IGN gets its GOTY right, but its ratings wrong

IGN has released its console-specific GOTY awards and Fallout 3 has come out on top with the top honors for the XBox 360, which is something I can fully agree with.  What’s odd about it, however, is that Fallout 3 received a 9.6 from IGN just a couple months ago while GTA IV received a perfect 10 when it came out earlier this year.

Now, I’m sensitive to the fact that “better” games can come out later and receive worse scores than earlier, lesser games.  Certainly, game reviews are but a snapshot in time and the context of when something comes out is certainly going to color the rating.  This actually can happen all the time when “clones” of originally innovative games come out… they’re typically “better” than the original because the developer was able to build on top of what came before it, but will receive a lesser score simply because it’s no longer innovative.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with that.

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Jeff’s most overrated games of 2008

Unfortunately, my list for Best game of the year is going to be a little delayed as I try and catch up on the vast quantity of games I can now get back to after completing (for now) Fallout 3 (I don’t want to give any potential contenders short-shrift).  So, to compensate, I’ll just list what I believe are the most overrated games of the year, as I think I can probably do that already.

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Obsession’s Fallout

I realize I haven’t posted in awhile, and I do apologize. Indeed, my excuse is pretty lame.  Essentially, I’ve just been trying to relax and enjoy the holiday season, and I’ve wanted to play Fallout 3. Work has been extremely stressful as of late, so my first desire hasn’t gone so well so far, but I sure as hell have been playing a hell of a lot of Fallout 3 lately anyway.

It’s hard to describe exactly the kind of hold that Fallout 3 has on me because it hasn’t really happened with a game in a really long time, or at least not nearly as powerfully and lengthy.  The closest it comes is to something like World of Warcraft, which I certainly sank quite a bit of time into (for about 6 months), but I’m not sure I found it nearly as enjoyable when I played and it’s also probably not the best example.

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Column: Gaming the Economic Crisis

Our new column is up this week discussing the potential effects the economic crisis will have on the gaming industry.  You can read it here.

Enjoy!

Sign of the times

Street Fighter IV has received an official release date for its North American debut on the 360 and PS3, but despite the franchise’s roots will not be released as an arcade game in the US.

Of course, this makes a lot of sense as no one goes to arcades any more, and with online play it’s never too difficult to find a human opponent.  The only arcades I see now are in movie theaters, and they’re typically just made up of DDR, Time Crisis-like games, or classic games.

I’m sure hardcore fans of the game will contend that playing a game like SF IV online screws up all of their timing, and I’m sure they’re right, but 99.9% of the gaming population probably won’t care or notice.  Will arcades ever regain their popularity in the US?  I’m guessing not for awhile, if ever.

And while I’m complaining about Gears of War 2…

Epic actually paid someone to write this story?  Without giving anything specific away, let me list off a few complaints:

• The game borrows heavily from several different popular series including Star Wars, The Matrix, zombie movies, and probably others that I’m not mentioning here. I suppose this is to be somewhat expected, as this is a very well-mined genre, but still…
• There are a few jumps in the storyline that are made without much explanation at all.  You’ll know what your current mission is, then suddenly you finish it and you’re told that you need to go somewhere else even if you’re not really sure why.
• As far as I can tell, there’s a critical plot point in the game that undermines the entire reason for continuing onward.  When it came up, I wondered if I understood it correctly.  It becomes a crucial focus of the game, and indeed, I understood it correctly, but was left sort of dumbfounded as to how this could actually be the direction of the story as it basically made no sense.  If you’ve played the game, you probably know what I’m talking about.
• In addition to this, seemingly crucial plot advances/twists are left somewhat unexplored and therefore unimportant to the storyline, despite the fact that they’re originally played up to seem important… I guess they plan to explain them more later? (Though I believe people said the same thing after GoW 1).
• The dialogue is, for the most part, terrible.  This is, unfortunately, the least damaging part of the writing.

The game is pretty well polished and at least a story is told in a somewhat interesting way.  I don’t mind if every loose end isn’t tied up at the end of a game, though it would be nice if they could figure out a way to actually tell a full story within the scope of a single game.  As it is, I feel like we learned very little about some of the more interesting reveals and instead we get basically the framework story of finding another way to try and wipe out the Locust horde.

Don’t change the end of your game

Lots of developers try to add a bit of variety to their games by changing the gameplay mechanics for the final boss or stage of their games.  I guess the theory is that gamers crave variety, so throwing something new at them at the end is a good way to bring their games to a climax.  I have some advice for developers: don’t do this.

Unless you really know that you have something good going, chances are that your idea for a “unique” ending will end up worse than the rest of the game.  The reason for this is almost too obvious to post: you spend probably months or years creating and tweaking the core aspects of the game, so the sort of “unique” game that you switch to at the end, and only play for a few minutes (or less), is quite unlikely to have the same attention to detail as the rest of the game that you worked so hard on.  The best bosses/final stages offer something unique, but still ground the game in its core gameplay mechanics.  Yes, as with everything, there are a few exceptions to this.  I found whole final sequence of the original Metal Gear Solid to be pretty exciting.  Yoshi’s Island’s final boss is actually pretty well done and works a bit differently than the rest of the game, but even that is still pretty much grounded in the core aspects of the gameplay.  Halo 1 and 3 have fun endings, but at least driving makes up an fair and important amount of the game, so I wouldn’t necessarily call it completely divergent.  As you can see, I’m struggling to come up with many examples, which should be indicative of something.

I was moved to write this post after just finishing the campaign for Gears of War 2.  I was prepared to be somewhat letdown by the final boss after reading reviews talking about it being disappointing… It’s more than disappointing, it’s a damn joke.  My guess (and hope) is that they had something better planned for it, but ended up essentially scrapping it and putting in what’s currently there when time got short, as it’s honestly not much more than a (slightly) glorified cutscene.  At least Gears of War 1 had a challenging final boss that required some thought to kill.  This one doesn’t do the rest of the game justice.

Not a good sign…

Did you know that Call of Duty: World at War launches today?  Unfortunately, as of yet, there isn’t a single review of the game up yet.  For such a high-profile game, this seems rather strange.

I can only assume that it means something similar to when movies are released without critic screenings.  In other words: Buyer Beware.

LittleBigPlanet a LittleBitLonely?

I picked up LittleBigPlanet the Saturday before its “official” release date when Gamestop got their copies in early.  I played it a bit for a few days, but because the servers had not been brought online and were having problems, the deluge of other games, and my travel, I decided I’d give it a little break.

I fired it up again last night, though, hoping to finally see what people had produced to see if there was any user content that was more than just a gimmicky diversion, but unfortunately the servers still seemed to be down.  I was limited to the (admittedly pretty good) single player content.  Is anyone else still having problems with the LBP servers, or is something wrong with my game/PS3 or whatever.  For the record, the PSN store works just fine for me.

*Update* - Online finally worked for me last night.  I was able to try out a smattering of levels… a lot of them just seemed to be people finding creative ways to play video game music they liked.  There was 1 level I played that I actually really liked and gave 4 stars to… the others… nothing that great yet.  I don’t really like the system for finding levels… You can search for adjectives of levels, but you can’t search for just the top rated levels, which seems to me like a bit of an oversight.

It keeps going and going…

While it’s pace may have slowed down slightly, World of Warcraft has now hit 11M subscribers.  It is astonishing to me that after several years and several very well-hyped competitors that WoW continues to dominate like this.  Even though I don’t play it any more, Blizzard deserves enormous credit for somehow continually creating enough new content to keep old subscribers interested and new subscribers signing up.

Supposedly, Blizzard is creating another MMO now that is unrelated to WoW, but I’m guessing that it’s still at least 2-3 years away, as I imagine it’s going to take awhile before the number of WoW subscribers actually starts to decrease instead of increase, even if it’s normal pace of 1M per 6 months doesn’t quite continue (it took about 10 months this time).