Game of the Year from The Good Doctor

Well, 2010 is finally over. And personally I’m glad. My 21^st birthday is ten days from now, more video games will be coming out soon, and most importantly, the first decade of the 21^st century is over. Now people finally have no excuse to refer to the date as “two thousand-whatever.” It’s “twenty-eleven” now.

OH WAIT NOT VIDYA GAMES.

Anyway, this all in all was a pretty good year for gamers. We had games like Halo: Reach, Epic Mickey, Donkey Kong Returns, Sonic 4, and others. Like any year, there are some that don’t measure up though, but here, for me, at least, are the two games most deserving of the title “Game of the Year.”

Game of the Year:

Red Dead Redemption

This one was a bit of a shoe-in for me, as I, unbeknownst to many, am a huge fan of westerns. I loved Red Dead Revolver, this game’s vastly different predecessor, for all its ridiculous campy glory. Exploding Pig-Men, Circus-Midget-Banditos, and invisible bear men and all. When I heard there was to be a more serious toned sequel, I was overjoyed.

What I really enjoyed most about this game was that serious tone that Rockstar approached it with. Rockstar’s previous endeavors were all good, campy, over the top fun, but with Grand Theft Auto 4, they suddenly stopped having ridiculous excuse plots, and their humor became much more savagely directed at the flaws in our modern society. I bring this up because Red Dead Redemption does much of the same thing. Many people have in their minds, a sort of idea of “The Grand Old West,” where cowboys rode wild, and life was all about freedom. In reality, the very existence of the frontier western culture was being fought against tooth and nail by the powers of “advancement” from the very moment. The true old west as we know it only really existed roughly between the years of 1875-1895. Red Dead Redemption takes place in the year 1911, which most people don’t even think of as being part of the “Old West” era, and it’s this very discrepancy that the game bases itself around. The idea that the age of the frontiersman was dead. Also prominent is the idea of how, at the same time, the lack of civilization that allowed the lawlessness of the West to flourish was not to be idealized, but showed just how awful life could get for people. However, in spite of all this somberness, the game still manages to have Rockstar’s signature sense of humor, and there is a colorful assortment of characters to help John Marston in his journey, and the game certainly does manage to be a lot of fun. John Marston himself is a great character, who, I absolutely cannot stress enough, has the patience of a saint. He has to deal with thieving snake oil salesmen, lazy drunken assholes, idiotic lawmen, all while trying to track down a man who he has to chase practically across 4 states.

As far as the gameplay itself goes, the controls are very well done, utilizing a similar targeting system than that of GTAIV, but with a few tweaks so that the game isn’t doing all of your aiming for you, which I quite liked. The only issue I had with the controls was that I thought the weapon selection wheel was a bit awkward to use in combat.

Runner Up:

Bayonetta

I love hack ‘n slash games. It’s a damn shame to me that there aren’t more good ones out there. You’ve pretty much got the Devil May Cry series, the God of War series, and then an assortment of games that are essentially just palette swaps of them. These games, such as Dante’s Inferno, or Darksiders, are by no means bad, but they’re just sort of playing “follow the leader,” and it was getting kind of annoying looking for a new hack ‘n slash game that was its own.

Enter Bayonetta.

Bayonetta is made by the same creative team that made the Devil May Cry franchise, and has been called a sort of spiritual successor to them by many. While this is not entirely inaccurate, it would be better to call it what I see it as: a deliberate, completely over the top parody of ridiculous action games like the Devil May Cry or God of War series. Now, this parody is by no means mean spirited, as if to say “here’s what you’re doing wrong.” It felt more like the creators simply said, “hey you know how we had ridiculous, physically impossible moves in Devil May Cry? Yeah, those were cool. Ridiculous, but cool. Well, let’s take those same kind of moves, and make them even more ridiculous and impossible. Bayonetta is so over the top, that anyone I’ve known who started a new save file on it would begin the opening action scene saying something to the effect of “HOLY SHIT I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON BUT IT’S FUCKING AWESOME!”

The moves, cutscenes, bosses, and pretty much everything about the game is every crazy action game stereotype turned way way up. “So action game heroes always use two guns? FUCK THAT SHE’S USING FOUR. WITH TWO ON HER FEET. I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW THAT WORKS BUT I DON’T CARE.”

“So action games have recently been using brutal looking finishing moves? WELL SHIT SON WE’RE GONNA MAKE HER USE EROTIC TORTURE INSTRUMENTS ON THEM. SLAP AN ANGEL IN THE ASS AND CALL ME ‘DARLING,’ MOTHERFUCKER!”

The characters are also ridiculous as well, from porn star/librarian/witch Bayonetta, her beleaguered Joe-Pesci like driver, to Ronin, the game’s answer to Mr. T, Mike Tyson, and Miceal Clarke Duncan (that big ass black guy from The Green Mile).

Also present in the game are about a million different shout outs and references to other games, from Bayonetta using Dante from Devil May Cry’s guns, to collecting what are called “halos” but in reality are the rings from Sonic games. There’s literally more here than I could list, and I haven’t even finished the game yet.

My one complaint about the game though, is that it’s very hard. Not so hard that I have trouble beating the levels, but hard enough that I can’t play through them with the grace and style that a character as kick ass as Bayonetta deserves. When you die, or get a low ranking on a mission, you feel bad because you’re saying to yourself “dammit, Bayonetta would do better than that. Not this sloppy-ass shit.” And any game that pushes you to perform with that in mind is alright in my book.

Alright, so those are my two favorite games of 2010. But unfortunately, not all the games out this year were great. And so, my award for biggest disappointment goes to:

Biggest Disappointment:

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

Let me start off with a bit of a disclaimer. This game originally came out in December of 2009, on the Wii. However, in late January of 2010, Konami released a port for the PS2, which, if you’re going to play this game at all, I would recommend playing it on the PS2, not the Wii. The controls for the Wii version are kind of awful.

Alright now with that aside, allow me to give a bit of backround on this game. It was originally billed as a remake of the first Silent Hill game, to which many rejoiced. It was then announced that it was not going to feature any combat whatsoever, which was actually greeted with more enthusiasm than you would think. Many realized that the best aspects of the Silent Hill series came not from fighting the monsters, but by being freaked out by the atmospheric environments.

Then the bad news started coming. It was said that rather than a straight up remake of the first game, it was to be a “reimagining” of the first game. This got quite a few groans, as that’s essentially what the Silent Hill movie was, and while not terrible, most agreed the movie would have been better if it had stuck to its roots more.

But, being the Silent Hill fanatic that I am, I decided to give this game a try when I found out it was available for the PS2. And much like the movie, there is nothing patently awful about this game, but overall, it just fails to scare like the previous games did, the levels have nowhere near the amount of horrific atmosphere they had in previous games, and the system implemented to avoid enemy encounters was just rather boring.

The story itself, which is usually what the chief focus of a Silent Hill game is anyway, again, while not being terrible, wasn’t overly well done, and while the twist at the end was rather well done, it was nothing that hasn’t been done before in the Sixth Sense or Fight Club. The setting itself didn’t really gel well with other Silent Hill games as well, where the town had genuine elements of the supernatural, whereas in this game, it’s much more cerebral, and, to my tastes, not in a terribly interesting way.

What makes it be on this list though, is not it being a truly bad game, per say, but rather, the feeling I get by looking at it and saying, in the words of John Whittier, “Of all the sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: It might have been” This might have been a great way for the Silent Hill series to break away from its terrible camera system, and the clunky combat, but in the process, it seems to have broken away from what made the franchise great in the first place.