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.

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 OnLive MicroConsole(TM) adapter and controller

Living in Australia is a wonderful thing – it’s sunny, we’re allowed to start drinking, smoking, gambling and driving all on the one day and we get to ride kangaroos to work.

There are some things we miss out on though.  Bands take forever to get around to touring here and our video game ratings system is a little dodgy.

Cloud gaming is something else we miss out on thanks to our shoddy internet speeds*.  Americans have been using the OnLive service since March 2009 to play games on their PCs and Macs using nothing but their internet connections – all the processing is done by remote servers and the output is just streamed to your screen meaning the game doesn’t care what video card you have or how many RAMs may or may not be jammed into your motherboard.

The company is set to launch its next product at the start of December - a little black box that connects to your TV and lets you play games without even needing a computer or console.  The list of games isn’t huge and high-speed internet is obviously still a prerequisite but at only US$99** the price is going to be right for a lot of people.

Time will tell if the concept takes off and obviously it’ll be years before Australia has the internet speeds to even contemplate such a service.  On top of that, the country as a whole might have to do away with the idea of a data usage quota considering that OnLive apparently sucks down over 3gig of bandwidth an hour.  But those trifiling points aside, I’m thinking and a “console” smaller than its controller is going to raise more than a few eyebrows at the the companies who’ve madly been slapping words like “slim” on the end of their console names in recent years.

* The relative infancy of the industry obviously has something to do with it too, but I wouldn’t want to miss a chance at getting the boot into Australian interweb services

** That’s about $17 Australian now, yeah?

Only live people signed this petition ... it's official!

Remember more than six months ago when the Australian people definitively told the government that we want an R18+ rating for video games?  Well … yeah, they’re still ignoring us.  I guess things like feigning indignation at banks for raising interest rates are more important.

Which is a pity because there’s yet more proof that a hell of a lot of people care a hell of a lot about this issue.  Video game retailer Game and PALGN ran an in-store petition earlier this year that drew even more signatures than the 2005 online petition to ditch the Howard government’s grossly unpopular Workchoices legislation.  No mean feat given this petition involved actual people turning up to an actual store and using an actual pen instead of just clicking a box online.

Of course, all those signatures can be ignored because they’re not from an independent source, right?  Nope, they can’t be – or at least they shouldn’t be.  Super-credible bean-counters BDO have just finished auditing the results and they’ve confirmed that 89,210 people really did sign the petition.

Congratulations to Game and PALGN on this fantastic result and for their great work on this issue.  The earliest we’ll know if we’re getting anywhere will be the Standing Committee of Attourneys-General meeting on December 10th, and while I don’t think anybody’s holding their breath just yet, hopefully this will get us one step closer to an intelligent resolution.  Click here to learn more about what Game and PALGN are doing on this issue and see a copy of the official audit results from BDO.

Write protect tabs, the original DRM

Remember tape? You know, that cutting edge media format that played music? Come on you know, before we became entrenched in the land of handheld gigabyte warehouses? Tapes were the beginning of piracy. We all remember the awful VHS piracy warnings on rental videos, but it was the audio cassette that really started it all. As a child every piece of music I owned was pirated, from my brother or my father or a friend; it was “taped” from the original vinyl or taped from another tape. We didn’t burn a copy we taped one, it was all very innocent, in fact I had no idea that what I was doing was in fact a nefarious and illegal activity.

I may be teetering on the edge of glibness with my loaded statements regarding the triviality of piracy; certainly the prevalence of piracy has skyrocketed in tandem with the ease at which digital data is copied. I got my first PC right on the lip of a breaking wave caused by the Doom (the 1993 one) revolution. I was given a copy of the game, freshly zipped onto six 1.44 inch floppies, from a friend; without a second thought I installed it and started playing, and it was great. That was the first of many games that were copied, installed and played without even considering that what I was doing was wrong, or even illegal. The idea that data could be stolen through duplication was so foreign to me because just like music, data is intangible and therefore in a very real sense it doesn’t exist, at least not in a “holding in my hand” sort of way that a thirteen year old understands.

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NFS: Hot Pursuit promises hot cars pursuing each other. Nice.

The pendulum of driving game responsibility has swung again – Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is due to hit shelves in a few weeks and for the first time in years we’re back to a proper street racing theme.  The demo version is out now and since Matt went to the trouble of downloading it I couldn’t resist taking it for a spin.

The story that the demo hints at is as preposterous as it is thin - the city of Seacrest has become a street racing mecca and in response the police force have kitted themselves out with Bugatti Veyrons and other such high-end automotive porn.  Still, a healthy disregard for any kind of proper story in these games really just means less C-grade acting so I’m chalking this up as a positive.  I’m also going to ignore the unimaginative title (which the series has used before).

The demo lets you drive one race each as the cops and the racers.  The racing course is pretty straightforward, just get yourself across the line first, and it’s pure arcade hilarity.  That’s right folks, we’re talking recharging nitrous bars, shortcuts, banging soundtracks and loads of powerslides.  Brakes aren’t there to slow you down for corners, they’re just there to help you initiate the all important powerslides.  This required a quick period of realigning for my F1-addled brain but I soon had it worked out.

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This was Guillermo's favourite dog

While we could be fooled into thinking the above quote was in response to pretty much everything that’s been said about video games by Australian politicians in the past two years, Oscar-nominated director and all round Pretty Cool Guy Guillermo del Toro actually said the above in defense of video games as an art form:

Video games are an art form and anyone saying differently is a little out of touch because they are a narrative art form

He continues, stating that he’s a big fan of titles such as Halo and Shadow of the Colossus.  We’ll choose to ignore the fact that he’s justified his opinion by saying ‘it’s an art form because it’s an art form’, ignore the fact that his comments are likely prompted by his upcoming but so far mysterious involvement with THQ and instead focus on the important message: people who don’t like video games are dumb-dumbs because a cool rich guy with a beard said so.  Brilliant!

Full story on 1Up, and selected other quotes from the actual Q&A session over at the Portland Mercury.

Are you a bad enough dude to battle the Flood?

The past twenty years has seen video games and the oft referred “geek culture” rise to a prominence that back in 1992 would never have been imagined, not even by the most fanatical zealot of electronic entertainment. Humble were the formative years of my gaming fascination, playing Super Mario Bros. at my friend’s house, whose parents spoiled him like milk in the sun. And then there were the many Sunday afternoons endlessly slaving over the greasy NES controller battling awful controls and hideous game mechanics for a measly 8 bit food pellet at the games completion. I’m sure I’m not the only one with fond memories of wasted weekends in willing servitude of these simple plastic game machines, and I bet none of us would change a thing. I can still remember playing Streets Of Rage 2 well into the night on my friends Megadrive, then swapping it over for my Super Nintendo to play the centipede boss in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past; all the while munching on popcorn and coffee beans (yes, we were strange).

I remember the magical awe I felt after we spent way too much money hiring a Japanese copy of Street Fighter 2 for SNES, playing against Balrog… or was it Vega? Who can remember, with the names being arbitrarily changed for the western market? Back in my hometown of Perth there was a store called Discount Video Games; I remember it was run by a middle aged super nerd in the front room of his house. The retailer specialised in imports, and rare and expensive games and consoles (Neo Geo anyone?). There was a demand from the obsessive; an unending desire for parity between arcade and the home console arena. Neo Geo was SNK’s answer; game cartridges the size of an ancient tome of knowledge with large digits identifying the (by the standards of the time) massive amount of memory in the plastic case, which as we all know reflects with pristine clarity the quality of the game. The carts were absurdly priced, as if by a madman with the crazy idea that there was a dollar per megabit system in place. (more…)

Another round against Eddie Gordo, sport?

If I took anything away from the recent Melbourne independent games festival Freeplay (other than a lingering hangover), it was that great things can happen when developers aren’t afraid to mess around with traditional gaming conventions.  For me one of the festival’s stand-out titles was Hazard: The Journey of Life, a philosophical first-person puzzler that created environments based upon impossible physics then used them as a metaphor for human existence.

It’s definitely worth checking out if that type of thing is your bag, but if Hazard sounds a little bit too … arty for your tastes, then maybe you’ll find something to enjoy in the following collection of indie games.  I’m an avid fan of unconventional games (and always partial to a well executed troll), and all of these titles certainly have their own unique take on what a game can be.

Now some of the games I’m about to list can reach dizzying heights of frustration, so it’s probably best that we begin with p0nd.  P0nd is a medatative relaxation game that teaches the player breathing exercises as they walk through a picturesque forest.  You could technically call it an art game, I guess, as the goals are never specifically stated and your success can only be gauged by the level of relaxation it affords you.  Just remember to breathe along with the game’s instructions for the best effect.

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Not thinking about white bears was also kind of difficult

Seems we’re going through a period of high activity in the high powered field of phsychological research on video game usage.  Last week, Matt filled us in on a University of Rochester study that found action games can make you more decisive.  Not to be outdone, researchers from Ohio State University and Central Michigan University have just released their own study on the effects of violent video gaming.

Apparently, playing violent video games can make you continue to have aggressive feelings for up to 24 hours after you turn the game off, provided that you’re instructed to continue thinking about the game.  Don’t worry though ladies, you’re immune.  It only works on men.

Interestingly, the authors conclude that the results from their sample group will be applicable to the general population because “violent gamers usually play longer than 20 minutes, and probably ruminate about their game play in a habitual manner”.  Interesting.  Whatever we might think of the findings of the study, it seems like it was executed with some degree of scientific rigor but “probably” is apparently OK to apply it to the entire population.  Hmm.

The summary article released by the publisher (haven’t been able to track down the full text as of yet) doesn’t say anything about how strong the effects are or how they compare to playing sports, watching the evening news, getting two-outed on the river or being raised by wolves.  Which means for all we know this could be a storm in a great big proverbial teacup.  But, naturally, nobody will fucking care because there’s an “OMG video games are part of the cancer that is killing kids!” headline in it and that’s all that matters.

The even sadder part is that some people point to this as yet another reason to censor games.  I think they’re missing the point entirely and they should go back and re-read the article because it seems to me that it’s not the games themselves that are to blame – it’s the post-game ”rumination” that we need to be banning.  Lose the rumination and no more problem.

Shit people, do I have to solve all the world’s problems for you?!?