Miscellaneous Gaming Awards of 2011
Once again, I have been neglecting this blog for far too long. Sometimes it’s hard to come up with decent ideas to talk about every week, and so I started to fill up the spaces in between by talking about various news articles of the week. It turned out to be a pretty shitty idea. It wasn’t interesting to read through my various synopses of seemingly unrelated news articles, and the posts themselves had a very limited shelf life. One thing that I like about the various lists that I have put together is that they tend to have fairly decent shelf lives. I can go back to my post about the iPhone 4 almost a year after writing it, and it still reads like something that is somewhat relevant. Moving forward, I would definitely like to put together more posts of that nature instead of trying to be a reporter (and failing at it). So with that being said, I have a three-week plan in mind where I talk about various games that came out in 2011, along with games that will be coming out in 2012. None of the lists that I have in mind are of the original nature, but hopefully they’re at least mildly interesting. Here’s part one: the miscellaneous gaming awards of 2011!
My favourite under-appreciated game: Motorstorm Apocalypse: I’ve already discussed this game at great lengths in my original post earlier this year, but I was slightly surprised to see this game come and go without much fanfare. The delay that it went through (Sony made a decision to delay the game in response to the disaster in Japan) may have hurt the hype machine, but it’s a bit of a shame to see such a fun game go by seemingly unnoticed. The challenge in Motorstorm Apocalypse has been discussed at length (I even had a few words to say about it), but one of the things that I really loved about Apocalypse is how it demanded your undivided attention. Hazards can creep up out of nowhere (walls caving in, trucks tipping over, roads collapsing on themselves), and the only way to avoid disaster at the higher skill levels is to ensure that you’re completely focused on the track and what’s coming up ahead of you. I have tremendous love for the Forza series, but unless you’re playing on a really complicated track, you can usually play that game somewhat passively. If you take that passive mindset to Motorstorm Apocalypse, you’re going to find yourself frustrated early and often.
My most surprisingly good game: Mortal Kombat: I have a confession to make: I didn’t care for any of the Mortal Kombat games of the previous generation (Deadly Alliance, Deception, …whatever the other ones were called). I got quite a bit of enjoyment out of Deception, but that was more due to the various game modes that they crammed in (my buddy and I had a blast with Chess Kombat) as opposed to the core fighting system itself. I didn’t find the attacks in those games to be visceral at all, I wasn’t impressed by the movement, and don’t even get me started on those shitty weapons. My disappointment with the PS2 generation of Mortal Kombat games is probably why I came into the new instalment with such low expectations. I wouldn’t even have given the game a chance if my buddy hadn’t bought the game, and in retrospect, I’m so glad that he did. It’s still not the deepest fighting game in the world, but there is no denying just how fun the Mortal Kombat is in a group of people. To be honest, I’m not sure if the new instalment is a big improvement over the old games, or if my personal disposition has changed, but that game has been fun every week since the day my gaming group started playing it. If you’re looking for a competitive fighting game, you’re better served elsewhere, but if you’re looking for fun, laughs, and a hell of a lot of hollering over supposed instances of “cheapness”, Mortal Kombat is fantastic.
My favourite non-brown, non-grey game: Bulletstorm: This game could easily stand alongside Motorstorm Apocalypse as one of the most under-appreciated titles of 2011, despite the massive amount of hype that it received (thanks primarily to Epic’s identity and EA’s treasure troves of money). I’ve heard quite a few different criticisms for Bulletstorm, from people talking about how it “tries too hard”, to people talking about how “stupid” it is. I could write an entire article about how unjustified those arguments are, but I want to focus instead on how great the game looks. In a console generation that has been largely defined by its grey and brown shooters, it’s nice to see a healthy splash of colour throughout the world of Stygia. I’m not going to sit on my high horse and pretend that grey/brown games are a bad thing - the colour palette should match the overall theme of the game, and Resistance 3’s bleak atmosphere would not be well suited by bright greens and yellows. That being said, I’m always happy when games like Serious Sam 3 and Bulletstorm come along to remind us that the FPS genre has a life beyond quasi-realism and depression.
Best game that I want to play more of: Dark Souls: I didn’t get very far in Dark Souls, which is a damn shame because it’s a really, really well done game. Dark Souls is a strange creature, because when you look at the game at the pure base level, it doesn’t look very appealing. The graphics are quite ugly by today’s standards, a lot of the enemy designs are typical examples of what you would expect from the genre, and the voice acting is pretty awful. That being said, the beauty of Dark Souls is not of the superficial variety. When you’re covered in sweat and nervous about what might be lurking behind that corner, when you’re running away from that overwhelmingly powerful enemy in an attempt to salvage the 20,000 souls that you’ve collected, and when you finally defeat that boss after the forty-fifth try, you will realize that Dark Souls is a beautiful game and a member of an extremely rare breed. I have a lot of games that I want to play in the next little while (Skyrim, Uncharted 3, and the complete Mass Effect trilogy once the third one comes out), but I have made a promise to myself that I will return to the world of Dark Souls at some point next year.
Biggest “I told you so”: Duke Nukem Forever: People got mad at me when I said that Duke Nukem Forever looked like shit prior to its release. It wasn’t enough for them to merely disagree with me and leave it at that - they were angry that I would dishonour their lord and saviour. By suggesting that DNF might be a subpar game made me a blasphemer, but at the end of the day, it also made me correct. I only put about four hours into DNF, but that was enough for me. From the subpar graphics to the outdated jokes and the complete lack of badass elements (Duke needs to hide and regenerate his health? Seriously?), it’s a little shocking that something this awful actually made it out of Gearbox’s hands and into the world. In fact, this game is so bad that it has forced me to go back in time and reassess whether or not Duke Nukem was ever a cool character at all. Was Duke actually cool, or was it just my juvenile past self that clung to his jokes and personality because of how subversive it was in the gaming climate of its time? Perhaps it’s best not to think about it. Perhaps I should remember Duke at his finest: back when Duke Nukem 3D was the king of FPS.
See you next week. And this time I mean it :).
