The Games of 2005

By Vermouth

Okay before I get to the games of 2005 first a little bit of a preamble. I’m speaking for me personally, I don’t claim to speak for all of Aelon staff so no sense telling me I’m wrong, (but I certainly welcome hearing about it if you disagree). Further I obviously haven’t played every single game that came out this year. Indigo Prophecy stands out as probably the most notable omission. So what follows is a brief recap of the year that was and what i feel were the best games that came out this year.

Furthermore I decided that I wasn’t voting for any game which already had a version released before 2005, which disqualified GTA and Ninja Gaiden Black. In fact, Ninja Gaiden already received my GOTY last year. That said, the two games I played to death this year (which were really my games of the year so to speak) were Baldur’s Gate 2 and World of Warcraft. There were some awesome games released this year but those two really dominated my gaming time. I had more time than usual for reasons mentioned in my bio. I also decided to not include any negative awards for disappointments as I didn’t want to ruin the celebratory tenor of these.

There were 3 news stories that seemed to be the toast of the internet town in 2005, the first one of which actually started towards the end of 2004. It was the handheld war which was in full swing this year. Sony launched with an exceptional line-up then managed to have a drought that lasted the whole year long after that, only procuring two other AAA titles after the PSP launch. The DS started very slow last year but by the end of the year had become one of the best platforms around.

Secondly we had the launch of the Xbox 360 and the next generation. We had all the expectable delays, mediocre launch games, beautiful new graphics and tons of complaining. Their decision to launch two SKUs strikes me as an interesting one and the higher price of course nobody really likes. Even worse to my way of thinking is the higher prices of next-gen games. $60 is a whole lot to ask for a game especially when said game is little more than an up sourced port of a PS2 title.

Of course, the number one story of the year has got to be Hot Coffee. Regardless of what you think of the issues, this is having huge repercussions for what seemed like a harmless mod to me. I mean, it’s going to be interesting how the ESRB tries to govern mod content in the future. Far more menacing is the serious specter of censorship. After Hot Coffee, Hillary Clinton, the presumptive front runner for the 2008 Democratic Nomination for President got involved, and has introduced legislation of federal regulation. It will be interesting and a bit scary to see where this goes from here but you can’t deny it is news.

Anyway on to the games of 2005 which were all my favorite titles. I didn’t rank or categorize these per se as excellence really is excellence, and ranking and categorizing really just becomes about making arbitrary decisions based on increasingly trivial reasons. So I have my contenders and my game of the year. So without further yammering from me, the games of 2005:

Contenders

Brothers in Arms: The Road to hill 30— There were few genres more in need of a breath of fresh air than the squad based WW2 Shooter. Between this and another game 2005 provided a real breath of fresh air, as this game introduced a fantastic new style of a sort of tactical puzzle shooter. By combining this formula of 4 F’s with one of the most interesting stories told in any war game, Brothers in Arms provided a really fun and novel experience. Had it came out first I suppose Earned in Blood could be sitting here but by the time it came around it just seemed like a rehash and the novelty had worn off a great deal.

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory—I think at this point you probably know where you stand on the subject of Splinter Cell - you’re either a fan or you’re not. I’m a Splinter Cell fan myself and while it may not be as fresh as the series once was, the additions of co-op gameplay, new graphics, more options of how to do things in each level, and more opportunities to be violent than ever before, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory was one of the best incremental upgrade games that we saw all year.

Resident Evil 4 – A lot like Civilization 4, this game could have won it all and it’s really the clear come-back game of 2005. That is to say the series had gotten tired, and they totally wiped just about all of it and made it a pretty hot shooter. The graphics are pretty stunning; the gameplay is quite challenging, and the story has got some nice twists and turns. I think by the end though I was suffering from a sense of shell shock. It eventually made me want to scream, and not in the good way, for being just a bit too much of a good thing. The game just gave me the feeling of being led around by the nose for a while and just having a touch too much filler.

Civilization IV—This game is the game that’s proverbially “this close” to being on top of the list. The gameplay is the same stuff we’ve been seeing for around a decade now; you start off with some settlers and maybe one military unit and you build up through science, trade, war and taxation to a world-wide empire. National borders that have a meaningful impact on gameplay and religion adds to the formula to make the best Civilization game yet. Bugs however practically ate this game alive. It had some nasty stability issues on my computer and different graphical glitches on ATI and NVIDIA cards. Finally while the Civ games still have that addictive one more turn till forever style, after playing the Total War games it feels a bit like a step back to merely slide units into one another. All in all an exceptional title but the margin for error on a best of list is of course very small.

FEAR–Monolith strikes again with the combination of a great story and great FPS mechanics with some flat out gorgeous graphics. If you’ve got the beast in the box this game is the kind of game you show off with. While the story was awesome and it had it’s creepy moments, the really freaking amazing thing about this game was the AI. Stuff like pushing over obstacles and jumping through windows to get a better go at you was very cool. Whereas Resident Evil 4 suffered from being a bit too long and throwing in one too many turns, this one feels a bit too short and doesn’t have enough turns. Maybe not a bad thing as it didn’t feel too repetitive to me.

Call of Duty 2- Do you like killing Nazi’s? I hope you do because you can pile up the bodies five miles high in Call of Duty 2 for the PC or Xbox 360. I think the most interesting thing about this game is the damage system. You’re either going to love it, or you’re going to absolutely hate it. I think it’s utterly brilliant and makes the game a lot more immersive and fun. I’ve often said in FPS titles that “thought is the enemy” because if you’re really thinking you’re not reacting. In this it’s just like football, thinking about what you’re doing is bad—reacting, doing what you’re supposed to do naturally is good. By removing something like health packs you really do a great job of making the player think less and react more. While this may not be great for a tactical game or a role-playing game, for an adrenaline soaked experience it’s an awesome way of keeping things turned to 11 for the whole game.

Kirby’s Canvas Curse—It would have been fair to assume that platformers were played out and they’d gone as far as they could go. We’ve been playing them pretty constantly for over 20 years; but these next two games took two very different routes to prove that kind of thinking to be quite wrong. By changing the control scheme and changing control from over the character primarily to primarily over the course, Kirby’s Canvas Curse manages to be one of the most instantly fun games I’ve played in a long while. It’s also nice to see a game that starts out really easy and by the end is quite the challenge. I mean I’ve showed this to my mom who hasn’t played console games since they went 3D, and she totally picked it up like when she used to play Sonic the Hedgehog or Super Mario Brothers with me.

Psychonauts— It’s a Tim Schaeffer game. That’s a phrase that should make gamers feel very interested, and bean counters scared. All his games are excellent and for whatever reason they don’t sell particularly well which is quite sad. Not many people bought Psychonauts, and they really don’t know how awesome a game they’re missing. The humor in this game combined with it’s wonderful art style and it’s very well done platforming mechanics makes for one of the best games I’ve played in years.

My favorite game of 2005

Advance Wars Dual Strike—If you’d told me that a year ago that the best game of 2005 would be a handheld strategy game on the DS, I’d have thought you to be of questionable tastes. But yet this turn based handheld game is my favorite game out of a weak field. Despite some morons writing the dialogue the game is a rare mix of accessibility and depth that one just doesn’t find very often. In some ways this is the beneficiary of a weaker field but the diversity of the missions and the accessibility of the missions is such that this game is the best game of the year.

Some may look at the graphics and sneer, but when I look at them I see a really beautifully rendered game in which everything is very stylistically whole. I often found myself up at 5 or 6 in the morning having been lying in bed for several hours playing this, just telling myself “oh just a few more turns then I’ll have them for sure.” This game strikes me as a new breed of beer and pretzel war game tailored for a handheld. It’s so good you’ll play it not only when you’re on the run, but you’ll sit around the house playing this for hours at a time which very few handheld games have ever inspired me to do.