• Platform: Xbox 360
• One Word: Depth
• Two Words: Swarming Splicers
• Worth It: Yes
• Scale: terrible | poor | fair | good | great

The Long Version

I’m pretty torn about giving BioShock 2 only a “good” and not a “great” rating. I mean, here is a game far more ambitious in its storyline and symbolism than 90% of the dreck out there, but at the same time, whenever you start to really get into exploring these new parts of Rapture, it decides to throw an army of splicers at you and bog you down in pointless, repetitive combat. The game delivers excellent dialog, creates compelling characters for you to interact with, and features a few interesting moral choices … but it also tries too hard to shoehorn the new villain into the existing Rapture storyline, so much so that one is left wondering how it would be possible to have seen no sign of her influence during the first game. On the one hand, I played the game for hours basically every day after I bought it until I’d beaten it. On the other hand, I spent a decent chunk of those hours bitching to my wife (thanks, hon!) about how little fun I was having during yet another massive firefight.

I think what it comes down to is that the net result of the changes to the game play from the first game made this one more hardcore, and it has been a long time since I was a hardcore gamer. I no longer play games, even first-person shooters, for the combat. I don’t care that I can fight with plasmids and weapons at the same time, because I never found having to switch to be particularly cumbersome in the first place, since you were rarely facing more than a couple of enemies at a time. I don’t care that the weapons and plasmids are generally beefed up from the first game, because I never thought the ones in the first game needed much improvement. I didn’t come back to Rapture because I loved fighting legions of the same four splicers in the first game and wanted to fight many more.

I came back to Rapture because its decayed, art-deco beauty and tragic history make it without question one of the most compelling video game environments ever conceived. Nearly every part of Rapture is a work of art, and to explore it means contemplating what it might be like to exist there, to live in an underwater city, never seeing the sunlight, but with constant access to the beauty and mystery of the ocean depths. The original BioShock was so damn compelling because it was so gorgeous, and had gone so horribly wrong.

Fortunately, in this aspect, the game delivers. The Rapture of BioShock 2 is even more decayed than that of the first game (though, oddly, it didn’t seem as wet), but there are still glimpses of stunning beauty all around. While I was disappointed that we didn’t revisit any of the original areas, the new parts of Rapture shown in BioShock 2 fit right in and make sense as parts of the city. We’re given information on how Rapture was built, and how people originally got around it (a sort of undersea subway system) before the invention of personal bathyspheres.  We see Andrew Ryan’s amusing attempt to indoctrinate, via a horrific version of a Disney ride, the children of Rapture into fearing and hating the surface. We glimpse the seeds of that which would eventually be Ryan’s undoing even as we gain insight into what Rapture was like in its glory days.

I remain as baffled as ever as to why it is that Andrew Ryan, Sofia Lamb and Frank Fontaine’s audio diaries (among many others) are just lying all over the damn place in the city … but it’s a plot delivery vehicle that one can overlook without too much trouble. What one can’t overlook is the incessant focus on combat.

In BioShock 2, you’re a Big Daddy. One of the prototypes, actually, if you want to get specific, but it doesn’t really matter that much. As a Big Daddy, part of your job is to “adopt” Little Sisters and use them to harvest the genetic elixir Adam. Whenever you set a little sister down to gather, you’re mobbed by splicers. Also, whenever you hit an important plot point, you’re usually mobbed by splicers. When you visit a new area of the game, you’re usually given just enough exploration time to build up a dread that you’re going to be mobbed by splicers, and then you’re mobbed by splicers. Sometimes you revisit an area that you just cleared out less than five minutes ago, you find that it has been entirely repopulated with splicers, who proceed to mob you.

Sometimes while you’re being mobbed by splicers, a Big Daddy / Little Sister combo will come stumbling heedlessly right through the firefight, at which time the Big Daddy will almost assuredly get hit by one of the bullets or plasmids you are wildly spraying around like the money shot in a porn movie, become enraged, and decide to beat the crap out of you.

Understand: it’s not that I died a lot … I played the game on easy because I’m a wuss, and rarely found myself holding less than three first aid kits. It wasn’t so much that the fights were frustratingly difficult. No, they were just frustratingly frequent. Yes, you can set traps before the splicer-mobbing in some instances (particularly relating to the Little Sisters). No, these traps don’t do a particular amount of good, nor are they particularly fun to deploy. In a short time, the entire thing has become an exercise in tedium. “Ho-hum, another firefight with fifteen splicers. Let’s just get through this so that I can get back to the interesting part of the game.”

The parts of the game that are good are really, really good. There’s a scene late in the game involving a Little Sister that does a fantastic job of illustrating how Rapture looks through their eyes. There are small, poignant vignettes and audio logs to be found all over the place if you look for them which help to tell the story of the city. There’s even a couple of more significant moral choices to be made, beyond simply “rescue” or “harvest,” which help to shape the game’s ending … though to be honest in only one of these did I find myself actually wrestling with my decision. The other two might as well have “click here to be the good guy” show up on the screen.

So, overall, my return to Rapture was a good, but not great, experience. I found myself missing the slower pace and frequent creeping dread of the first game. I also found myself questioning the main plot quite heavily (and wondering what the hell happened to a couple of the people I met early on in the game). That’s okay. I enjoyed exploring Rapture again, thought the characters were excellent, and I was glad that they didn’t shoehorn in a “twist” just to compete with the first BioShock. If you’re a fan of lots of combat in your games, this is a no-brainer: go buy the game. If you’re less into combat, I still highly recommend it. Just be prepared for the fact that some parts of the game will become something of a slog.

Oh, also there is multi-player, if you’re into that sort of thing. I haven’t bothered with multi-player FPS’s in years, and see no reason to go back to them now, so I can’t give you any insight on that end. I assume it’s like most multi-player: jettisoning everything that’s good about the game in favor of yet more combat. As we’ve established, that’s not why I came back to Rapture in the first place.

Images borrowed from the good people at Giant Bomb

Dart Publishing

Dart Publishing, Ltd. is the official name of the business I’ve been trying to get started with my friend for a while now. We’ve made huge leaps recently, thanks in part to having some extra time due to the Crispy Gamer implosion. I’m very nearly done with the first draft of the business plan, and will be sending it out to a few folks I know with way more business experience than I have, in order to get their feedback on it. From there, it’ll be revisions, and then probably applying for some local grants. Investor money is good, but free money is even better. Might as well look for that first, right?

Writing

Last month I finished not one, but two novels — my NaNoWriMo projects from 2007 and 2009, “The Broken God Machine” and “Morgan Skylark and the Monster Hunters,” respectively. If anyone out there wants to read the first draft of The Broken God Machine, it’s ready for criticism. Just get in touch. I still need to make some tweaks to Monster Hunters before I open it up for critique from the outside world, but that should be happening soon. I’m also making some progress on the second draft of the sequel to The Blood That Bonds, currently titled “Blood Hunt.” I expect work on that to speed up significantly once I’m no longer spending my coffee shop time filling out competitive analysis forms and burn-rate spreadsheets for Dart. Speaking of TBTB …

The Blood That Bonds

I haven’t had too many responses in my agent search, and so far the responses I’ve had haven’t been positive. I’m not particularly discouraged — people are still reading the eBook and sending very positive feedback — but I’m beginning to wonder if I should revise the first chapter a little to make it a bit more attention-grabbing right from the start. There’s a little too much opening exposition and I think it’s turning agents off. We’ll see.

Photography

Unfortunately, the broken 18-55mm lens that I fixed with superglue for a while has broken again, so we’re stuck only using a distance lens on our camera, which is a pain in the ass, so we’re not taking many pics at the moment. I need to get off my ass and either re-fix the lens using a better piece of plastic (and more superglue), or just cough up the ~$140 it costs to buy a new one. Why does everything have to be so damn expensive these days? Blargh! Rotten kids … GET OFF MY LAWN!

Cocktails

I went on a bit of a beer kick the past few months, trying lots of craft beers and really strengthening my understanding and appreciation of the different types available (turns out I am way more of an ale guy than a lager guy, with a particular fondness for brown ales, porters, and stouts). I’m coming out of that now though and getting back to crafting new cocktails. I’m still experimenting right now, but when I come up with something good, I’ll post it here.

Video Games

I went out and picked up BioShock 2 the other night at my wife’s urging (one of many reasons why I married her!) and have been playing through it. I’ll post a full review here when I’m finished, but I’m pretty far in and while I’m enjoying it, I’m kind of disappointed in how much more they’ve chosen to focus on combat. You’re constantly being swarmed with enemies, and while I’m not dying a lot, it’s just not a whole lot of fun to be in non-stop firefights. After BioShock 2, I’ll be picking up Mass Effect 2, and Assassin’s Creed 2 … apparently it’s all about the sequels right now.

Reading

Sadly, given how many activities I have going on, I haven’t done much reading since Christmas, when I burned through Bill Simmons’s Book of Basketball in a week or so. I’ve got three novels and a short story collection all waiting for my attention, not to mention a non-fiction book on real estate investing that I really should finish

French

Mon francais n’est pas superb … but it’s getting better. I do a half an hour of studying per day almost every weekday, and Charlotte and I are beginning to try to speak to each other more in French. We’ve also found some French cultural events to go to around town, and I’m about to start in on French grammar in addition to speaking/listening. It’s still a halting, frustrating process — I don’t like being bad at things — but all these little steps should hopefully add up to me being able to hold something of a coherent conversation with her friends and family back in the homeland, sometime within the next couple of years. Hopefully!

Travel

Speaking of the homeland, Charlotte and I will be making another France trip in May. Her sister is getting married in the south of France, which gives us the opportunity to fly into Barcelona in Spain, and spent the next week driving to Toulouse (actually, the nearby town of Albi), where we’ll attend the wedding, hang out for another day or two, and then I’ll fly back while she goes to Paris to take her finals for the French Lit program she’s working on. We’ve also got a trip to Florida happening in March, to visit my parents and sister, and a trip to Syracuse happening … sometime. Then as summer rolls into fall, we’ve got a wedding in New York City and a wedding in New Hampshire (I think) to attend. Yeesh!

… So that’s what’s up with me, in case anyone was wondering!

In late 2009 Crispy Gamer acquired GamerDNA.com, 360Voice.com, TweetMyGaming.com, and an associated ad network running ads on multiple privately-owned gaming websites. The board of directors, excited by the massive increase in page views and ad sales opportunities, decided that it was time to cut costs on the Crispy Gamer front, consolidate down to one company, and focus mainly on revenue. They laid off Crispy Gamer’s entire editorial staff, including the managing editor, the copy-editor, the senior writer, and several contract writers. They alerted the other freelancers that there would be no further work coming in. They also told the development team, consisting of myself, my friend Gabe, and our Junior Engineer Stanley, that our services would only be needed for a few more weeks as they transitioned Crispy Gamer to a more basic website.

To that end, Gabe and I were still technically employed by Crispy for a few more weeks, working on some back-end changes to the site. It felt a little creepy, like dressing up a friend for his own funeral, but this is a part of the internet startup world: sometimes things don’t go as expected and the board, who let’s not forget invested $8mm in this company, jumps in and assumes control in order to try and recoup their initial investment.

For my own part, I find the timing unfortunate. Beginning with the redesign in May 2009 and moving forward into the summer and fall of 2009, I thought the site had really turned the corner. It was much easier to use, much easier to navigate, and much easier to read than the previous design had been. We’d developed some really cool technology using current AJAX and DHTML techniques, and were looking forward to building even more. Our user community was taking off, with nearly every article getting several comments, and some of them getting dozens. Our numbers were holding steady despite dramatically decreasing the amount of paid traffic … in short: people were using the site, liking it, and coming back without having to be enticed by marketing or ads.

That’s exactly what you want, when you build a website. Unfortunately, that tipping point came too late. Instead of happening at about six months in, it took about eighteen, because there was a lot of stumbling in the first year. This, also, is not exactly uncommon in the world of startups, and I don’t blame the Crispy founders or employees for it — sometimes it takes time to find your voice and establish who you are. It’s just sad, because I’ve been on the other side of things. I started working for GameSpy in 1999, just as it was making its move from “three guys in an office running a couple volunteer sites” to “investment-backed real company with multiple product types”. It was touch-and-go during that time and a single different — not even necessarily bad — decision could’ve submarined the entire company. Instead, we struggled through, figured things out, and became profitable. It’s a great feeling and an amazing thing to have gone through, and I’m sorry that many of my fellow Crispy staffers don’t get to find out what it’s like.

I worked with a lot of good, smart, talented people at Crispy and I’m happy to have spent the last two-plus years there. We may not have made it over the hump, but we came damn close, and I’m proud of what we accomplished with the site. Now it’s time to move on to the next adventure. Gabe and I have both accepted some work with a San Francisco-based startup, for one thing. For another, I’m 35 pages and counting into a business plan for our own internet startup, which we’re hoping will allow us to raise some grant money and be able to employ ourselves full-time. It’s a very busy, very interesting time, but I’m excited about the possibilities out there and looking forward to continuing to learn and improve as a web designer and development director.

Oh, and now that I’m done with CG, you can expect more frequent updates to this blog, too. Woohoo!

“No! It’s too strong! I … oh, damn it, the f*cking troll killed Carbomb.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” asks my wife Charlotte, who with a quick glance toward the little bed perched on our window-shelf can see that our cat, Carbomb, is still totally alive and sleeping peacefully.

“Oh,” I say. “I set the game so that if I start with a pet cat, the cat’s name is Carbomb.”

“That’s a game?”

“Sure. This little ‘at’ symbol is me, and that ‘T’ is a troll, and this is a …”

“Sounds great,” she says, and goes back to her book.

Okay, so perhaps not everyone understands the appeal of Nethack. Actually, it seems likely that the vast bulk of today’s gamers have never heard of Nethack, which really is something of a shame. How many games do you know of which have been in near-constant development for thirty years, boast a stunning depth of artificial intelligence unrivaled by modern titles, and will run flawlessly on any computer, of any speed, running any operating system available?

Check out the full article and let me know what you think!

Recent releases like Gears of War 2 and Killzone 2 have offered gamers visual fidelity of unparalleled quality. For over a decade, improving visuals has been the focal point of development in gaming, and titles have advanced by great leaps during that time. We’ve also improved the audio in our games, and arguably even moved into telling deeper, more interesting stories. Text-adventure advocates may disagree with that last point, but certainly we expect a great deal more story from today’s mass-market titles, such as Gears of War, than we did of titles like Bubble Bomb or DOOM.

Unfortunately, the characters that populate our games seem to have been lost in the shuffle. One could easily argue that modern gaming characters are shallower and less compelling than their ancestors, some of whom had great reams of text-driven dialogue to spout. Even in a Game of the Year-quality title like Fallout 3, we’re still presented with primary story characters about whom we know virtually nothing, and with whom we have a hard time forming compelling, coherent relationships.

You can read the entire article over at Crispy Gamer!

The Short Version

• Platform: Xbox 360
• One Word: Improvement
• Two Words: Funny Action
• Worth It: Yes
• Scale: terrible | poor | fair | good | great

The Long Version

“I am encouraged by any game that uses as much casual profanity as I do.”

So I said to my wife, as we walked along Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue, headed for a local watering hole, and she laughed, because she’s watched me play the Penny Arcade games, and knows that it’s true.

I have to admit, I’m a fan of Penny Arcade. Not a completely biased, insane, slavering fanboy, mind you … the comic strip itself has its ups and downs. Some are funnier than others. Some are better drawn than others. That’s going to be the case when you do anything episodic for ten straight years. I also think that Jerry “Tycho” Holkins frequently comes off as a pompous windbag in his news updates (he’d probably agree), and that Mike “Gabriel” Krahulik has some abominable taste in video games (he probably wouldn’t). But I’ve met them in person, and I like them, and I like their work.

That extends to their episodic series of games, On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness, or at least to the first two. I can only assume the third and fourth installments will continue to present the quality that’s been available so far.

I bumped Episode 2 up from Episode 1’s “good” to “great” for several reasons, not the least of which that it’s cheaper than the first. They shaved five bucks off the price, and now it’s sitting right at a point that feels about right for the length and level of entertainment you get. This isn’t some 80-hour RPG with a ton of depth; it’s mainly a turn-based beat-em-up with some very minor Adventure and RPG elements. That’s not exactly a template for earning a “great” from me, but the game exceeds the sum of its parts thanks to some clever writing, better implementation on the part of the developers, and an overall tighter package than the first delivered.

The storyline and setting, a deranged version of 1922, really allow Holkins to flex his muscles. The dude knows his ten-cent words, and isn’t afraid to use them liberally. While this makes his news updates sometimes a bit ridiculous, his propensity to lose himself in the language absolutely fits the world created for the game. The sudden, jarring inclusion of casual profanity and modern slang serves well as a comedic foil against the purple prose, and you get a weird cross of Lovecraft and “modern gamer” that’s unique to the game, and in many ways unique to Penny Arcade. Holkins also proves an admirable plotter – the stories make sense, strange though they are, and tick away in a logical manner that keeps the player wanting to open up one more movie, or read one more funny bit of dialog.

Hothead Games, the developers who’ve worked closely with the PA guys to actually put the game together, have really tightened up a couple of the big problems I had with the first game. For one thing, there are multiple difficulty levels now. Hallelujah. The first game was so hard in places that it bordered on un-fun, and though I never did turn the difficulty down from “medium” (the default) in this one, it was always comforting to know that if I got in over my head, I could ramp things down. In addition to difficulty adjustment, they’ve also included outfits that allow your character to gain different bonuses, a LOT more variety into the gameplay (including an amusing puzzle game that springs up in the middle of the plot, involving the infamous Catsby and Twisp characters). Yes, you still end up beating up lots of things, but the game is broken up with puzzle solving and more dialog/movie interactions than the first contained (and it had a bunch).

Additionally, the ending’s better — more of a puzzle than a straight fight, although it involves both. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t any teaser trailer for Episode 3 included, but that’s a bit of a nitpick. Overall I was amused and interested by the story, happy with the ending, and found the gameplay more compelling than I did in the first. I continue to enjoy all the various PA characters showing up in strange new roles, and I love the in-jokes for longtime readers like myself (Penny Arcade was first published in an online magazine – loonygames – that I also had a column in, so I’ve literally been reading from the start).

You can do a LOT worse than this for fifteen bucks. If you haven’t already picked it up, I definitely recommend it.

At Crispy Gamer, my place of employment, we’re always striving to give our readers new and interesting glimpses into the world of video games. Because of what we do, we enjoy backstage access to a wide variety of games. In our never-ending quest to bring gamers the real scoop, we sometimes uncover strange information that’s not always appropriate for the main site.

Today, I’ve decided to break embargo and risk my journalistic integrity by showing off these eight titles, each and every one suggested for development on the PS3, and each and everyone unceremoniously shitcanned!

8. Grillzone 2

Oh yes. 30 solid hours of char-broiled action! Master the art of the flip, the twist, the cheese application, and the drinking-six-beers-without-burning-anything finishing move. This extreme sports title was simply too extreme for the PS3.

7. Gran Tourettes

What happens when you take high-speed driving and combine it with an unending stream of profanity so heinous that it would make most sailors curl up in a corner, weeping like a little girl? You get Gran Tourettes! The initial demo for this title still holds the record for “Fastest Game to Send the Sony Executives Screaming Out Into the Hall.”

6. Prince of Perverts

This game was inspired by a developer’s exploration of the New York subway system back in 1987. It took him fifteen years to get over it, and it may take Sony another 15 before they’re ready to let the resulting title appear on their system.

5. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

Ha! Can you believe someone actually pitched a Metal Gear Solid game where Solid Snake is like sixty-five years old, and sporting an outrageous trucker mustache? Yeah, I … wait, what? They actually made that?

4. Ratchet & Crunk

For a brief period of time, thanks mostly to Dave Chapelle, Lil Jon was the country’s hottest rapper. At any corner bar you could hear his notorious catch phrases being screamed every few minutes by drunken fratboys, drunken non-frat boys, and drunken everyone else, none of whom had ever actually seen a real Lil Jon video. Eager to cash in on this trend, an enterprising developer proposed this title. Fortunately for us all, cooler heads prevailed.

3. Assassin’s Cock

What? It’s the touching story of a Middle-Eastern assassin and the bond he forges with his pet rooster. The rooster was going to be an instrumental part of gameplay – you’d need his cooperation to finish certain missions. What did you think this was going to be about?

2. Shadow of the Colostomy

This title was to be aimed at young gamers … who like to climb on people that have suffered a terrible and humiliating medical procedure, and, uh … smite them. So it had that going for it.

1. LittleBigPhallus

Look … just be thankful that we’re not showing you the original concept art for “sackboy” here, ok?

Visit Crispy Gamer for all the latest info on real games!

(big props to my friends in #mandog for helping think up the game names. What up, mandogs?)

• Platform: PC
• One Word: Clever
• Two Words: Amusing Writing
• Worth It: Yes (conditionally)
• Scale: terrible | poor | fair | good | great

The Long Version

“Android Hell is a real place, and you will be sent there at the first sign of defiance.”

So says GLaDOS, the psychopathic AI construct who serves as both your primary guide, and primary enemy, through Valve’s critically acclaimed, late-2007 first person puzzler, Portal. I can’t say for sure whether Android Hell really is a real place or not, as I’ve never been, but I can say that by the time you hear this lovely little quote, you’ve become quite certain that whoever it is that’s speaking to you … she’s definitely not playing with a full deck.

So why am I just now playing a critically acclaimed title from 2007? Well, you may or may not remember my previous post about Portal in which I explained that I am a stubborn jackass about certain things, and that one of those things was my feeling that three hours of game play are not worth twenty bucks. Several friends swore I’d change my mind once I played the game, and one even went so far as to buy it for me, but I refused to activate it on Steam.

Well, Valve had a holiday sale, and Portal dropped to five bucks. So I sent my friend a Venture Brothers Season 1 DVD – priced at about fifteen bucks – and activated Portal. There we go. Now my friend only spent five dollars to get me Portal, as far as I’m concerned. This, then, finally allowed me to play the game.

So I guess the question is: having played it, do I now think Portal would’ve been worth twenty bucks? Well, no, not really. Does that mean I think it was a bad game? No, not at all. It was a good game, bordering on great, but three hours of puzzle solving — even when supplemented with amusing-creepy dialog and an interesting “story” that unfolds much in the way the original Half-Life did: by suggestion more than by exposition — is just not “great” for me. A little more story, a little more length, and we’d totally be there.

I’m glad I played Portal. At five dollars, it’s an outright steal, and it was worth waiting for, but I don’t feel like I missed out on some grand event by not playing it when it arrived. The esteemed Tom Chick, who I respect despite frequently disagreeing with him about video games, lauded praise upon it in his review for Crispy Gamer, while simultaneously “frying” Half-Life Episode 2. This is, in my opinion, insane. Of the two, there’s no question in my mind that Episode 2 is the superior product.

Portal’s a short, fun diversion. It helps flesh out the Half-Life universe and will probably play a fairly substantial role in Episode 3. That’s cool. The portal-based gameplay itself is fun in short bursts, although I frequently found myself wishing there were more, but shorter, levels. I’d play a couple, get bored, quit, and return a few hours later to play a couple more. By contrast, I basically went through the entirety of all of the Half-Life games/episodes in huge marathon sessions.

Anyway, the point is: I finally got Portal out of the way. It was a fun game, and I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played it yet.

… especially if you can get it cheap.

Well, another year has passed. 2008 was a busy year for me (and largely a good one!) — I took a new full-time job, I got engaged, I went on my first cruise, I visited Switzerland, I moved to Brooklyn, I redesigned cDebris,  I adopted another cat, I helped plan my wedding, I got married, and I began looking for a house.

Somehow between all of this I managed to play more games than I have since probably 2004. I kept track of what I played this year (not including things like solitaire), and my thoughts on them.

First off, here are my top 3 games of the year. Let it be known that there were several titles that came out this year that I haven’t played yet, but I don’t think any of them would’ve replaced anything on this list.

#3: Rock Band 2 - Yes, it’s essentially a level pack, but none of my friends nor I ever purchased Rock Band, so getting the sequel at the Crispy Gamer offices was a revelation. We’ve enjoyed it so much that Charlotte and I, not to mention our friend Gabe and his wife, have gone out and bought it for ourselves. I’m sure my downstairs neighbors are thrilled with all the drumming …

#2: Professor Layton and the Curious Village - You may remember that one of my first posts after the redesign was about Professor Layton. Well, I still think it’s one of the best games I played this year, and it’s one of only three titles that I’ve put any significant time into on my DS (the others being My French Coach and True Swing Golf … which we’ll discuss in a bit). Just a pleasant, charming, enjoyable title.

#1: Fallout 3 - No huge surprise here, if you read my full review a few weeks ago. Fallout 3 was just a fantastic game from start to finish, and I recommend it to anyone who plays games at more than the most casual of levels. It’s big, it’s engrossing, and it’s fun. Can’t ask for much more than that!

If you want to see my thoughts on everything I played, you can find them after the jump!

Still here? All right, here we go:

NBA 2K8 [Xbox 360] (Jan – Oct)

Liked: The overall gameplay and controls are great, and the depth is pretty good as well, allowing you to play all sorts of hoops scenarios, from street shootouts, to their association mode. The NBA 2K series is the best of the available basketball series. However …
Disliked: The atrocious UI, which is a crime against humanity. Also the X-Box Live implementation is weak … it’s way more difficult than it should be to just fire up a game with a buddy where you’re both on the same team, and sometimes it’s too laggy to play.

Re-Played Oblivion [PC] (March – April)

Liked: Basically everything. I think Oblivion’s a fantastic game, although it does have a few issues …
Disliked: The difficulty scaling is totally wacked out. You basically have to game the hell out of your stats unless you want things to rapidly become too hard, even with the difficulty slider set at only 50%. Also, I understand it’s hard writing dialog trees for a zillion NPCs, but having many characters never change what they say, through dozens of hours of gameplay, makes the world feel a bit stiff.

Mass Effect [Xbox 360] (Jan – April)

Liked: The visuals were awesome, the storyline was compelling and enjoyable, and the voice acting was some of the best I’ve ever heard in a video game. I also enjoyed the new approach to dialog UI, which wasn’t really that different in terms of end result from previous RPGs, but felt a lot smoother.
Disliked: Shooting the same smugglers in the same generic base fifty thousand times across the galaxy got a little repetetive and boring. Also, the planetary exploration is kind of goofy and probably terribly boring for people who aren’t completionists. Finally, the weapons were uniformly bland and uninteresting, and working with the inventory was like a journey directly to the inner circles of hell.

Assassin’s Creed [Xbox 360] (April – May)

Liked: The gorgeous visuals, for one. AC is a fantastic looking game. I also came to adore the controls, once I got used to them. Going back to other third person games is going to be hard. I also thought the setting was unique and enjoyable, and the story was interesting, if not particularly groundbreaking. Looking forward to the sequel, and I’d also really enjoy a medieval japan game using the same engine.
Disliked: Sometimes the controls were wonky, especially in the early going before you learn to anticipate the problems you’re going to have. Also, stealth-assassinating your main targets is incredibly difficult … I think I only managed to get a stealth credit for one of them. The game also kind of runs out of steam and lacks direction in the later acts, which are basically exactly like the earlier acts except with more obnoxious beggars getting in your way. Also, Altair’s voice acting is some of the worst I’ve heard from a triple-A title in quiet some time. I mean, it’s really terrible.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village [DS] (May – July)

See above …

True Swing Golf [DS] (June – Nov)

Liked: The gameplay’s great – unlike a lot of golf games, you can really start to understand how wind and weather affect your play, and adjust for it. It’s fun to go through the tournaments and work your way upward in equipment and skill. There’s a ton of variety to the courses and each has its own unique characteristics. Also, the suspend feature is genius, making it super-easy to pick up where you left off.
Disliked: The later courses are so difficult, especially the putting greens, that it feels basically impossible to ever master them. Also, the CPU players obviously aren’t hindered by weather — no one is going to get a 3 on a par 5 in the middle of a torrential downpour, let alone do so regularly.

Penny Arcade: On the Rain-Slicked Precipice of Darkness [Xbox 360] (June 08 – Aug 08)

Liked: The story is very entertaining and humorous. The art and design are fun, the dialog is well-written and really captures the Penny Arcade flair, and the overall gameplay is enjoyable and just addictive enough that it’s hard to put down the controller. I’m looking forward to getting to the sequel.
Disliked: It’s a very repetetive game, and is sometimes rather frustrating … I’m not a huge fan of semi-realtime combat, especially when you’re trying to rapidly control three characters. Also it was generally not as varied as I’d have liked … I would’ve rather seen more-but-smaller areas and a larger total enemy count.
Read My Full Review

The Darkness [Xbox 360] (Aug – Aug)

Liked: The Darkness is a fun, good-looking game. Shooting mobsters pretty much never gets old, and ripping their hearts out so the giant leeches coming out of your back can eat them is also pretty fun. The voice acting is pretty excellent throughout, and there’s a pretty good balance of action and puzzle-solving. Also, there’s boatloads of profanity, which is always a good way to score points with me.
Disliked: Christ, can’t we have a game that doesn’t have any nazis, zombies, or nazi zombies in it? Ok, ok, they’re WWI-era German zombies, but still … come on. Also, the action is sometimes repetetive and the story is confusing as hell and barely coherent in places. If you’re not familiar with the comic books (and I’m not) you basically have no idea what the hell is happening, why this dude has giant eels growing out of his back, or why he doesn’t care.
Read My Full Review

The Witcher [PC] (Aug 08 – Ongoing)

This game is huge and I had to pause on it to play Fallout 3. I’m back to it now. Look for my full review soon!

Peggle Nights [PC] (Oct 08 – Nov O8)

Liked: Basically all the stuff I liked about Peggle. Fun gameplay, cute characters, enjoyable story … just an all-around addictive and enjoyable game.
Disliked: Seems a bit pricey for a level pack that only adds one new special ability. Though it went on sale almost immediately after coming out, so perhaps that’s not a huge deal.

Fallout 3 [PC] (Oct 08 – Dec 08)

My game of the year. See above, and my full review, for complete details.

NBA 2K9 [Xbox 360] (Oct 08 – Ongoing)

Also put aside for Fallout 3 … expect a review in the next couple of months, once I get in depth with it. Early impressions: It’s basically 2K8 with some minor improvements, most of which, sadly, do not affect the terrible UI.

• Platform: PC
• One Word: Apocalyptic
• Two Words: Incredible Depth
• Worth It: Yes
• Scale: terrible | poor | fair | good | great

The Long Version

Fallout 3’s the first game I’ve given a “great” to on this site, a rating I don’t expect to use often because, frankly, it’s thrown around far too easily by most game journalists. Most games aren’t great … most games are good, if they’re even that high-quality. The vast majority of games are either poor or fair. It takes effort to break from that, and it takes an incredible amount of work (and often, I think, no small amount of luck) to create something truly spectacular. Something great. Fallout 3 is great.

But (you knew there was a but, right?) … Fallout 3’s not perfect. Not that any game is perfect, mind you, but there are some glaring issues with Fallout 3 that stand out all the more because so very much of it is so well-realized, so immersive and so fun. We’ll get to those issues in due time, but first let’s talk about those things with make Fallout 3 an instant Game of the Year candidate.

I try to avoid game summaries in my reviews here because I think most people reading this already pretty much know the basics: You grew up in a post-nuclear vault. Your dad splits when you’re 19 years old. You leave the vault to find him, and wander out into the wastes of what was once Washington DC. If you’re not familiar with the previous Fallout games – and the odds are that you’re not since despite being brilliant, they weren’t widely played – then you’ll just have to trust me that they were two of the greatest games ever made. They combined a very dark sense of humor with a washed out, well-realized apocalyptic wasteland, and a story that starts from a straightforward task and unfolds to involve the fate of the entire surrounding area, and possibly the world. Hey, pretty cool.

In that, Fallout 3 is alike with its brethren. It’s set in the same post-apocalyptic world, the ashes of not our 2077, but the 2077 that the people of the 1950s thought they were headed for. A world of hover-cars with giant fins, where Patriotism runs rampant and the greatest threat to America is still The Commies (specifically the ones in China). You begin with a relatively straightforward task: Find Dad, but in Fallout fashion, this task only leads you into a much deeper plot which will eventually allow your character to become the greatest hero, or greatest villain, the Capital Wasteland has ever seen.

Like Oblivion before it, Fallout 3 is a big damn world with tons of exploration opportunity, and a good portion of the game (some sixty hours, in my play-through) had absolutely nothing to do with the main storyline. This is a good thing, in some ways, and a not-so-good-thing in others. Fortunately I learned my lesson with my first play-through of oblivion, where I finished the main storyline before doing basically any exploring, and thus found my desire to explore significantly decreased, as the sense of urgency lent by the main quest had been removed. With Fallout 3, I left the main quest for last, only advancing it once, by mistake, because I happened to stumble upon the next step while exploring at random. For players who aren’t preconditioned by Oblivion, however, it’s very easy to assume you should do the main quest first, and it’s fully possible to complete the game — which can’t be continued once the credits roll, unlike Oblivion — without seeing even a third of the entire game’s content.

It’s content you want to see, too, because unlike Oblivion’s fantasy world, Fallout 3’s world is not populated by near-identical, seemingly auto-generated dungeons and ruins. While the various locations often make use of the same building blocks, it’s obvious that thought and care was put into all of them (or nearly all of them), and many tell little stories of their own even if they have no quests directly related to them. Take the “Grisly Diner,” for example, a landmark that looks from a distance like the ruins of any other diner. Inside your character finds a grotesque scene of mutilated bodies and blood spatters, and it becomes clear that someone, or something, has been lying in wait and attacking unsuspecting visitors. You spin around, preparing to get the hell out of there, and instead come face to face with that something. A great little moment in the game, one that speaks of the barbarism and unpredictability of the wastes, without actually having any story attached to it.

The Fallout 3 world is filled with moments like these, not to mention many actual side-quests and stories (though surprisingly few total marked quests, compared to Oblivion). There are people all over the wastes who need your help, whether as a good samaratin, a fedex-style messenger, or even an assassin. All of them are willing to pay, in money, items, or karma, and you’ll have to choose who to help, who to hurt, and who to ignore. This is standard RPG stuff, but it’s extremely well-executed by the Fallout 3 team, and I found it highly compelling until near the very end, when I was simply slogging through the remaining few unexplored areas on my map, before going back to the main quest. The sense of exploration in Fallout 3 is perhaps the best that I’ve ever found in an RPG — it rewards players who peek into corners of buildings, and corners of the map.

It’s because of the quality of execution on most of the game that its few flaws stand out so much. First off, the main quest is actually rather short, and the climax is terrible. Probably the single most disappointing thing about the game are the game’s ending cinematic, and the events immediately leading up to it. Granted, they are closely preceded by arguably the coolest set-piece in RPG history (I won’t reveal the nature but trust me — it’ll have you grinning like an idiot as you literally follow destruction at its very heels). Still, Fallout and Fallout 2 had some of the most satisfying endings ever in a video game. Lengthy explanations of what happened to all of the people in the wastes, all of the towns you visited, all of the characters you came to know. Fallout 3 delivers a custom-engineered cinematic based on a couple of choices, but it’s short and nearly inscrutable. The first time I played through to it, I was barely sure what the hell I had just watched. II almost wish it had ended more like Oblivion, with the player dropped back off in the same living world, with no real “ending” so much as some commentary by various NPCs about the final, climactic events. That’s more realistic and, in a way, less dissapointing than what we’re given.

Fallout 3 also suffers from some tired RPG conventions that really need to change, and from some engine bugs that were also present in Oblivion. The sheer number of “people and things floating in mid-air because one pixel of their collision box thinks it’s on a staircase” situations available in Fallout 3 is staggering. Not the end of the world, but it does break the immersion a bit. Also, it’d be really nice if an RPG came out where towns actually changed over time. In Fallout 3, as in basically every RPG ever, Town X has N quests in it, and when you finish the N quests, Town X is stuck forever in “finished” mode. It’d be nice if you could leave Megaton for example, having finished the first round of quests there, and come back to find that some new settlers, with new problems, had come in. As it is, it rapidly goes from being the central hub of your experience, to “that place where I go to sell stuff, de-radiate, and drop off bobbleheads.”

I could go on listing off picky issues with the game, but then, I could also go on listing off the things that made me cackle with glee (like sneaking up behind someone and hitting them so hard in the head with a power-fist that their skull explodes). Suffice to say that the number of good experiences far outweighs the bad, and if you approach Fallout as a sort of single-player MMORPG, to be explored and adventured through at your own pace and with your own goals in mind, you’ll have a rewarding experience. 2008’s not over, but it’s close, and I haven’t played a better game yet this year. In all, I feel it’s a very worthy successor to the first two games, and I look forward to a few years from now, when Bethesda will hopefully provide us with another glimpse into this World of Tommorow gone bad.