Chad, Reviewer/Indie Games Columnist:

“I should probably stick to what I know, and that’s not great big, AAA, blockbuster, smash hit video games.  I almost exclusively play indie and art games which leads me to the following recommendations.  These were two of my favorite games of the last year, and I think easily accessible to anyone looking for a great experience.

‘Flower’ was a favorite for me, and probably the best game I’ve played this year, hands down.  Guiding petals as the wind and using surprisingly good tilt controls for PS3 is incredibly relaxing and fun.  Then there is a real story to follow, one without words, that managed to force me through a lot of different emotions.  ‘Flower’ was exciting, it was heartbreaking and scary, it was beautiful to the point I could feel my eyes begin to water with joy by the end.  It’s a fantastic example of what games can do if you just strip away a lot of needless exposition, and use the mechanics to tell the story.

Actually, speaking of ‘mechanics telling the story,’ my other pick was the browser/iPhone insta-classic ‘Canabalt’ in which there is no story, except RUN!  That’s right, I had no idea what I was running from, who I was, what kind of distopic future I was in, or who was chasing me.  If you’re unaware, ‘Canabalt’ is a 2D rooftop platforming gaming with no beginning or end, the goal is to keep running while avoid falling off the roofs or running into an obstacles, and it uses only one button to play (jump).  It’s great fun, extremely addicting, and definitely one of the best games of 2009.  ‘Canabalt’ is a free browser game, but is even better for cheap on the iPhone.”

Rob, Reviewer:

Tom, King of the Site:

“Wow… Game of the year… such an honorary title that gets thrown around a lot… I’ve got two picks, a mainstream title and a lesser-publicized one.

First off, you saw this coming: Batman Arkham Asylum. Not only is it a great game, it is a great Batman game. Something that hasn’t been done since the days of the Genesis. One of the first branded games in a very long time that doesn’t just wrap branding around an existing genre, or re-skin an already-made title, Arkham isn’t an action game, a stealth game, a beat-em-up game; Arkham Asylum is a Batman game. As Rocksteady’s second game, they’ve truly outdone themselves. Arkham is my mainstream GOTY pick.

For the lesser known one: Machinarium. Not only is it a return to the classic point-and-click adventure genre that filled many hours of my childhood, it is a stylish return. Penning a beautiful story without using a single word, everything from the soundtrack, to the memorable coo-inducing characters, everything in Machinarium is polished to a mirror-shine. Running on virtually every computer platform out there for a minimalistic price, Machinarium is a game you owe it to yourself to play.”

Skizz, Reviewer:

“My favorite game of 2009 would have to be “Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days.” Although it’s a handheld, it has kept me pinned to the DS for hours on end. If you feel like stretching out the KH experience, you’ll have plenty of things to consume your time. Playing as Roxas, Sora’s Nobody, you’ll experience the world of Organization XIII and their activities during Sora’s one year slumber. Your level, abilities, items, and weaponry are determined by how you organize your panels. When you complete a mission you earn a Slot Releaser to… “release” a slot, enabling you place panels and to further customize your experience.
Believe it or not, it actually looks pretty damn good for a DS game. Granted, it doesn’t look perfect, but that’s because the point of reference is KINGDOM FUCKING HEARTS. Despite what you think it should look like, the quality of the graphics in no way hinder the quality of the game. You can even replay missions and earn Sigils to redeem for panels. Play “Mission Mode” with friends or by yourself to earn Crown Sigils. Within mission mode you can play as members of Organization XIII, or even (as I’m just now learning) members of the original KH trio. I miss the double jump, but they make up for it with the Air Dash, which you can eventually do multiple times if you play your panels right.
I’ll put it this way, I’m not even done with the game yet because I’m savoring everything I can get out of it. Then again, I’m a Kingdom Hearts freak who enjoyed Chain of Memories. This is a great game if you’re looking to delve into the series even further. And don’t worry, the challenges that splintered into your psyche still exist in this title. The rewards are worth it if you’re looking to get the most out of your time in the KH Universe.”

More coming tomorrow…

Survival Horror games are boring.  They replace the usual hack-n-slash fun that should normally be inflicted upon the undead and place it with patience and slow building fear.  Believe it or not though, there are actually games with horrible undead fiends and chainsaw-wielding massacres (chainsaws in the hands of the players).  And let us all remember that zombie killin’ fun is what Halloween is really all about.  That, and love…the love for candy.

So if you’re one of ‘em trigger happy types of any generation or creed of gamer there’s a zombie killfest for you!

The Modern Hardcore:
For all of you “hardcore” gamers I can only suggest two games.  (Hope you have an Xbox or PC because there’s no alternative for zombie blastin’ fun like) -  Left 4 Dead.  You and three buddies in absolute isolation (aside from…three…buddies), ripping through zombie hordes.  Intense, atmospheric, but with enough firepower and friendship you’ll blow your way through your undead attackers and survive to fight another level.  Alternatively, the solo player might get some holiday use out of Dead Rising.  It’s an aging and imperfect game, but the shear number of zombies you can kill with all sorts of hilarious weapons more than makes up for a few flaws.

Caught up in the Last Gen:
If anyone still holds tight to their last gen system then there’s at least one game they should seek out for some true Halloween horror.  And that’s Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel without a Pulse.  Change sides during this apocalyptic zombie invasion to the rotten green team.  You, as Stubbs, and your unholy army of the night will be able to tear up the town (and ride sheep!) while the delicious humans flee in terror.  There aren’t many games that have you fight for the antagonist’s side, and once you play through the story you’ll probably still feel justified for destroying a city’s worth of innocent morons – so maybe the zombies are sometimes right.

Old School:
Few zombie games from the past have been as charming as Zombies Ate My Neighbors.  You and a friend can run around using spirtguns, soda pop, and bazookas to put a whole in the zombie ranks, while protecting the neighborhood folks.  Zombies play the role of cannon fodder in this game, and the challenge really comes from imitation Chucky dolls, chainsaw wielding maniacs (before it was cool), and giant babies.  Everything fun, campy, comedic, and deadly that you could expect from a zombie shoot ‘em up.  You can’t beat the classic.

Casual Gamer:
If you like the pretty, the cute, the happy, and the undead then here’s a game for you: Plants vs. Zombies.  A tower defense game that came out just this year and is an essential for any zombie lawn care enthusiasts garden.  It’s very rare to see happy little flowers slaughtering the brain-eating dead, but somehow this game got made, but we’re lucky enough to have the casual game kings, PopCap, provide the treats for this Halloween party.

Indie Gamer:
I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1.  I’m only typing that once.  This Xbox Live Indie Game provides simple and furious zombie slaughtering fun, and a brilliant soundtrack to boot.  At an insanely low price ($1) it’s a deal that you’d have to be dead to pass up.

For me, achievements have always been a mixed bag.  I’m not an obsessive achievement whore, and I think that they can ruin the immersion of a game that doesn’t need them to reach it’s full potential.  But then on the other hand, achievements can be great for extend the value of a game and I always feel this little ping of pride when I get one, like I’ve come one step closer to a pointless and unknown nirvana that I never really thought about reaching until that moment.

At first achievements were a fairly pointless addition to the video gaming world.  A lot of early games could be beaten from beginning to end and you’d have enough to proudly fill in all 1000 points.  An example of bad achievements in a game is probably the video game adaptation of “Avatar: The Last Airbender;” it was described to me like this: “You can get all the achievements by standing in a corner and attacking the wall for five minutes.”  Probably an exageration, but probably not far enough away from the truth to make the achievements an extension of the actual gameplay.

The dull grey slaughterfest of Gears of War 2 is probably one of the better examples of achievements.  They’re tougher to get and require an appropriate amount of skill and patients.  So if a person really loves playing it than that will show through their achievements.  On the other hand, does a game like flOw really need achievements (i.e. trophies)?  flOw is a game based around calmly moving deeper through an aquatic wonderland of geometric shapes.  I don’t really have to actually kill anything and sometimes I just load up it’s start screen to listen to the soothing music.  Does it require bonus points to be a great game?  Does Gears of War 2?

No.  Neither of them require achievements to be fun or interesting.  The soul purpose of these little treats is to give the player more out of their gaming experience, and it does do that.  Plus the achievements of flOw are drastically different from that of Gears of War 2.  They both use achievements (/trophies) that cater to their primary audiences.

The Path was a surprising game to find item collection (and therefore some kind of achievement based system) in.  The game shows itself to be a slow-paced and deep single player experience and here they have me collecting arbitrary stars for some reason, which I’m sure are used to reveal some kind of both ending for each character, but they are also trying to be more like a standard game while trying to play it artsy at the same time, and the elements clash.  I love the games-as-art progress we’ve made in recent years, and that’s one of the reasons I embrace the Tale of Tales games.  They’re trying to do something different, and here they fail by trying to meet an audience that they don’t have half way.  Item collection is not something that will tantalize outsiders, and the fans that they seem to have want the unique aspects they provide without it.  From my point of view the item collection adds a layer of gaminess to a game yearning to escape convention.  A backwards step.

My point with this is that achievements are good in the right places and when you understand your audience.  Gears of War 2 certainly does, as does flOw’s thatgamecompany.  But using the extras and achievements just to pad the lining of your games doesn’t always serve a purpose or improve the system.  It’s important to remember who you’re making the games for and achievements should reflect that, and avoid pointless drudgery and ignorant simplicity to the fullest.

A long time ago Adventure games were really the alpha dogs of gaming.  This was back when PC-exclusivity wasn’t detrimental to sales and you didn’t have to have a top of the line computer to run games.  Back then we were barraged with Adventure games titles like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Carmen Sandiego.  But now they’re really passed their prime and games like Machinarium and Tales of Monkey Island no matter how much fun they are to play, seem a like bit of a step backwards.

My problem with adventure games is that I’m always either having a lot of fun solving puzzles or I’m going crazy rubbing every object against every wall trying to get something to do anything.  It breaks the flow of gameplay pretty seriously to stop and fiddle around for an extremely irritating duration of time instead of enjoying the simple linearity of action games.  And that’s probably where action games have done it right where adventure games did it wrong.  Modern action titles like inFAMOUS and Gears of War allow the player to beat the game without having being some kind of puzzle solving savant.

Probably the best step I’ve seen taken in genre melding brilliance is the fusion of action and adventure, or rather “Action-Adventure.”  This style of gameplay has made it possible to provide puzzles and challenges while still making the player feel like he is doing more than just clicking randomly at the scenery.  Compared to games like Psychonauts, Beyond Good & Evil, and the Metroid series, Tales of Monkey Island looks like a dinosaur.  It embraces not only the good aspects of adventure games, but the bad.  It embraces the aimlessness, the confusing inventory items, the requirement for Myst level attention to minute details, and stiff movement that have really weakened the genre.

Throw-back games like Machinarium don’t seem bad by any means, but when I hear someone say that adventure games were better than the games we have now-a-days, I have to laugh, obnoxiously.  Yes, the story telling of adventure games has a pretty good record, but that is only one aspect.  For everything adventure games do right they do about two more things wrong, and by fusing them with the real-time action genre we get a much wider array of possibilities and gameplay.  Adventure games aren’t bad, we’ve just been evolving beyond their limitations.

We’re probably all in agreement that Silent Hill 2 has a fantastic story, but looking at the original game I can’t really say the same.  But before I get to that let me say that Silent Hill 1 has always had 1 major advantage: mood.  The mood in that game is terrifically horrifying.  I’ve almost wet myself just waiting for the monsters to pop out, even when they never do.  And yes, mood can sell a game.  Anything in the survival horror genre has to feel oppressive and helpless which is why I feel like the daylight zombie kill-em-up of RE5 make it less of a horror game than Condemned’s angry hobos.  One fits the mood, the other doesn’t…at all.

So we can usually forgive survival horror for having clunky controls, lousy camera angles, and a crap story because it still manages to scare the hell out of us (in fact, those problems can sometimes aid the “scaring the hell out of”).  A game with virtually no story like Condemned can add to the scary by simply not letting us know why the homeless are trying to kill us.  But Silent Hill 1 does have a story, and it works while you’re still piecing it together.  It just fails towards the end.

Silent Hill 1 is about a guy who takes his adopted daughter to a resort town and on the way there she disappears, he crashes his car, and you spend the rest of the game trying to find her with the aid of a nurse and a police officer while psychotic monsters and bird-things try to rip you to shreds as the village is shifting dangerously in between foggy and pitch black.  All good so far.

***REALLY OLD SPOILERS FOLLOW***

Once you’ve barely figured out that your daughter is connected to the ghost girl and the old lady is trying to sacrifice her to summon some kind of demon, you still wouldn’t guess that you have fight the demon at the end, which you do.  This takes all the slow building mood and sets it on fire.  Then you escape with the police woman as fire rains down from the sky and you manage to save a new baby.  Happy ending.  But no!  What the hell?  I didn’t save my daughter and I’m already over it.  Here we have a peaceful moment of “everything’s gonna be alright” but there’s probably a bird-thing seconds away that wants to rip me to shreds.  And I just fought Lucifer, what kind of ending is this?

Needless to say, I didn’t like the ending to Silent Hill.  The story doesn’t manage to wrap things up in a dark or believable way… at all.  It comes off as silly.  So, I consider Silent Hill 1 a bright red rash on the Silent Hill series’ body of great storytelling.

The first four Silent Hill games show an incredible similarity to the first four Alien movies, and by incredible I mean minuscule, and by similarity I mean slight connection, and by an I mean a.  Within both series as wholes there are a few likenesses, both are about surviving horrible encounters with unearthly creatures in dark and restricting environments.  Both of them give male characters the chance to feel sexually violated and emasculated.   Both have been noted as bringing atmosphere and depth into almost completely generic genres.  But the biggest similarity between the two (and by biggest similarity I mean “similarity I choose to point out”) is the pattern at which they were released.

The Alien movies had a pattern like this: Alien – Aliens – Alien – Aliens.  While the Silent Hill series goes like this: Silent Hill – Not Really in Silent Hill – Silent Hill – Not Really in Silent Hill.  So ya’ha!  A coincidence?  Hardly.  Obviously Silent Hill is a blatant copy of the Alien films, just retold using nurses and rape monsters instead of the usual spaceships and rape aliens.  Now I’m not saying that the entire series is copycatting the success of a more popular franchise, many people would say that this is a clear salute to the wonderful movies that made so many of us wee our pants when we realized that it was right on top of him – no not that way – g’ya!!!, others might say that this is not a “real” comparison and that it makes no sense, but I choose to say that the entire series is, has always been, and will continue to forever copycat the success of a more popular franchise.

(My image editing is brilliant)

LucasArts used to be the place to find unique and original games back when Adventure games were all the rage, but now they’ve kind of turned stale.  Even when the original Xbox and PS2 were in their prime LucasArts was publishing new titles like Mercenaries and Armed & Dangerous.  But now, now they seem to put out nothing but Star Wars games at nausea and their version of original is remaking and making Monkey Island games, which isn’t really anything “new” even if it is “welcomed.”  So as far as I know, Lucidity is an entire change of pace for the company.  Now they can provide us a brand new title that looks fresh, and interesting, and fun.  They’ve been needing to do this for a while now, and it looks like a dramatic step away from the Star Wars franchise.

On the other hand, popularity of indie games (cheaper costs to make plus small teams of developers) like Braid and World of Goo have definitely caused some envy among the major publishers, and if nothing else LucasArts embodies the behavior of stereotypical major publishers.  So this seems suspiciously like a thinly veiled attempt to copy the indie gaming formula.  Which unlike most downloadable releases by big name publishers is intentionally trying to steal money from the little guy.  The logic behind this is: if nobodies can make great games for cheap, than we can do it easier and faster.  Lucidity also looks like something one would expect to see from an indie dev graphically and in gameplay, so I’m left wondering if the game actually is intended to be an artistic piece or if it is an imitator.

Then the name: Lucidity, and it’s intentional similarity to the company’s makes me think that LucasArts is stamping a giant TM over indie gaming idealism.

This is where I’m conflicted, whether it’s a quality game or not doesn’t really matter because playing it would make me feel dirty, like sleeping with a girl that looks a lot like your ex.  I don’t think LucasArts is above EVIL and their constant masturbation of the Star Wars franchise is proof of that, but I almost always welcome attempts at new ideas with open arms.  This is probably what they call a dilemma.

- Wow.  I’m never gonna pick that up ever again.

This is an irony with certain games; no matter how good a game can be sometimes, you just don’t feel like it’s worth playing the same levels, the same way, through the same story again.  There are certain advantages in games like Final Fantasy VII, Saints Row, Fallout, and Sands of Time that allow the player to want to play the game over and over, and Crackdown really has none of the defining characteristics that make it one of these games.

For example, in Final Fantasy VII you can choose different powers to take on each play through, allowing you to experiment with the different characters and Materia combinations.  In Crackdown the abilities you get are set in stone as to when you’ll get them and, for the most part, how powerful they can be at the time you get them.

In games like Fallout you can replay the game multiple times with varying skill sets and see the multiple endings.   But Crackdown only has one ending…and only one character with just different skins.  The variety provided by those skins adds nothing to the gameplay and the ending isn’t worth working to get to once you already know it.  It’s needless to say that it’s predictable, and obvious to say poorly executed.

As for Sands of Time, going through an intentionally linear game with lots of puzzles can be great fun a second time, if both the puzzles and the story are well done.  Sands of Time is probably one of the greatest examples of seamlessly meshing story and puzzle platforming.  A player may want to retread this ground not only because of the gameplay but the story, like rereading a great book or watching a classic film over and over.  And in Saints Row there are multiple gangs and lots of little side missions, you may want to replay it to experience the gang warfare in a different order and to play different side missions.  These two blatantly opposite games, one being extremely linear and the other very open world, use their key elements to make themselves well worth a second go in their respective ways.

And that’s really where the biggest problem in Crackdown lies, it’s a linear game pretending to be open world.  You first have to kill off the Chicanos, than the Russians, than the Chinese, in that order.  If you stay from it you’ll find that you would be easily slaughtered and left unable to jump high enough to get up the taller buildings.  There’s no variety, but they pretend there is.  While there is a difficulty curve it should sink up with your character’s progression from one gang to the next without fear.  The story is atrocious and the puzzles usually consist of button-mash the baddies.

All that said it was a FUN game.  It’s just that I can’t see it having any replay value after the first go, and therefore a game with some serious flaws.

A lot of you may be saying, “No it isn’t.”  But you’re damn wrong and I can prove it.  In the Legend of Zelda there are 3 triangles that you collect collectively called the tri-force instead of triangles, which should be obvious.  Each of these ancient artifacts symbolizes: Wisdom, Power, and (wiki-check) COURAGE!  (duh, courage.)  So a while back I was watching “The Rebirth of Mothra III” on crackle.com and I loved it because it’s crappy giant monster fun, so don’t judge me!  Not all films have to be “La Dolce Vita.”

My roommate pointed out that the three little nymphs fairie girls got the powers of Love, Courage, and Wisdom (or something) which were suspiciously close to the Heart, Courage, and Brains that the Tin-Man, Lion, and Scarecrow all sought for in “The Wizard of Oz.”  I then noted that it is awfully similar to the tri-force in the Legend of Zelda; he didn’t care.  But look at it this way: If the Wiz is Mothra and Mothra is LoZ than Wiz is LoZ!  It’s mathematics!

Note: Power = Heart, because heart is the power source of the body.  Heart also = love, because when you see a girl you like your heart beats faster which means love comes from the heart.  (Love also comes from sweaty palms, dried throats, and nervous twitches.)  And that also means that love = power!

LOVE = POWER!  Go reproduce, kids!  It’s the only way you’ll get anywhere in life.