Game of the Year 2009 (?)

The end of the year draws near which invites a lookback on the last 12 months and with video games it is no different. All of the podcasts, magazines, websites are all readying their lists now that all the big tentpole releases are out of the door, but what about yours truly? The long absence of an Insert Coin qualifies me to give the definitive answer of course, but for me who can be considered as part of the core demographic, this is probably the best and worst time of the year.
This year saw the sequel to Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, and so a lot of games have pushed back their release to the new year to get out of the way. Even so, the fall period still offers a rich bounty of top games, and for a gamer like myself, who wants to play and experience all of these great games, there simply isn't enough time to give them all a go and then give a solid response to the question "What is your game of the year 2009?"

Cast back to last year and I could not give my game of the year label until several months into this year. Probably at the time I would have awarded it to Left 4 Dead - the co-op focused, zombie survival shooter, which got a lot of my playtime since its release. On reflection, the true "winner" would be Fallout 3 - I never did a proper "review" but the atmosphere and sensibility - a post-apocalyptic Washington DC full of mutants, radiation-affected ghouls and other humans surviving now in a barbaric "dog eat dog" wasteland was terribling engaging, the number of hours invested confirms this.

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Plus the game was extended further with Downloadable Content, some of questionable quality (Broken Steel and Point Lookout are the only ways to really bother with if at all interested) which kept me returning. Out of the two "big" western RPGs, Fable 2 and Fallout 3, I played Fable 2 first, so didn't go back to Fallout until the start of this year in fact.
On a side note, I didn't get to play through the reboot of Prince of Persia until Jan/Feb but I still maintain that it is a great game and still to this day joke that it is "the best game evar!". It may be too "easy" for some, but the art direction, the accommodating windows of opportunity for the button presses, plus the banter between the Prince and the Eleka kept a smile on my face.
It's pretty hard to convince people that PoP is much like playing a song from a rhythmn-action game like Guitar Hero and Rock Band on easy difficulty - you move through the game and press the appropriate face button when you reach the visual cue in the environment, just like when the note on the highway drops down into the target where you must strum.

it really is worth taking a moment and having a look around the environments and really appreciate what they've achieved, Naughty Dog seem to be one of the few studios to have really got an understanding of maximising the PS3

I lamented about Call of Duty 4's mutliplayer and how it was broken a long time ago, and in that respect, Modern Warfare 2 is exactly the same. The matchmaking serves as a function to find a multiplayer game and the notion of an intelligent algorithm working in the background to find opponents of a similar ability is non-existent. Just like COD4, there are no multiplayer achievements, but I have unlocks and rewards coming out of the wazoo - it's impossible to not play a few games without being awarded . There was obviously huge expectation on Modern Warfare 2, and there has been a backlash to the single-player campaign - it seemed like there was no way it could live up to the hype. This wasn't helped by the now infamous "Airport" level, props to Infinity Ward for trying to push the envelope but it didn't achieve what was intended and raised the question again about how video games are the reason for violent behaviour/school shootings in the US etc.
If I'm honest, a moment late on in the game where you are suspended from your feet and grab an unsuspecting NPC, stab them with a knife and choke them/break their neck and the look of panic in the victim's eyes before they roll back in their head was more disturbing to me - the massacre at the "airport" level is done on such a scale that some of its impact is removed, plus repeating civilian NPCs don't help. That being said, the level matches Infinity Ward's motivation to make a more thrilling and bombastic game than the first - more akin to a Michael Bay Summer blockbuster than war simulator.

Borderlands is an interesting game, something I definitely need to pick up again although is not quite at the top tier standard of some other games this year. That being said, the cel-shaded art direction, humour and the 4 player co-op help it stick out in the crowd. Halo 3 ODST also came out this year and it proved there's still some life in the Halo franchise, the game sold well even without master chief. I think of ODST as a "greatest hits" of the previous Halo games when you play through the flashback levels - there's the warthog driving level, there's the silent cartographer level duking with two hunters in an arena, the library/forerunner structure level, the banshee level featuring a scarab, a lot of the bases are covered.

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The New Mombasa hub was interested, and the "night-vision" HUD breathed new life into the series. The audiologs throughout the hub felt a bit too much "me too" copying of Bioshock for me, plus the audio story wasn't interesting enough to drive me to find them all. The new multiplayer mode "Firefight" is the horde mode for the Halo franchise and was a well received addition. There have been a lot of complaints about the cost of ODST, but people like me who didn't buy every map pack when it was released, bundling all of the multiplayer does help - I believe I pre-ordered on the cheap so from memory I only dropped £30 on it so I'm ok with that!

The sequel to the aforementioned Left 4 Dead, the cleverly titled Left 4 Dead 2 was also released this year - still a lot of fun, generally it is more of the same, but there's enough new mechanics here to rightly warrant a sequel. Last year saw a lot of original IP, games like Mirror's Edge and Dead Space, but this year seems to be the year of sequels, playing safe and offering an improved iteration of a successful game - I haven't even mentioned Forza Motorsport 3 yet where once you get past the new shiny front-end UI feels very much like Forza 2 - for christ's sake, a lot of the tracks are repeated.

I could go on, but let's save the best for last, and while there are a number of games released this year that I want to try, Batman Arkhum Asylum and Assassin's Creed 2 are two recent releases and then games from earlier in the year like Red Faction Guerilla, I think I can conclude with a fair amount of uncertainty that Uncharted 2: Among Theives is my game of the year. I have just this very day [[[[change]]]] finally finished the single-player story and I have been consistently impressed and thrilled throughout. The original was regarded as a success and the team at Naughty Dog took pretty much every aspect of that game and improved on it.

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The actor performances - the voice acting and motion capture are still great and a joy to watch. The visuals are improved and the use of colour and how it pops is impressive - the vistas are stunning - it really is worth taking a moment and having a look around the environments and really appreciate what they've achieved, Naughty Dog seem to be one of the few studios to have really got an understanding of maximising the PS3 - it's fanboy flamebait, but I'm not sure the game would be possible on the 360, or at least not in the same fidelity as seen here. Combat is improved which one of the sticking points from the original, and just like the first, the platforming is a lot of fun, I've not seen better use of the camera in another game, it always move to a view than does not obscure the next platform and the seamless drop in/drop out of the cutscene interludes where platforms crumble either under your weight or enemy ballistics does a great job in supporting opinion that this is the closest thing to an interactive movie.
New to the series are stealth sections which mix up the gameplay as you pick off henceman one-by-one, and also a great number of set-pieces and sequences like the train sequence and the helicopter boss in Nepal.

The only real weakness to the game are the puzzles. They are pretty weak and consist of pressing buttons/moving weights etc the correct combinations are all found in Nathan's handy notebook.
Multiplayer is now a necessary addition to acheive longetivity in today's titles and Uncharted 2 is apparently no different. A strange inclusion for a game that has such a strong single-player focus but it's there for those that are keen to keep playing after the first try. It has been lifted from the Call of Duty template, perks can be unlocked for your character, called "Boosters" here and the matchmaking where you are more often than not matched with players at a much higher level than you is just like COD4 as well. The multiplayer allows the saving of games and the editing of the film much like Halo 3 and even offers a machinima mode if you are so inclined. The game mechanics do allow the climbing and platform traversal from the single-player giving levels a useful verticality plus melee kills are a viable option so that adds an extra dimension and maintains its place in the Uncharted 2 universe

So there's my ultimate pick plus a couple of thoughts on other big releases this year. Just like last year the decision may change and with any luck I'll get back into the routine of doing "reviews" - to be perfectly honest, I lack the time to attack a game and play all day like these obnoxious teenagers I hear online so they will more likely be afterthoughts, it's very difficult to stay current.