Top 10 Games of the Year + NBA2K12

Tomorrow, I'll be on a train for four and a half hours, so I'm going to use some of that time to draw up my list of the best games of 2011 and write some stuff about them. If you've read some of my previous posts you'll probably have a good idea of at least a few of the games that will be on there, but hopefully there'll be a few surprises.

For now though, I'll talk to you about NBA2K12 because that's pretty much all I've been playing over the last couple of days. I decided to buy it because it was cheap on Steam (which is also the reason I buy a lot of games). Anyway, here we go:

This isn't a review because I haven't played enough of it yet. I've barely scratched all the different game modes. The one I've been playing the most is the one where you create your Basketball man and join a team and start playing out your career. Goodness me, it's addictive, and I'm not even very good. Well I say I'm not very good...I've won the "Rookie of the Month" award twice now, although that could just be a gameplay thing that makes you want to keep going.

In this Create a Player mode, you start out by playing a single game in front of all the bosses of the teams in the NBA. Your performance is rated and after the game you go into a little interview situation with some of the teams where they ask you questions and you can pick one of four answers, the most amusing ones being the options which might as well be labelled "I am an arrogant ass". This is a nice little touch that helps you connect more with your guy more than in similar modes in other sports games.

So you get drafted by a team, and then work your way up from bench warmer, to starting line up. As you play, you earn skill points by doing good things, like scoring, assisting, good defending and so on. However you also lose skill points by not performing as well, committing turnovers, missing your shots etc. Then you can use these skill points to increase your attributes, like shooting, defending and passing. It could just be that I'm bad, but these skill points seem to accumulate very slowly, at least in relation to my main point of reference, the create a player mode in Madden 12. In that game I had pretty much maxed out all of my main attributes about halfway through my second season.

Anyway, that mode is great, and the gameplay is very fun. All of the animations look really slick, and most importantly, your player usually does exactly what you want him to do. The most annoying thing about Fifa (other than Sweaty Goals) is when you see a great opportunity for a pass, you hit the button, and your player tries to pass to the wrong guy and it gets intercepted. The game looks GREAT as well, and they've done a really good job of making you feel like you're watching a real NBA game. There's the Halftime Report where you get taken to other games happening at the same time, little cutaways in between quarters showing you upcoming big games, and a few other neat little touches.

On top of the great gameplay, the commentary is phenomenal... by far the best I've heard in any sports game. They seem to know what exactly is going on, and how it relates to the overall game, and even the season. The commentators can also be in the middle of a thought, and then break away to some big play that just happened in the game. Then after that, they'll say something like "Anyway, back to that..." and carry on with their thought! It's just the little touches like that that make this game really impressive, and I'm not surprised that it won the sports game of the year at the VGAs.

As I said, I've barely touched on the other game modes. I look forward to playing games as a whole team, and I'm told that the mode where you play historic games is really well put together too.

Batman: Arkham City Review

Batman has certainly been the superhero of choice during the last few years. The billion dollar success of Nolan's films, and the glowing reviews of it's predecessor Arkham Asylum meant that Rocksteady Studios had their work cut out for Arkham City. I don't want to say they fully lived up to the high expectations, but they have certainly made a high quality game, which is fun and compelling to play.

The biggest change from the first game, both aesthetically and in a gameplay sense, is that there is now a fully open city to explore. From a story standpoint, this area is actually a walled off section of Gotham City, which is being used as a mega prison and is now home to your typical henchmen, political prisoners and of course, a huge selection of recognisable Batman villains that we've all grown to love... Bane, Poison Ivy, The Joker, Mr Freeze and many more make an appearance (although Egghead is still strangely omitted, which scrambles my brain in an eggstremely unpleasant manner). Now, imagine you lived in Gotham City... if someone floated the idea around that "hey guys, we're going to wall off some of the city, kick a load of people out of their homes, and then shove all of our criminals in there"... how many of you would say, "Yeah, sure, sounds a great idea!" Needless to say, the story connections are a bit loose this time round, but if you look past that, everything else is still outlandish and slightly over the top in a way we've come to expect from Batman.

The new open area would be nothing without an exciting way to get around it, and Arkham City doesn't disappoint. Batman's grappling hook, combined with opening his cape to glide make for great way of traversing the city, and it looks damned cool when you do it too. It's not perfect, you often find yourself catapulting yourself the wrong way off a building, but once you get used to it you're getting from place to place in no time.

What's disappointing is the lack of main story stuff that happens in the open world. Most of the missions take place inside, at which point it's back to the basics laid down in Arkham Asylum. Swinging around from conveniently placed ledges, waiting for guards to become isolated, and then taking them out silently. If you're discovered however, and the guards start converging on your position, all is not lost. Arkham Asylum had probably the best combat system in the business outside of straight up fighting games. Arkham City took that system, and improved it. So simple, and yet hard to master, combat is still a mixture of timing, quickly using one of Batman's many gadgets, and simply flailing your fists at guys. This time around, they've added in a critical strike system, where if you time your strikes perfectly, you'll deal more damage. You've still got your array of gadgets from the first game, with many more added here. New additions range from a freeze grenade, which will immobilise guards caught in the blast for a few seconds, to a disruptor, which can disable enemy weapons silently and from afar. This makes for extremely satisfying situations where you walk up to a guard, they try and shoot you, they look helplessly at their gun, and you proceed to beat them senseless. The animation is also still top notch, with Batman going between jumping, dodging, attacking and blocking seamlessly. The graphics are still extremely nice looking, the darkness partly mirroring the tone of the game, and the frame rate was solid for the entirety. I said it earlier, but it remains true, it just looks damned cool.

The other main feature is the ability to play as Catwoman. She has her own story missions which break up the main ones nicely, but she is just not as enjoyable to play with as the Bat himself. She only has her whip to move about the city with, making getting around much slower, and combat just feels like an inferior version of Batman. It could've been a really nice feature, but it ended up feeling a little tacked on.

The challenge rooms make a return, where you're confined to a small space, tasked with beating up waves of increasingly challenging enemies, or beating up guys with your own abilities impaired. This remains the least compelling part of the game for me, but it's there if you want it. This is the only place in the game you get to play as Robin or Nightwing though, so there's that.

Outside of the main missions, you are once again tasked with finding all of The Riddler's secrets, scattered around the world. These involve finding his trophies, solving his riddles and taking a photograph of a specific location, or entering Batman's detective mode and finding huge question marks hidden in the scenery invisible to the naked eye. There are over 400 trophies to find alone, which is a crazy amount, and it would take a lot more time than I care to give to find them all. However once you have completed everything he has set out for you, you are promised the pleasure of facing Mr. Edward Nigma himself... and I'm sure by that time, you'll be more than willing to knock the stuffing out of him.

So really, it's nothing revolutionary. Although I suppose more Batman Arkham Asylum is what we wanted, so that's what we got. I just hope that for the next game, something is changed a bit more drastically, to avoid it becoming one of those jaded, yearly releases that everyone plays, even though nothing has really changed. I'm sure Rocksteady will stop that from happening, because Batman isn't the game the industry needs...it's the game it deserves.(sorry)

Thanks for reading.

Bastion Review

Bastion is the first game by indie developer Supergiantgames. It's an action rpg centered around your character, The Kid, who wakes up after a catastrophic event referred to as The Calamity which has broken apart the world. As you move around, the world forms around your feet, although there is an ever present danger of falling off the edge. This happened a few times as I was exploring, thinking I could step where I couldnt, or when I was dodging around during a particularly intense battle. The only penalty for falling off though is some fall damage when you return to solid ground, so it's not too frustrating, and there is a nice touch where you damage enemies if you fall on them.

The Kid sets out to find the Bastion, a place where people could go in troubled times, but when he gets there he finds almost nothing left of it, much like the rest of the world. He does find an old man, Rucks, who tells the kid they can rebuild the bastion if they find cores which have been scattered around the world. Rucks also acts as the game's narrator, who comments on nearly everything in the game, from actions the kid takes, to the weapons and buffs he chooses. There's a crazy amount of dialogue, I've played through the game twice now, and there were barely any repeated lines, other than the critical story ones. It's a testament to the hard work put in by the developers, in that half (or maybe more!) of this dialogue will never be heard by the player. This is all helped by the fact that the guy who plays Rucks, Logan Cunningham has one of the best narration voices I've heard in a game. You can hear him, and get a feel for the game in this trailer:

The action takes place in various locations around the fictional place Caelondia, which are accessed from the bastion via a skyway. Your job is to find cores which can be used to rebuild the bastion. Each core you bring back allows you to construct a new building on the Bastion, such as an arsenal to change your weapon load-out, a distillery to change which buffs you have, and so on.

At any one time you can have two weapons, a shield and one special power equipped to your character, and there are multiple weapons that you are slowly introduced to along your journey, and the game does a good job of teaching you the best way to use them as you discover them. Combat is an excellent combination of attacking, shooting, countering, blocking and dodging, and it feels very satisfying to pull off all of these fluidly to defeat a large group of enemies. You can find special items in the world, or buy them in the shop once you unlock it in the Bastion, which are used to upgrade specific weapons. Another way of obtaining them is to take part in one of the challenges tailored to each weapon, and if you do well enough in the challenge, you unlock a special skill for that weapon, such as a multiple barrage attack for the musket. Once or twice, the action on screen got a bit hectic, and I ended up spamming the dodge and attack buttons until I had killed enough enemies to figure out what was going on...but for the most part the combat is very impressive.

Bastion has an interesting take on a buff system, whereby the kid carries various alcoholic beverages with him. These have standard abilities such as granting higher damage or critical strike chance, but there are also more interesting ones such as gaining health when you successfully counter-block, or when you damage enemies with your weapons.

The most impressive part of the game for me though is the soundtrack, the story, and how it is told. You are introduced to a small group of characters, who, although silent you feel you grow to know them very well as you learn their past from various items which you find in the world. Most of the story is told through Rucks' narration, there are a few cutscenes, but mostly the narration takes place as you explore the world.

I mentioned the soundtrack, and it is indeed good enough to warrant a soundtrack edition of the game where you can get all of the songs in the game, which I would highly recommend. There is a level where you find Zia, a musician, who plays an absolutely hypnotic song which you can hear throughout the entire area. This sequence was worth the entire price of the game alone for me. There are several similarly poignant moments throughout the game, which break up the action beautifully.

As an aside to the main story, there are three extra dream sequences (four with the free DLC that was released today) in which the kid must fight off waves of enemies. These serve as a good way to make money, test various combinations of weapons, and on top of this the narrator provides extra back story for each of the main characters in between waves. There are online leaderboards for these sequences, which adds a competitive element to the game. The boards are ordered by the amount of shrines that the player has active at any one time. These shrines are similar to the Halo skulls which improve the enemies or decrease the abilities of the character. They can also be activated for the main story levels, with the bonus of gaining extra money or experience for each one active.

I've been playing the PC version of the game, and it runs like a dream, I've noticed next to zero performance issues. I have also been playing with a 360 gamepad, which makes controlling the character a lot easier than with the keyboard.

All in all, Bastion is a game with a beautifully presented world, solid combat and an excellently told story.

If those are things which appeal to you, then I advise you pick it up as soon as possible.

First Post + VGAs

So, the Spike Video Games Awards just happened. Figured I'd start my blogging career with something topical so I'll run through the list of winners and give you my thoughts:


Game of the Year: Skyrim
Didn't see that one coming. Steam tells me I've played 66 hours of Skyrim so far, which is probably an over-estimate considering the time in menus/ leaving it on pause etc, but that's still a hell of a lot of time only a month or so after release (plus I haven't played it in about a week). It remained thoroughly enjoyable throughout the time, and I will definitely be going back to it at some point. I played stealth/ magic by the way.


Of the other nominees, I've only played Batman: Arkham City and Portal 2. I don't own a Wii for Zelda (nor do I particularly want to) and I haven't got round to Uncharted 3 yet. The two games I have played had the unfortunate trait that they were sequels to two phenomenal games. The thing is they were both also amazing games that I spent a huge amount of time with as well...but they just didn't have...it... Batman just didn't change enough from the original formula, sure you could fly (glide) around the city, but the actual 'game' part of the game took place inside, where it was just Arkham Asylum again. Portal 2 improved the gameplay and added quite a few new and interesting mechanics to the game, but it didn't have the same 'magic' as the first one. I'm also reliably informed that Uncharted 3 falls into the same problem of being hampered by the success of the previous game...shame really.

I'll skip a few categories here (ones I don't particularly care about) and go onto the console specific (kind of...you'll see what I mean) categories.


Best Xbox 360 Game: Batman: Arkham City
Hey guess what, my Xbox is broken. I played the game on PS3 though and really enjoyed it, in fact I was going to continue playing it and keep collecting all the Riddler stuff, but then Skyrim came out, sorry Bats. 

So here's my beef with these console awards... Batman was out on all of them, so was Portal 2 (which makes an appearance in the PC category). But the PS3 nominees were all actual console exclusives. It's not like these exclusives were any better than the winners of the other console awards... for example Killzone 3 was nominated. Now I played that game, it was fine...I guess, but why did it make the list above, say, Batman?
Anyway:
Best PS3 Game: Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
Ain't played it yet, seems like a worthy winner given the other nominees though.

Best PC Game: Portal 2
Again...why was Battlefield nominated here and nowhere else? Portal's good though, you should play it. Also, play the co-op with someone, it's just as good as the single player, and nearly as long now with the recent (free) expansion. The Witcher 2 was also a delight to play, wouldn't have even thought to pick it up if it weren't for the glowing reviews, and then was pleasantly surprised.

Best Shooter: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
I haven't bought a CoD game since Modern Warfare 2, I played A LOT of it...which is surprising because I didn't particularly enjoy it that much (hence not buying any more of them). The main reason for playing so much is the fact that you can do anything with friends and it will be enjoyable...maybe not anything, but you know...anything...what? My point being, who knows how worthy it is of winning. I bought Battlefield though this year (for the first time since 2142) and it was pretty cool...AND the campaign wasn't as bad as you've probably heard, its just that it's a modern FPS campaign, that's what they're like nowadays (apart from the quick time event to kill the rat...what?)

Best Action Adventure Game: Batman
The bat comes up again. Uncharted was a nominee for this...is it really an action adventure game rather than a shooter? I guess... Anyway, I played through the new Assassin's creed (another nominee) and it just didn't click with me. Brotherhood was really surprisingly good given the short turnaround time, and for this year's game they've just made the same game, set it in a new place and given you a new blade and bombs to worry about. I breezed through it in 9 hours, ignoring the side stuff which I had no interest in after doing it all in Brotherhood. The multiplayer is still really cool though, I'd probably spend more time with it if I had a few friends playing.


Best RPG: Skyrim
Well if it wins GotY it has to win its own category right? Dragon Age 2 is on the nominees list, another game which doesn't live up to the first one...the gameplay is better this time around but the story is definitely lacking. I'm not sure Deus Ex can be classified as an RPG..you're levelling up and putting points in stuff and all, but it's a 3rd person stealth/ shooter at the end of the day. Dark Souls seems cool, I don't think I have the patience to play it having heard stories about it though.


Best Multiplayer: Portal 2
Yeah, it's really good, but out of the nominees Battlefield 3 pips it for me.


Best Team Sports Game: NBA 2K12
That's a basketball game for the 2011/2012 season if you're wondering what all those letters and numbers mean. It's funny because the game was released at a time when it was thought there wasn't even going to be a professional basketball season this year (you can find out about that from someone who knows more about it than me). I'd quite like to play this one actually, I'm not big into basketball, but it does seem very well put together. I've played a lot of Madden 12 and Fifa 12, so one of those would be my winner, but if professional reviewers are to be believed, NBA is a worthy winner.

Best Driving Game: Forza 4
This didn't seem that compelling to me, didn't play it. I did play a lot of DiRt 3 though, and that was super fun...although a lot of time was spent playing this game type online with a friend where the players are split up into teams. Each team has one player driving a slow mini, and the rest driving fairly fast cars, and the objective is for the team to get their mini to the end of the track first. This nearly always results in hilarious carnage, you'd probably have to experience it to appreciate it. Need for Speed is on the list...really? I played the demo and was like...this is bad, and after so much promise too. And then lo and behold, the game got slated.

Best Motion Game: Zelda: Skyward Sword
Come on, this is a category? Motion games. Seriously.

Best Independent Game: Minecraft
I dunno man, a hell of a lot of people play minecraft (myself included occasionally, haven't checked out version 1 yet though) but I bet a lot of those people haven't played Bastion. Please go and play Bastion. Like, seriously. I was about to spew a bunch of hyperbole about it but what use is that? It's really, really good. That'll do.

Best Song in a Game: Setting Sail, Coming Home (End Theme) by Darren Korb, Bastion

Haunting, captivating and beautiful. The entire soundtrack for Basion is unbelievable. I'm a bit of a fan of music, I'm sure you'll find this out eventually. 


Best Original Score: Bastion
Yep, sounds good to me. (geddit?)

Best Graphics: Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
I'm assuming this category was for console games, because I'm sure there are PC games which look better, I mean Uncharted does look pretty though. And did you SEE the facial animation in L.A. Noire?


Most Anticipated Game: Mass Effect 3
It's Bioshock Infinite for me, but I'm really looking forward to all the nominations (Diablo 3, Halo 4, The Last Guardian). Well, not Halo actually. Halo: CE was an amazing, genre-defining (for console shooters) piece of work...but lately, it's just been plain old Halo, man...we know exactly what to expect. I tired of it after the end of the third one, you know, when it was supposed to end?

Alright that'll do then, well done for making it to the end.