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.

Next week I’m going to try to post a new web design tutorial. See you all soon. Happy New Year!

On that exciting, autobiographical note, here now are the links for the first half of Voices - Chapter 8, beginning with Page 75. It’s available in the Writing section, as always.

If you’re celebrating New Years Eve tonight, I recommend partying responsibly … by which I mean drinking like a fish, but not getting behind the wheel of a car. That’s our plan, along with consuming massive quantities of delicious, Caribbean-themed snacks. It may be cold and gross out in Brooklyn, but in our apartment, we’re all going to be Barbados Slim for the night!

Half of Chapter 8 coming tomorrow, the other half on Thursday, and the final five pages (Chapter 9) coming on Friday. Hooray!

I’ve managed to put together all of Chapter 6 for you, starting with Page 53. You can find it in the Writing section, or just click one of those there links. Therein you will find the continued adventures of our ragtag band of misfit superheroes.

Come back tomorrow for more!

We start by finishing up Chapter 5, and then I’m going to try like hell to finish the entire thing this week, so that I can get on to posting new things, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, web design tutorials, or just general musing on life in Brooklyn and my continued obsession with the real estate market here.

So. Voices, Chapter 5, pages 47 through 52. Here you go, in the Writing section as always. Enjoy, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow!

The latest version of WordPress has a new admin interface, and it makes posting pages a bit easier, so that’s a good thing. Should make it easier to finish this thing up. There’s still a lot of pages to go!

Anyway, the latest pages can be found in the Writing Section, as always.

More soon!

• 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.

I am a lucky man.