario ghosts or ice skating or sling-shotting. The story certainly wasn’t the most air-tight, but when has any traditional Mario story line been that compelling? Super Paper Mario, did you say?

It’s definitely the most fun I’ve had exploring a Mario Universe ever (thanks in no small part to the smart environment puzzles that fit well with each world’s context), and I think Miyamoto is right when he says that it’s something that anyone can pick up and enjoy without alienating hardcore gamers.

Either way, it doesn’t make the top of my BEST GAME EVER list, but I’m glad that it made the number 7 spot on your list for last year

Anyone played Williams Pinball Hall of Fame for the Wii? Because that shit is CRUCIAL. It’s a $20 game that should be under every Christmas tree this year (and it’s definitely on my favorites for THIS year).
on 18 Dec 2008 at 3:12 pm 8.bburbank said …

I think my bigger problem these days is with Nintendo and the concept of using the Wii to either:

A) Hit the thing with the thing
B) Throw the thing at the thing
C) Point or Look at the thing

It’s part of why I thought Zelda: Twilight Princess was better on the gamecube. So, please take all of my apparent hatred towards Mario Galaxy and apply it to Wii gaming. Honestly, had it been a gamecube game, I would have liked it more (this was proven by playing Super Mario Sunshine after playing Mario Galaxy).

Anyway!

I have not played the pinball game for the wii, but that does sound pretty banging. I will try and track down a flea market copy for $10!

I will now list the games that I have yet to play from this year that I think have a chance at making this list once I spend some time with them:

* Prince of Persia (PS3/X360)
* Disgaea 3 (PS3)
* Resistance 2 (PS3)
* Crystal Chronicles: Final Fantasy: My Life As The King (or whatever it was called) (Wii)
* World of Goo (Wii/PC)
* Warioland Shake It (Wii)
* Capcom vs. Tatsunoko (Wii)
* Persona 4 (PS2)
* Thunderforce VI (PS2)

And there are more in my suggestions pile that I’m just not sure have a chance of beating out one of those 10 games up there. Pretty soon here I’ll be posting the list of games that just plain wouldn’t make it onto my 2008 ROM mixtape 10 years from now. I guess I should also post a list of games that I downright hated.
on 28 Dec 2008 at 11:35 am 9.Juls said …

Check this too:
http://www.offworld.com/2008-offworld-20-04.html

The Last guy looks awesome
on 28 Dec 2008 at 2:22 pm 10.bburbank said …

So I think I like the Last Guy. I don’t know, I haven’t really had fun with it, I guess. But it does LOOK awesome. And it certainly SEEMS awesome.

I’m sad that Pixeljunk Eden was on their list, but not Pixeljunk Monsters (I think Monsters, a tower defense game, is much more enjoyable, although I think Eden is quite beautiful).

And World of Goo is kind of meh. I think it is technically impressive, and has some fun things going on, but it feels too Jenga for me to really say I’m having a blast.

But Rolando is really kind of great! Other than the fact that it completely bites Loco Roco’s style I’d say it’s the best iPhone game bar-none. It’s certainly the most Not A Phone Game that I’ve played for the thing.

However your Offworld link has reminded me that I HAVE to play Soul Bubbles for the DS. It is a moral imperative.