Are you a fan of Valve's four player zombie slayer Left 4 Dead? Have you ever wished that their winning formula of great writing, fast paced game play, great level design and cooperative survival could be transplanted into a Warhammer Fantasy universe with Read more
Well the headline says it, I love this game. "But why Scroo? We need to know." I hear none of you asking but I'm going to tell you anyway. Below is my review for yet another game I played and praise a lot. Read more
Welcome to Game Club.
I’m your host Greywolfe and for the next two weeks [we’re reconvening on the 16th of April, 2017] we’ll be playing a game that’s very dear to my heart, “The Dig.” Read more
So I picked up Nier: Automata on release day without any prior experience with the Drakengard series or Nier. I had paid it mild attention when I started seeing early footage and then it went largely forgotten, lost behind my growing backlog of games yet to be played. When I started seeing footage of pre-release reviews and very early first impressions I began seeing what was so intriguing again. Then I learned that this game was being made by Platinum Games - I had all but decided this was going to be next on my list. Read more
Way back in 2010 Vigil released Darksiders, a game that followed a Metroidvania style of play. I remember very clearly being totally enthralled by the atmosphere then and guys, it's still awesome. Stay with me and I'll tell you what I thought about this newest remaster from developers, Vigil Games and Kaiko and publisher, THQNordic. Read more
So I had actually written a pretty long rant about this game but I decided I better rethink some points and make it something people can read instead of just a bunch of frustrated garble. Read more
Welcome, one and all to a new year and a new February. Last year, I didn't do very well at all, so this year, I'm going to try my utmost to actually vanquish four games off of my tottering pile of games that I've collected over the last forty+ years. Read more
Yes you are reading that title correctly and no this is not an awards show for the games that came out during 2016. Instead this is a look back at the year of 2011 in games. I will be awarding games as if I had never played them until this year!
(Some games like Orcs Must Die and Saints Row The Third I actually never played that year )
Why am I doing this? Well a while back I had wrote an article about how to better improve gaming awards shows, and one of my suggestions was waiting five or maybe even ten years before we give out awards. Because when you actually sit down and play games from that long ago you may be surprised by both how you yourself have changed, as well as the industry at large. One example of this from said article was the year 2003, a year when Knights of the Old Republic, Beyond Good and Evil, and Prince of Persia came out. But what did tons of publications give game of the year? Madden 2004.
This wasn’t the only year like this and so this year instead of picking my favorite games of 2016 I decided to give my delayed awards show a fair shot and see what truly stood apart in 2011. In doing so I was shocked, not just by how well some games stood the test of time, but how others did not. And how games I didn’t care much for from that year such as L.A. Noire or The Witcher 2, held up far better in many categories than games I loved five years ago like Human Revolution and Skyrim.
Speaking of categories, I have never cared for the ambiguous awards given out such as “Best Action game” and the like. Judging from my reviews, one could easily tell I really like to focus on aspects that individual departments of a development studio worked on. So it would be only natural of me to do the same for an awards show. (Hey i'm already making an award system that is purposefully five years too late, I may as well continue going out of the norm.) So without further ado here are the categories that I decided to go with for the 2016 Game Awards for the year of 2011!
Now for the list of games that will be qualifying for these awards. Please understand that I am only one person on this silly quest and I don’t have all the money or time in the world to have played every single game from five years ago. For example I don't own a single Nintendo system :( So unfortunately their games are completely absent from this list. Maybe they should actually let other platforms sell their games.... Just a thought. Regardless, here are all the games I was able to get some time with. Please be aware though not every game listed here received a nomination in the forthcoming categories.
40k Space Marine
Batman: Arkham City
Bastion
BulletStorm
Dark Souls
Dead Island
Dragon age 2
Dues Ex: Human Revelution
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Hard Reset
L.A. Noire
Mortal Kombat 9
Orcs Must Die
Portal 2
Rage
Saints Row: The Third
Uncharted 3
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
Well we know the games so let's waste no more time and start the show! Starting us off it's a category near and dear to my heart.
Let’s take a look at what the best Animations where in gaming five years back.
What can I say? I love animation. It's what I focused on the most while learning how to make games in school, and its nominees all received high praise from me for their great use of it.
The Nominees are:
And the winner by a very narrow margin is....
I'll be honest I was really leaning into this or Dark Souls. Dark Souls for its amazing work on so many different character rigs for the wacky enemies you fight in that game. But the precise and fluid motions combined with key frame poses that look like they where hand drawn first, it's hard not to give the animators over at Rocksteady the credit they deserve.
Having recently played Alien Isolation for GameClub I can attest to just how important this next category is to both atmosphere as well as player feedback.
Let's have a listen to the best sounds 2011 had on offer.
These cats do hard work that never gets appreciated and is half the feedback from any game you play. Go ahead and play the new 2016 DOOM on mute, it looses its balls. These nominees deserve a lot more than an award from an obscure gaming website five years too late.
The Nominees are:
And the winner is brutally....
Every combination of Slashing, Crunching, Screaming, Ripping, and Tearing are impeccable examples of great foley work. At times the audio can upset you at a core level, even without the visuals. I don't think I've ever played a game where I could hear the sound of meat and muscle being violently pressed against an opponents bones as accurately the audio team has managed here. These extremely well crafted sounds had some careful attention to detail. They are sounds you wouldn't tend to notice in a fighting game that make the environment feel lived in. I just can't give this award to anyone else.
Speaking of Environment. Games are rarely fun to play if the space you're in is not fun or compelling to be in. Not too be confused with a later category, Environmental Modeling takes a peculiar attention to detail and a LOT of tedious texture work.
The Nominees are:
Man I really hated trying pick a winner in this one. But i had to go with the one that did the best job at creating a world that would be extremely difficult to replicate...
Say what you will about Rockstar's games. One thing very few developers can do as well as them is environmental modeling. Yes the texture sizes aren't as large as other games due to the size of their worlds, but making textures as detailed as these in a 512x512 square is way harder. Put aside that incredible work and it would still get the win for somehow managing to perfectly replicate the city of L.A. in the 1940's. Not just replicate it's many roads and monuments that are long gone, but make it feel alive and tangible.
While a lot of the shadow mapping and technical effects don’t always hold up too great over the years, good Lighting is still something that is more than worth celebrating. It is an essential part of any visual medium and one of the hardest to master. Lighting teams hardly get any credit in any visual medium. Animation and gaming both make the job at least twice as hard. This is due to the need to create digital lighting effects that trick the eye in the first place. They don't have light sources they can just place around a room. They need to finely tweak and re-value every little aspect of any light that is created for a room or scene. Seriously, these games deserve some credit.
And the four best lighting teams where those who worked on...
And the winner is..
While there may not be as many fill lights or varied shadow types like in Human Revolution, Uncharted 3's uncanny ability to capture the lighting of so many different types of locations. From the harsh light of the desert to the looming shadows and warmth of torch lights of its many caverns, no other game from 2011 was really able to light so many drastically different locations as well as Naughty Dog.
There's a reason why a voice acting strike is a huge deal to the industry. Without these talented actors and actresses all our games would sound like Two Worlds. Rather than choose individual voice performances though I wanted to celebrate the game that was able to let all their voice actors shine brightest.
The nominees are:
And the winner is...
Honestly this category was a lot closer than you would think. But yeah it's hard not to say that this game came into this category with a bit of an unfair advantage. Because while L.A. Noire had many great film and Television actors, they weren't all quite as good at voice acting as they are on screen. But between Kevin Conroy, Nolan North, Tara Strong, Troy Baker, and of course Mark Hamill, the cast here has well over 50 years of combined voice acting experience. And all of them deserve the praise they've received over the years for their performances. Every one of them has held up incredibly well.
You can have the most well modeled environments in the universe. But it won't mean jack shit if the level design falls flat. The look of a world will invite you in, but great level design will keep you there forever.
Here’s the best level design from 2011:
And the Winner is...
One hell of a showing for a three to four hour game. But honestly, this level design team deserves it. All of the games in this category deserve some serious recognition. But Portal 2 is the only game that relies solely on the strength of the play spaces for us gamers. If the single player levels don't impress you, there's a full co-op campaign that will seriously require more reciprocity than most games that offer such a mode.
This does not include soundtrack.... It always bugs me when jukebox musicals win awards over original compositions and scores. Well, Not on my watch! The music of a game undergoes two hard tasks. One is to be the perfect fit within a game’s context both for the player and the world at large. The second task is when gamers take that sound track home and listen to it without fighting dragons or solving crimes. When music from a game can truly be appreciated and loved anywhere, you know you have a gem on your hands.
Let’s listen to some of those now:
Spike in a Rail by Darren Korb
Dragonborn by Jeremy Soul
Minor 9th by Andrew and Simon Hale
Wasteland Races by Rob Abernethy
It's categories like this that make me hate I have to pick a winner, but without further ado the winner is...
Below Track is titled: J.J. Bop
Music, like all art, is highly subject. (So is this awards article you've been reading.) And to me, nothing sang quite as loud as the dulcet tones and snappy jazz that Andrew and Simon Hale put together.
No, I couldn't just have one category too encompass all modeling. It would be just as insulting as putting all the art assets under 'Best Graphics' What the hell does that even mean? Plus, characters are what stick with you long after the game is over.
Characters are the most important thing to me when it comes to a game’s narrative. It’s the characters that really stick with us over time. Both from how they are written, but also how they look. The later is what this category celebrates. Not just the great telemetry and efficiency of polygons, but creative design and flawless execution.
Here’s the best Character Modeling from 2011:
And the Winner is...
Now I'll be honest I really wanted to dock this game some serious points in this category because it really didn't have to create any original ideas for characters. And the ones they recreated in the game have had 70+ years of refinement to help cradle the modelers into a good direction. But when I played through everything else the year of 2011 had to offer, there really wasn't another game where I could distinctly remember as many characters as I do here. Mortal Kombat came damn close in this one too for that same reason. But clearly the technical edge goes to Rocksteady here. Their impeccable topology combined with some really subtle texture details puts their models miles above the rest. And while I know the history of many of the main characters certainly helped, everything seems appropriately exaggerated to push the characters just shy of being over stylized versions of themselves. This is even true for the many varied types of gang members and Batarang fodder you'll encounter in the game. You never feel you are punching the same guys over and over again because their body masses are so well modeled and stylized. This really was one of the hardest to widdle down to four choices, let alone pick one out of the mix. But for my money, Arkham City's character models are the best on offer from 2011.
Well you can't have an awards show without this one right? While all other categories have only had 4 nominees each, it was hard enough to narrow this down to 5. There are so many amazing games from this year and I can wholeheartedly recommend every game that was nominated for any category. But alas, they won’t let me call it a game awards show without the granddaddy of game awards.
So let's look at the nominees for the 2016 Game of the Year from 2011.
Well it's the beginning of the new year so as far as I’m concerned it's still fine to make lists about 2016! And as I mentioned in my best games of the year list, I didn’t get to play as many games that came out as I would have liked too. So today I’ve decided to list the Top 5 games that I wish I got to play in 2016.
And I was still playing Saint's Row 3.
And I have grown to seriously not like the hostage diversion.
I'd been messing around with stealing cars, because you have to do that to get through the big list of stuff that entails a "perfect game." and along the way, i'd taken twenty hostages. these were all mostly innocent bystanders. i just wanted the cars, you see, so i could rack up the requisite number [150] for the achievement.
But then I had to sit down and actually slog through getting hostages.
And that's super tedious. Allow me to explain:
To take a car, you go up to the car and you hit a button. Not a problem. If there's a bonus person in the car, you can take them as a hostage. But not everyone's on board with being a hostage, so while the car is being stolen, they will typically tumble out before the hostage notification can be posted. OK. Fine. There's a faster way of stealing a car where you can run along the tarmac and "jump" into the car from a distance. Only this will SOMETIMES eject everyone else out the car. Did it have two people in it [a driver and a potential hostage?] Well, great, now they're on the floor spazzing out.
The game also randomizes cars and how many people are in them. See a car that - one time - had a driver and two hostages? The next time, it might only have a driver.
It's tedious. And you have to get 50 [!] of these. No wonder I've been leaving these for last [well, these and the backbreakingly stupid Heli-Assault missions.]
So. Gentle Reader. In the pursuit of a "perfect game" what achievements and/or actions have you had to perform that you ended up disliking?
And with that, let's find out what the rest of the Twinstiq crew are playing: Read more
