Over the rest of the year I’m going to be traveling, with limited access and time for posts. As a result (and to not stress myself out over the holidays with the blog), I’m going to be on hiatus until the new year.
I hope everyone has a good close to 2015, and a happy set of holidays. I’ll be back in the new year, recharged and with more nonsense gaming blather for your feeds.
Desktop Wallpaper
Firstly I feel like I need to lead off this morning by saying… I am feeling much better. Thanks for all the support yesterday, and I have to admit that a video shared to me by ChibiSeira helped a lot as well. Part of the problem is… I have been reviewing my blog for a project that you can see above. Normally this isn’t a big deal, but depression loves to lie to you. It makes things seem worse than they actually are, and in my mind… I have been in this present down cycle for months and months. The reality however is this current phase has only really been there since late October at the earliest and more specifically in this post Thanksgiving stress period that leads to the end of the year. Basically my down cycle is happening during the most stressful and hectic part of the year so it is absolutely expected. I’ve probably had one of these cycles every single year of my life, but where things wound up getting a little cross wired yesterday was the fact that at the time of posting… I had only actually managed to make it through June. So sifting through my blog it seemed like I was so active and so functional during the first half of the year… and the depression filled in the blanks and told me that I was absolutely useless for the tail end of the year. Hell to be truthful with August and September I have no clue how I ended up playing so many things… especially considering it is another massively stressful time of the year as my wife starts a new school year again.
Basically as I finished sifting through this years worth of blog posts… it made me realize that my brain was in fact telling lies to me. That sure the last few weeks have been a bit sparse, with me getting sucked back into World of Warcraft again… but that this is in no way indicative of the year as a whole. Essentially the above image started as me wanting to know the answer to a simple question… “How long of a break did I take from World of Warcraft?”. From here it shifted into… “wouldn’t it be cool to plot the various MMOs I have played this year” to finally “fuck it lets just plot everything I talked about in my blog”. To the best of my knowledge this represents all of the games that I wrote about this year in one form or another, which pretty closely marries to the games that I have played. If you are really curious you can see the actual google sheet that I built the image off of. I am sure there are little blips here and there that I poked my head in but never thought to write about them, but for the sake of this discussion we are safe just assuming that for one reason they weren’t that important to me. The list as a whole currently includes sixty eight different games, and I underlined the games that represented the AggroChat Game Club titles. The first thing you will notice is that I am absolutely very much an “MMO Gamer”. Thirty Six of the games fall into the loose bubble that is “MMO” or “Online” game, and in many months I was playing more than one of these actively.
One of the things I have come to realize is that apparently I am wired oddly these days, and this has been highlighted through participating in AggroChat and namely the Game Club. My Co-Hosts often seem to focus on whether or not they have beaten a game, and honestly… this rarely ever enters my mind. My focus seems to be on the playing and whether or not that was enjoyable. The funny thing is… I was not always this way. I remember during the Nintendo era, my friend Wade and I had a running competition to see who could beat the most games and as a result we both had lists of the games we had beaten. My focus was always on trying to churn through the game as fast as possible to get to the end, and then something changed. I was introduced to the internet, and the social aspect of gaming through IRC and MUDs. Then when Everquest was released and I was subsequently “jumped into” playing it… to borrow a phrase from Beau Hindman… my focus became about the experience and the social aspect of playing an MMO. Years later… I still MOSTLY play MMOs and when I play single player games… it becomes about the exploration and savoring the moment to moment game play and less about the win condition.
I guess this makes sense as MMOs generally have no win condition at all, but are instead a sequence of small moment to moment game play experiences that continue to build upon each other making up the overall game experience. Basically I find that I don’t like my single player experiences to end. When I play Mass Effect 2 for example, I spend time doing every single side mission because I know once I start that one mission… it is all over but the crying. That zeroing in on the end of the game is the least exciting part of the equation for me. Similarly I tend to avoid the main story line in both Fallout and Elder Scrolls games like the plague, because in the past at least they have had a similar problem of ending the game… when you finish the main quest. Then there are games that kill your character as part of the main story arc, and I find them insanely unsatisfying because even if I am not playing it… I like to think my character is out there somewhere moving around in the world without me… still existing. I think this is ultimately why I will always favor Mass Effect 2 to 3…. and will always take that one option in Dragon Age Origins. Basically I have been conditioned through playing MMOs to not want the enjoyable experience to ever end. So often I get right up to the end of a game… and then just stop playing it. When I revisited Wolfenstein New Order for example… I was less than fifteen minutes away from beating the game… but there was a part of me that desperately did not want to do it.
The fact that I managed to create a post this morning is a Festivus Miracle!!! That’s right folks… it is Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us. Right now the game play for the rest of the year is to dig into some of the things I played and talk about various experiences… like the game that surprised me or the game I struggled with the most. Not everything I played was amazing, but a lot of it actually kinda was. I am also hoping to finally beat the main storyline for Fallout 4, and maybe do the same for a few other games that I left stranded like Witcher 3. In any case, I hope you have a happy whatever it is that you want to celebrate. Be it Christmas, or Festivus, or a belated Chanukah… or ever a Super Christmas nod to my friend Grace… I hope you enjoy whatever it is that you celebrate with friends and family. Right now we have this awesome Christmas day planned of marathoning through the original Star Wars movies and then going to see seven in the theaters since my wife and one of her friends have yet to see it. I seriously could not think of a more perfect way to spend the day.
In the last week of research and writing about various games to put together my list of “The Best Games of All Time”, there are a number of game types and genres that I didn’t include much of, if any. In the same way that I talked about specific games that didn’t quite make the cut, I also wanted to talk about sections of the gaming medium that didn’t quite make it either.
If you’ve looked at the previous list, and wondered “why didn’t Tam include…”, read on.
Racing/Sports Games
Racing and sports games have a long history in video games. They’re some of the first games we made, and we make LOTS of them. Both genres are built upon slow, steady iteration, taking the boundaries set by predecessors and gently nudging them outward, but rarely if ever pushing well past them. innovations are subtle, small things: enhancements to UI, control sensitivity upgrades, improved physics, better customization. For a lot of people, the “best” racing or sports game is the one that got them into the genre; individual years blur together.
Additionally, racing games diverged very early on between the “arcade” racer and the “simulation” racer, and the choice between the two has long since been a matter of taste. With two fairly divergent schools of design that nonetheless heavily affect one another, slow but steady iteration, and the blurriness between the various iterations, I don’t know that I could pick out games that really stand out.
Classic Adventure Games
I’m talking here mostly about the point-and-click puzzle story games– the ones made by Lucasarts, Dynamix, Sierra, or a variety of other studios. So many of these kinds of games came out and iterated on each other so rapidly that it’s hard to establish a starting point or connecting threads, particularly once you reach back into text adventures or forward into action-adventure games. I think these games are important, but I also think they’re important as a whole, not individually. I don’t think it’s possible to pick out King’s Quest, or Full Throttle, or Day of the Tentacle, or Sam and Max, or Kyrandia, or Quest for Glory, or Police Quest as a particular stand-out.
For myself, I can come up with compelling arguments for pretty much any of that previous list, but it’s questionable how relevant any of them still are. We’re starting to see a resurgence of adventure games– Telltale’s games, Broken Age, Dreamfall Chapters, and others, but many of them define themselves by how far removed they are from the old style of point-and-click.
BBS Games
The predecessor to the modern MMO, BBS games and the MUDS/MUSHes (and eventually MMOs) they evolved into are certainly notable in gaming history. Like some of the above categories, however, there were a lot of them released in a very short period of time, with very similar feature sets. While popular for a time, very few of them endured beyond dedicated hobbyists, and most of them are notable only because they were online with other people, but did very little else well in the context of games as a whole, especially for their time. Perhaps the most notable one would be DIKUMUD, just due to its lasting influence on role-based games, but frankly even that I have a hard time holding up compared to its contemporaries.
Certainly important games, but difficult to claim as Best Games Ever.
Real-Time Strategy
Command and Conquer or _____craft? The two represent very different philosophies for RTS games, and while they both sit fairly high in terms of quality, they also tend to be somewhat monofocused. Given my own criteria, the vast majority of RTS games don’t make the cut, with Starcraft being one of the only notable exceptions, though Warcraft 3 developed the now popular concept of the “hero” unit. On top of that, RTSes as a genre have been sputtering out in a lot of cases, particularly with the rise of e-sports and MOBAs.
The RTS is such a divergent design model that it’s done relatively little to affect things outside itself, and there are very few serious stand-outs.
Shmups/Bullet Hell Shooters
This is another genre like RTSes, that has kind of absorbed into itself and doesn’t really cross-pollinate that much. It’s kind of an evolutionary offshoot that has its own subset of games but rarely breaks into the overall gaming consciousness nor really affects the medium as a whole a lot. There are many great games that fall under this umbrella, but it’s hard for me to recommend any of them as a “Best Game of All Time”.
Side-Scrollers
I use this term to describe games like Metal Slug, (older) Ninja Gaiden, Streets of Rage, Contra, Battletoads, and a variety of TMNT games, many of which appeared first on arcades. Other than people playing them a whole lot, though, most of these were overshadowed by the real stand-outs of the 16-bit era, and especially the arcade ones were very, very similar to one another with only nominally different skins. Super Mario, Castlevania, Metroid, Sonic 2 and Mega Man fairly adequately cover all of the ground that these games cover (exception: co-op arcade which was notable and early, but about the only thing some of these games did), but there’s not a lot of variance or innovation. I have a lot of fond memories of these games, but I can’t exactly put any of them up on a pedestal; they were largely kind of shallow even for their time.
Still-Living PC Games
There are a small number of games that have stayed alive and kicking through PC hobbyists for a long time. I’m thinking of MMOs that have been resurrected by fans, popular classic shooters like Quake 3, and other snapshots of particular times in gaming history that have been preserved. While a lot of these have been ported multiple times and even still have tournaments every year, they’re also followed by pretty small audiences that are very insular. There’s a big difference between a game that’s relevant today because a small group of hobbyists has kept it alive and a game that is relevant today because new games are still copying its design.
Mobile Games
There are a ton of mobile games. It’s still a very new market, and it’s really hard to pick out stand-outs, especially considering how far they’ve come in the last five years. You’ll note that there were very few early home console games on my list– much like early home console games and early arcade games, early mobile games are exploratory forays into the medium, but not terribly refined yet. Per my own criteria, simply being the first to do something doesn’t make a game uniquely notable, and I feel like we haven’t had quite enough maturation in mobile games to start pulling out true stand-outs.
I have absolutely no doubt that we’ll get there, though.
Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs)
This one rode a line for me. Technically, League of Legends was released in 2009 and available on multiple platforms and is therefore eligible for the list. What I don’t know is whether or not MOBAs are a briefly entertaining offshoot of RTSes, like skateboarding games that were huge for several years and then nearly all evaporated, or if they’re a new mainstay of gaming. It’s largely too early to tell, and it’s uncertain whether League of Legends will retain its stranglehold or whether DOTA2 will pull ahead. Both represent very different philosophies, and I don’t think any of the stand-outs have been around long enough to really claim Best Game Ever status, and the genre’s progenitor, the original DOTA, is frankly overshadowed by its successors.
Based on my initial criteria, there are a LOT of games that make it into consideration. I want some way of organizing them sensibly, so that I can explain not just what games make the list, but why. To that end, I’ve got the following categories, to help me filter games:
- Enduring Classics
- Medium Changers
- Genre Pinnacles
- Right Place, Right Time
- Honorable Mentions
- Why Didn’t I Include…
The first four cover games that I think make the cut for “best games of all time”, the latter two are for things that are close, or aren’t eligible for inclusion for one reason or another. I’ll be doing each one, day by day.
There are a number of games that didn’t quite make my list for one reason or another, but are either oft-expected inclusions or are worth mentioning for various reasons. I waffled on including these, and while I ultimately didn’t, they’re largely excellent games that deserve recognition. This is the list that I suspect people will be mad about, and know that I waffled on pretty much all of these before ultimately deciding against their inclusion.
Final Fantasy VI
Boy, did I go back and forth on this one. It introduced the ensemble cast, it showed a villain with a complete character arc. It offered highs and lows, and it’s a finely crafted game. What kept it off the list was criteria #6. The game was excellent for its time, but hasn’t aged well. Its pacing is all over the place, making it hard for its strongest suit — its narrative — to stand up to more modern games with a higher caliber of writing. While it pioneered several interesting ideas (most notably the ensemble cast and no “true” main character), it set a drumbeat that, for the most part, other games have not marched to, or seen much success if they’ve tried.
We may see a resurgence in the kinds of ideas that FF6 pushed forward, but outside of a few PS1 era games (SaGa Frontier, for example), it hasn’t really influenced much beyond itself, and doesn’t quite hit the heights or the long-term relevance of its biggest Genre Pinnacle competitor: Chrono Trigger.
Metal Gear Solid
MGS is very, very similar to FF6 in terms of what prevented its inclusion. It’s still a great game, and it continues to fuel a beloved series, but it marches to the beat of its own drum in many ways, with a lot of its innovations not really making a splash in other parts of the gaming sphere. It does a lot of things that only it can get away with, because they wouldn’t be appropriate or sensical in other games. It’s also worked very hard to become almost entirely inaccessible from the outside, with in-jokes and nonsensical storytelling elements that you either “get” or don’t, but either way it rarely bothers to explain them.
That having been said, it’s still a very good game with some very compelling moments, it just forged a path that the rest of the medium didn’t really follow, and as time has passed, it’s pulled more and more from other games than it has come up with ideas that other games then take.
Resident Evil 2
A survival horror game where limited resources and slow-paced controls help amp up the fear. This sort of third-person horror game dropped off fairly dramatically in popularity as controls got more and more refined, because they largely became third person action games against monsters with jump-scares, rather than legitimately provoking fear and dread. Like the previous two, a lot of the things in Resident Evil died as controls got more precise and more responsive; the fear factor in a lot of modern horror games comes from a limited viewpoint, not limited controls.
That having been said, Resident Evil 2 offered some genuinely terrifying moments and had some interesting, arguably well-executed ideas about control limitations as a mechanic, just none that really took off.
Shadow of the Colossus
SotC nearly redefined the boss battle. It was a game almost entirely composed of just boss battles, and it was visually astounding and occasionally very moving. It had compelling controls and exciting gameplay, offering forms of climbing and traversal gameplay years before Assassin’s Creed would bring parkour into cities. Its enormous bosses were fought not by hitting their legs until an HP bar went away, but by climbing atop them and avoiding their attempts to shake you off until you could reach their weak point and strike.
Unfortunately, God of War beat it to market, and the visceral action with quick-time-event driven boss battles became popular instead of SotC’s boss mechanics.
Beyond Good and Evil
It pains me, but I can’t *quite* give BG&E a spot on the list. It’s a brilliant game, with one of the best female protagonists ever, a lot of compelling non-violent and stealth-driven gameplay, and a rich, compelling narrative. When I played it as it first came out, I expected that I’d see a lot more games that focused on non-violent, more nuanced gameplay, where victory is achieved through something other than “hit everyone bad until they stop moving”.
Sadly, BG&E is a massively underappreciated game, and hasn’t quite gotten the cachet to influence the medium as a whole. It was, I think, ahead of its time just enough to keep it from being an instant classic. Its sequel has been in development hell for quite a while now, and while I’d like to hope we’ll see it, I’m not convinced we will.