The 2007 Gaming Club

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."

Comments

Yeh right.....

[madhatter256]

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)

Heh. Yeh, right......

I didn't know slate and nytimes had the top gaming gurus.....

Updates to existing games

[KingSkippus]

I think it's a shame that updates to existing subscription games always get left out of these lists.

I play City of Heroes/Villains myself, and this year saw three HUGE updates to the game. In Issue 9, we had a new villain zone released, as well as a new invention system that provides a ton of end-game stuff to do, and an in-game auction house. In Issue 10, we got a major world event and a new hero/villain cooperative zone. In Issue 11 (just released a couple of weeks ago), we have another zone, Ouroboros, that allows heros and villains to complete "flashback" mission for even more end-game action, two new power sets, and a ton of new costume options. And those are just the main features, there have been lots of other little tweaks and new surprises.

The game is a LOT better today than it was when it was released around three and half years ago, and it was really a lot of fun back then. The best part of it is that unlike most other games, all of those expansions were released for no addition cost to the regular subscription fee, and the developers under the new NCsoft banner are busy working as I write this on the next expansion, Issue 12, probably to be released around the end of March or so.

Sorry if I sound like an ad, but they've really done a bang-up job on the game. Don't get me wrong, I love Halo 3 and playing with the Wii, but those tend to be merely diversions from the game I've been going back to for years now. It may not be the uber-hyped behemoth that other "Games of the Year" are, but personally, I'd rather stick with one that's been consistently interesting and good year after year.

Maybe it will make the list of "Games of the Decade."

Re:Updates to existing games

[KingSkippus]

Well, I will admit that CoH/V tends to not appeal to two types of players.

First, those who are all about min/maxxing their characters and power-leveling through to the end. There's really not much point, since the game isn't focused so much on end-game content and pwning other people, though as mentioned, we did get a nice invention system for those level 50's out there to participate in.

Second, the griefers. There are exceptions of course, but most of the folks in CoH/V are generally nice, helpful folks who are thrilled to be part of the community. Griefers generally have a hard time, because the developers have designed it so that there's just not much they can do to disrupt the game for other people, and the community is pretty quick to react and report the people who do.

So yeah, I guess it might be a pointless waste of time to some people, but the general absence of those people in the game and the tendency of those people to quickly leave the game is one of the things that I really like about it. You have your opinion, but from the tone of your post, I think I'm pretty safe in saying that we're pretty happy that you don't like it.

Wow

[roadkill_cr]

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.

DTD? C'mon...

[ZombieRoboNinja]

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?

Re:DTD? C'mon...

[Roger Wilcox]

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.