The end of another year and it’s time for retrospective tributes to the best and worst games of the past twelve months. This morning Gamasutra posted its ten best games of the year, and I contributed words on Minecraft, a game released in Alpha form in 2009, but which found its global popularity and its Beta phase in 2010. Here’s what I said, along with some words on other ‘honorable mentions’.

The basic human instinct to practice survival through play is woven into the DNA of all video games, but in Minecraft, the indie title that dominated PC gaming in 2010, it’s hewn into the very rocks that make up its randomly-generated world. You are deposited into a field, your only task to create shelter for yourself from the beasts that rise at sunset. It’s survival horror in its purest form, no need for cinematic shocks to punctuate the creeping sense of dread as you race to fashion tools from gathered wood and set about digging a hole in which to cower.

Survive the first night and the game that dawns on the second day is entirely different to the one you played on the first. Minecraft‘s brilliance is to be found in the way in which goals, almost all self-made, unfurl in new directions with the passing of time. Want to construct a working computer? Sure. Create a scale replica of the Taj Mahal? No problems. How about turn the world into a giant Monopoly set? Pass go. By giving the player exactly the tools they need to express themselves, Minecraft is perhaps the closest we have to a true God game.

And outside of its confines, it’s one of the most interesting commercial stories of the year, turning its one man creator, Notch, into a multi-millionaire before it’s even into Beta. As a result, here is a little game that in its purity of vision has irrevocably changed the very landscape of gaming, even as we have irrevocably changed its own landscape in kind.

Honorable Mentions

Just Cause 2 (Avalanche Studios, Xbox 360/PS3/PC) One of the first games to elevate explosions into an in-game currency from mere window dressing, Just Cause 2′s National Geographic photo-spread of a world is one of the year’s most enjoyable to visit both as a tourist and as a terrorist.

Dragon Quest IX (Square Enix, NDS) Yuji Horii’s latest may enjoy contemporary flair by way of its multiplayer component, but the fairytale aesthetic is as traditional as it ever was, and repairing this world, one quest at a time, is one of the year’s most engaging and affecting journeys.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (Criterion Games, Xbox 360, PS3) Criterion trimmed away the fat of its previous title, Burnout Paradise and returned to the schizophrenic Need for Speed series’ first principle of cops vs. robbers for this startling re-imagination. But it’s in the introduction of Autolog, an always-on competitive social network overlay, that this release becomes a game-changer, evolving the humble leaderboard to an obsessive, prodding competitive pursuit.

Quake III Arena, from which this Xbox Live Arcade port is derived, popularised many of the conventions and much of the terminology of the contemporary first-person shooter: everything from brown corridors to the term ‘deathmatch’. And yet, sitting down with id Software’s shooter concentrate 11 years after its debut, it’s curious just how different a multiplayer experience it offers to its descendants.

That’s partly thanks to its sheer speed. Quake Arena Arcade is all about split-second prediction-making. In Black Ops, rounding a corner into the arms of a foe is a game of who can squeeze the trigger first. But here, thanks to the speed at which players move, anticipation is more important than fight-or-flight reaction: firing a rocket ten metres to the left of an opponent who is travelling at breakneck speed in the hope that it will hit the target mid-sprint.

If Modern Warfare and Battlefield are about making opportunities and then taking shots, Quake Arena Arcade is about the science of expectation. It’s a machine gun volley of estimation challenges, designed to test your foresight. Here, accuracy is only the second most important skill after twitch prophecy, and as a result, the game offers thrills of a different character to the modern FPS.

The purity of Quake Arena is reflected in its minimalist environments, the designers limiting decorative flourish to steel-riveted door frames and skirting boards imprinted with skulls. There are no props to distract or bespoke animations to interrupt, just a red-cloud sky over a suburb of hell.

These are bare-bones levels designed to churn players around in cyclical fashion, washing machine barrels filled with blood and BFGs. Their geography is drawn in until they are as tight as they can be without becoming cramped.

A mainstay of the professional multiplayer scene, Quake III Arena launched the careers of many of the e-sports thoroughbreds, from Jonathan ‘Fatal1ty’ Wendel to John ‘Zero4′ Hill. Again, it’s the speed and anticipation the game requires that make it the perfect school for competitive play. Quake Arena Arcade could be seen as a training camp for the blockbuster FPS: spend two days within its confines and you’ll emerge a better player, with honed skills that are transferable to other games.

At least, it would be a perfect training camp if anyone were actually playing the game. With leaderboard numbers measured in the low thousands, assembling a full room of 16 players requires not only patience but a sizeable dose of luck. Perhaps it’s the dated visuals or the overpopulated genre. Either way, it seems few FPS players are returning to their genre’s home for Christmas this year, and the game’s community is lacking.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here

The review I wrote of Nintendo’s commemorative 25th anniversary edition of the Famicom Super Mario games last week proved divisive. Not only were many of Eurogamer’s readers unhappy with my approach, but ex-Amiga Power journalist, Stuart Campbell felt compelled to write a rather scathing attack on my approach on his blog.

That kind of thing stings, of course, but rather than sulk I thought I’d try to engage. So I tweeted at Stuart that, rather than fight, we could maybe make-out instead. I’d even wear my Mario thong, I promised, seeing as I’m such a massive Mario fanboy. We joked around a little before Stu asked, seriously: WTF was I thinking? So, I e-mailed him my defense of the piece.

I chose to do so privately because, well, that kind of felt more civil. Stu subsequently responded to the below, and I admitted that, while we weren’t going to see eye-to-eye on the matter, I do agree that we have probably reached a point in the medium’s maturity where reviews of re-releases of classic titles should be split into two parts (as many DVD sites will do with classic editions): one that looks at the game itself, and one that looks at everything else. Almost all of people’s issues with the piece would have dissolved within that structure. Anyway, the below is just a chance for me to respond to Stu’s piece, hopefully in a gentlemanly way.

Hey Stu,

Simon

One tragic casualty of the game industry’s creep towards digital distribution is videogame packaging. Games are, by definition, ethereal things: arcane lines of code that push clusters of coloured light from pixel to pixel on electronic displays. As such, the boxes they come in help ground these esoteric journeys of mind and screen in certain kind of reality. They bottle our experiences, allowing us to read their labels, share specimens between one another and feel their weight in the hands: none of which is possible with a file downloaded to a hard drive.

Boxes make the intangible tangible, allowing games to invade senses otherwise untouched by the medium. Who, as a child, didn’t press their nose against the pages of a freshly printed instruction manual and inhale the scent of possibility? And even today, running your nail along the spine of a game case, tearing the cellophane with a tiny rasp, feels like unlocking the door to a new dimension. Digital distribution offers convenience. But it does so at the expense of experience. And Nintendo has always understood the value of experience.

Super Mario All-Stars, a game that bundles together four of the series’ formative 8-bit titles, enjoys packaging that is both commemorative and celebratory. The smooth, dusky Famicom-mauve cardboard box is emblazoned with a gold leaf wreath, inside which an 8-bit Mario sprite stands, facing right, poised ready, as ever, to run off into the inviting distance. Understated but thoughtful, like a Criterion Collection version of a cherished children’s film, it strikes a welcome balance between playfulness and austerity.

Nintendo, unlike its cinematic counterpart, Disney, has always shied away from celebrating the past with re-releases and commemorative-boxed versions of its past creations. But Super Mario Bros. isn’t a run-of-the-mill classic. For over twenty years it remained the best-selling game ever, shifting over 40 million copies worldwide and popularizing a character that, by the 1990s had become more recognizable amongst American schoolchildren than Mickey Mouse.

Moreover, Super Mario Bros.’ iconography has come to define the medium in popular culture. The red splash of Mario’s plumber costume, the unfashionable cap and moustache, Koji Kondo’s irrepressibly joyful theme tune, the squat, shifty-eyed Goombas and the spike-backed kidnapper, Bowser, all symbolize video games to much of the world. If Mario’s most important game is 25 years old, we should absolutely throw him a party.

And physically, the re-release has been treated with an appropriate degree of care and attention. Inside the box, there’s a compilation soundtrack of music from the series, along with sound effects – trills and warbles that can be pinned to every action and reaction in the game from memory. Likewise, a Wii-box sized booklet outlining the origins of the series, and featuring comments from creator Shigeru Miyamoto and never-before seen artwork from its development, is a welcome bonus.

But inside the game, contemporary spit and polish is nowhere to be seen. This is, instead, a ROM dump of the Super Nintendo title, Super Mario All-Stars, which eschews Mario’s debut in Donkey Kong and the subsequent arcade game, Mario Bros. and instead bundles Super Mario Bros. and its sequels together, repainted in 16-bit sprites. The code remains untouched from its debut 17 years ago; the copyright line on the title screen reads 1993; the on-screen instructions are written for a SNES pad, not a Wii controller, Classic or otherwise. Without 60htz support the games must be played bordered and with the slightly fuzzy definition that plagues emulated SNES games when played on a modern, non-CRT television.

Does any of this matter? Yes and no. No, because each of the four games on offer still sparkles with creativity and assured design, not mere museum pieces, picked out as crucial forms in gaming’s evolution, but also as vibrant, relevant and exciting experiences today. Yes, because, when throwing someone a 25th birthday party, it’s a little stingy and awkward to put up the same decorations you used for their 8th birthday party.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here

There are two types of videogame: those in which you develop an avatar’s skills, and those in which an avatar develops yours.

Story games – the Zeldas, Final Fantasies and Metroids – generally fall into the former camp. As you lead these characters on a journey, so they grow and develop, slowly becoming more fully realised versions of themselves. Mile by mile, Link gains the ability to use a boomerang, a crossbow, hover boots and so on, while Cloud guzzles down experience points that allow him to summon ever more stentorian spells.

When you reach the end of these characters’ journeys and put down the controller as the credits roll, you will have levelled your avatar to its final form, the Polaroid likeness finally easing into its full clarity and colour. The character will have learned lessons and gained new abilities and, just maybe, in the pre-determined journey you prodded them along, you might have caught some truth about your own story reflected in theirs. But you probably won’t be a changed person for it.

Conversely, the player that emerges after 25 hours spent with Trials HD will be different to the one who went in. Here is a game uninterested in its character’s journey from newcomer to expert, but entirely obsessed with its player’s journey from incompetence to proficiency. As such, the game follows the great tradition of games such as Tetris, Breakout, Peggle, Super Meat Boy: all experiences that level the player, not the avatar.

Link, Cloud and Samus are given bigger, better weapons and tools with which to touch their worlds, but the effort lies in acquiring those tools, not necessarily mastering them. Conversely, in Trials HD and its ilk, you have just one tool – in this case a man and his motorbike – and the journey is all about learning how to use it.

Before we get too excited, in the case of Trials HD, the skill you learn has almost no practical application in the real world. After all, where else is is it a useful skill to be able to balance a 30-pixel-high motocyclist’s centre of gravity with precision in order to bounce across giant inflatable balls? An Evel Knievel-themed ball pool party organized by The Borrowers?

Fun is not always conflated with usefulness, though, and as you journey through Trials HD, the progression in your own abilities is tangible. A level that seemed impossible four hours ago, requiring scores of attempts and instant restarts to learn, suddenly seems unfeasibly straightforward, and you wonder what all the fuss was about. Games like this are microcosms of education, allowing us to grow from infancy to maturity in a matter of hours. Therein lies their great appeal; their big thrill.

Trails HD’s Big Thrills add-on understands all of this. RedLynx knows that the players sitting down with the game in December 2010 are very different to the those that sat down with it in December 2009. They are veteran experts who boast the precision muscle memory necessary to suspend an Xbox controller’s analogue trigger at half-throttle while simultaneously gently rocking the rider back and forth. In short, the developer has leveled its audience, and this pack reflects that. The 40 levels in this DLC pack – which includes 10 competition-winning, user-generated tracks – have been designed for the capable.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here

The last time I sat down with Jonathan Blow was the day before the release of his first game, Braid, on Xbox Live Arcade.

In the weeks that followed, Braid established itself as one of the most successful releases on the service, a fact worth celebrating regardless of what you think about the idiosyncratic experience. After all, it’s not often that a release of such uncompromising vision from such a small team achieves this sort of critical and commercial success.

Braid’s considerable financial earnings have since allowed its creator to start work on a more ambitious 3D project, titled The Witness. At the recent GameCity event in Nottingham I had the chance to sit down with Blow to discuss the past two years, and his thoughts on a wide range of interesting topics.

You can read the entire interview here. below is an extract in which Blow talks about his concerns over certain trends in game design that he perceives to be potentially damaging, providing interesting insight into the way in which game designers seek to hook players in to their game’s systems in the wake of yesterday’s controversial BBC Panorama documentary on so-called ‘game addiction’.

So you’ve been talking again recently about things that you perceive as damaging game design trends, which is kind of in a theme that you’re known for. My perception of your work is that you value games that level the player over games that level the avatar. Do you think that’s true, and would you prefer it if all games functioned like that?

Jonathan Blow: Well, you know, it’s really difficult to say. I don’t want to be in the business of saying that all games should be anything. Because I think that, actually, there should be a variety of all kinds of games. That’s what makes things healthy, right? Like all the time, the way we progress in anything — in science, in arts, or whatever — is that totally out of some left field corner, some surprising thing happens and it moves us; it causes a paradigm shift. So having a wide variety of games, I think, is the most healthy thing. I don’t ever want to say, “Don’t make that”.

However, that’s not the situation that we have right now, right? What we have is, there are a large number of a small set of kinds of game, and there’s all this territory that’s kind of unexplored around it.

And so when I go and give lectures like that, I feel like it’s a good idea to call attention to certain unexplored things and say like, “Hey, maybe this is valuable”. And then also on the other side, like what I was doing in my most recent talk [is to] say, “You know, a vast majority of our games that we’re making — and almost all of them — have these certain design trends in them and I actually want to question that trend because I do think it’s unhealthy.”

Now me personally, as a designer, I think very much about when I make something and I’m going to put it out into the world… You know, Braid sold hundreds of thousands of copies, right? That’s hundreds of thousands of people playing a five-hour, four-hour… however long it is for them. And that game has an impact on somebody’s mind, like that’s just how it is.

And so when I do that and I’m putting something out with that kind of volume, I have to care about what it’s doing. It’s doing something to the minds of my players, and the question is, “What is that?”. And for a lot of games, you know, going back to really old games like Pac-Man or something, what the game does to the mind of the player is mostly about just teaching them the basics of the game.

Like, okay, I’m this yellow guy and I’m eating these dots and these ghosts will kill me but I can eat the power pill and chase them. You don’t know that before you ever sit down to play Pac-Man, but at first you know it and then you learn how to strategize around that or whatever, right?

So there’s a learning process that happens, and that can be a very positive thing. And I think to a large extent, that’s what games are actually about, is learning. So then the question is if games are about learning, if every game teaches people something, then if I make any particular game, what is that game teaching people?

And obviously there’s always this very game mechanical level of things that it’s teaching, but usually there are subtler things as well. And so what I try to do is think about what those subtler things are, and make sure that I feel okay about that. And call attention sometimes when I feel like there are huge trends of subtle things that are very negative that are being done to a large volume of people. I just feel like I ought to say something about that, because very few game designers think about things that way.

So getting back to the first part of the question, while doing all these talks, I don’t ever want to say to any specific game designer, “You shouldn’t make some kind of game.” Actually, that’s not true. I would say that about most actual games — like, you know, even back when I gave a talk a couple years ago saying like, “Hey, I don’t think World of Warcraft is that great”.

I still wouldn’t tell people, “Don’t make that game” exactly, I would say, “Think about what you’re making and be careful when you make it and try not to exploit players.” But I mean now that we’ve got FarmVille and stuff like that, I pretty much would say “don’t make that kind of game” because I don’t see much value in it.

It’s only about exploiting the players and yes, people report having fun with that kind of game. You know, certain kinds of hardcore game players don’t find much interest in FarmVille, but a certain large segment of the population does. But then when you look at the design process in that game, it’s not about designing a fun game. It’s not about designing something that’s going to be interesting or a positive experience in any way — it’s actually about designing something that’s a negative experience.

It’s about “How do we make something that looks cute and that projects positivity” — but it actually makes people worry about it when they’re away from the computer and drains attention from their everyday life and brings them back into the game. Which previous genres of game never did. And it’s about, “How do we get players to exploit their friends in a mechanical way in order to progress?” And in that or exploiting their friends, they kind of turn them in to us and then we can monetize their relationships. And that’s all those games are, basically.

And there’s this kind of new way where people are, like Bryan Reynolds working on FrontierVille and stuff, making it supposedly deeper, but that kind of thing has been very token so far. And in fact, I would argue that the audience of that kind of game doesn’t necessarily want a deeper game, or certainly that’s not proven; it’s very speculative.

So I would say don’t make that stuff. If you want to make a Facebook game, there are a lot of very creative things that could be done, but the FarmVille template is not the right one.