Top 10 Games of 2010

I have no patience with "objective" top 10 lists, and not much more with claiming that the order of said lists is unchanging. With that said, here are ten of my favorite games in something approximating the order in which I preferred them.

10. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Portable

Even though it's a port of a 3 year old game, P3P added enough new content--and has held up so well--that I had no qualms about sinking 80 or so hours into it.

9. Heavy Rain

Despite loads of plot holes and bad acting, I can't deny that in the 6 or so hours I spent blowing through Heavy Rain, I was completely taken in by it.

8. Costume Quest

While it's incredibly easy for anyone who's ever played an RPG, Double Fine's Halloween-themed adventure is hilarious and charming, like some forgotten animated holiday special.

7. Dead Rising 2

I really disliked the first Dead Rising and couldn't be more burnt out on zombies, so the fact that I had so much fun with Dead Rising 2 says all that needs to be said.

6. Rock Band 3

We've all played as much Rock Band as we want to, but 3 is undeniably the pinnacle of the series, and probably of rhythm games as a whole.

5. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX

It's 2010, and Namco has made sure that we're still playing Pac-Man. Like Jeff Minter's brilliantly over-stimulating shooters, Pac-Man CE DX can't throw enough light and sound at the player, and is all the better for it. It's not as strategic or challenging as its predecessor, but Pac-Man CE DX was still my favorite pure gaming experience of the year.

4. Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth

The Ace Attorney series needed something new after four more or less identical installments. While Investigations actually doesn't switch up the formula that much, it does what Ace Attorney does, and does it incredibly well. Miles Edgeworth makes a great main character, and a welcome change of pace from hapless heroes like Phoenix Wright and Apollo Justice. Investigations tells a well-crafted and entertaining story throughout its various cases, and also introduces great new character Kay Faraday, who could easily be spun off into her own series.

3. Trauma Team

No one is more surprised than me that the newest installment in the Trauma Center series is in my top 3 games of 2010. But few games this year grabbed hold of me the way Trauma Team did. From its multi-faceted gameplay (including a forensics-based adventure game that could probably have stood on its own as a DS release) to its fun anime-style take on American medical dramas, it's hard to find things to complain about in Trauma Team. Even Shoji Meguro's porno-ready soundtrack, while jarring at first, grew on me by the end.

2. Limbo

I talk a lot of yang about indie games, but it's mostly because there's no reason for more of them not to be as great as Limbo. Unlike other indie developers who are content to endlessly recycle ideas pioneered by Capcom in the mid-'80s, Limbo pushes the envelope of what video games can say and do. While the puzzle platformer gameplay is hardly innovative, thanks to its wordless storytelling, gorgeous black and white art style, and willingness to inflict grisly deaths on its cast of nameless children, Limbo still feels like it's breaking new ground. All indie developers should be forced to sit down and play Limbo again any time they think about making another faux 8-bit platformer or basing their game on the internet meme of the week.

1. Deadly Premonition

Deadly Premonition looks, plays and sounds like Dreamcast-era abandonware. Its story plays out as if it were a Twin Peaks game that lost its license at the last minute, and was reshuffled just enough to still be released. In short, it would be easy to take a cursory glance at the game and think it could only be enjoyed ironically. But my love of Deadly Premonition is completely sincere. Main character Special Agent Francis York Morgan is hands down the most likable and engaging character I encountered in any game this year. His running monologues, ostensibly conversations with an imaginary friend named Zach, give him a depth that no other video game character has ever achieved. Throughout the game, we learn about York's tastes in movies, music and women, we see him fall in love and deal with the family issues that lead to him becoming a special agent. Granted, most of this plays out as comedy rather than drama, but it represents a dedication to character development rarely seen in video games. The romantic subplot between York and small-town cop Emily Wyatt is awkward, rocky, and surprisingly believable. And when the game ramps up the horror and weirdness, it's effective in spite of the stilted character animations and often questionable voice acting.

It's a shame that Deadly Premonition will be remembered by most gamers as a wacky, so-bad-it's-good curiosity. Director SWERY did a fantastic job with elements of the game, and his taste for distinctly Japanese weirdness shouldn't overshadow his gift for designing characters with actual depth.

Kusoge Sunday - Dark Summit

My first two Kusoge Sunday posts featured games that were indisputably kusoge. I knew that, sooner or later, I would have to branch out from that, though, and take on games that are less universally reviled. While I’ve been known to really dislike some critical darlings like Super Mario Galaxy and Uncharted 2, I can at least get some sense of why others would have raved about them. Some games, though, are so bad that even positive critical consensus can’t save them from being labeled kusoge.

Enter Dark Summit, a 2001 snowboarding/adventure game developed by Radical Entertainment, who are responsible for a lot of relatively respectable games, as well as Mario Is Missing! Dark Summit could easily have been nothing more than a quick cash-in on the success of SSX, but to their credit, the people at Radical tried to strike out in a new direction, giving their snowboarding game a story and basing its primary missions around advancing the plot. However, every aspect of the game’s production works against its goals, from ill-advised character designs to boring level layouts.

The presence of a story is the most obvious way in which Dark Summit departs from the SSX formula. However, this is about as perfunctory as game stories get. Heroine Naya decides to trespass on a ski slope that doesn’t allow snowboarders, and gets involved in some vague black helicopter conspiracy nonsense. A shady group wants her to stop the shady plans of...some other shady group. Honestly, I’ve never been clear on exactly what’s supposed to be happening, as the game’s audio presentation is incredibly muddy, and the dialogue is pretty tough to decipher through the constant wall of techno music.

Whatever the story is actually about, it seems clear that Dark Summit wants us to buy into Naya and the other snowboarders who help her unravel the mystery as hip young rebels. That’s impossible, because there’s nothing hip about these characters. The ones who don’t look like extras from a Mountain Dew commercial circa 1998 look like they took up snowboarding as part of a midlife crisis. This is especially true of Naya, who looks like a cougar dressed up for a rave circa 1996.


Even worse than the character designs are the level designs. The supposedly exclusive ski resort at which the game takes place is littered with pools of acid, rusting cars, electric fences and even naval mines. Naya’s drive to ride on such a course might be explained away by her being totally extreme, but why would rich people pay to ski here? We already accept more bad writing in games than we should, but no amount of shouting “It’s just a game!” can excuse this sloppiness. Adding injury to insult is the game’s color palette of sickly browns, greens and yellows, which make you yearn for the crisp blue skies and sparkling white slopes of the SSX games.

Capping off the Dark Summit experience are cumbersome controls that feel designed to keep the player at arm’s length from the action. Any trick more complicated than a simple grab or spin requires a string of button inputs that have no connection to what’s actually happening on screen. Successfully entering the inputs triggers a canned animation that can’t be combined with flips or spins. The significant lag in the controls combined with the rare opportunities for big air mean that you’ll spend a lot of time watching Naya transition from the canned trick animations to the canned falling animation. Speaking of which, the developers couldn’t even be bothered to make unique falling animations for different situations. Dropping off a cliff triggers the same loop of Naya flailing around as running into a wall.

It’s hard to tell how seriously Dark Summit takes itself. It usually feels like the game really wanted to be cool and exciting, but most of the design choices work against that. Like another Radical Entertainment game, Prototype, it feels as though the team recorded a brainstorming session, then transcribed it to be used as a design document. Just as Prototype was constantly introducing new powers that rendered old ones moot (without taking the old ones out of your arsenal), Dark Summit throws out design choices that are at odds with other design choices, until the game is just a mess of contradictions.

Why Dark Summit received largely positive reviews at the time of its release is beyond me. It shouldn’t have, as even by the standards of its time, it was a bad game. But that’s just my opinion, just as the positive reviews were just the opinions of a few critics. The lesson, if there is one, is that game reviews are neither consumer advocacy nor an attempt to uncover the Truth about a game’s quality. They are, and should be, entirely subjective. And Dark Summit’s should have been far more brutal than they were.

Yar's' Revenge(s)

Yar's Revenge is a re-imagining, and re-punctuating, of the great 2600 shooter Yars' Revenge. The latter is one of the few 2600 games that can still hold your attention for more than a few minutes, so I really hope the reboot will be good.

But how this

became this

cries out for explanation.

I don't envy any designer the task of having to update a game as old as Yars' Revenge. Most of the story for 2600 games was told through box art and instruction manual text, which themselves often had very little to do with what players saw onscreen. The graphical and mechanical choices that programmers made were determined by the strict limitations of the hardware. Yet in the best cases, of which Yars' Revenge was one, the results were iconic.

Still, what was iconic on the 2600 usually doesn't make much sense in the context of modern game design. Look at the recent remake of another 2600 game, Haunted House. Having the character turn into a disembodied set of eyeballs every time he walks into the dark is an allusion to the eyeballs that served as the player's avatar in the original Haunted House, but in the modern context, where we want an explanation for most of a character's body disappearing, it's more distracting than endearing.

Now personally, I think a giant mechanical fly is a more interesting main character at this point than yet another anime girl in powered armor. But I'm not going to begrudge the people at Killspace Entertainment their creative license. What mattered most about Yars' Revenge was the gameplay; better to focus on getting than right than worrying about how to render the Qotile in 3D. And in the context of a Panzer Dragoon-style rail shooter (which Killspace namedropped as an inspiration), the basic mechanics of Yars' Revenge could actually work pretty well.

So well, in fact, that people may even forget that they're not playing as a badass space fly.

Everyone Is Clones

The people behind the Indie Games Winter Uprising are promising to provide an alternative to the “massage apps, clones and garbage” that (apparently) make up the bulk of the Xbox Indie Games Marketplace. Let’s set aside for a moment the sour grapes underlying the whole premise (which again undermines the notion, beloved of game journalists, that indie devs are a bunch of cool guys who are above the usual games industry nonsense). What’s so bad about being a clone?

Try to think of a completely new style of game. Go on, really try. Don’t just mix genres, or come up with a scenario that nobody has used within an existing genre. No, try to think of something that nobody has ever done.

Can’t do it? Don’t feel bad, most people can’t. Moreover, most people don’t really want to, including the people who developed the Winter Uprising’s line-up of shooters, RPGs and adventure games. They were happy to work within existing genres, but they also seem happy to take cheap-shots at others for doing the same.

There’s nothing wrong with being a “clone.” For years, all first person shooters were called “Doom clones,” even by people who liked them. Dungeon-crawls like Shiren the Wanderer and Zettai Hero Project are called “Roguelikes” because they’re like Rogue, the progenitor of that particular type of RPG. If you wanted, you could call the seemingly endless parade of modern dual-stick shooters “Robotron 2084 clones.”

None of this is insulting. People like Shigeru Miyamoto, David Crane, John Romero and John Carmack, Roberta Williams, and so on weren’t necessarily the most creative game designers of their time—they were just in the right place at the right time to get their ideas out there first. That others explored the same concepts after them may make them “clones” in a strict sense, but it doesn’t necessarily make them uncreative.

People who think that being unoriginal is necessarily bad are deluding themselves in a couple of ways. First, they think it’s possible to do something that nobody has ever thought of before. Miyamoto’s game designs are original as far as games go, but they borrow ideas from popular fiction like King Kong and Alice in Wonderland. Second, they’re ignoring the long artistic tradition of imposing limits in order to spur creativity. Are poetic forms like the sonnet less creative than free verse? If you’ve ever attended a bad poetry slam, you know the answer.

As for massage apps, Justin Le Clair’s original entry into the genre, Rumble Massage, was just that—original. It was followed by a number of clones, and while I haven’t played any of them, I’m willing to accept that most of them are garbage. But it’s not necessarily true that all of them are.

So what is the uprising really against, since it clearly isn’t really against clones. If it’s against low quality, then more power to those behind it, but they’re being elitists by pretending that it’s impossible for certain products (e.g. massage apps) to be high quality. And if what they really want is for XBIG to contain nothing but traditional gaming experiences (like RPGs and shooters), then they’re actually against originality, since those traditional games are, by definition, derivative.

Anyone who is enthusiastic enough to make a game is probably enthusiastic about games in general, and therefore can’t help but be inspired by the work of others. In other words, everyone is ripping off something, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with slamming your peers for a lack of originality while promoting your own entries into well-worn genres as somehow better.

Kusoge Sunday: Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu

Color Dreams, the developers of numerous unlicensed NES anti-delights, is not normally thought of as a publisher. But publish they did, in between coding classic kusoge like Menace Beach and Baby Boomer. One might have expected them to put their limited resources behind a game that represented a step up from their usual garbage. Such expectations would be misplaced, as Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu makes abundantly clear.

Developed by Sachen, a Taiwanese developer whose unlicensed Famicom games were similar in reputation to Color Dreams' NES games, Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is an unqualified disaster. It should be enough to say that the game seems to have taken its primary inspiration from The Legend of Kage. Its main character (who I suppose is Master Chu) looks, jumps and fights like Kage, and the title screen even has him standing on a high tree branch.

The similarities are all superficial, though. While The Legend of Kage is no masterpiece, it is playable. As nearly as I can tell, there is no way to progress past the third stage in Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu. The object of each stage is to collect eight hidden yin-yang symbols, which opens a door to a boss room. Levels are small and scroll left and right, and there seems to be no way to uncover all the yin-yangs in one trip across the screen. Rather, there are a limited number of hiding places which turn up a different item each time you shoot them, so opening a boss door requires running back and forth through the level a few times, shooting the same spots over and over until all the necessary items show up.

If you think that sounds awful, you're right. But it gets worse. Both characters (Hu is playable in the two player mode, but controls exactly like Chu) are woefully underpowered; it takes three or four shots to put even the weakest enemies down, and bosses feel almost invulnerable. Pressing B causes Chu to swing a fan, which on a few random occasions blocked projectile attacks, but either timing blocks is completely unintuitive, or the mechanic is simply broken, because attempting to block the projectiles that stream out of bosses usually just led to dying.

It's hard to say whether Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is an improvement over Color Dreams' own attempts at game development. On one hand, it looks worlds better. Even though the level designs are depressingly bad, the characters at least don't look like google-eyed monstrosities. But as floaty and loose as the average Color Dreams game is, at least it feels like you could, with enough practice, acclimate to the controls and win the game. Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu, on the other hand, feels like it was released before they coded the bit where your attacks actually damage enemies. In short, it looks marginally better, but is essentially unplayable.

Call it a wash. Just don't let Color Dreams' rare moment of inspiration in renaming this game trick you into actually playing it.

Kusoge Sunday - Tag Team Wrestling

Tag Team Wrestling began life in Japanese arcades under the title The Big Pro Wrestling! It was ported to the Famicom as Tag Team Pro Wrestling, and finally brought to the NES by Data East as Tag Team Wrestling in 1986. Released months before Nintendo’s landmark Pro Wrestling, the game innovated in two major ways. First, it featured tag team matches, something rarely seen in wrestling video games. Second, its control scheme was unlike any wrestling game before or since.

Innovation, however, isn’t necessarily a good thing. While it did beat better games to the punch in featuring tag team matches, Tag Team Wrestling’s gameplay is hilariously bad. In most wrestling games, moves are executed from a grapple, while running, or from the top rope. On machines with only two or three buttons, this limits the number of moves, but it works. Tag Team Wrestling tried to offer a larger moveset, but did so in a way that makes it feel nothing like a wrestling match.

Here’s how it works. You start by trying to land a strike on your opponent. If you’re successful, you're presented with a menu of moves you can execute, and three seconds to scroll through it. This mechanic is, to put it plainly, a disaster. Many move names have been reduced to baffling English abbreviations, and some haven't even been translated. It’s barely possible to scroll to the end of the list in three seconds, let alone make sense of choices like “B BRIK” and “TECCHU”.

With experience, you can get the hang of navigating the move menu, but you can’t do anything to mitigate the game’s other mechanic. Remember how Hulk Hogan used to delight audiences by appearing to become invulnerable while making a spectacular comeback? Well, that happens in Tag Team Wrestling, as well, only it’s the heel team who do it. Supposedly, this is a consequence of avoiding contact with your opponent for too long, but it never works that way. More often than not, he’ll just go invincible any time you start winning, ensuring that only luck can carry you to victory.

Maybe the awfulness of the gameplay could be rationalized if Tag Team Wrestling excelled elsewhere, but it doesn’t. Character animation is extremely limited. No move consists of more than two frames of animation. Flying moves and falls consist of the sprites being rotated to give the illusion of jumping or laying down. The only aspect of the game that is even passable is the audio. The music which plays during matches is nice and urgent, if repetitive, and there’s even (bad) digitized voice for the wrestlers’ grunts and the referee’s three count. It hardly salvages the game, but it’s something.

Despite all this, I would kind of recommend giving Tag Team Wrestling a shot. Sure, the game is a barely playable mess, but it does have one endearing quality. Your current ranking is always displayed on screen, and watching it move one step closer to the top rank in your current tier with each victory can be addicting. It’s like an MMO in that sense, always dangling another carrot in front of you. Sometimes that's all it takes to hook you, even if the the only reward the game has to offer is yet another frustrating battle with The Strong Bads.

It's Not Wrong To Pay $3

This weekend, indie developer Tale of Tales is having a pay-what-you-want sale on a bundle of three of its spookier games: The Path, The Graveyard, and Fatale. The minimum payment is $3, but those who pay at least $50 will receive an undisclosed bonus. After the success of the Humble Indie Bundle back in May, we shouldn’t be surprised to see another developer take a chance on the pay-what-you-want model. We also shouldn’t be surprised that giving Tale of Tales money is being treated by some as a moral imperative.

“There is some motivation to pay more than the minimum (beyond it being pretty crass to lowball an indie like that)...” says Joystiq’s JC Fletcher, in his post on the sale. Apparently we have different definitions of “lowball.” If someone says “I’ll take $3” and you give them $3, you’re not lowballing them, even if they make pained faces as you hand over the money.

But is it crass to pay the least that someone asks? Not in this case. These pay-what-you-want sales are a calculated risk. If the number of people who were curious about a game but not curious enough to pay full price for it is high enough, then the developer makes money through volume. If not, well, no business venture is a sure thing. Hopefully Tale of Tales arrived at the $3 minimum after careful deliberation. If not, so much the worse for them.

Still, even if it really is crass to pay the minimum asking price, what does the fact that Tale of Tales is an indie developer have to do with it? They’re people trying to make a living by making games, just like, for example, the people at Pandemic, Realtime Worlds, and Krome. Despite the support of major publishers, the above studios had to close down when people didn't want to buy the games they made at the price for which they were sold.

Fletcher’s reasoning (which, to be fair, is in no way unique to him), is really just the flipside of that employed by pirates who say that it’s all right to steal games released by major publishers. They have the money, so they can absorb the loss. Indie developers, on the other hand, are seen as perpetually scraping by, and therefore entitled to more support than those developers who have tried to find a measure of security by working with big publishers.

The indie entitlement narrative may be benevolent, but that doesn’t make it rational. Indie developers are no more or less entitled to money than any other developer. All of them are human beings trying to make a living by doing something they love. What’s really crass is to suggest that one deserves special treatment simply because they’re more in line with some obscure idea of cool, and not because they do especially good work.

I’m going to buy the Tale of Tales bundle, and I’m going to pay more than $3 for it. But it’s not because I think indie developers are a privileged class of people who are entitled to my financial support. Rather, I’m going to do it because I think Tale of Tales is making a type of game that needs to be made, and I want to support their vision. Anyone who disagrees, or simply isn’t sure, can pay less, even $3, and sleep well at night.