OK, a few ground rules: I don’t own a Nintendo DS. I haven’t played Mass Effect or The Witcher. And I probably didn’t play your favorite game, or I didn’t like it. So there.
Notable games that didn’t make the cut: Crysis and Call of Duty 4. The former made the latter’s linearity and heavily scripted gameplay feel very, very tired, and I’ve already documented how much Crysis ultimately disappointed me.
So, here’s the list.
10. Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (PS3)
I knew I got this PS3 (for free) for a reason other than watching movies. The only game I own aside from Motorstorm, which came with it, is one of the best games of the year. It looks great and has solid controls, and the gameplay is a terrific mix of shooting and running and jumping.
9. Crackdown (360)
This game pegs the stupid meter at 11 throughout. It’s all about running and jumping and throwing cars at people, in a completely unscripted, open-ended world. This is the direction more games need to go, though maybe with a wee-bit more polish and a few more structured things to do to advance… something.
8. BioShock (PC)
It’s good, but the pretentions of its story write checks its somewhat pedestrian gameplay can’t cash. Love the world, love the ideas behind the story, but I kept wishing it would end because after a few dozen splicer battles… I was kind of done with it. Still, it’s impossible not to admire how it feels carved from granite, how everything in the world supports that story.
7. STALKER (PC)
I want to turn Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” into an RPG. You explore a wasted landscape searching for survival goods for yourself and your son. And you’d spend the entire game waiting for all of the combat that’d never actually happen; there’d be exactly one fight in the entire game. STALKER is kind of like that, only with more combat. It’s horribly broken in so many ways. It’s too hard. It’s buggy. It’s nonsensical. It has bad writing. But when you’re creeping along, freaked out that some soldier or (worse yet) some mad radiation thing is going to attack you, well… it totally works.
6. Peggle (PC)
This is the gayest game of 2007. “Ode to Joy.” Rainbows. Unicorns. Pachinko. Bust a Move. Breakout. Luck. Why does this work? Because PopCap rules. I reviewed this for our “lost issue,” and it started with this: “Now that we’ve all rediscovered the joy of physics thanks to rag dolls and breakable environments, it’s time to turn our attention back to geometry. It dominated gaming back in the days of pool and pinball, when you were conscious of the physics of the ball but mostly interested in finding the right angles to hit all the targets and max out your score.”
5. Lord of the Rings Online/World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade (PC)
I kind of view MMOs as one continual experience with a few variations depending on which game I feel like playing. So, the two MMOs I played this year were the best, since… well, they were the ones I played. (I suppose the month I spent in Vanguard might count too, though I’d rather forget that experience.) I was the first person in Outland on my server (love those review copies), and I was immediately besieged by hundreds of “ohmygodhowisit? Do you work for Blizzard?” messages. The new classes are fine, the new areas fine… bah, WoW’s a machine. And LOTRO does WoW almost as well as WoW, only it substitutes Hobbits for Tauren. And sorta dies at level 25, though I understand patches have addressed that somewhat.
4. Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (PSP, 360, PC)
I must’ve liked this game, since I bought it three times for three different platforms. It managed to put an interesting wrapper on match-3 games, and turned a lot of people on to why casual games can actually be high-quality and closer in depth to “real” games without losing their casualness. But it has the weirdest difficulty curve, starting “difficult and frustrating” before moving on to “cakewalk.” That might not be ideal.
3. Portal (PC)
Yeah, it’s brilliant. But it has one flaw: Its story. Wait, what? It’s not the narrative or dialogue itself, both of which are brilliant. (I hate that no one will ever be able to write a whacked-out computer again without being compared to GLaDOS.) It’s that when you give a puzzle game a story, it affects its replay value. The same thing happened for me with Bookworm Adventure, and to a lesser extent Puzzle Quest: When I “finish” a story game, I rarely go back and play it because, well… it’s finished. When puzzle games are just about solving puzzles or the joy of playing, I tend to replay them more frequently.
2. Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)
I have exactly zero emotional involvement in Mario. I never had an NES or SNES. I don’t own a DS. But I did get a Wii, and I did get Mario, and without the baggage of past Marios, it stands alone as a fantastic game. It’s about the pure joy of running and jumping, and of totally fucking with your perspective. This is the most 3D ever made, forcing you to constantly re-orient your brain. But it delivers so many visual cues that it’s never very hard. I stopped playing at around 90 stars, but I plan on going back in once I get through my backlog.
1. Assassin’s Creed (360)
Who saw this coming? I certainly didn’t. In fact, I hated this game for its first couple of hours. And I hated it again for its last couple of hours. But everything between just gave me warm fuzzies. I’m not 100% sure I’d recommend it to a lot of people, because they’d get hung up on its failings. Me, I’d pay another $60 just to be able to climb up to the tops of more multi-story buildings, hit “Y” to survey the landscape, and then do the “leap of faith” into a pile of hay. (That bit just never got old for me. And yes, I got the achievement for finding all of them, thankyouverymuch.)
A few years ago, I had a conversation with John Cutter, who was the designer of Betrayal at Krondor (amongst other games) and was at the time working at my current employer. I asked him why there’d never been a modern fantasy RPG set in a single city, a la Grand Theft Auto (going way back, there was Alternate Reality). He made a terrific point; without a car, traveling from point A to B isn’t very interesting.
Assassin’s Creed tests that theory. It’s very much an action/RPG/parkour simulator, with a world that’s structured a lot like San Andreas, with three main cities and a connecting world. That these cites are Damascus, Jerusalem, and Acre and the game is set during the Crusades in the 12th century certainly gives it a unique look and feeling… well, OK. It looks like a fantasy game.
Some people criticize the repetition of its gameplay. You basically do the same thing nine different times; the setups for each of your assassinations involve “gathering information,” which involves a handful of different possible tasks. It’s really no less repetitive than a GTA game; you’re usually shooting someone or driving around. However, those games do a better job making you think you’re doing something different; Assassin’s Creed is just more literal. And once I figured out that combat was more rhythm game than button-mashing, it got a helluva lot more enjoyable and easier. And easier yet when I discovered countering with my hidden blade. (And the combat animation is phenomenal; this is a case where pulling occasional control from the player works, because you’re rewarded with complete badassery that’s often breathtakingly brutal.)
The storyline is crap. The modern wrapper is even crappier. Despite being set during the Crusades, it dodges all of the interesting questions raised by its premise… maybe cowards out is a better way to view it. (Come on, let’s just call people Christians and Jews and Muslims and not do our best to ignore what the Crusades were really about.). Maybe if Ken Levine writes Assassin’s Creed 2, we’ll see the greatest game ever.
The less said about the ending the better. Plot-wise, nothing is resolved. Gameplay-wise it tosses aside all of the awesomeness of the beginning of the game in place of wave after wave of combat. And Ubisoft’s designers clearly hate its players and don’t want them to finish games, so they placed the checkpoints too far apart. Seriously, people. Let someone else play your game. And let everyone finish it. It was plenty tough throughout, and plenty long; just let us all finish it without flinging our controller across the room in disgust. (I did this; it survived.)
But I could pick apart all of these games if I really wanted. I just didn’t get sick of running around the three cities, engaging in random mayhem, going on 20-minute chases through the streets, across rooftops, up and down walls. I took out hundreds of guards in secret, I rescued all but three citizens (gotta go back for those)… in short, I just
But the real star in the level design, the art direction, and the animators. This is easily the greatest world ever created for a videogame. It’s just perfect. Ubisoft has been leagues ahead of everyone in these areas—just look at the Prince of Persia games—but the folks there outdid themselves this time.
This is one game that didn’t always play by the rules and, flaws and all, is my favorite game of 2007.
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:39 am
Who saw this coming?
No one I suspect.
Just answer one question:
If I go in expecting nothing more than lots & lots of Prince of Persia style wall traveling (and the other forms of movement) will I be satisfied? I’m well aware of the terrible story, so I’ll be able to disregard it quite easily now that I’m not going in blind to that fact.
January 2nd, 2008 at 10:52 am
[...] he’s out of the professional commentary game, former CGM editor still knows what he likes. His list has the usual suspects but not in the order you would expect them to be [...]
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:41 pm
I very much enjoyed Assassin’s Creed. It’s very flawed for all the reasons you list, but it’s one of those games (like Crackdown) that makes the simple act of moving from place to place a pure joy.
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:55 pm
“If I go in expecting nothing more than lots & lots of Prince of Persia style wall traveling (and the other forms of movement) will I be satisfied?”
You’ll also get a fair amount of Prince of Persia-style combat. If that sounds appealing, I say go for it. It’s basically PoP in a free roaming environment, with a bit of Splinter Cell for good measure.
January 2nd, 2008 at 7:50 pm
*hangs head at #1 choice*
January 5th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Good call on AC, Steve. I share all your complaints, but there’s still an ineffable factor of the game that staggers you: the aggregate of the city vistas, the parkour, the animation, and the totally reconsidered stealth mechanic. I can never honestly pick GotYs, just as I can never really rank games (or movies, or book), but this is a good list.
I’ve also bought PQ for the PSP, 360, and PC, and in that order. :)
I think SMG is overrated in general, but I’m in the crazy superminority.
January 5th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
As for Super Mario, I think it helps that I don’t play every platform game that comes down the pike, nor do I have some irrational love (or hate) of Nintendo.
But for the week I blasted through it, I adored it. I don’t really look back on it with any sense of “wow,” though.
January 6th, 2008 at 12:30 am
Don’t get me wrong; I really liked SMG. However, when I reminisce about it, I just remember gameplay elements in SPITE of the overall excellence, like how irritating manta racing was, or the horrible swimming controls, or the overall uselessness of the bit-shooting mechanic. (Okay, I also remember the farkin’ awesome boss fights, too and the crazy extra heavy-duty platforming levels.)
It’s the opposite with AC, though. I remember doing all this really cool shit and the thrill of the Templar kills, and I seem to forget the repetitiveness of the investigation tasks entirely.
In both cases, I think either game could be so much more, but with SMG I wanted them to remove things that irritated me, whereas with AC I simply wanted them to ADD things — and as a result, AC gets the nod.
January 20th, 2008 at 12:00 am
Can I put in an honorable mention for Uncharted:Drake’s Fortune. An excellent Tomb Raider clone and far less frustrating for the PS3 controller challenged.
PS. Ugh I hate console controllers with a passion.
January 20th, 2008 at 12:06 am
I didn’t care for the demo of Uncharted; seemed too combat heavy. Is the full game a better mix of running and jumping, or is it still pretty combat-centric?
January 20th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
I’d say combat heavy which is my personal preference. I am not a big fan of platform jumping puzzles. At least the platforming in Uncharted isn’t frustrating and can be solved without too much stretching of the grey matter.
January 21st, 2008 at 11:23 am
Uncharted is way heavy on the combat, but it’s also very well-realized combat. I don’t think you should skip it if you’re concerned about that.
I’m about halfway through it now and the shooty bits are balanced about evenly with the jumpy bits and both are pretty much excellently created, exciting and entertaining.
It’s also got some of the best voicework and scripting I’ve ever seen in a movie-style videogame. It’s basically a Bruckheimer film in videogame form and if you dig that kind of thing even a little bit, you’re probably going to really enjoy Uncharted… aka the action-platform game for people who must have realistic settings for their videogames.
January 21st, 2008 at 1:46 pm
“It’s basically a Bruckheimer film in videogame form”
Is that a compliment?
January 21st, 2008 at 5:08 pm
I think in this case it is, because how many videogames have you played that even aspire to be that?
January 21st, 2008 at 5:09 pm
…and yeah, when I typed that I kinda figured that would be your question. :D
January 21st, 2008 at 5:41 pm
I think the problem is that’s all they aspire to: Bruckheimer-level spectacle.
January 26th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
The Bruckheimer games are the ones with flashy graphics, poor gameplay, and a story that goes nowhere interesting. Let’s toss in a bad script.
I’ve played a lot of games that made it past that level.