What I've learned and my Game of the Year

So I learned something with my last post. Not the one about the Wii. The other one that was up for about 15 minutes and that I then deleted.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post promising a retrospective on the Wii, PS3 and the DS. I had something to say about the Wii, so I thought to myself "I may as well do a year-in-review of the console, and while I'm at it, do one for the PS3 and the DS." The problem here? I assumed I'd have something interesting to say about the PS3 and the DS. Turns out I did not. My lesson learned? Don't promise readers future content when you don't already have ideas for those posts. If I actually had a decent readership, that could easily end with a lot of fans walking out the door, any credibility I may have built along with them.

So my apologies. I will not be writing a PS3 and DS year-in-review. Instead, I will be talking about my Game of the Year.

I thought carefully about what my Game of the Year was. I considered thinking about which game was most finely crafted, or the game with the most influence of the year. Then I read The Brainy Gamer's post about The most important game of 2010. It is, as always, an excellent post and one that I recommend you read.

So since The Brainy Gamer already covered the most important game of 2010 I decided I'd just go with my personal favorite. It was an easy choice, since there was really only one game this year that I fell in love with. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed many other games in 2010, but none of them really grabbed me as strongly as this one did. Most of the games I played this year were also 2009 games, so not legitimate candidates.

So with enough pussy footing around, here we go!

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies for the Nintendo DS. When this game was being advertised, it was made clear that Square Enix wanted to make the Dragon Quest series as popular in North America as it is in Japan. DQIX was the result of that desire. They did not do a drastic overhaul of the series to make North American consumers interested. They included one very North American gaming mechanic to draw some sales, which is to allow the player to create their own main characters in a character creation process at the beginning of the game. Other than that, the game is Dragon Quest through and through.

No one thing made me fall in love with Dragon Quest IX, but rather an accumulation of tiny details. This game was crafted with love. A fine balance of nostalgia from previous Dragon Quest games along with its own style, DQIX screams with personality from start to finish. The battle system is proof that turn-based RPG battles can still be fun amongst the onslaught of new battle systems in most new RPGs. It forces you to make use of your full range of spells and abilities, particularly during the challenging boss fights. One of the most charming things about DQIX is the humor. Almost relentlessly, the text in the game is full of puns and word play. Equipment names, character names and most of all, monster names, this game is full of some of the best wordplay that I've seen in a game. Names like Cruelcumber (cucumber monster), Zummeanie (zuchini), Wight Knight, Knocktopus, Stenchurion, Bad Karmour (a living armour enemy) and so on.

This game is also pack full of content. Hundreds of different pieces of equipment, 12 different classes and a post-game that is even larger than the main game. You will almost never run out of things to do in this game. And just to make things even better, there are dozens of quests available as downloadable content that are still being pushed out once a week, a service that only ends in January 2011. Oh, and the whole game can be played with up to 3 other friends via local wifi.

Square Enix did not hold back for Dragon Quest IX. Oddly enough, it was a much better game than Final Fantasy XIII, which was actually kind of awful, even though FFXIII had an absolutely massive budget in comparison to DQIX. They created one of the best (if not the best) Dragon Quest games to date and one of my favorite games of all time, much less of 2010.

I want to thank the few readers that I have for returning to my blog with its sporadic updates. I appreciate the traffic no matter how much or how little there is. When I have an idea about about video games, it's nice to know there's somewhere I can go to write that idea down and have you few people read about it. I look forward to what 2011 brings for gaming and I will hopefully be able to provide some interesting perspective on whatever happens.

Have an excellent New Year!

The Wii 2010

This year Nintendo decided to flex its history muscle. In seeming response to the so called "hardcore" crowd hating on the Wii in all of its waggling glory, Nintendo hauled out the big guns and released a new main-series title for pretty much every single one of its franchises. Mario Galaxy 2, Metroid: Other M, Kirby's Epic Yarn, Donkey Kong Country Returns and an announcement of a new Zelda game for 2011.

There is a thin line between being desperate and giving the fans what they want, and I'm not sure which side of that line Nintendo landed on this year. On one hand, they don't need money. The problem here is that the company knows that anytime they slap one of these big names on the front of a box that it will sell like hot cakes. The big N relies on these franchises like a BLT relies on bacon. There isn't a lot of room for interesting new franchises on the Wii since its constantly hit with wave after wave of shovelware and half-assed ports. The Wii's popularity is part of its problem when it comes to accruing favor in the eyes of critics and gamers. Thus, the Marios, the Metroids and the Zeldas. If Nintendo can pump out quality titles in these franchises fast enough, critics will turn a blind eye to the absolute lack of anything interesting happening on the console that was once named the Revolution.

Nintendo might have released very good quality games such as Mario Galaxy 2, Donkey Kong Country Returns and Kirby's Epic Yarn in 2010, but I feel that they've given up on part of their mission statement with the Wii. They have stopped trying to revolutionize the gaming world. They haven't even made a serious effort to make the Wii Motion Plus work particularly well yet, although that's presumably what the new Zelda game is going to be doing. As for 2010, Nintendo has mostly reached back into their past to find their acknowledgment from fans. It's not a bad thing. I enjoy the few first party Nintendo games that are released. I just don't think that they've done anything terribly important for the gaming industry this year.

Year in Review - 2010 pt. 1

The year is coming to a close and gaming sites, magazines and shows are getting riled up with game of the year awards. I'll be doing my own post on my pick for favorite game of the year, but I also want to do separate posts on the consoles that I played and what I think they have achieved.

I'll be talking about the Wii, the Nintendo DS and the PS3, but nothing Xbox 360 related , since I haven't laid so much as a finger on a 360 controller this year and nothing PSP related, since I only played 2 games on the PSP this year and they were both 2009 titles.

Since we're about to start the second full week of December, I'm going to do about 1 post a week, starting with the Wii.

I'll mention games I'm considering for my pick of the year as I go along and I'll wrap it up with one final post about that game and why I chose it among everything else I played.

I'd also love my very few readers to offer their thoughts on favorite games of each console as I make the posts. Feel free to talk about PC, 360 and PSP games as well and maybe if enough of a discussion starts up I'll try to work some of those thoughts into my last post of the year.

The Supernatural

I am having a stupendously difficult time getting into Red Dead Redemption. I played the game for a good 3 hours. About one hour in I was looking forward to turning the game off, but I continued since I read so many phenomenal things about the game. I tried a second time and didn't get much farther. Every now and then I'll read something else about how fantastic the story or the music is in the game, pop it back into the PS3 and have a serious go at immersing myself in the apparently deep and rich narrative aaaaaand, fail to care once again and turn it off.

Why can't I enjoy a game that sits amongst the very highest scores on metacritic.com? And it certainly isn't the first time that this has happened to me either.

Any release of Grand Theft Auto is met with critical acclaim and after reading about the game (let's use 4 as an example), I get excited that I might finally understand why people love these games so much. Then, sure enough, a couple of hours into the game I turn it off and put it in its case, never to be taken out again. Call of Duty games illicit a similar response as well, although I enjoy the Zombie maps in Call of Duty 5 and Black Ops.

What is the one things that all of these games have in common? They're normal. I don't mean normal in the sense that they are every-day, boring or lackluster. I mean that they lack supernatural elements. Even if the stories get a bit carried away, all of these games feature completely normal people without any super powers other than excellent aim and, occasionally, a super-powered attitude. All of the guns in these games are based on guns that actually exist or existed and so are the vehicles, scenarios and characters. It's not the "normal" narrative that I have a gripe with, though. It's the gameplay.

Somehow, the fact that it's technically possible for me to acquire one of these guns in real life and go out and shoot it (at a firing range, of course) diminishes how much I will enjoy the game. But throw in some super powers like in Borderlands and give me guns that defy logic and have fire, acid and lightning flowing out of their barrels, and suddenly I'm interested. Each time a new GTA game is released I can't help but find myself wishing that the main character had super powers. The idea of such an open and free world appeals to me, and I've heard that the stories get better and better as the series advances. Grand Theft Auto 4 is probably a much better game than Infamous or Spider-man Shattered Dimensions (two more open-concept sandbox games), yet GTA4 hardly gets 3 hours of my time, whereas I play these other games to completion.

Now, I'm not saying that Infamous isn't deserving of the title "great game". I feel that it is. The way the developers made it fun to just move around the city as Cole, grinding on rails and floating through the air with lightning-powered hand-thrusters is wonderfully done. Just moving in this game feels great. But, it doesn't have a strong story or very deep characters. Because of this, games like Infamous fall of the grid for the most part when it comes to discussing great design, advances in gaming narrative or game of the year topics, whereas a game like Grand Theft Auto 4 is still talked about several years later.

As much as I crave a good story in a video game, maybe gameplay is still more important to me. Something that my partner has made fun of me often for is my urge to feel "cool" in a video game. Because of this, games like Ninja Gaiden, Devil May Cry or Bayonetta (all games with famously terrible stories) are big winners in my book. I derive a huge amount of satisfaction from dodging, attacking and comboing to destroy enemies and looking awesome while doing it. When I'm playing a game as a cowboy with a pistol and a horse, I don't get that feeling. Because of this, the gameplay doesn't make me want to continue the game. I don't look forward to the next big shoot-out if I can't launch some lightning bolts or fireballs over there alongside my bullets. I can't look forward to the next part of the story if I can't even look forward to the next battle or other gameplay element.

I have the same reaction to sports games. I cannot play the newest iteration of FIFA, NHL, NFL or whatever. I do, however, play and thoroughly enjoy every single Mario sports game that is released.

I know that I'm amongst the few who do not play Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, but I'd be extremely interested in hearing if anyone else agrees with me. Do you have difficulty getting into these games? Is it for the same reason? If there are different ones, what are they?