Some games elicit fear in their player through ambiance: the hollow grumble of a cello, a mortal cry for help daubed in blood on a wall, a rocking horse swaying in an unfamiliar breeze, candles flickering beside some arcane scrawl, a nursery rhyme sung by an unseen child. Other games engender fear through brute shocks: sudden power failures that rob you of a sense, floorboards that give way in a shower of splinters, monsters that burst through walls that you already ticked off as ‘safe’ in your subconscious.
Yet more games unsettle their player by restraining their reach into the world, limiting the amount of ammunition or health packs that can be carried at any given time, spreading save points out between long tightropes of danger, closing the walls in to create a sense of claustrophobia and panic when trying to line up a headshot in a confined space. Dead Space 2, meanwhile, does all of this.
If yours is a fear of the unknown, then approach the sequel to Visceral Games’ galactic survival horror suckerpunch with some confidence. We may be three years from the hellish events experienced on board the USG Ishimura, but in most meaningful ways, Dead Space 2 picks up at the moment its predecessor ended, presenting a rollercoaster ride that picks ingredients from influences Dead Horizon, Resident Evil 4 and Doom 3 and bakes them together into its own cake of terror.
Once again you step into the shoes of engineer hero Isaac Clarke, who having chased the promise of his lost girlfriend in the first game, is now chased by her ghost. She invades your consciousness, eyes swapped out for white beams of light, ghoulish hands as cloying as her melancholy dialogue. Her presence in the game is not only to allow the game’s designers to shock you with quiet-quiet-LOUD interruptions every 15 minutes or so, but also to indicate the decaying state of Isaac’s mind.
The game opens in a psychiatric ward on the space station The Sprawl. As you break from the leather straps of your bed, and struggle against the restraints of your strait jacket and your own sense of imbalance, yours is an avatar robbed of most ability. Like a drunk driver you manoeuvre Isaac through the dark corridors, ducking explosions and sidestepping the lunges of the long-limbed Necromorph monsters that tear at your clothes all around. For the first fifteen minutes there is no way to fight back, a sense of helplessness in the face of victimization that only steels your revenge resolve.
Few games leave no room for a sequel. It makes for poor business and, let’s not forget, while the intended destination for most videogame makers is fun, the fuel that gets them there is potential profit. These days, if you want to make money from a blockbuster, the sequel is part of the business plan. But at the beautiful, altruistic core of LittleBigPlanet was the dream of a world that could not only nurture and grow life, but also sustain it. And nearly two years since its debut, this patchwork dimension is still achieving just that.
This simple little platform game and its idea lifted from PC game development – that giving your players the tools to make their own stuff after they’ve finished with your levels will not only maintain the life of your creation, but will enrich it and increase its value – has succeeded in building a community of amateur game designers. They deliver fresh content on a weekly basis, over three million levels to date. Not all of it is very good or interesting content, but enough of it is worthy of attention to keep LittleBigPlanet a perennially habitable planet.
So why the need for LittleBigPlanet 2, then? If the only type of content that could be generated by makers using the first title had been yet more woolly platformers, then it would make sense to create a spin-off, focusing on different styles of game. But the original game offered just enough flexibility to allow a creative designer to cajole its virtual ropes and pulleys into making a shoot-’em-up, or a giant calculator. On this basis, LittleBigPlanet’s original dizzying potential precluded a sequel. No?
The first hour or so spent with that sequel will do little to convince you otherwise. Visually, this sequel maintains its predecessor’s crafty, design-savvy aesthetic; as though Hartbeat was remade by Taschen. It’s achingly pretty and art magazine-ish, not very much like how videogames usually look at all and all the better for it.
Structurally too, LBP2 is identical to its predecessor. Stephen Fry’s warm, reassuring tones narrates the menu screens, which direct you one of three ways: into the six themed worlds that comprise the single-player campaign, towards the workbench where you can start work on your own level, or online, where you can sample those created by others. But before you can do anything else, you must complete the seven main stages that comprise the first world, thereby learning the basics of play.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
That videogame blockbusters such as Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops top many of the end of year game lists is of no surprise.
Not to belittle their great accomplishments, but these titles have been praised with such predicable enthusiasm over the past month that their celebration can seem a little rote and dry.
Far more interesting are those titles that have been overlooked by the bulk of the gaming populace, games without the marketing budget equal to the GDP of a developing country who, by failing to match prevailing fashions or by choosing the wrong moment in the release schedules to make their appearance, fell by the wayside in 2010.
Here are five such games, experiences that offer something different and fascinating, games that you won’t find on many of the Top 10 Game lists of the year but who, by rights, should feature on each.
An alternative Top 5 list, these underrated games of 2010 deserve your attention, if only to encourage their makers to keep swimming against the tide in order to keep this medium both diverse and stimulating.
5. Chime (Zoe Mode/OneBigGame, XBLA/PSN)
Zoe Mode’s music puzzle game may seem derivative of Lumines in style and approach, but in mechanical terms it’s by far the more interesting proposition. With an inverse goal to that of most block-clearing games, Chime has you attempting to fill a grid with pentomino shapes.
The musical aspect to the game is then overlaid on top of this, each shape triggering a sample whose pitch is dictated by its position in the grid, generating a composition that’s at once unique and familiar.
With pieces of music licensed from artists who rarely feature in video games, including avant-garde composer Philip Glass, Chime would be one of the most interesting downloable titles of the year even if it hadn’t been created for charity.
As it is, this, the first release from OneBigGame demonstrated that the philanthropic initiative is just as interested in creating interesting, innovative games as it is making the world a better place. The result is anything but a charity case.
4. Hot Shots Tennis: Get a Grip (Clap Hanz/ Sony, PSP)
The RPG-ification of games has continued apace in 2010, with games in a huge range of diverse genres doling out experience points for the most unlikely of virtual accomplishments.
But none has committed to the design approach with such forcefulness or success as Sony’s Hot Shots Tennis: Get a Grip (known as Everybody’s Tennis everywhere outside of the U.S.) on PSP, a game that awards Exp. on a per-shot basis.
The endorphin micropayments for every ace served and on-the-baseline lob successfully landed work wonders on the handheld. It may be a cheap trick, designed to artificially heighten the sense of accomplishment for otherwise routine actions, but it’s done with such flair and abandon here that it’s difficult to begrudge the designers for it.
With the leveling and doll-dressing couched in a J-Rocky-esque narrative with heroes and villains and pacts and rivalries you have one of the most exciting tennis games of the decade, albeit one that owes as much to Pokemon as it does the sport it riffs upon.
3. Resonance of Fate (Tri Ace/ Sega, Xbox 360, PS3)
Tri-Ace has long been the Japanese RPG developer most willing to take risks with what has always been video gaming’s most conservative genre. Released mere weeks after Final Fantasy XIII, the developer’s latest effort, Resonance of Fate is by far the more exciting game.
Not every one of its innovations could be considered a success and certainly the convoluted battle system reveals its complexities over the course of hours of play, not minutes but nevertheless, this unusual mixture of Victorian weaponry, John Woo-esque acrobatics and board game metagame is fascinating in its creativity.
Even the world in which the game is set subverts convention, turning the traditional hero’s journey from pastoral village out to the ends of a troubled earth on its head into a vertical climb up a decaying steampunk tower of Babel.
The story may be transient and esoteric, but with pared back cut-scenes, and a reassuring turn from voice actor-du-jour Nolan North, it’s palatable. The result is a game that transcends its frustrations with creativity, bristling with quirky charm and ideas ripe for plucking by the JRPG’s less daring artisans.
2. Just Cause 2 (Avalanche Studios/ Square Enix, Xbox 360/ PS3/ PC)
The Achilles heel of so many sandbox worlds is the distance between missions. No matter how exciting the assignments placed before you, so often the sense of pace and excitement to a sandbox world is nullified as every journey between targets is turned into a commute. The trick then is to make the journey as exciting as the destination, and it’s one that Just Cause 2 excels at.
Of course there’s still the opportunity to hijack a car or plane to traverse the terrain, but the combination of parachute and grappling hook makes launching into the sky a two-button sequence, allowing you to shift your view into the beautiful island of Panau in an instant, making the ground around as important a factor in negotiating space as the vehicle between your legs.
As a result Just Cause 2 may have the opposite problem to many sandbox titles, its thrills front-loaded and the somewhat lackluster mission structure in the latter stages dulling what has gone before. But nonetheless, few 3D spaces have been such a joy to navigate.
Moreover, developer Avalanche Studios nails that other, impromptu appeal of the sandbox game, offering a playpen in which you can tether enemies to gas canisters and watch the resulting rag-doll spectacle, or attach two jumbo jets with a wire and see them spiral out of control across a blemish-less sky. No other game in 2010 offered a world filled with such explosive joy.
1. Sin and Punishment: Star Successor (Treasure/ Nintendo, Nintendo Wii)
The sequel to one of the Nintendo 64’s strongest titles exhibits a great many of those traits that has maintained developer Treasure’s position as Japan’s leading boutique developer. This on-rails shooter, like so many other games in the company’s oeuvre, offers a relentless conveyor belt of inspired ideas, distinct, discrete moments of brilliance that dizzy the mind with their intensity and inventiveness.
It’s un-sustainably expensive game-making, the fixed positions of enemies and immovable set-pieces leaving no room for padding with procedural battles. Rather, every moment in this rollercoaster ride of twitch shooting has been meticulously orchestrated with a brand of care and creative attention rarely seen today.
As with its forebear, your character exists only on a 2D plane, firing into the screen as per Space Harrier. But the camera wheels and dives around, shifting perspective in ways that thrill and changing the language of interaction from side-scroller to top-down to vertical shoot-’em-up and back again.
Being a Treasure game, the spectacle is buoyed by score attack mechanics that inspire repeat play long after the visual treats and surprises have grown cold. Despite the level of craftsmanship and inspiration, the game is perhaps something of an anachronism, its workmanlike graphical assets failing to draw the attention of the Wii audience.
Nevertheless, Sin and Punishment: Star Successor is one of the strongest titles of the year, bold evidence that Japanese developers on many counts still produce the most thrilling and inventive video games for those with eyes to see.
Honorable Mentions
Darksiders (Vigil Games/THQ, Xbox 360/PS3)
Army of Two: The 40th Day (EA Montreal, Xbox 360/PS3)
Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions (Beenox/Activision, PC, PS3, Wii, Xbox 360)
Split/Second (Black Rock/Disney, PC, Xbox 360, PS3)
Singularity (Raven/Activision, Xbox 360, PC, PS3)
Patchwork Heroes (PlayStation C.A.M.P./Sony, PSP)
Blur (Bizarre Creations/Activision, Xbox 360, PC, PS3)
R.U.S.E (Eugen Systems/Ubisoft, PS3, Xbox 360, PC)
This feature first appeared over at Gamasutra as part of the site’s round-up of the year.
Need for Speed is the Britney Spears of video game brands, a cipher to front whichever hot producer or fashionable trend its owner, EA, wants to hand creative duties to on any given year. As a result, its games may provide a consistent financial yield, but they are also the hardest to pick out from a line-up, flitting from arcade slang street-racer one year to straight-talking sim the next. Who is Need for Speed? It’s whoever’s driving the development at any given time.
Which makes 2010′s entry the most exciting racing game of the year, even if 2009′s was lacklustre and if 2011′s goes on to fall short of its developer’s tall ambition. Most game series present the evolution of a design, the developer behind it growing strengths and diminishing weaknesses with each iteration. But this year, this brand benefitted not from the lessons of Need for Speed entries past, but from Criterion’s trailblazing Burnout series, whose DNA can be found splattered over the boot and dashboard of every car within.
Burnout Paradise, the developer’s previous title, succeeded in encasing the wind-scream thrills of the arcade racer in an open-world city, one friends and rivals could drop in to and out of in search of impromptu competition. It was smart and impressive but nevertheless a little unwieldy, the drive between missions and races bulking out what was always a series that prized tight focus and efficiency.
Hot Pursuit trims away the fat, even while doubling the number of ‘campaigns’. There’s still a sense of geography to the game world, the game hub a top-down map of an American state, but now switching between missions is done via point and click. Criterion’s first sensible move was to revisit the series’ first principle: cops vs. robbers. Next, the developer correctly ascertained that the thrill of being chased and the excitement of giving chase are sufficiently different to both warrant inclusion in the game, promptly splitting missions into two categories – police or criminal – and allowing you abstract freedom to jump between roles.
Next, rather than simply bundling endless point-to-point races, the developer pulls ideas from its previous titles, offering a huge variety of mission types to add variety and dodge player ennui. Straight races are interspersed with time attack runs in which every glancing bump or scrape is assigned a penalty, then followed by police chases in which bumps and scrapes are the necessary tools with which to remove your rival from the road. The variety is on a fundamental level, the way in which you play the game shifting in direction in a way that no other racing game has yet managed with such purity and clarity.
Read the rest of this article over at Eurogamer here
