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The Finest Moments in 2007 Gaming
Stephen Totilo, as he did last year and the year before, has put together a piece looking at the finest gaming moments to be had in 2007. From the high-jumps of Portal to the Colossus battle in God of War 2, he's got a lot of gaming goodness packed into this one article. My favorite moment (the end of Mass Effect) isn't on there, but this is a close second: "Late in the much-praised first-person shooter BioShock, the player is required to don the outfit of another character in the game. Saying much more about this moment would ruin the effect. But rest assured, this transformative sequence changes the way every character in the world reacts to the player's presence. Plus, it might just give a BioShock player some pause about what they had been doing for the dozen hours that preceded the moment. Saying anything more would be a spoiler."
I'd argue saying much more wouldn't be much more of a spoiler than what was already said in the summary.
That said, I agree.
The part he is talking about in Bioshock has got to be the dumbest part of that entire game. It was an excuse to fit in some fetch quests and an escort mission into the game because it was too damn short.
Are there FIFTY of these, too?
Itemising this stuff is like a setup for the Spanish inquisition:
"This is Uncle Ted in front of the house.
"This is Uncle Ted at the back of the house.
"And this is Uncle Ted at the side of the house.
"This is Uncle Ted, back again at the front of the house, but you can see the side of the house.
"And this is Uncle Ted even nearer the side of the house, but you can still see the front.
"This is the back of the house, with Uncle Ted coming round the side to the front.
"And this is the Spanish Inquisition hiding behind the coal shed."
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
That is about as much not a spoiler as the average trailer to your average current movie.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Very chilling. My favorite HL2 character too. Looking back at the dialog in ep2, it was sort of obvious it would happen - heaven forbid there ever be any straight-forward plot exposition on the G-man.
BTW, anybody else thing the stabbing/sucking appendage looks just a little phallic?
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
The release of UT3 proves that UT2004 still RULES!
Portal: Not the end, but the first time you find one of the rooms where "others" had dwelled before you. Insanity.
Assassin's Creed: When the main character acquires the 'eagle vision' near the end.
Bioshock: Any time you're walking around and you hear a Big Daddy, was a truly great moment. Sadly, this game was ruined for my by the last boss battle, which seemed to take everything the game stood for, and threw it away in the name of a Turok: The Dinosaur Hunter final boss battle. (loved Turok, for the record)
Mass Effect: I really cannot pinpoint any spot that was a 'finest moment'. Great game, one of the best this year. Maybe it's 'finest moment' can be the fight with Matriarch Benezia. The only battle I had any actual trouble with.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
...that just don't happen to be video games: link.
Nomad: What about you major?
Major Strickland: I'm a marine son, I can walk on water if I have to! Now get the fuck off my island while I draw it's fire.
You mad
Overall, many great memories from this year of gaming...nothing will compare to the summer of 2004 for gaming memories for me (closed beta of WoW, 15 friends, an empty house, a lot of water pipes, and half the summer taken off from work), but I would have to say these were my top 5 from the year (in no particular order):
1. Opening 15 minutes of BioShock. This was done with 5 friends around the couch, all of us huddled close together...home theater setup was turned way up high, my Tannoy PS 110-B sub rattling the floor, a gorgeous image on my HDTV...honestly, one of the most tense 15 minutes of gaming I have ever experienced.
2. First time I played a Wii. This was at a friends house way back in February. There were a total of 7 of us taking turns playing Wii sports...considering how often we host gaming parties or LAN parties, I knew the instant I started watching and playing that I had to get one.
3. Experiencing the story of Mass Effect. In my opinion, the greatest sci-fi universe ever conceived...buy the art book, amazing! I was actually a little frustrated when it ended primarily because I wasn't ready to finish it yet! Cannot wait for the second one...
4. Rainbow Six: Vegas on Live. Spent 16 straight hours (taking breaks every 4-5 hours to get food and goto the bathroom, of course) playing it the weekend I get my HDTV. I likely gained 20 pounds that weekend, but it was definitely a weekend to remember.
5. Playing through the Orange Box...Half-Life 2 is one of my all time favourite games, and I hadn't played it since early 2005. Seeing it on a big HDTV with an awesome surround system, coupled together with playing through Episode 1 and 2 to further the storyline (and yes, of course, playing Portal) was amazing. Ravenholm is absolutely terrifying at night with all the lights out and the system cranked!
So there they are, my top 5 gaming moments of 2007. There were plenty other great ones, to be sure, but these were the most memorable for me. A man chooses, a slave eats cake!
Living With a Nerd
The last 5 minutes of CoD4, where you have been going after this certain terrorist, everyone else is dead and you finally end the hunt. It gets all slow-motiony (word?) for that last shot. Loved it.
I've put 11 hours into that game, and then you write a summary like this. You've spoiled the game for me. You suck.
For me it has to be the little scene when I first saved a Little Sister. It was a beautiful moment in my opinion. The Swell of the music, the brilliant light, her vain struggle and finally ending with a simple Thank you. One of the few moments in gaming I felt like a real hero.
I'm making a note here:
HUGE SUCCESS"
Seriously, end of Portal (which I finished last night, actually) is deffinitely up there, in my book. And the credits song is in the running for best video game song of all time, up there with Homeworld.
MARIO GALAXY had a couple of dousies too:
- Intro with the Airships and Mario 3 theme, I shit myself.
- *spoiler* Point in the storybook where the "girl" suddenly comes to terms with the death of her mother. The cute music stops, the somber strings swell, and it's one of the most poignient moments I've ever seen in a game.
Also, am I the only one who found the end of Bioshock increadibly beautiful and well-done. Sure it was probably the shortest ending since Donkey Kong, but it was more powerful than most 30 minute endings.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
2007 was a great year for games, but I have a stack of great un-finished games sitting in my closet now because Team Fortress 2 has taken up all of my time.
Sorry, Zelda: TP, Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime Corruption, Bioshock, and other games -- you'll have to wait until I get bored of breaking peoples' kneecaps with the scout's bat.
I just experienced my gaming moment of the year today.
After fixing my Assassin's Creed 360 disc (which I damaged by tilting the 360...oops) I played for a little bit up to where you arrive at Damascus. The view of the city as you come over the last hill was damn near breathtaking, at least with my 47" HDTV in 1080p. This was the first experience I had that made me feel the next-generation of console gaming had arrived. I've never seen such so much detail come from a tv displaying console gameplay.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
This has been a truly great year for FOSS games! From the latest version of Open Office, to the newest and hottest text editor for Teh Lunix, to the latest bug-fix version of Ubuntu, it's been a four star year for FOSS gaming!
In your face, MiKKKroSuxorz!!!!
For me, today,
Picked up a Wii this morning (had to bribe and shoot some people for it to get the last one in the country) got a extra controller and Super Mario Galaxy.
My girlfriend and me have been on a gaming binge for about 10 hours and loved every minute of it.
Boy, does the Wii take back the Fun in gaming, that's a capital F !
Of course you play all games for fun. But Wii sports and SMG is the acting crazy and loud laughs kind of fun. No new shiny item in a MMO or perfect headshot can compare to this.
Sheer brilliance.
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
So you rule out games simply because they're presented from a first-person perspective? If so, you missed possibly the best game of the year, Portal. You also missed Bioshock and Metroid Prime 3, as well as Halo 3 (I wasn't going to mention this, but I couldn't help myself :).
Aside from that, there were some great non-FPS games out this year. Assassin's Creed was fun, if a little repetitive. Mass Effect was great in the Bioware RPG tradition, perhaps even better than the prior KOTOR games because it was not restricted to the existing Star Wars mythos. Forza 2 is perhaps the best console racing simulator to date, and although GT5 will look prettier Forza 2 still has a much better physics simulation (it updates 360 times per second, modelling all four wheels across three separate points on the contact patch). Ratchet and Clank almost made me buy a PS3 (still holding off on that), and I'm really considering dusting off my WiiMote and picking up Super Mario Galaxy.
What exactly are you looking for from games?
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
My finest gaming moment of 2007, was when I finally finished Freecell.
About 2 years ago I started playing all the freecell games in order, in an attempt to beat/win every possible combination.
It wasn't pretty, and there was no 5.1 audio announcing to the office that I had completed this monumental task, but I felt it was a moral victory.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I missed a word there. It was supposed to say: "There were only a few games this year that were NOT just new levels for old ones."
Bioshock and Portal were awesome. I admit it. But they were absolutely drowned out by the flood of crappy FPSs that didn't do anything new whatsoever. That includes Halo 3 and Metroid Prime 3.
I've -played- those games before. If I want to play them again, they're sitting at GameFly and waiting for me. I want -new-.
Mass Effect is okay... I'm actually playing it right now. But it seems to be the same thing over and over... Rush in, kill some things, hack a computer, get yelled at by someone, repeat. Nothing about the plot is even new, either. Traitors, aliens, The Council, extinct species, history repeating itself, aggressive species leaving home area for first time, humans colonizing the dangerous zone where no other species will try to live... It's all been done.
Bladestorm is at least different, and oddly addictive.
Mario Galaxy? -yawn- Mario 64 all over again.
Forza, GT5? Racing again. -yawn- Last racing games I truly enjoyed were F-Zero and JetMoto. Guess why? They were -different- and new. The sequels sucked.
Ratchet and Clank? Done that way too many times.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
So I ask again, what exactly are you looking for from games? From a broad perspective, there's nothing new in games. Even something novel like Guitar Hero (itself suffering from sequelitis) was nothing really new. DDR with a guitar, yawn. But wait, not even DDR was unique! NES Track and Field but with dancing, yawn.
There's value in doing things well even if you're not ground-breaking. For example, Halo 3 is a very solid shooter with fun online play and a conclusion to a story that many of us have been following for 6 years. It may not add anything to the FPS genre directly, but that doesn't mean it's not worth playing. As another example, compare Oblivion (valid because the Game of the Year edition released this year) and Two Worlds. On the surface, they're pretty much identical -- medievel-ish PC-style RPGs with wide open worlds. Oblivion, despite being a sequel (4th of the Elder Scrolls RPGs), was great. It ran well, felt solid, had a great story, and truly benefited from the Elder Scrolls mythos. Two Worlds, on the other hand, was essentially a piece of crap (didn't stop me from enjoying it, though :). It had massive performance issues, quest-breaking bugs, horrible voice acting, and flawed controls. If you're just looking superficially, you'll dismiss both because they're just "Ultima with a modern graphical veneer, yawn," and in the process you'd miss out on the excellent game that was Oblivion. Of course you'd also miss out on the crapfest of Two Worlds, so that's not too bad :).
Obviously you're not the target audience for Forza or Gran Turismo, and that's fine. I take it you enjoy more arcade-style racers, in which case it'd be a shame for you to write of game series like Wipeout just because F-Zero did it first.
Oh yeah, meant to add this to my last post.
You're holding up Bladestorm as a model of uniqueness? It's just fucking Dynasty Warriors set in Europe rather than China (or Japan, like Samurai Warriors). It's got a few new gameplay mechanics, but so do most of the other titles you derided.
If you like Bladestorm, great. More power to you, it's great that you found a game you can like. It's just a little hypocritical to claim that many of the other games are not worth your time because they're just the same old thing you've already played, but Bladestorm's not. Choose not to play Halo, Metroid, Mario, etc because you don't enjoy the games, or you have no interest in the story, or even because you're too "1337" to play the same games as us plebs (though in that case I'd expect you to extoll the virtues of indie developers, which so far you haven't). But stop claiming that you only like stuff that's "new" when it's patently obvious that's not true.
Have you played Bladestorm? It's -not- like Dynasty Warriors. (I love the Warriors series, with DW Gundam being my favorite, with Samurai Warriors second.)
DW has you, a single person, be an amazing bad-ass 'general' who is more of a 1-man army. You completely control the character and are always on the front lines.
Bladestorm has you lead a troup (which can be changed any time you are near another troup) and you have very little interaction. You tell them when to to attack and activate powerups. Instead of being front-lines, it works best to stand behind your troup and guide them.
Saying the 2 are the same is like saying an FPS and a 3/4 overhead are the same.
And I'm not claiming they aren't worth my time without having played them. Every game I've mentioned, I either bought or rented. The ones that bored me, they bored me because they were the same old thing. They didn't have anything interesting. And by interesting, I mean different than other games that I've already played.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I did play the Bladestorm demo a while ago, and it left me with the distinct impression of "DW clone". Yes, there's a bit of a new gameplay component, but it's really nothing new. Basically Bladestorm is what you'd get if you mixed the Kingdom Under Fire (KUF has you controlling squads rather than just your individual hero) games with Full Spectrum Warrior (where you play the game by issuing orders, and the AI carries out those orders without your intervention). So yeah, "Bladestorm is just KUF mixed with FSW, yawn".
And I argue that just because a game isn't different from one you've already played doesn't mean it's not a good game. That's especially true with sequels. Halo 3 isn't substantially different than Halo 2 in gameplay, but it was worth playing for the story, at least for me. Even non-sequels aren't necessarily going to be "new", depending on how you define new. For example, Assassin's Creed == Prince of Persia + Grand Theft Auto. Nothing really new there, right? Yet it was still worth playing through (for me, it was short enough that the main "repetitive" complaint didn't really have time to factor into it).