Ho-leeeeee shit, I added to this list. I've actually moved house now, so I might get this finished one of these days. Not that I've written everything yet, but hey...
Apologies for the fact that any sort of update schedule has been unceremoniously chucked out the window. I'm in the midst of attempting to move house, and having to look after my infant niece quite often in the mornings (I work afternoon/evenings). So...yeah.
39. Super
Smash Bros. Brawl
Developers: Sora, Game Arts, a few other
people they grabbed off the street
Most of the
games on this list are things of elegance.They demonstrate superior design, rabid originality, refinement and
class.Red Faction: Guerrilla is not one of these games.Red
Faction: Guerrilla wants shit to blow the fuck up.
Guerrilla
is the third in the Red Faction
series.The first two were first-person
shooters on the PlayStation 2, PC and Xbox.I haven’t played them.I’m not
convinced that anyone’s played them.The
cornerstone (pun kind of intended) to the Red
Faction series is destruction.The
first two games were on systems that couldn’t handle what the developers
wanted.But come the Xbox 360 and
PlayStation 3, the tech was there for stuff to go boom.
Guerrilla
breaks from its predecessors by swapping into a third-person, open-world
format.(One of the admirable things
about the series is Volition’s willingness to completely change the game style
– the fourth game, Armageddon,
switched things up again to a linear shooter a la Gears of War and company.And there was also a spinoff between games 3 and 4 that was entirely
vehicle-based, although apparently that was a bit pants.)The plot, such as it is, sees you as builder
Alec Mason (DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY DID THERE DO YOU) drawn into an attempt to
free Mars from the military chokehold of Earth forces and give the planet a
fresh start.You do this by breaking
things.
Guerrilla
is entirely a showcase for GeoMod 2.0 – an engine that allows unrivalled levels
of physics-based destruction.Every
building in the game can be destroyed, and it’s all carried out the way you
would in real life.Walls shatter before
steel beams buckle.You can take out a
building in one go with a well-aimed sledgehammer swipe at a load-bearing
area.Use an explosive and bits of
wreckage fly through the air and smash through other buildings.No piece of cover is entirely safe, as it too
could be destroyed.
It’s astonishing.Allegedly, Volition had to hire some real
proper architects as the engine was so true-to-life that some of the more
outlandish sci-fi structures they’d come up with wouldn’t take their own weight
and would collapse as soon as they were coded into the game.And it makes the primary act of the game –
its core, its USP, its very raison d’être
– exactly as enjoyable the five hundredth time as it is the first.Smashing stuff up simply never gets old.And the toolset you get for smashing up said
stuff is highly pleasing.Mason’s never
without his trusty sledgehammer, and the limpet mines you get right from the
start – chuck ‘em on to something, detonate ‘em when you feel like it – are so
pleasing they’re unlikely to ever get left out of your inventory.(Extra sadist points – stick a mine to an
enemy soldier and cackle as they run around in a panic.)Going up through typical weapons through to
oddities like the electricity-shooting arc welder, sawblade-spitting grinder or
the enforcer, with its homing bullets, is great fun.
And great fun is basically what this game is
about.It’s not deep and meaningful, and
it’s not trying to be deep and meaningful.It just wants to entertain you.When it gets it right, it’s like playing a cheerfully dumb action movie
from the ‘80s or ‘90s – probably starring Stallone or Schwarzenegger – and is
exactly as enjoyable as you’d hope.(You
even get a jetpack near the end.And
occasionally you get to run around in a big mech suit smashing things just by
waving its arms about.)Admittedly, it
doesn’t always get it right: some missions are annoying, the last one in
particular, and quite a lot of the sidequests are a bit rubbish.But the good bits are so good that it doesn’t
really matter.Plus, it’s an
American-made game from 2009 where you play as a heroic terrorist with distinct
Communist undertones.How likely is
that?
MAGIC
MOMENT: The mission that ends the second chapter, where you have to evacuate a
town before the troops arrive, is breathlessly exciting.
Right, here we go. I wanted to get a decent backlog before I actually started posting these.
DA RULES
All publisher info, release dates etcetera refers to the European version of the game. 'Cos I live in Europe and buy European games.
For "format", I list the version I actually own first then the others in alphabetical order. I haven't bothered to list every single machine you can get each game on 'cos with some games we'd be here all day - I've just noted the ones that the game was initially released on. So there's no "Xbox 360" for Sonic 1 or whatever.
This is 100% personal preference, regardless of the game's objective quality, to such extent as objective quality exists. So there.
The longlist is actually a couple of months old now so if I wrote one today it might be slightly different but whatever.
it begins
50.
Psychonauts
Developer:
Double Fine
Publisher: THQ
Year: 2005
Format:
PlayStation 2, Xbox, PC
No matter
how generic and unadventurous gaming gets, there’ll always be a Tim Schafer or
two.In 2005, we were just coming out of
the stealth game boom and warming up for the rhythm-action takeover.Schafer’s Double Fine, meanwhile, were
unleashing their first game – a free-roaming platformer with adventure
elements.Set at a summer camp designed
to train psychic children.Psychonauts tells the unlikely tale of
Raz, a young acrobat with considerable mind-manipulation skills.Running away from the circus and attending
Whispering Rock Summer Camp to hone his talents and achieve his dream of
becoming a psychonaut – a secret agent who can delve into others’ minds – he
instead stumbles across a fiendish plot to steal his campmates’ brains.As you do.
The game lets you wander across Whispering
Rock at will, taking the Zelda-style
method of letting you enter one level at a time and locking off areas until you
get the requisite ability to open ‘em up.Once you actually go into a level, it’s a more straightforward 3D
platform affair.But that’s where the
“straightforward” bit ends, because the levels are, as you’d expect from the
plot synopsis, set inside people’s minds.And good heavens do Double Fine take this idea and run with it as far as
it’ll go.Levels wrap around themselves,
so you’re running on the floor, and suddenly the floor’s the wall, and then
it’s the ceiling.You sort out literal
“emotional baggage” – crying pieces of luggage – by finding its lost address
labels.The people whose brains you’re
running through might appear as themselves, or as a giant bull laden with
symbolism.There’s a secret room in one
brain-level that completely re-evaluates one of Raz’s teachers – I won’t say
more, but it adds a huge amount of depth to the character and is arguably the
game’s most startling, affecting and thought-provoking moment.And you could quite easily go through the
whole thing not knowing it’s there!
It’s the wealth of detail that makes Psychonauts, really.The way that late in the game you get the
ability to see through other characters’ eyes, so you can see how they view the
world.The pile of extra bits and pieces
to find.How Double Fine manage to come
up with legitimate justifications for a couple of platforming’s most enduring
bits of silliness – Raz can double-jump by telekinesis, and can’t enter water
because his family are labouring under a curse that says they will all die by
drowning, meaning that he becomes paralyzed with fear and imagines a hand
coming up out of the water to grab him if you get too close.
The only major fault of the game is
difficulty spikes – most people agree that the final level, the Meat Circus, is
too hard.Personally I didn’t have any
major problems with it.Instead, I got
stuck on a boss fight barely halfway through the game – if I hadn’t found a
toggleable invincibility cheat, I would’ve given up altogether.Important note for game designers there –
always provide an out.If it hadn’t been
for that cheat, I wouldn’t have got through the game, and it wouldn’t have
taken its rightful place on this list.
MAGIC
MOMENT: the utter genius of the level The Milkman Conspiracy.Set in the mind of a near-catatonic
conspiracy theorist, it presents a twisted view of suburbia where the streets
twirl into loops and the classic mysterious men in hats and long coats are
everywhere – except they’re trying to disguise themselves as members of the
community.And they’re absolutely
terrible at it.It’s completely
hilarious.
Yeah, anyway. At some point in the near future, this blog will host my Top 50 Games Ever. Because it's something to do. And it'll provide some much-needed practice for my writing skills, which have got somewhat rusty due to the fact I haven't had any professional writing work for the best part of a year.
(Hi, Mr/Ms Writing Job Person! You should totally hire me! I can almost guarantee wacky hijinks! Or at the very least punctually-filed copy!)
I've just dived into the mysterious new world of Kickstarter to help fund Carmageddon: Reincarnation. I'm a little leery of whether Kickstarter's the bold new future that some people have been claiming, but Carmageddon II remains one of my all-time favourite things of any sort and I couldn't resist the chance of a new one.
I hope they put in that forklift that was converted into a mobile guillotine. I liked that.
I was just playing the GoldenEye Reloaded demo on los Xbox - rather enjoyed it, I'd heard it was rubbish. (Although my enjoyment might be partly because I only played the N64 original for about two minutes fourteen years ago, so I didn't really have anything to compare it to.)
But something that amused me was that I got genuinely confused for a minute by the fact that Bondface could pick up more than two gunsat once. Like, whoah. That odd little mechanic introduced by Halo has got so pervasive that it didn't occur to me that a recent major FPS release might not use it. I don't even like the mechanic! And yet I was startled by its omission.
It reminded me of the nice article in the Observer yesterday by Lucy Prebble - she pointed out that when playing L.A. Noire she was surprised by the fact that the player character, a cop in '40s Los Angeles, isn't corrupt and the game doesn't want you to play him in a corrupt way. It's a sign of how some tropes and concepts get so deeply ingrained for one reason or another that it's quite shocking when they're deliberately not used.
On a not-really-related note, I gave the Asura's Wrath demo a whirl too. Bit of a nutty game, eh? I'd like to have the ability to spontaneously grow four extra arms when I get really angry, mind.
