These are just my personal views and not necessarily the views of the CH Staff/Site as a whole. We haven’t had some good/heated arguments in a while so I figured I would try to entice a few. I should also note that I didn’t play any Sports titles in 2008 (I rarely do). I also don’t have a PS3 so the only PS3 games I had the opportunity to play were MGS4 and LBP – both of which I was impressed with for one reason or another. I should also note that I was much less impressed with Fallout 3 or Grand Theft Auto 4 compared to most of the known gaming world apparently. As such, expect a few surprises.
Best Visuals:
1) Metal Gear Solid 4
2) Gears of War 2
Best Story/Writing:
1) Braid
2) Witcher Enhanced Edition
Best Audio:
1) Dead Space
2) Call of Duty: World at War
Best Innovation:
1) Little Big Planet
2) Mirror’s Edge
Best Platformer:
1) Little Big Planet
2) Braid
Best Shooter:
1) Gears of War 2
2) Left 4 Dead
Best Multiplayer:
1) Left 4 Dead
2) Gears of War 2
Best RPG:
1) Witcher Enhanced Edition
2) Fallout 3
Best Indie:
1) Braid
2) World of Goo
Best RTS:
1) Sins of a Solar Empire
2) King’s Bounty: The Legend
Developer of the Year:
1) Valve
2) Stardock
Comeback of the Year:
1) Tomb Raider Underworld
2008 Game of the Year:
1) Left 4 Dead
2) Gears of War 2
3) Little Big Planet and Braid (tie)
Fallout 3 wins just about everything for me… GTA4 I agree with though. The gameplay hasn’t changed since it became 3D, the targeting is still frustrating, the missions are total garbage and rehashes (for the most part). I think its about time someone take the GTA model and export it to new genres than city explorer.
@The Main Event
Like a post-apocalyptic wasteland?
joshx0rfz´s last post: YouTube Tuesday: Singing about Kissing Wookies Edition
Heh, I was about to say the same thing.
“The gameplay hasn’t changed since it became 3D, the targeting is still frustrating, the missions are total garbage and rehashes (for the most part)”
That sounds awfully familiar to Fallout 3 and Oblivion, Dagger Fall, Elder Scrolls, etc.
Zombie slaughter is the most thrilling sport known to man…
That’s science FACT!…
Reverend Mike´s last post: Demotivational Monday: 2009 Is The International Year of Friendship
“The gameplay hasn’t changed since it become 3D…the targeting is still frustrating”
-> The VATS system fixes targeting issues. When you run out of VATS you are then back to FPS default mode, but this is at least explained in gameplay and encourages you to make some interesting choices about how high your agility will be. This also qualifies as a change in gameplay, so my those two criticisms of GTA:4 don’t really apply to FO3.
“the missions are total garbage and rehashes (for the most part)”
-> I played Oblivion and got tired of its trudge everywhere missions in a large part due to load times for Xbox. Fallout’s load times were acceptable. Moreover, the flavor of those missions were pretty entertaining, even if many were just spins on the typical.
Some of this is RPG bias. I mean, when is the last time you had a totally new take on a mission in an RPG? Even so, I don’t get sick of it. On the other hand, my tolerance wasn’t the same for the GTA series. Really, after Vice City, I lost interest. Anyway, the missions are often funny and have interesting twists enough for me to be satisfied with FO3, but not GTA4.
The Main Event´s last post: Hit Him in the Knees
It sounds like it’s fortunate in my enjoyment of Fallout 3 that I hadn’t played any of the Morrowind games. It’s all fresh and new to me, and that’s great!
I do agree on Left 4 Dead… I haven’t gotten to play it all that much yet, but what I have played has been lots of fun.
Thanks for posting this.
I was exaggerating a bit… of course. 🙂
VATS is pretty cool and for the console version, I agree it can be helpful. For the PC, I actually found it more of a detriment than a boon – especially at medium to long ranges or when baddies were partially concealed (ha! a D&D pun) by cover.
And I totally agree with the statement that all RPG-based missions are essentially the same thing. You either collect something, kill something, or deliver/escort something. It certainly is the challenge, scripted events, rewards, and story that determine whether they are interesting or not. This is one of the things I’ve meditated quite a bit about when it comes to videogame design.
I don’t think Fallout 3 is a bad game at all. It’s just that it could have been so, so, so much more if there had been ANY amount of effort or creativity at all. My issue with Fallout 3 is not that I think its horrible – I just don’t think it is anywhere near as good as many people make it out to be. I think its lack of longevity will be testament to that… like many of Bethesda’s other titles.
I’d actually like to hear some more reasoning behind many of your choices, but I’d also like to see more entries for each listing so that I can see more than just the “obvious choices”. Though I have to say I was very surprised to see Fallout 3 listed based how much you bash it. 😛
Left 4 Dead is definitely the stand out for me, they kept in a lot of teamwork building design decisions that other games would have removed because it makes the game harder for solo-douche players.
My main complaint about FO3 is that people seem to overlook legitimate complaints about the game. Things they complain about in other games are brushed under the rug for FO3. Like GTA 4, it’s still a good game, but it has a litany of issues which plague it.
joshx0rfz´s last post: YouTube Tuesday: Singing about Kissing Wookies Edition
Hmm, if it weren’t for Josh’s review, I don’t think many people who visit CH would have ever heard of Braid. Most people have never heard of World of Goo either. King’s Bounty is a very underhyped RTS game. Sins of a Solar Empire was a very obscure title when it first launched back in Feb – and since it launched back in Feb, I’m sure it fell off tons of people’s radar. I’d wager many of those are less than obvious choices. 🙂
I usually write up a little blurb about each category when I do these, but people often skip over them (at least on other sites they get posted to).
Here were some other games I played that I enjoyed to various degrees (including none at all):
Castle Crashers, Pure, Rise of the Argonauts (barely), Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, Audiosurf, Battlefield: Bad Company, Bionic Commando Rearmed, Ninja Gaiden 2, Rockband 2, Force Unleashed, Too Human, Sacred 2, Penny Arcade Adventures, Super Smash Brothers, Alone in the Dark, Legendary, Endwar, Devil May Cry 4, and probably a couple more I can’t remember.
For the most part, the first half of 2008 was spent playing oldies-but-goodies like Call of Duty 4 and Puzzlequest.
Some of the bigger releases of the year that I didn’t get to play were: Fable II, Last Remnant, Guitar Hero World Tour, Haze, Boom Blox, Crysis Warhead (which won best visuals on many sites), Eternal Sonata, Far Cry 2, and Infinite Undiscovery.
There are quite a few RPG’s in there and a couple which apparently had awesome graphics. Not sure if it would change anything for me personally, but I’ve heard good things about some of them.
About Fallout 3:
I totally agree with Josh. Let’s take L4D as an example. The AI Pathing of the zombies in that game is pretty amazing when you consider technical issues like: destroyable walls (which only the tank or players can destroy), doors (open/closed/destroyable by all), ledges (tops of trucks to buildings), ladders, holes in floors/ceilings, climbable fences/obstacles, etc.
And then look at the AI pathing in Fallout 3. They don’t need to contend with ANY of those things and yet, its pathing is far worse.
And then look at the simplistic, yet deep, design of the special zombies. Witch – fast, weak, tons of damage. Tank – tons of health, strong, mostly melee. Smoker – like a sniper. Hunter – like a rogue or assassin almost. Fat one – kamikaze melee. And then you have the zombies themselves which have cool mechanics such as their attention to noise, light, proximity, climbing, speed, etc.
And then you have AI for all the computer-controlled versions of those.
Again, Fallout 3 has none of that. Everything is just a stupid thing that either shoots you from where it is or runs straight for you and shoots/melees you… getting caught up on the pathing along the way.
And then you have the broken items such as Stimpacks which basically make you Godmode if you have enough of them. You have Stealth Boys which completely trivialize one of the skills that you can waste points in. Lockpicking is trivialized by just spamming your cursor over every possible character quickly. And when you do open stuff, it rarely has anything unique, useful, or rewarding compared to someone who decided to never use lockpicking – its not like picking every lock will net you items that non-lockpickers can get. All of the dungeons are completely lifeless and don’t tell a story at all. Its just cookie-cutter pieces of sections put together differently. And like a rat, you try to get from one side of it to the other… over and over and over again. When you play shooters or MMOs and good RPG’s, the dungeons have this sense of progression to them. You can tell that a particular area was used as a guard outpost, and this one was a torture chamber, and this one a throne room, and this one the pins for attack creatures, etc. Fallout3 has none of them. The list really does go on and on and on.
In the end, people just seem to love walking around somewhat aimlessly in a post-apocalyptic world – collecting whiskey bottles and teddy bears.
The intro area to Fallout 3 was awesome – the Vault. You could tell they spent a ton of time on it. And then you can tell where crunch mode settled in and they just glazed over the rest of the game.
Tonester: I agree on the pathing, and mostly agree on the AI though I think if the pathing were better the AI wouldn’t feel as bad either. Item management is an interesting aspect of the Fallout series, and I have rarely had any problems with being low on resources in FO3 versus in the first game where I pretty much always felt like I was going to die. The problem there is that I never finished either of the first two Fallout games, probably because of low resources / quick death. I can’t blame them too much for making the game easier, because there is still a sense of resource management and being low on resources (even if you really aren’t that low, you still want to save what you have and use it in the best way).
I can understand your argument about the dungeons/design, but when you say “all of the dungeons” and “has none of them”, you’re wrong. There are several areas that have the character and design you’re talking about in addition to Vault 101, but there are probably equally as many areas that fall into what you’re talking about. So I agree with you, just not to the 100% extreme that you’re presenting. Examples: the Museums / Archives on the mall, many of the metro areas have raider bases and checkpoints and torture chambers, the Citadel is very clearly designed based on ruins of the Pentagon, also I found the mall itself very interesting with the super mutant bunkers/trenches (if only they didn’t get hung up on all of the terrian 😀 )