Games, 2012

I already talked about my favourite films of 2012. So now it’s time to talk about my favourite games of 2012.

FTL

FTL is a deceptively simple game. You make your way across the galaxy, dealing with emergencies that come up. But it’s less frantic than it sounds. The game is rarely frantic. Any time you lose, it’s not because you weren’t fast enough to click on something, it’s because you made a bad strategic decision ten or twenty turns back. The best Star Trek game never made.

Dishonored

Just in terms of world-building, this game deserves some serious credit. The story was pretty disposable – a dystopian world, there’s a rebellion, you’re its last hope, nothing you haven’t seen before – but the depth of the world was incredible. Each character had a fleshed-out back-story, whether you interacted with them or not. And the game does nothing to force this on you. A lesser game would say WE PAID WRITERS A FORTUNE FOR THIS SHIT, SO WE’RE GOING TO MAKE SURE EVERYONE HEARS IT. Not Dishonored. Bless them.

Super Hexagon

Remember when I said that I’m not particularly good at games, but muddle my way through anyway? Super Hexagon is the perfect example of this. I’ve sunk a worrying amount of time into it and still haven’t beaten it on its third difficulty level (of six). But that’s okay, because I can feel myself getting better at the game, even if it’s only in millisecond increments. It’s the only game on the front screen on my iPhone. That says something, right?

Journey

Journey gave me a completely unique experience. As you make your way through the game’s dreamlike environment, your game may or may not intersect with the games of other people. You can’t touch these people or interfere with them. The only thing you can do is to ‘chirrup’ at them – a little sound, with a symbol appearing over your head. Each player’s symbol is unique, like a fingerprint. You don’t know who these people are and the only way to identify them is with this symbol. You could play through the game and intersect with lots of other players dropping in and out of your game. Or you could play through the game with one other person.

That’s what I did. I played through the entire game with one other person. Completely organically, we developed a way to communicate with each other through these chirrups. We’d fly around the levels and make different noises to say different things, like “over here!” or “where are you?”. We’d show each other cool things we found in the level. It was lovely. The last level is a cold, snowy mountain. As we made our way towards the peak, the cold started to affect our characters. We couldn’t chirrup as loudly any more. It was harder to stay together, with the wind blowing us around. We had to huddle together to keep our energy from completely disappearing. And even though we couldn’t communicate with chirrups any more, we didn’t need to. What we had to do was obvious. We had to stay together. That was all. Right at the end, you have to make it across a narrow ledge with the wind trying to blow you off. At the very last moments, before the turn into ‘safety’, I made it. I turned around, but my friend hadn’t. He’d been blown off.

I couldn’t believe it. I was distraught. I put the controller down, not knowing what to do. I waited there for fifteen minutes and he never came back. He was gone. That last part of the journey was the saddest thing I’ve ever experienced in a game. During the game’s credits, you are shown the symbols of each of the players you encountered and their PlayStation username. I messaged that guy straight away. I can’t imagine another game invoking a real, human-level connection with another person quite as well.

Mark of the Ninja

This was the most perfectly-judged game I played this year. The stealth mechanic was spot-on and actually meant that there was a sense of being a “ninja” (as opposed to most other games, where “ninja” means “guy with a sharp sword and throwing-stars”). I finished this game over the course of two sessions and immediately started a new game, on the newly-unlocked difficulty level, where your character has his field-of-vision limited to what’s in front of him. Oh wait, did I say “perfectly-judged”? Fuck those dogs.

Halo

In the fiction of the Halo universe, Master Chief is a supreme badass. Look at him in that trailer there, taking on twenty-foot tall space monsters like he hasn’t got a care in the world. Look at the way he moves, stringing together action after action after action. It’s balletic. Brutal, but graceful.

When I play the game, Master Chief is a braindead meatbag who is more likely to die in the first five minutes by throwing a grenade at his own feet because the person controlling him is trying to figure out what each button does. The kind of idiot who jumps into a firefight with one bullet in the clip, so he spends the next 10 seconds getting riddled with bullets as he stands there, reloading. He’s a moron whose neck muscles are made of jelly, so he spends almost the entire game looking either straight up or straight down.

This is because I’m not great at Halo¹.

I’ve accepted that I’m not great at certain games. Most games, to be honest. I’m okay with this. I muddle through. I’ll die a lot and eventually limp across the finish line. My death-count in VVVVVV stands in the couple-hundreds, but this is fine, because I’m getting through the game at my own pace. This is how I get my money’s worth.

Except with Halo, this approach seems wrong, like it’s missing the point. The main character, Master Chief, is not supposed to be the kind of person who just “muddles through”. I realise how stupid and overwrought this sounds, but I don’t feel like I’m doing justice to the character. The Halo story I’m playing out is wrong: my Master Chief doesn’t deserve any awe or respect.

And this is why it takes me months to finish an 8-hour game of Halo.

Movies, 2012

One of the resolutions I made at the beginning of 2012 was that I would document every single film I watched. I actually stuck to this resolution.

Here are ten of the best I saw this year:

Lawrence of Arabia, 1962

Are you fucking kidding me? I spent my entire life avoiding this film, thinking it would be a big, bloated mess, only good for background noise during your post-Christmas dinner nap. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was mesmerized by this film.

Silver Linings Playbook, 2012

If you’d have told me that David O. Russell would give us us one of sweetest, most tender depictions of depression and mental illness I can remember seeing, I would have called you a fucking jackass. But that’s exactly what he did.

The Master, 2012

I’m still not sure exactly what I saw or what it’s saying, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I saw it.

Moonrise Kingdom, 2012

My favourite Wes Anderson film since Rushmore.

Magic Mike, 2012

Balls to the haters, this was fun. When I went to see it, I was one of only three men in a crowded screening. That was one of the most hilarious cinema experiences I’ve ever had and I thank Magic Mike for giving me that.

Dredd, 2012 / The Raid, 2011

This is my blog and I’ll lump these two in together if I want to. They had similar setups, but as action films go, they both did great jobs of scratching totally different itches. And they were the two best action movies I saw all year.

The Cabin in the Woods, 2011

Why do they even have that button?

50/50, 2011

A great little film that could have been lost underneath the egos of the actors involved. Fortunately, it wasn’t.

Argo, 2012

Even if the film wasn’t any good (it was), this would be on here for Ben Affleck’s beard alone.

Indie Game: The Movie, 2012

A lot of documentaries this year didn’t seem to have anything to say and were content to just be a collection of unconnected vignettes (Queen of Versailles, for example, has no through-line, the makers just happened to be in the right place at the right time). Indie Game: The Movie did a great job of shining a light on the vast wealth of human emotions that go into something as apparently frivolous as an independent video game.