And so another year draws to a close, and we can take a week to reflect on an entire year’s worth of gaming.  2010 delivered so many fantastic games, many of which were supposed to arrive in 2009, but it also dropped a great deal of disappointing titles too.  Choosing just one Game Of The Year seemed a little bit too much like hard work to us (after all, we’re all hung over and in food comas after last week), so instead each writer has delivered their own Game and Shame Of The Year.

Matt:

Game of the Year: This was actually quite a tough decision for me, but I’d have to give my official thumbs up to Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.  Although the single-player was interesting enough, it was really the multiplayer aspect which had me hooked.  There is something about the “hide in plain sight” concept that translates so well to a riveting multiplayer experience, and you couldn’t care less if it takes you several minutes of planning just to pull off that perfect incognito kill.

Of course, matchmaking needs some serious fucking work (you can stare at a “Loading” screen longer than playing the actual game), but the game itself is just too much fun to let it get you down.

Shame of the Year: Although there have been plenty of average games released this year, I’d have to say Army of Two: The 40th Day was my low-light.  It wasn’t even the worst thing I scored this year, but the fact that EA took what was such a humerous action licence and turned it into a “serious” shooter with morality moments just reeked of wasted potential.

If the series gets another installment, I’m hoping they go back to doing what Rios and Salem do best: bro-fists and explosions.  Of course, 40th Day potentially killed one of them off, so how’s that going to work?

Jess:

Game of the Year: Though not a complete surprise hit (quite a few people have lauded it), Ninja Theory’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West ticked all my happy gamer boxes. Post-Apocalyptic? Check. Excellent characterisation and dialogue? Check. Mythology? Check.  (Button  mashing fighting style? Check). Mix in some very pretty graphics and I’m sold. While not the high-punching Triple A title like the guys have picked, Enslaved was a game everyone could play, accessible and enjoyable. There was humour and heart in the plot which hooked me in and kept me interested where other games this year fell short.

A sneaky second for me was Alan Wake: clever, original and well, nothing beats this: Poets of the Fall – The Poet and the Muse

Shame of the Year: Speaking of falling short, holy shitting eels did Final Fantasy XIII come up flush with boredom, repetition and those bloody clippity-cloppity footfalls. Playing this game was a chore. At first glance, FFXIII impressed me with its design and cinematics, but after nearly 5 hours of tutorials masquerading as gameplay, I was ready to frisbee the first of the three discs out the window. It was overblown, obtuse and there was no pleasure in the time I put into it. Square Enix should have spent the money and time making an animated movie, or done something like Heavy Rain, rather than churning out another cookie cutter JRPG.

Stu:

Game of the Year: This one was a total no-brainer for me: in my eyes Mass Effect 2 pissed on every other game released this year from such a great height there just wasn’t any other choice.  Bioware took all the good points from the first game, made them better, ditched some of the irritating bits and only found a few annoying things to put back in their place. The game was visually stunning, the sound design was excellent, combat was fun, there’s been some decent DLC to keep us coming back and the voice actors were top notch.

But it’s the story that really makes Mass Effect 2 work for me. There just aren’t enough studios out there that can compete with Bioware in terms of the time and effort they put into their stories and they’ve already got me dying to get my hands on the next installment. Game of the year for me, no contest.

Shame of the Year: Since there’s no such thing as trade ins on PC games I don’t take a punt on many games that might suck – if I’m going to be stuck with it I want to have a decent idea it’s a game I’ll like before I bother with it.  It feels kind of unfair to put Poker Night at the Inventory up for worst game because I don’t think it had many pretentions towards being a proper game in the first place. Whether Torchlight was released this year or not depends very much on how you feel about physical boxes and discs – suffice to say I didn’t think much of it regardless of the release date.

But I’m not actually going to nominate a “worst” game. Instead I’m going to nominate F1:2010 for the “y’know, I might’ve got that one wrong” award. Since reviewing it I haven’t been able to bring myself to play it – finishing even my first season of a potential seven just seemed like way too much hard work to be bothered with and I don’t see myself picking it back up again any time soon, if ever. It’s triumphs speak for themselves but along the way I missed the fact that they forgot to bring the fun.

Moose:

Game of the Year: Without a doubt (and I don’t expect any major disagreements from my fellow reviewers) the high point of the year as far as gaming goes is Red Dead Redemption. With the expanded online mode and the classic GTA style gameplay, it was always going to be a success. In many ways, I feel this game succeed where GTA IV failed. GTA on horses. Can you think of a better idea?

Well, I could. It’s called MacGyver Under The Sea. Keep your eyes peeled for that.

Shame of the Year: Well, there were a few stinkers to sift through this year, but I would definitely go with Iron Man 2. Given my man-boner for Tony Stark and all things related, I found myself wanting this game to reward my rigidity … it did not. The one good thing I can say about it is that it was short. And may we never speak of it again.

This week’s new release list is brought to you by the Christmas spirit.  Want some?  ‘Course you do!

This is going to be the shortest release post ever because as far as we can tell nobody’s got anything slated for release this week in Australia.  Must be that public holiday that’s coming up interfering with the schedule or something.  So you’ll all have to console yourselves with old games until the new year when I’m sure somebody will release something.

A merry Christmas to all our readers from the entire staff here at Armchair, we’ll probably be too stuffed full of food to post anything over the break, but we’ll be sure to take a look at that mountain of back-log and see if we can have some new stuff ready for you in the new year.  We will be posting up our Game Of The Year nominations before the end of the month, so be sure to check back in and see what our diverse-taste staff picked as their favourite!

You think this car crash looks bad? Wait until you see our update!

So if you’ve been enjoying Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit as much as I have, then you’ve probably also come to love (or loathe) Autolog, the social engine that allows you to troll all your friends by beating their fastest times and tell them so next time they log in.  So when a free patch to update Hot Pursuit arrived this morning promising new cars and an “upgraded experience”, I downloaded it gladly and unknowingly joined the ranks of Xbox 360 players to have their career progress wiped.

Download complete, I was treated to those insufferabledandy trailers for Shift 2 and Autolog (again), told thank you very much for playing the demo (again), and then went to check my Autolog Recommendations, only to find them completely empty.  When I logged into Career I found that my entire bounty and event progress had been erased, and I’d been demoted back to a Level 1 Cop and Racer.

I’m not alone either.  From the looks of things only Xbox users have been affected, but there are multiple accounts coming in online with the same results.  The official word from the Need For Speed Twitter account is that Xbox gamers should avoid downloading the update until Criterion can figure out just what is going on.  They don’t sound particularly optimistic about being able to recover gamers progress either, here’s what they had to say to me when I asked about the chances of recovery:

Depends on how much is saved to the servers. If it can’t be fixed, we’re thinking up ways to make it up to users that lost data.

-@NeedForSpeed

Maybe they’ll send me a poster or something, who knows.  Whatever the case, EA is asking any gamers encountering the same problems to leave their details on an official forum post so they can try and find the reasons behind the bug.

But the offical message is clear: If you’re playing Hot Pursuit on 360, do not download the 1.1 update until further notice.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I guess I’ve got some Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood to play online.

I'm looking forward to Patapon 3, Alot!

This week’s new releases are brought to you by that most mythical of beasts – the Alot, a perfect pet for grammar nazis and people who never graduated the second grade alike.

When you’ve finished working out whether or not you like this Alot more, you could mosey on down to your local games store where the following games should be appearing on the shelves this week:

• Dodge Racing: Charger v Challenger (December 16, Wii)
• Speed (December 16, Wii)
• Nickelodeon Fit (December 17, Wii)
• Patapon 3 (December 17, PSP)
• Tangled (December 17, DS)
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam (December 19, PC)

Well I acquired them all legally, you can be sure of that ...

“Red keycard?  Shit, where am I supposed to find that?  I haven’t shot anything in at least 30 seconds and my ctrl finger is getting itchy … bugger it: i-d-k-f-a and I’m on my way!”

I’d reckon anyone old enough to recognise that internal monologue had the exact same discussion with themselves at some point.  Something dawned on me recently that made me think about it again: the relationship between games and cheating has changed a hell of a lot since I first started playing.

Once upon a time it seemed pretty much every game had cheats built into it – all you had to do was find the right keystroke combination, probably from the cheats and codes pages of your favourite gaming magazine.

The thing that really made me start thinking about this was the recent blowup over Starcraft II players being banned from the game for life for using hacks and trainers in the game’s single-player campaign mode and Blizzard’s threats of legal action against some of the people responsible for developing them.

I’ll get back to that later but in the meantime, what’s changed?  At what point did we decide that, actually, we don’t like cheats any more?

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The math based Risk: Fractions was scrapped due to lack of interest

Not since Arthur Percival surrendered his 138,708 strong army of Allied soldiers to a Japanese force numbering approximately 30,000 has such poor military nouse been exposed on such a large scale … until now.  Risk: Factions is based upon the classic Parker Brothers board game, Risk.  The basic concept of the game is simple world military domination, while smack-talking the crap out your opponents and attempting to rob them of any feeling of self-worth.

Games need a minimum of two players, with a maximum of five, but you can set each game up with a mixture of human and AI opponents.  Each player takes one of five factions: Humans, Cats, Robots, Zombies or Yetis.  In the traditional game you play a board based on a map of the world, cut up into territories and regions rather than the countries.  The gameplay is turn-based, with each player taking turns attempting to attack the surrounding occupied territories to build up their own empire.  At the beginning of each turn you receive extra soldiers based upon the number of countries and continents you control.  A traditional match ends when one player takes complete control, or (unfortunately more commonly) when the last remaining human player  disconnects in defeat.

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Tetris art courtesy of Naolito.com

This week’s Australian new release list is brought to you by the public’s fascination with magic falling blocks.  To this day scientists are still unable to explain the why but the what has been abundantly clear for decades: put a human being in front of a screen with falling blocks on it and they’ll be mesmerised by that shit.

Secret diplomatic cables* received by Armchair Diplomat this week reveal that several countries are even looking to harness the effect for military purposes.  “We’re probably about two or three years away from being able to drop a giant projector screen into a warzone and stop the enemy in their tracks by showing footage of falling blocks,” said one general who we can’t name because we value our bollocks in their current locations.  “The sticking point has been trying to immunise our own troops against the effects – it’s no good reducing your enemy to a bunch of drooling halfwits if your own troops are left in a similar state.”

Early attempts at developing an immunisation have been deemed failures.  While they were successful in rendering immunity to the falling block mesmerisation effect, word got out that the trial group also stopped seeing the “funny” side of Two and a Half Men and since then no soldier has been willing to take the drug.

If you’re not mesmerised by falling blocks yourself, you might want to try one of the following games that are due in stores this week:

• World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (December 7, PC)
• Bejeweled 3 (December 8, PC)
• Game Party In Motion (December 8, 360)
• Cabela Big Game Hunter (December 10, Wii)
• Def Jam Rapstar (December 10, 360 / PS3 / Wii)
• Goldeneye: 007 (December 10, Wii)
• Hide and Secret Trilogy (December 10, PC)
• Nickelodeon Fit (December 10, Wii)
• Pac Man World 3 (December 10, DS)
• PDC World Championship Darts (December 10, 360 / PS3 / Wii)

* Resemblance to actual cables written by an actual government may vary

Sprinting for your life hasn't been this colourful in a long time

Reimagining a myth is a classic launch pad for entertainment.  The evolution of story, characters and themes nurtures these myths, keeping them alive in a world that can have the memory span of a goldfish.  Sometimes it goes well (the God of War franchise and Dan Simmon’s Illuim books being fine examples) and sometimes it goes quite badly (Clash of the Titans or The Bible … not so much).  Thankfully Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is a member of the former group. It’s not the first modern retelling of the myth of Monkey – you may remember the old TV show and might have seen the recent terrible movie adaptation starring Chairman Kaga from Iron Chef.  These kitschy retellings thankfully were followed up by Damon Albarn’s Opera last year.

Ninja Theory’s game leaves out some of the recognisable markers of the original story, but is thankfully no less enjoyable for it. There’s no Dragon-disguised-as-Horse, no demons, no overall journey to become a great immortal sage or collect scrolls. Monkey certainly can’t multiply himself or change into anything (except maybe from angry man who wants to kill Trip to an angry man who might be in love with Trip), but we do have the Cloud, the headband, the staff. We still have Pigsy and his lecherous ways, and we still have a story that ends in Enlightenment.

As the story goes, the nature of Monkey was … irrepressible.  In this version (written by Alex Garland) Monkey is a large, agile, brutish man, plucked by Slavers from the wasteland of post-apocalyptic North America and held in a an egg-shaped containment unit on a flying transport.  He watches an attractive and early 90’s fashion-inspired young woman escape, and then the ship begins to explode.  Nice timing, really.  Monkey escapes, just barely, in what is a rather nicely done spin on the Tutorial level, and crashes to Earth on the outside of the girl’s escape pod.  He wakes up to find that the girl he followed has now slapped a Slaver control headband on him.

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The colourful cast of Poker Night at the Inventory

All of us here at Armchair Diplomat have spent some time playing poker, at varying levels of seriousness.  While the others have all moved on to other, more interesting hobbies I still play regularly and Matt decided that meant I should be the one to review Poker Night at the Inventory.  Keeping in mind it’s a casual game I’ll do my best not to get all VPIP balanced ranges on y’all… here goes!

The premise of Poker Night at the Inventory is simple.  The Inventory is a club, it’s poker night and you’re there to play.  Your opponents are Max (from Sam and Max), Strong Bad (of Homestar Runner fame), the Heavy Weapons Guy (from Team Fortress 2) and Tycho (from the Penny Arcade series).

Each game has a $10,000 buy in and the winner takes all.  You never run out of money so you can play as many times as you like.  The game keeps track of how far up or down you are and each game shouldn’t take much more than 30 minutes to play.  Forget about all that though because, as we’ll discuss in a little bit, this isn’t really a poker game.  It’s actually a vehicle for getting the abovementioned characters together to engage in some witty banter.

Your opponents never stop talking.  Sometimes it’s prompted by the game and sometimes they just talk among themselves but they’re always jawing away.  Max is the deranged bunny rabbit we’ve come to know and love over the years, Strong Bad is Strong Bad-y, Mr Weapons delivers a good deadpan Arnie-esque line and Tycho’s dry nerdy wit balances things out nicely.  You don’t have to be a fan of their respective franchises to enjoy it but there are some in-jokes there for those in the know as well.  It’s reasonably clever too, and if for some reason the cards interrupt someone’s story they’ll wait until the distraction is over and then resume their story.  They’re not just responding to what’s happening on the table.

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I wonder if the crown would like to hold hands for a while?

The strongest memory I have from the entire Fable series is way back at it’s beginnings.  My hero is old.  Very old.  Deeply wrinkled skin and baggy eyes stare out of a face framed with grey hair and a golden halo.  He stares down at a woman who appears to be around half his age … his mother.

In a title packed with innovative features, it was this moment that defined the game for me, and remained with me all the way through the sequel.  A prime example of a brilliant concept that’s execution was fundamentally flawed.

Which is the stigma that surrounds the series as a whole, if we’re honest, due in no small part to the over-enthusiastic promises of lead designer Peter Molyneux.  After long ago promising not to discuss ideas that he can’t demonstrate, he’s actually said some rather interesting things in the lead up to Fable 3‘s release, but the one that caught my interest the most was the fact that Fable 3 would probably upset a great deal of gamers, most likely because the game has been redesigned to be less of an RPG and more of an action-adventure.

Now although that seems like a very strange thing to admit pre-release, and even though I’m generally a fan of RPGs, I took this admission as a promising sign.  I figured Lionhead finally was sitting down to fundamentally rethink Fable and enhance what worked while fixing what didn’t.

But I guess I figured wrong.

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