Richard's Online Journal

Richard’s Games of 2009

Filed in: adventure, games, magesarebest, noawardceremony, rpg

Yes, with the year pretty much over, and because the alternative is something I’ve been putting off all weekend, it’s time for a fun look back at my favourite games of the year. It’s exciting, because I’m on the internet and I’m typing words.

Dragon Age (PC)

“What, is there something stuck in my teeth?”

Thirty-seven hours. That’s longer than I’ve spent with a game in what feels like forever, and here’s the thing: I barely noticed it. Some individual bits are a bit tiresome, and I wish that Bioware had embraced the chance to create a whole new world instead of just their own version of the Forgotten Realms and every other RPG ever, but on the smaller scale, this has some of the best plotting and writing around.

Three things in particular stand out. First, its mages are phenomenal. Plate-armour wearing dealers of so much death (with the right Specialisation), they make the poxy meat-shields look like the worthless non-mages they so definitely are. Second, it features one of the best romances in gaming history — the romance between a female PC and team comic relief Alistair bouncing effortlessly from genuinely moving to genuinely heartbreaking in ways that make perfect narrative sense, even if there’s no way you could have predicted them. I don’t want to say too much because I don’t want to spoil it, but suffice to say that it’s not over when the (incredibly bad) sex scene plays. I actually felt upset when (in one possible ending) he suddenly broke up with me.

With Vasha! My mage! I meant with my mage!

Third, there’s the sheer amount of content in there. I don’t mean in terms of subquests and things to do, although that’s impressive. I mean the way that Bioware has built it so that every player feels like they’re getting the full experience, only realising when they talk to other players just how much damn stuff they’ve missed. The base story may be the same no matter who plays it, but the companions, the stories you unlock, even the way that individual characters get invisibly hardened by certain dialogue options that affect their responses later on, all makes for a wonderfully crafted experience.

Most impressively at all, the game is incredibly modest about that. Bump into an apparently evil mage as one character and he won’t say “Hi, I’m the guy you’d have met if you’d played the Mage origin story”, he’s just another guy. Visit him as a mage however, and you have the added personal knowledge that he’s not evil so much as an idiot, completely altering your perception. Dragon Age is easily, easily Bioware’s best RPG yet, and a truly fantastic experience. I can’t wait for Mass Effect 2.

The Highlight: Finally, mages getting their due. Even cooler than Warcraft’s.

Chrono Trigger (DS)

And this is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with… a giant porcupine from outer space. Damn, I miss Sephiroth right now.

What? It came out in 2009, didn’t it? If you live in the UK, anyway. We never had it on the SNES, and while it’s been available emulated for years, emulated console games just don’t have the same feel. I’d played the opening bits of it many times, but never gotten past the first trip to the future. Now, I’ve finally been able to check it off the old hit-list, and that feels good. It’s easily the best traditional JRPG ever made, with so many beautiful little moments and touches. I love the lack of grinding, the character interplay, and scenes like the courtroom and What Happens To Crono.

Really, I only have a couple of problems with it — the way the pace grinds to a halt when Zeal shows up, and the fact that Lavos is the least scary looking Big Bad in the history of really crappy end-bosses. Also, I’d quite have liked to have played it on my SNES. Where it was meant to be played. 15 years ago. Goddamnit.

The Highlight: No longer having to um and aah every time it’s mentioned.

Saints Row 2 (PC)

Hey, I’m the caption round here, pal! Get lost!

I don’t like GTA IV at all. I hate tiresome gangster shit. Even so, Saints Row 2 blew me away. A GTA style game that doesn’t get bogged down in telling a hideously paced story, doesn’t pretend you’re there for anything other than blowing shit up, and doesn’t just cross the line as dance over it naked while defecating on a dead nun. It’s spectacularly cruel, spectacularly horrible, yet brilliantly, amazingly fun. I avoided it for ages thinking it was just a GTA rip-off, and while yes, yes it is, I’d play it over Rockstar’s squillion-dollar sequel I never actually finished any day.

There are so many great moments, from the mini-games to the character customisation that lets you spend the whole game crushing the city while dressed as a hot-dog if you want to, but the story I always tell is of one of the Maero missions. This is the one where on a whim, the psychotic main character steals a boat, races over to the local nuclear plant, takes on a whole army while hunting through it with a geiger counter bought from a local store, steals nuclear waste, fights off an army while a friend brings over a helicopter, gets shot down, steals a car and races the horizon… all to put the green goo in a rival’s tattoo ink supply, burning half his face off as a prank. While dressed as a hot-dog, of course. Otherwise it might be silly.

There is of course no chance of this happening, but you know what would be fantastic? Let Rockstar make the city. Let Volition make the game. If nothing else, it’ll give at least one of them some time to learn how to port the damn things onto PC. (They’re both in pretty decent shape now, but it took most of the year. Grr…)

The Highlight: Fuzz, the minigame about being the world’s worst cop.

The Nameless Mod (PC)

In other news, Black Mesa Source has a new release date. Says here ‘after the heat death of the universe’. Cool.

Like all sane people, I love Deus Ex. Unlike some insane people, I didn’t spent the time since it came out crafting an incredibly overambitious total conversion of the damn thing, recasting its semi real-world conspiracies into a Tron style dystopia filled with forum-folk, spork throwing gamer cults and about seventeen books worth of new dialogue. But I’m glad they did, because not only is The Nameless Mod a truly fantastic mod, it’s one of only two games ever to really live up to Deus Ex’s legacy.

(The other one is Vampire: Bloodlines. We do not speak of Invisible War.)

As I said when I last talked about it, don’t let the premise put you off. The first level is very geeky and in-jokey (and a bit too big for its own good), but the conversion from forum into cyberpunk quickly fades into the backgrounds. There are two complete storylines to play through, each about as long as the original Deus Ex, and the design, writing and characterisation is easily on the same level. Not only is The Nameless Mod an incredible labour of love, it’s an incredible game in its own right — packed to the gills, genuinely funny, and with design that more than rivals the original game. Cheat your way past an obstacle and you’ll find an NPC on the other side asking how you did it. Break the storyline by doing something like just pulling a gun and murdering the game’s Big Bad in his office, and the fourth wall itself shows up to have a word about narrative structure and your role in the action. Then it kicks your arse.

There’s simply no way a project this chaotic, this freeform, should ever have come together into something so coherent, and I have no idea how the hell it happened. I’ve decided not to worry about it, and just enjoy the team’s accomplishment.

Download it here. Needs Deus Ex, of course.

The Highlight: Three words: Scara B. King

Batman: Arkham Asylum (PC)

It’s official. Getting shot in the face is funnier than The Now Show.

A phenomenal game. An amazing license. One of the few stealth games that not only held my interest, but made me go back for a second go. It controls like a dream. The characters are superb. It absolutely nails the Batman look and feel, from the predatorial take on stealth to the look and feel of pretty much any version you’re likely to have seen. Only the lame boss fights and the tedious addition of super-soldiers really got in the way. This is how much I liked it: I can even forgive Harley Quinn’s costume.

Actually, that’s a blatant lie. Let’s wash it away with the song:

Oh, Harley. Who could ever stay mad at you? Except Batman, of course.

The Highlight: The scavenger hunts. Not just a time-killer, a way to make you pay attention to the phenomenal world design.

Tales Of Monkey Island (PC)

Genuinely episodic gaming, solid design… I was worried about this one, but Telltale’s done the license proud so far.

I’ve been reviewing these every month over in the land of print, but not really said anything about them over here. I’ll fix that when they’re all out, because there’s a lot to talk about, but for the moment, suffice to say that a new one landing in my inbox has been one of the highlights of the month, and not just because I have a total game-crush on Morgan Le Flay. I’ve liked most of Telltale’s games, with the notable exception of the so-badly-missed-the-point Wallace and Gromit episodics, but this is easily their best series yet. More later this month when it concludes.

That said, I do wish Monkey Island wasn’t now officially a cartoon franchise. I really miss the more realistic look of the second game and the effect of contrast on the wackier comedy bits, even if replaying the series in preparation made me realise I’ve been way too tough on Curse of Monkey Island in the past. Yes, the last chapter is rubbish, but the rest is stunningly beautiful, well designed, and much better than I remembered. Maybe next, I’ll feel sorry for being so nasty to Max Payne 2 all this time.

(fires up Max Payne 2 on Steam)

Nope!

The Highlight:

GUYBRUSH: “You fight like girls!”

MORGAN: “Yeah, and we kill like ‘em too!”

Spelunky (PC)

A rare case of Not Dying Horribly. It won’t last.

Okay, yes. Technically 2008, but it only sank its claws into my brain over Summer, so there. If you’ve played Spelunky, you probably know why. If you haven’t, it’s tough to explain. Instead, I torture everyone who’s stuck on the bloody ice-world with this speed-run of some git finishing the whole damn thing in four minutes.

If you know anyone who’s done it faster, please keep it to yourself — I’m already depressed enough just thinking about my death-count. Damn, I hate Spelunky.

The Highlight: Finally getting to the ice world. It means so little, now.

Enjoyed That? Try One Of These