Blog FeedGames of 2007: A Debate by Mail
Head881,
I don’t think your ideas about game of the year are that far off base. I think it’s one of those things that has sort of mutated as the signal-noise ratio has gone way off the charts with the widespread penetration of the Internet and now it’s more of like a vehicle for discussion of games than it is a coronation of some games ahead of other games.
First off I’d like to join with you in recognizing Peggle and Puzzle Quest too, though I’ve played a great deal more of the former than the latter. They definitely are both really fine examples of games in 2007. I didn’t include Puzzle Quest in my initial list because i haven’t played it enough to really talk about it in that kind of context and at least initially it doesn’t blow me away. Honestly I don’t even think it really would carry it’s own genre because of Portal & the multi-player of Planet Puzzle League but it’s a very good game all the same.
Additionally I’d like to take a second to recognize two other games that I debated putting in my list and they deserve some mention Super Mario Galaxy & Crysis were both pretty spectacular games in their own right but at the same time they didn’t really appeal to me quite enough to make the cut.
Super Mario Galaxy didn’t make the list because I haven’t played enough of it to say intelligently whether it’s a game of the year caliber game and I won’t be able to before the year is out. But through seven stars the game has some of the most enjoyable mechanics that I can remember playing. This is very much the substance as substance game of my list but it’s not really an example of what I want from the future of games to be. Its entirely possible that when I can find a Wii and play this one at my own pace that it might end up in the first category but if I were taller I might be in the NBA next year too.
Bestbuy is running an ad campaign about bringing the wow back to the holidays and if you go there to buy Crysis you’ll certainly bring the wow to your gaming. The game is just a visual stunner on a scale of 1 to 10 it’s a 12 visually. And it certainly doesn’t bring just a pretty face to the party but at the same time it gradually slides down hill after a certain point it becomes more of a traditional checkpoint shooter and at that point it kind of starts to really feel awkward and like they put it in just because but that’s not what Crytek does.
Okay shoving all that aside I want to come back to Bioshock. As I read your criticisms it’s basically divided into two areas. It’s like the diet coke of previous hybrid games, and that the vita-chambers make the game too easy. These should be dealt with in turn.
The first question of what about it’s different than Deus Ex? Well for one thing it’s the graphics silly. I mean seriously JC Denton borders on having a Pac-man mouth, how seriously can you take anyone in that universe as a real person? The first time I was walking through Rapture and I saw the mother talking to a revolver in a carriage or the couple’s domestic dispute in the restaurant these were very real moments. And scenes of the splicers such as the Jesus freak singing his song, or the woman who thought she was in an upscale restaurant complaining about the food, it really had the feel of insanity that neither Deus Ex nor system shock really covered. Occasionally certain NPCs would say or do something interesting but it was kind of the exception not the rule. This whole sense of realism permeated the game in a way that never really did with Deus Ex. This was amplified when in combat in an up close and personal way. When you draw the Dragon’s Tooth sword and put it into people it never felt like you were doing anything but hacking apart enemies, in Bioshock it really feels like i’d imagine fighting with loons would feel like. Not just the AI which will do intelligent things like jump in the water if you set them on fire or run to a health station if you leave them alone but how they’ll yell and scream at you during the fight gave the fighting a sense of personality. And that was amplified the most with the little sisters which created a most eerie feeling—best described as not quite real—like the way they never shut up around the Big Daddies, and the songs they sing, the constant noisemaking, it was all very much like small girls with a very patient relative. And then the graphics really kicked in on the decision to save them as for that second you could really tell that they were regular little kids again after you save them or that they had been sacrificed in that case and you were stuck there not with a young girl in your hands but a disgusting parasite.
The other thing that really struck me is that, in some large part because of the technology, the game nailed the first person shooter aspect of it. I really enjoyed the game’s firefights a great deal more than the ones in Deus Ex. Like they were very fast paced and could be really brutal and feel amazing whereas so many battles in DX were just a matter of getting a drop on dudes with the sniper rifle and then hiding rinse and repeat, and if they got close draw the dragon’s tooth sword and make short work of them and it never really felt all that intense as a shooter. It carried the day on its hybrid nature but it really didn’t excite me that much to be in combat. One of the problems here was also that of expectations as the game was sort of initially described as a big hybrid and the successor to system shock and all that, but somewhere in the middle of the PR campaign on this game they really started to transition to selling this game really as a straight forward FPS. And people who looked at it as a hybrid I think tended to be more disappointed than people who were expecting an FPS.
As to the difficulty issue I really wonder if there is any winning on this issue. I really liked the vita chambers as in Deus Ex I’d be constantly fussing with game saves so that I wouldn’t have to worry about losing progress whereas in Bioshock I’d just sit down and play the games without having to be bothered with maintaining the progress I’ve made and I can just focus on playing the game and having fun so I really liked it—as for worrying about dying my own sense of pride really prevented me from being cavalier about it. However it was also clearly a design decision to make the game easier to finish as developers will tell you around 10-20 percent of the players normally finish these games and when you make a game that’s about story telling how hard do you want to make it. I mean you know how much I love the Baldur’s Gate saga but you got beat up by the Spiders in Beregost if i recall and that was the end of that game’s tale for you and you never got to the really big wow moments the series had to offer. In this game eif you want to you’re going to get there which I’m not sure if that’s a good move or not but it seems pretty reasonable. I also think eventually games need to fall off the radar for being a real point of comparison. Like if i told you my first impressions of Mass Effect they were actually pretty negative based on comparisons with Baldur’s Gate 2 but like on further review it became clear that it still really was pretty awesome judged on it’s own merits. Deus Ex are pushing 8 and 9 years old respectively I’m not sure how reasonable it is to hold them to the standards of those games.
Lastly as a total aside did you play Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines? If you’re looking for something more in the mold of Deus Ex in many respects that game hit the nail on the head as a RPG in first person. If you’re looking for something that’s hardcore then that might fit the bill more than Bioshock did.
- Vermouth
