Tag Archives: Games

Best Games I Played in 2018

Previously: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, [2017][5] It’s probably obvious but still worth mentioning that this entire list is based on an extremely incomplete sampling. I had very little free time in 2018, so I had to be ruthless with the games I played. For example, I slowly made my way through 2017’s Assassin’s Creed: Origins somewhere around the middle of the year. And I loved it so much. It probably would have been in my list of favourite games of 2017. But am I in a hurry to drop another 60 hours on Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey now? Am I fuck. Anyway, here we go.

Minit

My son – my second child – was born in March, which meant that my free time in 2018 was more precious than ever before. Thank fuck, then, for a game like Minit, which respects the player’s time. I was able to dip in and play this in tiny drops.

Florence

It’s pretty rare to see a video game even try to tackle the subject of interpersonal relationships, and it’s even rarer to see one incorporate the subject into the mechanics of the game.

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker

Is this a bit of a cheat because it’s a remaster of an old game? I don’t care. I played through this all over again on the Switch and I loved it all over again.

Red Dead Redemption 2

This is everything I wanted from a sequel to one of my favourite games of all time: a giant cowboy sandbox, with sliiiightly wonky controls that make everything just that little bit more interesting.

Marvel’s Spider-Man

For a while there towards the end of the year, this game was very much my happy place. It still is. When I want to relax and shut out the world for a while, I’ll fire up Spider-Man and just swing around the city. Maybe not coincidentally, this is the first game on the PS4 that I’ve platinumed.

Gorogoa

I still don’t understand how a human mind could have created something like this.

Return of the Obra Dinn

When I was 12 or 13, I got a Panasonic 3DO for Christmas along with a copy of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel. And while the 3DO isn’t the best console in the world and this Sherlock Holmes game is definitely not the best game in the world, they both have a really special place in my heart. When I think back to my time spent playing that game and the way it had my dumb little 12-year old brain cracking its mysteries, I’m reminded of all the things around the game. Like I remember that Christmas being the last one where everyone I knew and loved was happy. Like, genuinely, sincerely happy. And so it’s a very warm game for me. It’s a strange comparison, I know, but Return of the Obra Dinn gave me those same feelings and the whole time I was playing it, I was brought right back to that Christmas, on that couch in my Ma’s front room. Which is pretty spectacular when you consider it’s basically just a giant logic puzzle

Tetris Effect

Every year, it feels like there’s one game that stands out for me because of the way it helps me tackle whatever anxiety or depression or other emotional issues I might be going through at the time. This year, it’s Tetris Effect. A real joy of a game that will be unfairly overlooked because it’s “just Tetris”.

Subnautica

With games like Minecraft, the most entertaining and the most magical part of the game is the first few minutes, when you’re first getting set up and exploring and struggling to survive. Subnautica somehow managed to sustain this feeling for hours.

[5]: http://best games I played in 2017

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Elegy for a Dead World – Kickstarter

I try not to post about the kickstarter campaigns I support (because there’s not enough disk space in the world for that – sorry wife!), but I’m willing to make a huge exception for this. It’s such a great idea: a game where you write the story of what you’re seeing. And then you get to share your story with other people. And you can read other people’s stories! This sounds amazing. Insta-back.

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Baba Yetu

If you didn’t think *Civilization IV* had an embarrassment of riches, last night, Christopher Tin’s ‘Baba Yetu’ — the theme song for *Civ IV* — became the [first ever piece of music written for a videogame to ever win a grammy](http://www.strategyinformer.com/news/10982/civilization-iv-wins-grammy-award).

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Death in Videogames

[Kotaku – There is real death in this video game](http://kotaku.com/5739362/there-is-real-death-in-this-video-game)

> Beloved niche PC publishers Paradox Interactive today revealed Salem, a free-to-play MMO that wants to make sure that players take their decision-making seriously. To this end, things you do in the game are promised to have a lasting effect, while more importantly, if you die, you are dead.
>
> Your character is gone, and all your equipment is set loose for other players to grab. There is no respawning, no retention of your name or your stats or your skills. You are simply dead, and if you want to play again, you need to start all over at the beginning with a new name and a new character.
>
> … It’s a brave decision, and one that has a far more drastic impact than in a singleplayer game, where you’re the only person who cares. In an MMO, when you die, you can be *mourned*.

I love this idea, and I applaud the publishers for having the balls to put out a videogame that actually deals with death in a serious way, beyond the usual “LOL I TOTALLY JUST SHOT THAT FUCKER IN THE FACE.” My only concern is with how they are planning on implementing this. When you die, will you immediately be able to start a new character? Will they ban your account for a period of time? Death only has meaning because of its permanence. It’s the ultimate full-stop. There’s no coming back. And in an MMO, the character doesn’t matter, the *player* matters. So the idea that a player can just roll a new character and maybe even be present for the ‘funeral’ of his previous character bothers me slightly, like it’s missing the point slightly. Why would anyone mourn a character when they know the player is still around – the same person in a different avatar?

Still, it’s a step in the right direction.

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Videogames in the wild

Illustrator Aled Lewis has put together a series of images of videogame characters put into real-world settings, and some of them are terrific.

Off The Dirt Track

Hyrule Field

We Need A Montage

Check out [his full Flickr stream](http://www.flickr.com/photos/35699504@N00/) for more.

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Super Meat Boy

Super-Meat-Boy-Punch-580x361.jpg

People have been calling *Super Meat Boy* [‘one of the hardest games ever made’](http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/super-meat-boy/critic-reviews). [Over at Gamestyle](http://gamestyle.com/)One of the most underrated videogame blogging sites around, Bradley Marsh described it as [“a game made by sadists, for masochists”](http://gamestyle.com/reviews/1974/super-meat-boy/).

With all due respect to Bradley, and to everyone else who has been focusing on the difficulty of *Super Meat Boy*, you’re wrong.

There’s no sadism involved. This isn’t a game designed to punish you. It’s not a game like *Trials HD*, where the pieces have been placed in an clever, but nearly-random order and you have to forcibly wrench a victory from the game, like taking a gun from Charlton Heston’s cold, dead hands. *Super Meat Boy* has been designed by geniuses. I haven’t finished it yet (I’m still stuck in the post-Halloween glut of gaming), but every single level I have played so far has been designed within an inch of its life so that there is one completely perfect run-through that can be achieved in the minimum amount of time, usually just a few seconds. It’s when you dawdle that the game gets difficult. In other words, if you aren’t playing this game with the ‘run’ button permanently held down, then you’re not playing it properly.

Finding this perfect path through the level is tricky, and for the most part, it’s a matter of trial-and-error. But at least the game is smart enough to have almost no loading times so that when you die, you instantly restart the level. Frustration never gets a foothold. And when you finally *do* succeed and finish the level, you’re treated to a replay, showing all of your attempts to beat the level simultaneously, a glorious jamboree of death and failure and eventual triumph.

One thing though, no-one is wrong about how good this game is. Easily the best platform game I’ve played in years. I can’t recommend it enough.

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32 Days of Mass Effect

In [an interview with IGN](http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/111/1118657p1.html), BioWare revealed some of the stats they’ve collected about people’s *Mass Effect 2* habits. Interestingly, half of the players imported their game from the first *Mass Effect* and only half of the players actually finished *Mass Effect 2*. Much more interestingly is the revelation that four Xbox players completed the game 23 times.

Considering they also say that the average time to complete a game of *Mass Effect 2* is 33 hours, that means these four people spent roughly 32 solid days of their life playing this game. That’s almost five weeks. Solid.

Whoa.

(For context, [the average American spends two weeks of their *entire life* kissing](http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002800160_kiss12.html))

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Mass Effect 2: Addendum

There’ll be some discussion of the ending of Mass Effect 2, so if you haven’t played that game all the way through and you like your life spoiler-free, stop reading now

After about 30 hours of playing, I finally, finally finished Mass Effect 2. And having finished it now, I’m still happy that pretty much everything I said about the game still stands. There were a couple of side-missions that were time-based: you have X number of minutes to escape from X or to stop X from happening, but these were still small, local instances, usually coming at the ends of missions. There was no sense of urgency to any the larger narrative. Take all the time you need; that person dying of space-flu or space-gonorrhoea or whatever in isn’t going anywhere. He’s in another mission. Sure, the galaxy needs saving, but – holy shit! – that Krogan hasn’t tasted sushi before. Better take care of that first!

Which is why the ending feels like such a cheap shot.

After being stung by some of my choices at the end of the first Mass Effect – where the game pulled a switcheroo and the person I actually wanted to save ended up being the person that died – I made sure that, for Mass Effect 2, I read up about the ending and what choices I should make if I wanted my characters to survive. Some might call this cheating. To this, I say: FUCK YOU. Including the first game, I’ll have spent around 60 hours playing as this character and I’m not going to leave this shit to chance again.

Anyway, the Gamefaqs entry for Mass Effect 2 includes this little warning:

CONSEQUENCE OF DELAY

When you return to the Normandy, you will have the ability to go through the Omega 4 relay in pursuit of the Collector ship. If you go on any other missions first, half the Normandy’s crew will be killed, including Yeoman Chambers.

Now, I wasn’t affected by this because, like I said, there were almost no side-missions left by the time I came to travelling through the Omega 4 relay. But still, I feel like this is unnecessarily punitive, especially since that the developers have established one rule throughout the game: that you can delay and it doesn’t matter. Why the abrupt change? Why punish players like this? Why Yeoman Chambers?!

For the record (and as I mentioned on Twitter), immediately after saving the galaxy, I jumped straight in and did the dirt on Miranda. Commander Shepard: space mutt

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Red Dead Redemption: The Other Side of the Coin

A couple of days ago, I wrote about how *Red Dead Redemption* could be seen as a useful metric to [demonstrate how far videogaming has come](http://lowbrowculture.com/2010/07/12/we-deal-in-lead/). Now I want to discuss the other side of that argument, how *Red Dead Redemption* represents how far videogames still have to go as a medium.

Let’s tackle the issues in reverse order

##The Ugly

[As Emmett points out](http://blog.thoughtwax.com/2010/07/chasing-a-sound-in-your-head/comment-page-1#comment-182018), despite being labelled an ‘open world’ game, *Red Dead Redemption* does not offer the player a particularly satisfying level of immersion and freedom. There’s very little actual ‘openness’. It’s hard to play this game and not feel an amount of disappointment with the enormous gap between what is possible in the game and what you *wish* was possible. As with almost every game I play (especially these open world, sandbox games), the first thing I did with *Red Dead Redemption* was to test just how far I could push the game until it breaks. This gives me a feel for the ‘rules’ of the world I’m in. I started running around, knocking things over, knocking *people* over. I wanted to see if there was any way to get the non-player characters to react to me in the world. Nothing happened. I spent five minutes pushing one NPC into a fire, and again, nothing happened. One of the face-buttons on the controller allows you to ‘interact’ with NPCs; however, this could be more accurately described as a button that allows you to “tip your hat and say ma’m”. It does nothing else. This is the extent of your ability to interact with the majority of characters beyond shooting them deadEven this isn’t final. I can’t think of the amount of times I shot the poker players in Armadillo only to have them re-appear the next day.

And while I praised *Read Dead Redemption* for the range of possibilities it presented, the game offers little outside the realm of prescribed activities. Apart from the [hilarious](http://www.youtube.com/user/WhereDaBootz#p/u/16/rFoMvLmfFEY) [bugs](http://www.youtube.com/user/WhereDaBootz#p/u/18/7q7v4F8r9Og), very little emergent behaviour is possible within the strict videogame framework. Despite being traditionally one of the most popular activities in westerns, your character cannot rob a bank. One could argue that this is intended to keep your character in line with the game’s narrative (similar to why you cannot hire a prostitute in this game, despite it being one of the most famous features of its *Grand Theft Auto* cousins). Why, then, can none of these things be done during the game’s epilogue, when none of these rules apply?

On the other hand, perhaps this criticism is unfair. True ‘openness’ is virtually impossible to achieve without the assistance of a real games master behind the curtain — as in Jason Rohrer’s [Sleep is Death](http://sleepisdeath.net/) — or a virtual one — such as the kind of thing we’re approaching with [Left 4 Dead’s AI Director](http://left4dead.wikia.com/wiki/The_Director). On the plus side, at least the game’s setting helps give the lack of activity a sense of reality. For me, one of the most frustrating parts of *Grand Theft Auto IV* was the way in which the city appeared to be a bustling metropolis, a living world, yet the vast majority of the buildings were just flat textures draped over geometric shapes which you couldn’t interact with. Plus, with the crowds of people in *GTAIV*, there was enough character model repetition to break any sense of believability. It’s hard to take a game seriously when it randomly sends a herd of identical characters coming your way. *Red Dead Redemption* at least does away with these unbelievable flat-textured districts populated by clones in favour of a more believable barely-populated expanse of prairie. This at least makes sense within the context of its setting.

##The Bad

In my previous post, I mentioned how *Kane* was criticised for not having enough for the player to do. However, no-one complained about the weak-sauce narrative that supposedly tied the entire thing together. Maybe this was just a product of its time – ‘story’ didn’t seem to be a major concern in 1986 (the year that gave us *Crocodile Dundee*, *Cobra* and *Police Academy 3: Back in Training*). Or maybe it’s just that no-one thought a videogame could or *should* have a good story, so it was just taken as given that any story tacked onto a videogame would be a pile of ass. Who cares about story when shit blows up good?

First of all, let’s call a spade a spade. It’s 2010 and the story of *Red Dead Redemption* is no great shakes either. An outlaw, trying to mend his ways but brought back out for one last job. If that sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because it’s also the plot of Clint Eastwood’s [Unforgiven](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105695), a film that the developers return to again and again. Along the way, *Read Dead Redemption* touches on themes of manifest destiny, the taming of the frontier west and the whole Conradian question of whether civilisation is actually just savagery with a nattier dress sense. Again, these are themes that we see time and again across the entire Western genre. When *Red Dead Redemption* actively attempts to tackle these themes, it demonstrates just how immature videogames are as a storytelling form. For example, as a mouthpiece for the supposed dangers of scientific hubris and the inherent savagery hidden beneath civility, Harold MacDougal is handled dreadfully. There is no subtlety to any of his conversations. It’s as if Rockstar were so afraid that people might miss their point with this character that they decided to hit the player over the head.

Few characters in the game are handled much better than MacDougal. For the briefest of moments, I thought Rockstar were demonstrating an understanding of subtlety with their handling of the relationship between Vincente de Santa and Quique Montemayor. The first time you meet them, there is a brief look between the two of them that makes you think “hey – are they together?” It was so brief, so easy to miss that I thought maybe I was either imagining it or reading too much into a few keyframes thrown in by a bored animator. A few more interactions and it is hinted that, yes, these characters are in a homosexual relationship. But just like with MacDougal, the game eventually gives over, afraid that you might have missed those hints, again hits you over the head with the point: these characters are gay. This isn’t even the worst of *Read Dead Redemption*’s crimes against characterisation. Marshall Johnson is little better than a slightly less hateful (but similarly, slightly less nuanced) version of *Unforgiven*’s Little Bill Daggett. Landon Ricketts is clearly the bastard son of Lee Van Cleef and Sam Elliott. The snake oil salesman, Nigel West Dickens, well… well, he’s just a sophomoric creation lacking any sort of nuance or wit.

As well as the characters, many of the game’s missions are also lifted from films. For example, the stampede scene from *Red River* becomes an entire mission in *Read Dead Redemption*. Another involves rescuing Bonnie MacFarlane from hanging, just like in *Hang ‘Em High*. Robbing a train full of ammunition? *The Wild Bunch*. The side-mission where the player must save a person from being hung by shooting the rope is obviously taken directly from *The Good, The Bad and the Ugly*. Except without any of the tension or narrative support. Throughout the game, you are asked to save prostitutes from being sliced by some knife-wielding cowboy who, just like in *Unforgiven*, took offence at the prostitute laughing at the size of his penis. *Unforgiven* turned hat event into the inciting incident of that film. *Red Dead Redemption* treats it like a throwaway joke.

Against direct comparisons to film (which it seems to openly invite), *Red Dead Redemption* falls completely flat. The lack of originality in its storytelling is only exacerbated by the ham-fisted way in which it is executed.

##The Good

With that said, what these films fail to achieve and what Rockstar seem to pull off so easily is to provoke an emotional reaction to its themes. *The Wild Bunch* can make you think about the end of the era of the outlaw cowboy, but *Red Dead Redemption* can actually elicit an emotional response to this same theme. The reason Rockstar succeed where the movies fail is because of immersion. Your own experience is central to *Red Dead Redemption*, and placing you inside a well-realised world helps colour your experience.

*Mise-en-scene* is an enormous part of storytelling. I’m a huge theme park nerd, and my favourite part of any good theme park ride is the pre-show area, where you queue to actually get on the ride. To stop punters getting bored, the creators of theme park rides often litter the queuing area with props which create atmosphere and allow the punter to construct their own story before they even get on the ride. When it’s done well, the scene-setting transforms [a good ride](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Drop_tower_Santa_cruz_boardwalk.JPG) into [a great ride](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Zone_Tower_of_Terror).

Videogames have the ability to create a level of *mise-en-scene* that film, as a medium, has no hope of replicating. *Red Dead Redemption* is filled with incidental details that serve no explicit storytelling purpose but just enrich the atmosphere of the game. Props that tell stories, if you want them to. For example, although it isn’t beaten to death in the game, Marshall Johnson is a widower. If you want to, you can find his wife’s gravestone in the local graveyard. This allows the player to fill in the gaps and construct a back-story for Johnson, more than actually comes up in the course of gameplay. Likewise, the environment is dotted with things for people to find. For example, the [‘Mystery Site’ at Repentance Rock](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3i4DaqKPuE) [has become famous](http://reddead.wikia.com/wiki/Mystery_Site) precisely because there’s no explanation for it. It’s just there for players to stumble across and flesh out their experience. A film, on the other hand, is limited in how much it can put on screen. It must be judicious in its *mise-en-scene*. Too much and it can be confusing. As huge a fan as I am, Terry Gilliam sometimes tries to cram so much on screen at once that his films become visually distracting*The Adventures of Baron Munchausen* is one of my favourite films of all time, but I think I’ve only twice managed to watch it in one sitting. Every other time, my brain just *shuts down* from overstimulation.

Similarly, while film places the audience very much apart from the action, but videogames literally puts you *inside* of the action. This isn’t someone else’s story, this is *your* story. Although everyone plays the same game, the way in which you approach this game allows you to write your own story. How many people came across [grieving suicide man](http://lowbrowculture.com/2010/07/12/we-deal-in-lead/)? How many did it while hunting beaver in Aurora Basin? How many did it having just survived an attack by a grizzly bear *and* a coyote? How many players actually came across the Mystery Site at Repentance Rock? Although I share experiences with other people who played *Red Dead Redemption*, my play-through is *my* story. While some people argue that this kind of immersion can have a negative effect, it’s also one of the medium’s biggest strengths.

From a storytelling point of view, immersion is a valuable tool that *Red Dead Redemption* often uses to its full advantage. Even without the overarching narrative of the cutscenes and interactions with characters — the traditional storytelling tools used in videogames — the game tells an entire story just using atmosphere and its immersion.

(Here’s where I’m going to have to get a bit spoiler-heavy. If you haven’t played the game to see “REDEMPTION” flash across the screen, you might want to stop reading now).

The opening acts of Red Dead Redemption take place in the classic image of the frontier west: one-horse towns with ramshackle, wooden buildings. Lawless places where [storekeepers aren’t afraid to tell you about their hatred of the jews](http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2010/05/im-your-huckleberry.html). These towns paint a picture. Just as the town of Deadwood was as important a character to that show as Al Swearingen and Seth Bullock, the frontier towns you visit in the game are as important to the story of *Red Dead Redemption* as Nigel West Dickens and Landon Ricketts. You spend a good twenty hours in this version of west and, at the end of those twenty hours, you come to appreciate it, you come to romanticise it. Although some might accuse me of overstating my case, I’ll say you actually develop an *emotional attachment* to this placeOn a similar note, I’d argue that the 12 or so lonely hours you spend in the world of *Shadow of the Colossus* helps you develop an enormous bond with your only companion throughout that game — your horse, Agro — to similar emotional results.

So, when you finally reach the town of Blackwater, the last section of the game — with its brick buildings, tea rooms and vision of modernity — you actually feel out of place. You feel as if you are, as Landon Ricketts says, a relic, an anachronism. I personally felt a genuine sense of disappointment that I’d left the west that I’d come to love, because as a player, you understand *that* version of the west. As a character, MacDougal might be clumsily written, but he’s a perfect cipher for the entire town of Blackwater – underneath his facade of physiognomy, MacDougal is a racist prick – perhaps worse than the shopkeeper in Armadillo because he believes his racism is scientifically justified (the shopkeeper just hates Jews, take it or leave it). Blackwater is probably more savage than any of the frontier towns you’ve visited — suddenly you don’t feel as if the things you’re forced to do are serving any sort of ‘greater good’, they’re just plain mean — but Blackwater hides this savagery under a facade of modern brickwork and electricity.

The experience of reuniting with your family at the end is difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t played through to this part of the game. Having been exposed to the viciousness and brutality of Blackwater and having finally put a (somewhat unsatisfactory) end to your outlaw days, a return to a more straightforward, rural life is incredibly affecting. You might not be taking on gangs of armed bandits, but the idea of spending a few hours tending to your herd, teaching your son to shoot — the quiet life — feels like a *reward*. As I pointed out, *Read Dead Redemption* essentially apes the entire plot of *Unforgiven*, yet for everything that film did right, at no point did it make me feel any sort of emotional connection to Clint Eastwood’s character. At no point did I have the tiniest inkling of what it meant to put down guns, leave the outlaw way of life behind and to settle down. For everything *Read Dead Redemption* did wrong, I *understood* this. I *felt* this.

In many ways, the twenty-four years that separate *Kane* and *Read Dead Redemption* are like the hundred-something years that separate the Lumiere brothers’ *Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat* and James Cameron’s blockbuster *Avatar*. There’s no question that Cameron trumps the Lumieres in terms of sheer spectacle, but it’s debatable whether his film actually represents a century of storytelling progress. The level of technological sophistication in *Read Dead Redemption* is leaps and bounds above that of *Kane*, but at the same time, there can be little doubt that the level of storytelling has also improved. Granted, we’re talking about the progression from virtually nothing to [mere cave paintings](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9y6MYDSAww), but it’s still a demonstrable improvement. But, more hopefully, there’s improvement in the right direction. Rather than simply aping films and filmic conventions, videogames are finding their own feet when it comes to storytelling. They are using the uniqueness of their own medium to their advantage.

It’s a start, right?

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