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The 2007 Gaming Club

Posted by Zonk on from the all-the-way-back-to-january dept.

Slate has put together a great feature looking back at the entire year in gaming; Slate's Chris Suellentrop chatted with Newsweek's N'Gai Croal, the New York Times' Seth Schiesel, and MTV's Stephen Totilo (all MVPs of game discussion) about the best games of the year, big and small: "Some people have agreed with me that Desktop Tower Defense is wonderful, intoxicating, and addictive in its gameplay. But many have been flummoxed because I did not pick as my GOTY a truly grand, big-budget game. Lots of people seem to think that year-end lists should be reserved for epics like Halo or Grand Theft Auto. But that's not what 'Game of the Year' means to me."

3 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by roadkill_cr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Totilo gets +10 respect points from me. I hate how GOTY always revolves around big name titles.

    What really frustrated me was a GOTY thread that was started about a month and a half ago on a forum I frequent. People kept listing games that hadn't even been released yet. Assassin's Creed, Rock Band, Mass Effect... these all had yet to be released and the masses were all ready to give it the GOY award!

    When I argued that hype does not a game make, they replied, "Well, most of the time the big games are good." To that I laughed - had they never heard of the gigantic flop that was Daikatana? I remember being crushed by how awful Black and White was, one of the most hyped games that year.

    It sickens me, because this sort of mentality is exactly what marketers are going for... a blind, consumerist society that buys what they are told, rather than considering the pros and cons of any item before getting it.

  2. DTD? C'mon... by ZombieRoboNinja · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I like how the guy justifies his selection of DTD by saying that picking "game of the year" is like picking "favorite thing you've seen on your TV set," because I'd argue that picking DTD for the former is like picking Jerry Springer or American Idol for the latter because you "just can't stop watching."

    For that matter, I probably spend more time reading crappy fantasy novels than literary masterpieces, but I'm not gonna nominate "Dragonfyre Chronicles Part 7: The Soul-Blackening" as Book of the Year. These are the same guys who won't shut up about games being legitimate art, and they can't make this kind of distinction?

    1. Re:DTD? C'mon... by Roger+Wilcox · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What makes DTD so appealing, to me, is that it reverts to a pure, gameplay-oriented style.

      DTD has laughable graphics. The sound is limited to 5 or 6 cheap effects. The story is nonexistent. The important thing here, however, is that the game is playable for hours on end despite all of this.

      Glitz just doesn't do it for me. At the end of the day, when I sit down to play a game, I've come to play a game. I can't count the number of times I've been desperately wooed with dazzling graphics and immersive storylines that concealed such terrible control and gameplay elements that I had to leave them behind in frustration and disgust. If there's a bad game hidden underneath all of your fancy BS, I'll find out, and I won't want to play anymore.

      I applaud DTD for its simplicity and elegance, and I applaud Sullentrop for unabashedly pointing out that it succeeds marvelously in an area where many large-budget games fail.