2012 Worst Ending to a Trilogy
Assassin's Creed is by far my favorite game franchise. The mechanical satisfaction of moving through a sea of people, blending effortlessly into the crowd, and finally to strike and escape is a seductive power fantasy. AC 2 and its two sequels expanded the greater mythology of series, revealing more questions than answers, but always teasing forward. Ezio was as charming and well realized a character as has ever been seen in a game, and over three games, we grew with him. Even Altair, the personalty free douche from the first game is given his due in Revelations, truly preparing the series to step forward, and leave the past behind, and perhaps finally give Desmond some time to shine.
AC3 is unfortunately entirely bogged down by its legacy and it shows.
With its Revolutionary War setting, and extraordinary forest settings, the opportunity to play with historical fact is ripe, and the game makes some great choices. Despairingly, they attached their story to another douche character devoid of charm and who's story is extraordinarily limited. A fantastic twist takes 5 hours to manifest, and then several hours are spent setting up Conner, the douche, the character we will spend the next 10-15 hours not enjoying being.
The sequences set in the present are indirect homages to moments of games past, finally giving Desmond some moments to shine, but even his story is frustrating and rushed. Complicating matters is the un-surfaced nature of the systems at play, a mish-mosh of systems carried over from AC2 on, without ever explaining the benefit of those systems. Recruitment of assassin's is lifted from Brotherhood but has no tangible benefit. Economic systems carried over from AC2's villa upgrade exist but are meaningless. The snappy radial menu for selecting weapons has inexplicably been changed to a dense. hard to navigate menus, which destroy the flow of combat.
AC3 feels like a game started under different leadership, and as sequels to AC2 were born, their systems were shoehorned in. Design by committee has never seemed this obvious.
2012 Best Gamer Entitlement
Gamer's are dumb. Seriously.
The Mass Effect series so effectively hid it's authorship under the guise of player agency that when the climax of the story ripped that illusion away and announced "you did not write this", the audience LOST THEIR MINDS.
Bioware unfortunately threw their artistic leads under the bush and delivered a "better" ending, adding more context and cutscenes to the moments that already existed. Nothing was fundamentally changed (other than the Mass Relays becoming broken rather than destroyed). What I found to be more egregious was the severing of the Leviathan mission into DLC, robbing vital context from the original release.
In the end, gamer's whined, EA blinked, and things were improved slightly.
2012 Game Of The Year if it had been released in Oct
As mentioned above, key material in "from ashes" and "leviathan" were excised from the March release of Mass Effect 3. The new extended ending added emotional catharsis and closure that the more clinical original ending lacked.
As a package, Mass Effect 3 is a much different work today, nine months later. Different enough to rob it of Game of the Year contention. It is nearly unconscionable that most players will never experience a pure complete play-through of one of the years best games because of pure old school MBA greed. One can only hope a lesson was learned, but one doubts.
2012 Best Moar Betterer
*Spoiler* The ending of Borderlands sucked as did the PC port. A fine XB360 game was rendered un-enjoyable by poor FOV, poor UI design and general lack of care for the PC release. The is no story to speak of, simply shoot, loot, repeat.
Borderlands 2 is this year's most positive reaction to criticism in a sequel. Attention was paid to making the PC version the best it could be. An actual narrative with real, laugh out loud humor and some spectacular set-pieces was created.
The shooting is tight and well balanced, the gun-porn loot near infinitely enjoyable. The ending does not suck. Simply the best co-operative experience this year, Borderlands 2 improves what was bad in the original and increases all the good.
2012's 2011 GOTY I never finished
All of the emergent stuff I love in Far Cry 3 exists in Skyrim, or so I am told. After 15 hours of meandering from town to town I have seen precious little of the living world, and too much of dungeons and castles. I fear like Oblivion, this game may simply one day disappear from my collection.
Its saving grace has been the endless mods that allow me to remove the annoyances that rob the game of joy (encumbrance) and improve on what exists (visual tweaks). It is a visually stunning game with some truly terrible melee combat.
2012's 2011 Game-breaking bug
Imagine if you will spending 25 hours with a Polish RPG that has incredible visuals and a dense narrative. It is an improvement in every way over the first game in the series. You are invested.
Imagine then that you have had the game long enough for it to be ported to XB360, and the developer kindly updates the PC version with all of the tweaks made for the port. Alongside these tweaks comes a game-breaking bug that rotates a piece of geometry at the end of the second act preventing anyone from proceeding forward in the game.
And the developers answer is to replay the last 15 hours.
It finally got patched in 2012 and I finally beat the Witcher 2, but I very nearly deleted the install and moved on.
Unbelievable.
2012 Game That Was Better On PC
Dishonored is a great semi-open world game that lends itself to player agency, but the XB360 version is a washed out, ugly textured visual nightmare. On PC Dishonored is a glorious gorgeous tour de force of high resolution textures and gradients between light and shadow.
Sleeping Dogs is a close runner-up, with Direct 11 environmental effects giving extra texture to dynamic weather and the shining neon of Hong Kong at night.
Both games are stunning on a mid-range PC and I am anticipating Far Cry 3 will be as well.
2012 Game of the Year
I posted about Journey in march but it is simply the best example of games as art. A singular vision combining gameplay, art style, narrative combined with limited communication and no ability to grief.
Journey by design rewards neither grief nor co-operation, but by removing griefing and seamlessly transferring to anonymous co-op partners, the better part of human nature shines. Players naturally extend a helpful hand to each other with nothing but a chirp as communication.
It is the only game to ever move me to joyful tears mere moments after experience terror and despair. It is a triumph.
No comments:
Post a Comment