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Top 3 innovative games of 2008
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It was a good year for games. Developers from multiple studios have been pushing the limits of gameplay this year, and we gamers have reaped the benefits in a big way. Here are my picks for the most influential when it comes to changing how you play a game.
Fallout 3
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Metacritic's game of the year, and probably one of the prettiest games you'll ever play, Fallout 3 has been topping the charts consistently since its release. A combination of addictive RPG-style ability selection, an immersive story, and first-person shooter elements has made it a hit over and above its cult classic predecessors. Fallout has an irresistable steam-punk dystopian charm to it that echoes Bioshock, and it has quite possibly one of the most fun ways to vanquish your foes around. A unique slow-time interface let's you select your opponent's weaknesses while viewing the probability that your attack will succeed with nearly every weapon. Aiming for the face with the nuke launcher is not only possible, but incredibly silly to pull off with this system. Hands down some of the most fun I've had in a FPS game was using a ridiculously large powered sledgehammer to hack and slam my way through wreckage-strewn city streets.
So what's so different about Fallout 3? Most games that claim to have an "immersive storyline" will in reality have a story that is mostly involved with why the enemies you are killing are scary, like Dead Space. Some even think they can advertise "creativity" on their package when you are shooting things to get keys that open doors in the gameplay. Good thing no one has thought of "red key opens red door" before now, right Doom3? Fallout breaks out of the mold with its sandbox-style, interaction-driven story. What you choose to do or who you choose to save determines as much of what happens as the game mechanics. This is a change from traditional FPS games in a big, big way. Just look at my personal favorite, Half-Life 2. While the game is brilliant, its story consists of cutscene-like pauses where characters talk and interact around you and give you tasks to perform. Your only choices are between what weapons to use and whether or not you should save your ammo, not whether or not you will let an entire population burn in nuclear agony. I chose to let them burn, but you don't have to. Really. It's just a choice you make. Just because I incinerated people with a dormant nuclear weapon in the center of their badly-placed domiciles doesn't mean you feel compelled to silence their prattle should.
Left4Dead
Everyone and their dog raving about this game doesn't mean that I can't. Believe me, it's not like they pay me to. VALVe has enough good press on this game to choke a lion. The advertising budget alone could feed most of Ethiopia for a few days, but I'm not complaining.
"Ooooh, a zombie game. Really creative. Yeah. Brilliantly done." Honestly, dear reader, that sarcasm is too cutting. Left4Dead actually was an innovation. Rather than being yet another "scantily-clad heroine vs. the world" formula or a "find red key for red door in poo-brown cathedral of the Cult of Doom", Left4Dead breaks the guy who makes the mold with a neck-crushingly large emphasis. Two words: co-operative gameplay.
Every single enemy in this game besides the generic infected will completely incapacitate you if you are alone. Your life is your team. If the female character decides that she's had enough of male bravado to fill a tanker truck and runs off on her own, she's pretty much guaranteed to be butchered within a few minutes. Even if just two people decide that their team has as much sense as a sack of hammers and leaves, they'll still lose out to more than one boss infected. The upshot of all this is that you're running around, chock full of adrenaline, in a tight football-esque huddle bristling with weaponry and bad audio clips. Think of it like watching four people impersonate a porcupine, but instead of quills, they have bullets. When it works, its great, and when it fails, its great. This game turned co-op gameplay onto its head, spat on the competition, and danced a jig on the corpses of its contemporary zombie game friends. Resident Evil seems more like Resident Weekend at Bernie's compared to this game.
The added novelty of versus mode requires even more cooperation. Not only is it impossible to stop even a mostly AI team of survivors with one boss infected, but it's damn hard even with four human players doing their very best to pull people off of cliffs, chew them up, puke on them, or smash cars at them with glee. To make things even more difficult, the survivors and infected switch sides every level, meaning you have to be good at every facet of the game in order to pull it off. If you aren't, your team is there to help, and can actually give you good advice if they're not busy being jerks and stealing all the juicy survivor-meat.
Since many readers have no doubt tired of media hounds drooling over Gabe Newell like a pack of dachsunds at a weenie roast, I'll move on to my pick for the most innovative game of 2008.
The day I tried this game, my brain exploded so far out of my eyeballs that a man across the street shrieked after being hit with a chunk of gray matter. Mumbling incoherently with terror, he could only gape as I made my way to him and attempted to explain. After showing him Auditorium, he accepted my apology and handed me a rag to wipe the neurons off my face.
Is it a puzzle game? Is it music? Is it a tiny slice of God's left toe that some brave soul has managed to sneak away with? You tell me. Click the link, I promise you won't hate it. You just can't hold me responsible if it absorbs your life.
For those chumps out there who don't like clicking on things, this game is a puzzle game that involves manipulating particles. A stream of white, fancy-looking particles flows from one point on the screen in a certain direction. You use arrow tools (up, down, horizontal) and a few funny spiral tools to turn the flow of particles in the direction you wish. The goal is to fill up little meters with the particles. As you do so, a musical track beings to play. At first it will just be the melody line, but more meters mean more audio parts. One meter will fill up and play a base line, another the piano, and a third the strings. This provides an incredible sensory reward for completing uniquely styled puzzle formats.
As levels progress, you have to change the color of the particles by moving them through differently colored zones on the screen. In the last few levels, you have to move them through three or four different color changes just to get it done, not to mention manipulate three or four differently placed flow tools. I think some callus developed in my cerebral cortex on the second-to-last puzzle before I got it right.
You might ask me if this is fun. I might tell you that it's not fun at all, it's a life-changing glorious experience second only to that of watching Snakes on a Plane while eating vanilla bean cheesecake. I might also just say, "Yes. Extremely." I cannot emphasize enough how enjoyable this is. Unless you have a terrible disability or no internet access (in which case I would wonder why and how you read my articles) you simply have to try it. If not for the enjoyment of it, try it because it's remarkable, new, and has amazing potential.
One implication of this technology is even more mind-blowing than the game itself. Imagine for a moment that you can apply this technology to any MP3 or WMA audio file. Suddenly you're playing a visually gorgeous puzzle to Beethoven's 9th Symphony, or god forbid "Banana Phone". If that's not innovation, I'll eat my left middle toe with tobasco sauce and call myself Luther.
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