All posts by Olly

Best of 2010, Games, GOTY, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2010

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That’s another year down, and the sixth since I started doing this thing. It’s hardly seemed like a vintage year for gaming, to be honest, but looking back on my highly classified text document in which I keep track of anything that might be worthy of this list from 1st January until now, I was reminded of the Call of Duty effect, which resulted in some of 2010’s best games fleeing the Christmas bloodbath to be equally squeezed out in the year’s early months. Hopefully it’s not a trend, even if this year looks similar. We just have to hope that Activision bleeds COD dry as quickly as it did Guitar Hero, I guess.

So anyway, usual rules apply: any game that was released somewhere in the world in the calendar year 2010 is eligible and… that’s it. In fact, I might be abusing the ‘somewhere in the world’ rule to sneak in a game that I neglected last year. We’ll just have to wait and see.

My lists for 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Games, Impressions, iOS, Tech

Infinity Blade

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If you’re an owner of an iOS device who’s looking for a way to show off your hardware, Infinity Blade is the obvious choice. It looks simply gorgeous, and on the high-res iPhone 4 screen the image quality is astounding, giving many 360 and PS3 games a run for their money. When something as good-looking as Rage HD is being outdone so quickly, it suggests that iOS gaming is really going somewhere.

But at the same time, if you’re of the opinion that gaming on a phone is no substitute for buttons and a D-pad, it could qualify as your Exhibit A as well. It’s limited, largely on rails, consists mostly of the same 20 minutes or so of gameplay repeated infinitely, and the occasional death because you missed the on-screen dodge button isn’t out of the question.

I’m firmly in the former camp on this one, though. But beyond being a technical showpiece it’s a great little action RPG, ideally suited for playing on a phone and being quite unique in its ability to blend Demon’s Souls with Punch-Out. It’s also nice to have a game from Epic that looks so different to what we now expect from Unreal Engine games, and the fact that this was developed by Chair, the team behind the similarly impressive Shadow Complex, suggests great talent in that studio.

Rage HD is somewhat disappointing in that, beautiful as it is, it’s largely a tech demo with some on-rails score-chasing shooting, whereas Unreal Engine 3 has had its iOS tech demo in the awesome Epic Citadel – and didn’t charge for it. Infinity Blade is a big advert for the engine as well, but it’s also a brilliant little game that would still be worth buying had it looked like a PS1 game. Having put hours numbering well into double fingers into this already, I eagerly await the promised updates with new loot, new areas and – YES! – online play.

Games, Impressions, Xbox

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX

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Biggest surprise of the year? No need for a vote because this is definitely it. Truthfully I had no idea that this was even coming out, and it’s already only the third game for which I’ve unlocked all the achievements – not too difficult in this one, admittedly – and has sucked up hours on chasing high scores. No score attack game has had its hooks into me like this since Geometry Wars.

In the pantheon of classic retro arcade games, I’ve always had a soft spot for Pac-Man, and feel that its classic high-score-chasing gameplay has held up better than many of its contemporaries. Really, jazz it up with some HD neon graphics and I’d be pretty happy to pay for that, but the Championship Edition gave it a full modernisation, ramping the speed up to sometimes ridiculous levels, giving it a pumping soundtrack, doubling the maze width, and bringing in a host of new mechanics. This DX edition brings in some new mazes and further tweaks, so it’s one of those convenient follow-ups for latecomers that renders the original redundant.

But even with all the modes and mazes to choose from, I’m happy with the new Championship II on the standard five-minute score attack. That’s where the competitive play is, and although I’m unlikely to reach much beyond my current position, skimming the top 1,000, adding a few thousand to your top score and pushing yourself up the ranking is brilliantly intense. Get much beyond about 1,300,000 points and it becomes necessary to get yourself completely ‘in the zone’, and one mistake can warrant a restart – and you’re still miles off the 2,000,000+ scores at the top of the leaderboard.

I’m not the only one who’s gone head over heels for this game, and even if you’re one of the multitude of Call of Duty addicts, this is highly recommended. The five-minute games lend themselves to quick blasts now and again, with the occasional new high score dangling like a carrot the whole time, and as I’ve jumped between my current playlist of Black Ops, Halo: Reach and Castlevania, it’s become the perfect palate cleanser. Work up those reactions for COD after a spot of adventuring, or relieve the pressure of a hard day’s deathmatching before you go to bed.

Or, more likely, some twerp on my friends list is taunting me about overtaking my high score again…

Editorials, Games, Impressions, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Black Ops: Dumbest Plot Ever

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Seriously, for a game that’s following Modern Warfare 2, that’s saying something.

When this was announced, and given its historical setting, I expected Treyarch to have a bit of fun with the story, but to generally keep it within the bounds of plausibility. Maybe use the Vietnam levels for all-out action, and then be a bit clever with the other ones, having you sneaking into Soviet territory for low-key deniable ops of the kind that the series has done so well before.

What I didn’t expect was full-on invasions of Russia involving deadly chemical weapons, JFK conspiracy theories, a gulag escape involving a minigun – with those in prison camp cupboards, it’s no wonder the Soviet Union fell – and what is essentially the plot of The Manchurian Candidate. And that’s without mentioning the dream characters.

For all the outrageous stupidity of Modern Warfare 2’s plot, that at least had the defence of a near-future setting, but a Call of Duty in a historical scenario has come a long way – backwards, in my opinion – from the days of COD and COD2, when the emphasis was on being a grunt in a unit of grunts, rather than a special forces superhero. That was what the series was supposed to be a move away from, because it’s what everyone else was doing.

Still, good game, isn’t it?

Editorials, Games, Impressions, iOS, Tech

Apple’s Game Center

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It’s become a fixture of any Apple conference involving the iOS devices that there will be some chart explaining how it’s a bigger portable gaming platform than anything from Nintendo or Sony, and more often than not it’s laughed off. Just because a phone and/or MP3 player plays games, that doesn’t make it a games console, after all, no matter how impressive the numbers might be.

With yesterday’s release of iOS 4.1 and with it Game Center, Apple’s made quite a significant move, issuing an admittedly limited but still promising gaming network, and the first on a portable gaming system that comes close to the ubiquity of Xbox Live and PSN. It’s arguably even more so, given that you have an essentially permanent connection through which to manage your friends and achievements – the current PSP and DS hardware wouldn’t be able to equal it in that respect even if they tried.

At this early stage Game Center is pretty bare bones, below even existing third-party attempts like OpenFeint and Plus+ in features and support, but it’s the ubiquity that makes it a big deal. That and the fact that it’s really Apple’s first ever move into the gaming market. Now every one of those 230,000 new iOS devices activated each day has a bona fide gaming network built in, and although not everyone will use them for games, the 120 million iOS devices sold since 2007 shits all over the records of any console ever – going by these figures, only two consoles have ever exceeded that mark, and both of those did it with more than a decade on the market.

Many gamers will, of course, never take it that seriously. Gaming on iOS is a secondary feature, and it’s a secondary feature on a portable, which some stubbornly refuse to give the credit of the ‘real’ consoles no matter what huge franchises turn up on them. I can definitely see that perspective for iPhone games, as many attempts to cram existing games onto the touch controls make early attempts at putting an FPS on the PSP feel like a mouse and keyboard, but it’s still the first go-anywhere system with an always-on Internet connection and a proven digital distribution model – it’s the kind of thing that only a few years ago we’d fantasise about future consoles doing, and it got in by the back door.

Is the iPhone going to kill the 3DS before it even gets to market? No, of course not. It’s going to be a serious player, though; I’m sure of it. It’s already everywhere, it’s been shown to be a graphical powerhouse, and games are dirt cheap. You won’t see its impact in the charts, which makes it something of an oddity, but expect impressive graphs when Steve Jobs steps out on stage in January.

Games, Impressions, iOS

DoDonPachi Resurrection

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Although I’ve got a handful in my collection, I’m far from a shmup maven like some of my friends are. It’s one of those things that I just don’t ‘get’. Things like Radiant Silvergun are at least fair, but shooters of the bullet hell variety – check out this example from Mushihime-sama – are pure masochism. I can’t see where the fun comes from in something like that.

Nonetheless, I picked up DoDonPachi Resurrection at its special launch price for the iPhone version, having been impressed with the demo of Espgaluda II, and I must say it’s blown me away. This is a relatively recent arcade game that’s due for an Xbox 360 port later in the year, and the kind of thing that hardcore players would have complained that fairly recent systems couldn’t duplicate, and I’m playing a fine version with online leaderboards and assorted playing modes on my phone. I’ve made such an exclamation whenever the iPhone does something remotely impressive, but it still keeps managing to surprise me.

Even at its new price of £5.49, I have to recommend this as one of my favourite iPhone games. It’s a wonderful conversion of a really brilliant game, and even at that price, this is a game that’s good enough to justify a full-price 360 release in November. Even for people who find bullet hell shooters impenetrable, this version manages to be extremely accessible thanks to the 1:1 touch controls, making fine movements easier and your ship capable of much faster motion than will be possible with a joystick. Purists might complain that this makes it something of a Fisher-Price version, but as someone who, you know, plays games to have a good time, you’ll get no such grievances from me.

Look me up on the OpenFeint leaderboards if you’re a fan – the name is, as always, NekoFever.