Holiday 2008-candy canes and coal

December 16, 12:26 PMLA Video Game ExaminerKenneth Wesley

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The holiday shopping season is coming to a close and going off the sales data from November, all gamers are probably taken care of. This is a list for those in the mood of giving back to some games, developers, and events that helped define 2008. The people and events that truly made 2008 special for the industry will get a candy cane because who doesn't like candy canes? And lumps of coal will go to those who truly make you wonder why they'tr part of the industry in the first place.

Lump of Coal: Bobby Kotick, Activision CEO-Look at the smarmy smile, he needs to get knocked down a peg or six. This guy just can't wait to tell the world just how much money his company is making and yet couldn't find the stones to actually publish games like Ghostbusters and Brutal Legend, but rather more Guitar Hero games. 

Candy Cane!: Treyarch-This team was already derided for having to follow up Modern Warfare exactly one year later. They not only developed a solid game, they also developed an awesome first person shooter on the Wii, complete with online multiplayer. The fact kind of confirms what I've already felt about most 'talented' third-party developers who can't develop on the Wii: they're just wimps.

Lump of Coal: Betheseda & Epic-This is not to knock their excellent games, Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2. I personally found both fun to play...if it didn't have so many glitches. No professional developer should ever allow any one of their games to be shipped and bought at retail at full price if it has this many bugs. If, for example, Nintendo shipped a multiplayer fighting game, let's call it Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and it came with severe online lag, the gaming community would flip and critically attack that flaw like they did on the Gametailers TV's Spike VGA preview this past Friday night. Oh wait...

Candy Cane!: Wii Fansites-It took a bunch of great sites, purely fan driven, to do what many professional game sites inexplicably couldn't do this past year: give Wii owners fantastic coverage. When it came to finding a review for a game in November on the day it was released, sites like GoNintendo.com and Nintendojo gave out and found reviews immediately, while other sites didn't post anything until two weeks later.

Lump of Coal: 'Hardcore' Gamers-Xbox 360 and PS3 owners who just happen to have a Wii can't wait to jump on a message board and talk about how hardcore their games whenever the Wii outsells both consoles combined. They're so eager to talk about their shooters and RPGs...and that's it. I guess being a fan of only two genres instantly makes you hardcore. And you know where I see proof of their hardcore love: at Gamestop, trading a copy of a great hardcore game they bought in March to score a copy of Gears of War 2. That's real hardcore stuff: trading in a game to a store that's eager gouge some unlucky person into buying a used copy of game at only five dollars off the retail price. Real hardcore stuff.

Candy Cane!: Goichi Suda-While most people wanna debate whether or not games are art, Suda 51 actually made a work of art with No More Heroes, probably one of my favorite games in 2008. He wrote a hilarious and scathing satire of video game fans and the game industry at times when most big-budget games wanna be taken too seriously with their 'apocalyptic' stories. Say what you will about its technical shortcomings, this is one of the bloodiest and most fun games to come out in years, feeling like a anime came to life with great results.

Lump of Coal: Blogs and Video Game Press-Even though there are some writers, the video game press is just basically full of bloggers and writers-not journalists, which is what we need more of. And not just to tell gamers about some game they just pre-ordered and is gonna be awesome. Journalists who actually report of games they may not play at home or even be fans of. Journalists who don't just give out awards to games that only came out two weeks ago (I'm looking at you VGA Advisory Council). Journalists who actually research and studies information before writing articles like 'The Wii is not for hardcore gamers' and 'The PS3 is doomed'

Lump of Coal: Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection-Remember that awesome part in Brawl when someone came back on the platform, escaping a fall and delivering two knockouts with 10 seconds to go? Yeah, me neither! Due to the lag infestation, lack of communication, and strict reliance on friend codes, having online gameplay in their biggest games became a sore spot for Nintendo. It's not enough to get a win you didn't deserve in Mario Kart Wii, you gotta rub it in the losers' face. And what's the point of connecting Animal Crossing online when you have to send a friend code through other means, rather than sending it through the game itself.

Lump of Coal: Holiday Season-I don't know if everyone gets together and has decided that this is an unwritten law, but games don't have to be shoved out in the last three months of each year. People have money in January, July, and May, a great time to release anything. Im pretty sure I'll be a great Mario game anytime of the year, not just a week before Thanksgiving. And not only that, these big blockbuster games are stealing all the attention from other great games no one really knows about.

Candy Cane!: Nintendo-Say what you will about their software lineup and hardware tech, Nintendo's innovated gamble has paid of in spades and has sent other developers scrambling on how to mimic their success. There's no way anyone could've predicted that one of the best-selling Nintendo games is Wii Play and it still continues to stay in the NPD Top 10, to this very day. They didn't say everyone should produce junk in order to grow their revenue stream, they just didn't want games to be complicated, so that way everyone could play, not just 'hardcore' gamers. They deserve their success after the Gamecube...and probably don't need a candy cane.

Candy Cane!: Guitar Hero/Rock Band-In the age of dwindling CD sales and when Disney TV stars are the most popular, both of these music simulators have exploded in popularity to a point that big time bands actually wanna be involved with this juggernaut and has allowed a new generation of fans to discover just how awesome these artists are and fun how it is to shred an electric guitar.

Lump of Coal: Star Wars fans-Because Lucasarts cynically knows that diehard fans have more money and costumes and merchandise than any brain cell responsible for rational decision making, The Force Unleashed and Lightsaber Duels were just more toppings in 'bad trilogy' turd sandwich. When people get excited about a game that lets you swing controllers around like lightsabers, give us a game that has characters everyone knows and love, not these rejects from the Clone Wars. And if fans would stop buying these games, Lucasarts wouldn't be in hurry to release them so quickly and maybe, put some creativity into the game.

Lump of Coal: ESRB-Because they have yet to figure out or understand that a lot of gamers are actually adults who are totally fine with seeing graphic content in video games, developers are forced to keep their imagination in check to make sure kids don't acidentally see something really cool. And not only that, they deserve another lump for forcing publishers to reveal nearly every detail of their games, which is leaked onto the internet.

Candy Cane!: Professional Voice Actors-Somebody's got make the characters you're interacting with in games compelling, especially games that don't have much in terms in budget, but are exceedingly rich in ambition. As much money was spent on MGS4, they still used a cast of season voice actors, not someone famous person they threw money at to kill three hours of their day. And best of all, female voice actors became more compelling than the 'actresses' who are in games because their bodies look nice.

Lump of coal: Anyone who writes an 'end of the world' storyline-Really? This is the best we can do? The world's about to end, so let's go out and shoot at other living creatures. Is this the only we can be compelled to shoot big guns? Isn't shooting big guns inherently fun?

Candy Cane!: EA Games-For years, EA has had to deal with complaints they're all about money and are content to just rehash the same game year after. So, in 2008, they release some really wonderful and different games (Boom Blox, Army of Two) and the result from all that creative risk: possible layoffs.  

Candy Cane!: Playstation 2 and PSP-Just when everything but the sky is falling in Sony's world with the PS3, here comes the PS2 and PSP to contribute great sales and games to keep Sony afloat, which just goes to show that the video game business is a marathon, not the a sprint race. The PS3 will be fine...in two years.