LotR:C Update, and Game of the Year Analysis

Lord of the Rings: Conquest was released, so reviews should be coming soon.  Check for part two of the Predict the Review soon.  Also, since the year of 2008 is officially over (and has been for some time), “Game of the Year” titles are coming soon.

My prediction is that a majority of them will go to Grand Theft Auto IV, Metal Gear Solid IV, or Fallout 3.  Here’s the problem: there are more deserving games.

GTA IV is fun and all.  It has a great open world with some interesting characters, an amazing story and some impressive graphics.  Critics ate it up like it was free candy and they were sugar-starved diabetics.  Heck, it even got a perfect 10 from Gamespot.  I’ll admit that I had some fun with it, the multiplayer was interesting and I loved just messing around.

However, while the game had a lot to do, most of it was really shallow.  Yeah, you can go hang out with some gangsta’ buddies, but the only perk to doing was getting a singular special skill from them, like a free taxi or some weapons.

Metal Gear Solid IV was praised for it’s graphics, artistic story (complete with 90 minute cutscenes), and great stealth gameplay.  Again, critics took it in like zero calorie cake at a modeling convention.  What the game ultimately lacked was subtlety.  Yeah, the story was nuanced at some points, but it attempted to close off so many loose ends, that in the end the story was more like a shotgun.  It was subtle while flying down the barrel, then became as subtle as a loud bang and a blood splatter against the wall.

In terms of “stealth gameplay,” yeah, it’s there for you to toy around with.  Too bad there’s absolutely no use in it.  You have plenty of ammo, and enemies fall like flies to a few well aimed rounds.  Heck, you don’t even have to shoot them.  In most cases you can literally just sprint by.

Fallout 3 is a great example of how open world gameplay can work and fail all at the same time.  There sure is a lot of space for you to explore, it’s all very detailed, and full of a post-apocalyptic life-equivalent in the form of mutant, well, everything.  Fallout 3 also suffered from post-Oblivion-expectation disorder.

In Oblivion, you talk to any Joe Schmo, and he’ll have 10 quests for you to do.  In Fallout 3, you talk to any Joe Schmo, and he’ll talk about the latest rumors.  There’s simply less content in roughly the same amount of space.  Compounding this the fact that any quest you do get, even simple ones from every day Jane Schmo will send you half way across the map.  The artificial lengthening of the game and its low area-to-content ratio are, in essence, the exact opposite of what Oblivion suffered from; short fetch quests and an abundance of easy, smaller quests.  Fallout gave up its accessibility for its grandiose epic qualities.

That’s not to say these game are bad, but why are we even talking about these almost exclusively for Game of the Year when there were TONS of other amazing games that were released in the between January 1 and December 31.

Where are the nominations for Braid, Tomb Raider: Underworld, World of Goo, Persona 4, Mirror’s Edge, God of War: Chains of Olympus, The World Ends with You, and Professor Layton and the Curious Village?  I’m not saying that any of these would necessarily win, but they were especially amazing games that are being shunned by a few big-name, big-budget heavyweights.

So, before you click “submit” on that Game of the Year poll, just be sure that you actually liked the game you were looking for, and not just the picture painted for you so elegantly by the words of journalists.

In semi-related news, there won’t be a traditional Mdawgigies this year, since it’s not exactly like I’ve been “active” in the journalism sense throughout the year.  So, instead, I’ll post the “Mini-Mdawgigies” sometime soon.