Am I On Crack?
While the “Game of the Year” discussion has already been pointed out as ridiculous (especially without having played Massive Loading Time Effect and Assassin’s Crossing Creed), I’ve found the range of suggestions interesting. Here are the games I’ve been hearing the most GotY talk about:
- Bioshock: This is the clear favorite in official awards, and for good reason. Tts thematic and gameplay elements are wound tightly together, each informing the other. The Little Sister/Big Daddy relationship is central to the story. It’s also the primary path to character advancement, it’s the core player choice, and it’s the primary combat element. Bioshock shows the power of picking only a couple core themes, and relentlessly iterating on them.
- Portal: I’ve heard a lot of developer support for Portal as GotY, while others have accused me of being “on crack” for making the suggestion. (Or, perhaps fairly, the “on crack” statement was referring to my mention of Zelda: Backtrack Hourglass.) Portal is much more relentlessly minimalist than Bioshock, and the result is limited in scope but almost flawless. Which makes this a surprising developer favorite, given that it makes their favorite pastime– bitching about the best games around– quite difficult.
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: This was a huge surprise to me, after hearing about the game’s early beta-quality release (and subsequent patching that brought it up to… late beta quality). In spite of this, I’ve heard quite a few people say it was their favorite game they’ve played this year. (In a strange twist, an acquaintance just tried to play through the extensively fan-patched Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Even the hot vampire chicks couldn’t get him all the way through. So either STALKER is less buggy, or it has something even better than V:tM:B’s core mechanic of running around as a sexy vampire, seducing everyone in sight.)
This isn’t the post to go into it, but it’s also been a strong year for indies. Everyday Shooter and Dwarf Fortress have grabbed a lot of buzz, even if people probably clocked in the most time on Desktop Tower Defense.