Gaming -- the Mid-Year Roundup

I’ve been playing a shit-ton of games over the past six months, and they’ve almost all been excellent. It’s frankly kind of insane how lucky I’ve been… although the fact that I’m months (or years) late to the party on some games is a contributing factor.

This isn’t meant to be a “Top 10, Play What I’m Playing” wankfest. This is part gratitude for how good these games are, part trying to identify the best parts of them. If I want to be a creator someday, I want to know what to take inspiration from.

Mass Effect series (October? to March?)

Hands-down, the best AAA long-form game/series I’ve ever played. Yes, better than BioShock Infinite… much as that pains me to admit, in the post-completion afterglow. The series as a whole is the new standard for both epic and personal gaming experiences. It was so well realized that a few months after I finished the series, I saw a stranger and thought, “That’s my Shepard.”

“Mass Effect 2: Doing bad things, to bad people, to unlock cut scenes.”

My own experience of this series is colored by themes I’m interested in, primarily sunsets and the sense of things coming to an end. Yes, the third game is my favorite – doesn’t hurt that it was the only one I tried to 100%. I also watched the director’s cut of the ending. Since I felt like the entire third game was a long goodbye, the quality of the actual ending didn’t much matter to me. Your mileage may vary.

Takeaway: Teams and NPCs. The best part of these games was your team, beyond question, and from the inter-battle cut scenes to the downtime, they were the reason to play. If we could combine the companion AI and battlefield interaction of Elizabeth (from Infinite) with a team like this, endless fountains of fan art would result.

BioShock (April)

Would you kindly read the rest of this article as well? The twist in this game is spectacular, absolutely phenomenal. Before that was good, but not amazing. I don’t think I need to explain why this game is good – it’s part of the gaming canon. I’m not even going to make the twist the key takeaway.

This isn’t going into my personal canon, though. The twist is going on my list, but the rest of my game isn’t there. I have the same complaint as everyone else – the rest of the story after the twist is pretty ehhhh. I had also played the first three hours of Bioshock a couple times before, so the setting didn’t hit me as hard. I also am not a big fan of the gameplay itself, mainly because I get confused and lost in shooters.

Takeaway: The intro. My God, the intro for this is perfect. You get shown everything you need to know, you panic without being able to screw yourself over, it’s amazing. It was so good, they used it again. It plays like the first read of Atlas Shrugged, when the characters are superheroes and you get swept away – then you start to reflect on it, and wonder whether it could really work, and you see the depths to which it falls. The Big Daddy reveal, and realizing that eventually you’re going to fight one, is huge.

Takeaway: The setting. The city doesn’t need to be a character as much as in BioShock or in film noir, but exploring a place like this adds hugely to the fantasy and the mood. If you’re going to set your game in a drab world of cityscapes and forests, it had damned well better be because it helps the story.

BioShock Infinite (June)

Disclaimer, when I originally wrote this article, I was writing this in the afterglow. I played most of BioShock Infinite in an uninterrupted, twelve-hour chunk. I am writing this having eaten two bowls of oatmeal and one granola bar over the past 48 hours. After finishing the game, I spent two hours reading up on the ending and critiques.

You might say I enjoyed it.

I’m not going to be able to bring much more to the conversation on Infinite than what’s already been said. The violence is important, but the visceral relish the game takes in it isn’t; the setting and art direction is spectacular; Elizabeth is a very well-made character; the ending is thought provoking. It gets a 9/10, and would probably go into my Greatest Of All Time list if the dialog were snappier and more frequent.

Takeaway: Every developer making an AI companion should be brain-melded with this game. The mechanics themselves are designed to drive attachment to Elizabeth -- from her calling out priority targets to scrounging up life-saving ammo, salts and health. Even better, she seems to prioritize finding exactly what you need at that moment! Without this mechanic, the game’s combat would be a long distraction from its real focus. With it, it makes the characters’ relationship and trust shared by the player, and makes the portions without Elizabeth hit the player like a gut-punch.

Champions Online (Ongoing)

I work on this game. Am I cheating? Absolutely. But (Takeaway) the costume creator… dear God, the costume creator. What genuinely talented people have made is amazing, to the point where joke characters as niche as “Retina Regular” can exist. Even someone like me can poke around with the randomizer until I find inspiration, then build a new costume in about an hour. That costume is a new perspective on an existing character, and it reveals more about her.

FTL

FTL wants you to lose. FTL is very good at getting what it wants. Here’s what I think holds FTL back from being a truly great game, though: It doesn’t have much that gets you attached to a play-through, and it doesn’t have all-in mechanics. I’m going to be drawing a lot of comparisons to XCOM to make these points.

First, I don’t get attached to the characters or the ship in each play-through. I may feel really damned good about getting five Mantises, but each Mantis doesn’t matter. There wasn’t anything unique in each run, so there wasn’t any reason to claw my way back from the abyss in a run – I was better off letting myself die and using a different strategy.

The other issue is similar, because in XCOM, I sometimes had a favorite character go down, and I went all-in to save her. Not that it was the best decision, but it spiked the tension and made the best game. In FTL, though, there’s no all-in mechanic, nothing that lets me decide that something really matters to me. Irrationality is investment.

Takeaway: I want more genres of roguelikes. The only other roguelike that hit it big(ish) was Spelunky, and this proves that almost any genre can handle random levels, emergent gameplay, and permadeath. I’m waiting for Rock Band: Rogue Edition.

Additional Takeaway: This is how micromanagement should be, without sucking up too much time or leaving you feeling grindy. In FTL, pause-play gameplay works because it’s more like yelling at the bridge crew to target their engines, hold fire for a broadside, and desperately relaying directions to your boarding team. It’s not about pausing your entire offensive to order a single division around. Micromanagement should be five seconds of play for a single second of pause, I’m going to say.

League of Legends

Do I even need to go into this one? I’ve been playing LoL for about two years now, and it remains an exceedingly well-crafted game. It’s never going to be great-tier, because some of the things that make it so good are psychological tricks – but damn, this is good.

Forty minutes. Ten players. Five roles. Three lanes. And I’ve played something like 415+ hours of this.

Takeaway: This is how you do free-to-play when you have the luxury of having made a really good game to work with. It’s addictive as heroin – I chase the dragon when I’ve been on a losing streak. Forty minutes is the perfect time to create a feedback loop, where it’s long enough to get seriously invested, but not long enough that you can’t play one more game.

XCOM

Bluh. XCOM. Best strategy game system I’ve ever played, hands down. XCOM has some bad pacing issues in the campaign, but in a given mission you can reach climaxes of tension and panic in a single-hour mission. And because it’s all emergent gameplay, the tension is just as intense with every play-through.

I do want to point out the flaws, though. The aliens getting free moves when you discover them is obvious bullshit, but the pacing of the campaign was what really got me. First off, if you get yourself ahead in economics – which takes re-rolling instead of getting an actual in-game briefing – you’ll never suffer from want. You’ll have moments of tactical tension, but the grand plan will never be derailed. And the fact that I only got the psykers at a point when I could just click through to start the final battle… I should get a while to play with all the toys, not have them handed to me just before nap time.

Takeaway: I guess this is simplicity, just as much as TBP. The clarity of it, from what kinds of cover you’re in to what kinds of risks you’ll face, is spectacular and fast. Grand strategy games take ages to deliver feedback on whether you’re playing well, and tactical games (that I’ve played) tend to fall back on complexity and end up unsatisfying. XCOM makes high-tension, deeply-personal outcomes from relatively few moving pieces, and it shows all the moving pieces.

They Bleed Pixels

This is a better hardcore platformer than Super Meat Boy. I said it, now you can argue about it until the end of time. I swore more often, and louder, in TPB. Note: I’m aware that you can’t directly compare the short-level vs checkpoints paradigms that the two games take.

I felt taxed harder and better in TBP. In particular, the level paradigm meant that you could get all the way through an unbelievably difficult chain of jumps then see the bullshit waiting on the other side, and having (limited) health meant that a dumb slip was penalized, but not fatal. You then had to claw your way through with a single heart, which amped up tension even more.

Plus there’s the aesthetics. As much as I liked the setting and style of some SMB levels, the mythos in TPB is something that I could see incorporated into the larger Lovecraft mythos.

Takeaway: Simple and difficult. Two buttons, very few moves, but incredibly difficult. Reducing the number of moving parts meant that there were no bullshit issues like getting caught on geometry, getting confused, being slammed by a million enemies. Simple design, difficult challenges. (Additional takeaway: I hate feeling confused.)

Lord Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle

The only free indie on the list – my, times have changed for me. I think I found this one while looking for a customization-heavy JRPG, in the aftermath of finishing Mass Effect. This is decidedly not that game, but I lucked into this beautiful send-up of JRPGs. I compare it to Recittear, except you’re playing as the princess who gets rescued, after the rescuing already happened.

Also, it has one of the best uses of a major trope ever.

Takeaway: The dialog is spectacular. Better than Portal, hear me? The writing is perfectly-paced nerd humor at the intersection of D&D, anime and JRPGs. I have three-and-a-third pages of quotes and one-liners from Embric, most of it M-rated. Almost all of the game has a breakneck pace of hilarious dialog, and every comedic game writer should play this.