Super Meat Boy (XBLA)
A proud masochistic platformer which flaunts its retro roots. I mentioned this when I talked about Mega Man 10, but I'm a sucker for a solid brutal old school platformer.
This game is proud of its difficulty, and I admit that's what primarily got me interested. And the way this game handles difficulty is particularly interesting. It's never unfair in the same vein as I Wanna Be The Guy. It also avoid punishing the player too much like many other games in this platformer subgenre. It keeps the levels quick and fast paced. If you die, there is not a lot of retracing one's steps or wading through annoying menus to get back in the game. You do die in one hit, but within instants you are at the beginning of the stage ready to go once again. It leads to a great pace for the game, you can stop and take it easy when YOU want to, not when the game forces it upon you by interrupting your game flow with an unnecessarily long recovery time. The game embraces the fact that failure is part of the game, something you're expected to do. With many games communicating the attitude of "it's too hard if you can't beat it the first time," it's was great to see the problem solved by making failure recovery easier rather than making it more difficult to fail. And, indeed, the only levels to frustrate me were the ones where they violated this paradigm (screw you Skyscraper, screw you to hell).
As a self proclaimed lover of NES era games, I was pleased to see the homage this game played to many titles of that era. A fantastic example of this can be seen in the following video, which compares the chapter intro sequences to their "inspiration."
At GDC I was thrilled to meat (lolol) Tommy Referens, the programmer on the 2-man Team Meat. I told him how much I loved the game's pacing and that the path to becoming a Golden God (100% game completion) was a challenging one indeed, he seemed happy that someone there had completed it.
When I was actively defending my leaderboard position, I peaked at #85 on the 360 leaderboards. Out of the 150K scores or so, I was happy with that. After a patch was issued, though, something weird happened and I was #1 for a couple days. No complaints here!
Age of Empires III (PC)
This one had been out for a while, but there was a little promotion going on earlier this year where you could grab this title for a dime. Works for me!
I had put off playing this for a while, but I absolutely adored Age of Empires II. That game is probably why I missed the Starcraft bandwagon. The RTS my group of friends played was AoEII, so that's what I stuck with. I rarely did online gaming in high school, and I still don't very often now, but I had many fantastic late nights having amazing battles with some on my high school friends.
I admit, I didn't set the stage for having the same experience with this game. Not knowing anyone who played it, I just stuck to the campaign for the most part. Once I got past the inevitable "I don't know what any unit or building does" phase, it was really quite fun. And it was absolutely gorgeous - I was partial to AoEII's clean 2D isometric appearance when I played it. But that changed when I saw AoEIII not in static screenshots, but in motion. Perhaps the nature of my research has me biased, but the game's physical animations won me over. In AoEII, if a canonball hit a building, it might light on fire. Here, it will punch a hole through the wall as rubble falls around it. Great eye candy. I also got this around the same time I got a new desktop, so beautiful PC gaming was pretty novel for me. The campaign itself seemed like pretty normal RTS fair. I'll have to take a closer look at multiplayer one of these days, though I don't think it would be the same without a community of players I know.
Braid (PC)
I waited too long to play this game. It had been in my backlog for a while. Tim was an unlockable character in Super Meat Boy, and one of my favorites to play as. When this was shown as part of the Humble Indie Bundle 2, I knew I was left with no choice but to get it.
While a platformer, the pre-star platforming isn't really a challenge or the focus of the game at all. It's all about puzzle solving with various twists on the time manipulation mechanic. I won't go through them all, but each of them was unique and brought about several new affordances for types of puzzles. And those puzzles...they were just right. I was never stuck on anything to the point of being frustrated, but aside from maybe early ones I never blew them off for being too easy. And they consistently left me with a sense of pride and accomplishment. It's one of those games that makes you feel smart when you play it. I am the time master.
I want to talk about the game's end and post game, so beware SPOILERS from here on out. After I beat the last level, my mind was seriously blown. I could not believe how well done stage 1: braid was done. I didn't realize what was happening until I was forced to reverse time, even though all of the clues were there, you were stuck moving backwards for all of the other stages in the chapter, moving through them in reverse order... what a twist. While I resisted looking to the Internet for my playthrough, I dashed to it at this point to see what others had to say when I discovered the 'stars.' Very secret and hard to obtain items. Some include very tricky platforming. For one, you are forced to stand on a cloud for TWO HOURS, the time it takes it to traverse from one side of the map to the other. But you can do it, and you can indeed catch the princess. Through the game's text, Tim is characterized as being obsessive, driven towards a single goal without regard for consequence. I love how, to get 100% in this game, you must become Tim. You have to do absurd challenges and waste your time, all to catch the princess who does not want to be caught. And when you do catch her, as a not-so-subtle metaphor for the atomic bomb, she explodes. Congratulations death, destroyer of worlds. To celebrate your victory, the stars you found form a constellation, Andromeda - The Chained Maiden. I only went through with this because of my obsession to complete games, so indeed, I was Tim.
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn (DS)
My first Golden Sun game! I'm slightly cheating with the inclusion of this game since I finished it in January, but I completed the bulk of it in 2010. As context, I was going on vacation, and while some traditional folks like a book to read by a pool, I enjoy portable gaming.
At the time, I was in the mood for a basic JRPG, and this game delivered. I'm not actually sure I can point to much this game does that's particularly novel or noteworthy. I've also heard that it's EXTREMELY similar to past entries in the series. Nevertheless, I had fun playing through it, and often that's all you need. Leading up to this, my inner 'explorer' had been getting a bit anxious, so this, while not an iconic example of exploration, put off a break down for a few more weeks.
Well, that's that, the highlights of my gaming in 2010. We'll see where I take this blog from here. I'm still kind of playing around with how I want to structure it. But, particularly if you spot a game you've played, I hope my thoughts provoke some thoughts of your own. And if they do, tell me what you think! At the very least, I've now got a personal archive of my thoughts more robust than my feeble memory.
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